The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  He started to tell them more or less what Matthew Gale had told Mary Cottle. And was warming to his theme when he was interrupted by the dog pulling on his master’s arm, pumping it up and down as if he were raising bridges or flagging trains.

  “I don’t see the lady of the house anywhere about,” Pluto said.

  “It’s all right,” Mickey said, retrieving his arm, watching Rena and Benny and recognizing the girl magician and the wise-guy kid, rubbing both fielders’ mitts together. “These are nice girls and boys. Just our meat. Or mine, anyway. Mickey meat, you might say. Let’s stay on a bit, Plute.”

  “Or the master neither,” said the dog.

  “He thinks too much on masters and mistresses,” Mickey explained. “That’s his nature, of course, but sometimes you can overdo.”

  “You can overdo your nature?” Mudd-Gaddis asked.

  The Mouse looked him over. Terrific, he thought. A roomful of wise-guy kids. “Well, certainly, old man,” he said. “Ain’t that what makes tragedy? When we haven’t sense enough to get out of the way of our characters?”

  Lydia Conscience and Tony Word were whispering together.

  “What?” Mickey demanded. Tony Word looked down at his feet. “No, what?” repeated the Mouse. “Come on,” he said, “won’t you share with the rest of us? No? Don’t you know it’s rude to have secrets? No more whispering campaigns,” he scolded. “Is that understood?”

  “He wants to know how you got on the ceiling,” Lydia said.

  So part of it at least was a misunderstanding, a garble, a gloss. A little, that is, was farce, all the knockabout calisthenics of cross-purpose. Just so much was misconstrued, lost in translation. The children, the Dog and the Mouse, misunderstood each other. (Sure, they could be smeared across the ceiling like a slide show but they couldn’t see through walls, could they?) And then there was Kenny’s theatrical orientation. He was an actor. He’d had the floor. Of course he was angry. Boiling mad, actually.

  Already boiling mad when the shill opened the door and Lamar recognized him, as well as the girl on the bed, the snot- nosed charmer from the elevator, so fast—better than the Vegas mechanics he’d seen, so fast, a little quick-draw artist—with her hands, which (he was a fair man) he didn’t begrudge her in the least. Only wondering whether Matthew Gale, sweating, he trusted—anyway, hoped—in Lamar’s Pluto suit there was in on it too. Some cast member, he thought ungenerously. (He hoped sweating. He hoped fucking melting, f’chrissake. Because it really was an art, being in that suit was, a question of breathing, like the difference between the singers who played the lounges and the ones who played Vegas’s biggest, most important rooms: only a matter of breathing, of phrasing. What separated the men from the boys, the sheep from the goats. So if Matt was in on it, if all this was happening in any way, shape, or form to set him up, he hoped to God the lousy faggot was turning to tiger butter inside the Pluto suit.) So he really didn’t begrudge her. He respected her, if you wanted to know. Or her skills, anyway. The ends she put them to was something else. The ends she put them to was another story altogether. Scaring the shit out of people was. What kind of a way was that? This was entertainment? Thanks but no thanks.

  So, already angry when he walked in the door and saw them. Snappish and primed.

  Not realizing, of course, or anyway realizing the wrong things because the nature of misunderstanding, of farce (without which there would be no ball game), is that you don’t know that that’s what it is. If someone had been there who could see all sides, it would have been a different story, but there was no one. Matthew Gale didn’t remember them from the Haunted Mansion. (The girls hadn’t been there anyway, and only Mudd- Gaddis, so excited then, now so sedate, would have made any impression at all.) He saw so many tantrums during the course of a day it’s doubtful he could have remembered anything. Oddly, Mudd-Gaddis might have if Gale hadn’t been hidden by Lamar’s Pluto suit, warm and moist now as a greenhouse, incidentally, and growing gamier by the minute. Or Benny Maxine, who’d had a run-in with Goofy and Pluto in the restaurant, who’d squeezed Goofy’s nose and pulled the bristles in his jowls and messed with his hat and, on behalf of his comrades, even bet the pooches that none of them would die. (Talk, he might have thought, about your Mississippi riverboat gamblers! I’m a bleeding sport!) But who’d either forgotten the incident or didn’t recognize in the whipped and cringing mutt right there in front of him—from itself cringing, from its close and closing circumstances—anything of the aloof, valorous pup of that first encounter. So there was no one. Lydia’s remark about the ceiling gobbledygook to the general, Lamar Kenny’s rage not only inexplicable but not even picked up. (The whispering, of course—he was an actor, he had the floor; you don’t whisper when an actor has the floor; why, that’s worse than heckling him—Mudd- Gaddis’s remark, which he took to be a sly dig about his acting; the little girl on the bed—Of the three girls, only Rena had failed to get up when the Mouse and Dog appeared on the ceiling.)

