by Paul Theroux
‘Did the burger ever come back?’
Millroy took another bite of his bush of herbage.
With his mouth full, and mushing his words, he said, ‘I’d rather not say,’ and sounded as though he meant it.
He made a face, pressed his lips together, blew out his cheeks and chewed some more. His chewing gave him the alert face and squirrel cheeks of someone who was seriously wondering, really grinding away at a mental problem, as though the problem was in his mouth and he was dealing with it, chomp-chomp-chomp, thinking hard.
‘But, listen’ – he was looking at me, he was still wondering, he was still chewing a little – ‘if I were going to start a religion I wouldn’t let anyone in over the age of twenty or so. Twenty-five tops. Ideally, they’d all be teenagers. I wouldn’t want people who are unteachable. I’d just bring them along slowly.’
‘I agree.’
If I were going to start a religion was not crazy – it sounded to me like Dada saying, as he often did when he was jingled, If I were president, just as impossible. So I did not think much about it, except one night afterwards, when Millroy was on stage, as I sat on a stool in the wings those first days. He would not let me out of his sight, he often glanced up to make sure I was there. I was not yet his assistant. And that was when I realized that the way he stood in front of the audience, in his black outfit, and working miracles with his long pale fingers, and speaking with such an intense whisper that everyone paid attention – seeing him in that way I knew why his mentioning The Book and his talk about a new religion made sense: he looked like a priest in front of a congregation.
He saw me staring at him. When his show was over, he said to me, ‘You are happy.’
‘You know it.’
‘Tell me why.’ And he looked at me closely, waiting for my answer.
Because I trusted him, because he took all the decisions, because he believed in me, because he did not scold me, because I slept so well