  And spotting the wise-guy kid straight off, that was a treat. Who’d heckled hell out of his breakfast show that time, who’d made a scene at the fried eggs and balloons.

  (Which was what was so great about being a human being, thought Mickey Mouse and the girls, Mickey Mouse and the boys—the reasons, the fine tracery of the reasons. The swirl of motive. Like snowflakes we are, thought Benny Maxine, like fingerprint and tooth record.)

  But chiefly scaring the shit out of people, the difference in their artistic temperaments. (Artistic differences, they had artistic differences. Gee, thought Lamar Kenny, still comparatively new in the business and already I got artistic differences!) Yet, however impressed, even flattered, he may have been that they existed, it was their artistic differences that ticked him off most. For openers, he thought, he didn’t have a handle on just what he was dealing with here. The kids were a new wrinkle. That was clear enough. But fad or trend? Flash in the pan or wave of the future? He didn’t really know what was going on. From the time the original wise-guy kid had first given him the business, he’d been asking around. No one seemed to know if anything was up or not, though all had remarked the influx of terminally ill kiddies. He supposed the park was involved in some sort of market research and imagined that this group had something to do with it. He’d heard, for example, that someone fitting the description of the odd little lame duck over there in the wheelchair had made a fuss at the Haunted Mansion the other day. (Though not from Matthew, you may be sure, who was almost certainly in on it, whatever it was, and who he hoped had not only turned to tiger butter but was rancid as well, gone off inside the pup tent like a bomb.)

  Because he didn’t need the aggravation. Your death acts—here today and gone tomorrow—his hunch was, would never catch on, though he couldn’t deny the outrageousness of the concept. Only where was the art? What did it take, after all, to display the dying? If you asked him, it was a little like public hangings. Sure, the poet was right on the money and there was nothing new under the sun. As a matter of fact, if you asked him it wasn’t even in very good taste. Though he certainly saw the point, what they were getting at. The old triumph-of-the- human-spirit bit. Folks showing their lesions and cancers, exposing their stumps, sniffing their gangrene. There really was no business like show business. Well.

  The first thing, he supposed, was to check them out, find out if they were for real. (Because didn’t it stink, at least a little, of fraud and freak show?) He knew what the girl could do, of course, the one on the bed, but now he’d find out about the rest of them too, what the shouting was all about.

  He turned to Janet Order.

  “All right,” he said, “let’s just see if that shit comes off!” He tossed her a damp washcloth. “Oh, please,” Mickey Mouse said, “you couldn’t get chalk off a blackboard with such halfhearted efforts.”

  “I’m halfhearted,” said the hole-hearted child.

  “Here, let me,” said the Mouse, taking the cloth back from the kid, vigorously rubbing her
blue skin with it.

  “You’d lay hands on a customer?” Pluto growled. “On a customer?”

  “And how about you?” the Mouse shot back. “How about you, Mister Magic Fingers? You hypocritical dog, you!” Who was steamed anyway, who knew he’d been had the minute he walked into the room. Calling in his marker, Gale had said. For the times he’d pulled guard duty for him when Lamar had gone off to talk to the clubs. Calling in his marker. Calling in his mark was more like it! Telling him it was just to get his own back, furious because Colin had set him up, because, or so he’d said, the woman was in on it too. To get his own back, and maybe those manuals. Merely to devil them with implication and outrage, to bear down on the two of them with the full moral authority of Mickey Mouse and his faithful friend. (Faithful friend was a good touch. Faithful friend had a bit of genius to it, what, he supposed, had ultimately sold him.) Though why hadn’t he thought to ask him what he hadn’t thought to ask him? Why hadn’t he thought to ask him, “Then why not bring Minnie?” Because maybe Gale was no dummy. Because maybe he would probably have come right out and said what was on all their minds anyway: that Mickey and Minnie weren’t married, that there was something a touch suspicious if not outright unsavory about that relationship. That if they slept together—and after a fifty-year engagement who could doubt it? a Mouse wasn’t made of steel—without benefit of clergy, how could they hope to have any sort of moral edge over Colin and the woman? Anyway, he hadn’t even thought to bring it up. And understood he’d been had as soon as the wise-guy kid opened the door for them, as soon as he’d taken in—or been taken in by—all the wise-guy kid’s wise- guy cohorts, that little league of the year-to-live.

  So what was he doing here? That still unfigured. (Which was what was so great about being a human being! Oh, how he thrived on it! Reason and motive.—Not unlike his act, really, the thinking ahead, one man dueling for two.—Life like the crossword. Nine down, fourteen across, and the unpuzzled life not worth living. So what? Above all, was this an opportunity or not? Was Matthew his friend after all, or was he one of the company men he knew thrived in these parts? Running his abscams, baiting his entrapments and setting them? What if he was only posing as a faygeleh? To sucker his trust? If so, it might be an opportunity. Maybe 822 was his very own Schwab’s Drugstore; maybe Matthew Gale was that secret talent scout he’d always been on the lookout for. If not…well, if not, it was all up with him anyway. He was impersonating a Mickey Mouse. Dressed up in the Mouse’s own official Mickey Mouse clothes, the vaguely impresarial tuxedo Mickey frequently wore these days. How many years could you get for that? Perhaps life, maybe the chair. (God, what it said for the star system, for perks and privilege! He’d heard, and would have suspected even if he hadn’t—the cast was pretty tight-mouthed about their salaries—that the matinee rodent made tons more money than he did, or the other characters either, of course, and knew for a fact that the Mouse didn’t, unless he was in a good mood, always speak to the rest of them, sometimes not even giving Min herself the time of day, arbitrary and temperamental as a soprano, which he was. So why hadn’t they gone all out? Why didn’t they provide Mickey with a separate dressing room? Was this management’s way of keeping their star attraction in line? Why else would they make it so easy for Lamar to get into the Mouse’s locker, with its rinky-dink high-school-gym-locker lock? Why, of course, Lamar thought: not to keep him in line but to impose that same moral authority that seemed to emanate from the Kingdom’s every pore. Mousketeers didn’t steal. Not from each other. Not from anyone. They were clean, reverent, helpful, loyal, and brave. Mousketeers were the cat’s pajamas morality-wise. It was what lent them their terrible authority. Not only why they didn’t speak but why, except for the younger children, most of the guests seemed to clam up in their presence.)

  So what was expected? What? If he wasn’t being set up? (Which, increasingly, beginning to feel at home in 822, he felt he wasn’t.) What was expected? Ah, thought the trained actor, recalling Pluto’s words. “You’d lay hands on a customer? On a customer?” Was this an admonishment? Some secret cautionary? (And he wasn’t rank, hadn’t turned into tiger butter; nor, now he thought of it, had the Pluto suit ever stunk on any of those occasions when Matthew had worn it to cover one of Lamar’s absences. He knew for a fact Matthew admired him as an actor. And he wasn’t rank! Maybe he knew how to breathe, too.) “You’d lay hands on a customer? On a customer?” If that wasn’t a paraphrase of the ghost’s warning to Hamlet to spare Gertrude, why then he’d never heard one! So what? What? Something to do with death, he bet. (Because something of what they did here was always a little slanted toward death. The Haunted Mansion where Matthew worked, for example. All the nostalgia: Main Street, U.S.A., with its gas lamps and hitching posts, its nickelodions and penny arcades and horse-drawn trolleys. Liberty Square with its colonial modes. Frontierland with its stockade and squirrel-cap ones. Most of it fucking Yesteryearland, if you asked him. Even Tomorrowland. The past and the hereafter. And what about Snow White herself? Old buried-alive Snow White in her glass casket like those hatbox-shaped containers that keep pies fresh, doughnuts and sweet rolls, on counters in restaurants? And how about those Seven Dwarfs? Yeah, how about them? Sneezy, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, and Doc. Cholers and pathologies. Wasn’t there an analogue to be discovered between the dwarfs and these wise-guy kids? He’d seen what she could do with a handkerchief, what, out of the corner of his eye, he could see she was doing now. The girl on the bed was a shoo-in for Sneezy. And the kids who’d been whispering together, the girl with the belly and the boy who’d stared at his shoes when they’d been caught out, who’d let the belly speak up for him. The guy was a clear Bashful. Lamar couldn’t quite figure the little shaver in the wheelchair. His question about overdoing one’s nature had clearly been hostile. On the other hand, despite the commotion, he seemed to have dozed off. A sure Sleepy! And it seemed to Lamar there was something a bit vacant about the stare of the kid with the amputated fingers. A probable Dopey. The original wise-guy kid, the officious creep who’d mouthed off in the restaurant and with whom he’d had the run-in at the elevator: a distinct and definite Doc. The little girl who looked like she’d gotten herself knocked up? Happy? Which left the blue kid, who’d given him that sullen, halfhearted response and who, more importantly, was the very color of choler. Grumpy to the life!) So something to do with death.

  Only he must be careful to follow old Plute’s cryptic warnings, his tricky, understated guidelines. If not, he could kiss his opportunities good-bye. If not he’d be out on the street without even the mangy old doggy suit to cover him. Remember, then, it was strictly hands off the customers. It was absolutely gentle as she goes.

  He glanced from Matthew in the Pluto suit to the Kingdom’s sickly new clientele, then moved smoothly into his audition in his soaring countertenor.

  “You guys are something else,” said Mickey Mouse. “‘The Fated Follies.’ I love it!” He pointed to Tony Word. “How long they give you to live?”

  Tony shrugged.

  “Hey,” said Benny Maxine.

  “An hour? A day?” Mickey insisted.

  Tony shrugged.

  “Hey!”

  “Because if it’s less than a day you can forget about Rome. Know why?”

  “Hey,” Benny said, “you!”

  Tony Word shrugged.

  “Because Rome wasn’t built in a day!” roared the Mouse.

  “Is he crazy? Why’s he saying these things?”

  “Why’s he bullying sick children?”

  “The Mouse is a rat.”

  “All right,” Mickey Mouse said, “let’s see a show of hands. Who wants to be cremated? What, nobody? All right, who’s for being planted? Hands? Not anyone? Buried at sea then? Recycled? We’re running out of options here. Boy, you’re some tough kids to please.”

  Pluto seemed to have slipped away. Mickey hadn’t heard him leave. Perhaps he was listening in the bathroom.

  “Alone at last,
” said the Mouse. “Let’s see, where were we? Right, we were discussing what’s to become of you. Or I was. You all seem a little shy about the subject. Oh, I know why, of course. This particular mouse wasn’t born yesterday. He’s been around the block a time or two. I’ll tell you the truth, though. I was never really into tragedy. Control was always my thing, my gift. My special talent, you might say. Well, I never had any enemies to speak of. Popeye has enemies; Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Tweetie-Pie. Heckel and Jeckel have enemies. The Pink Panther. But not old Mickey the Mouse. I never had enemies. And neither do the people I hang with. My duckies and doggies. Life’s too short. Hey, no offense.” He looked around at the unsmiling children. “All right, all right,” he said, “enough about me. What would you have wanted to be if you’d lived?” Doc, Dopey, Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Happy, and Sneezy stared at him, their ancient humors clogged, choked, stymied as ice, their deflected phlegms and cholers, their thickened bloods and biles subsumed in stupefied wonder. “Tch tch tch,” said the Mouse, “you kids, you poor kids. I don’t think I ever saw such losers. Where’d you grow up—on Fuck Street?”

  Pluto tittered in the toilet. “On Fuck Street. Fuck Street! That’s some mouse!”

  “This is terrific for the nervous system,” Lydia Conscience said.

  “Oh?” said Janet.

  “It makes it nervous.”

  “Because really,” Mickey Mouse said, “I mean, it’s a raw deal. What, are you kidding? I mean, all the King’s horses, all the King’s men?” He stared directly at Benny. “Those are some odds. Still,” he said, “I suppose there’s advantages, silver linings in the shit. Sure. Of course. Why not? Run amok. Break a law. Pillage and plunder. Smoke if you got ’em. I mean, what’s to worry? Today is the first day of the rest of your life! You may never see Fuck Street again.”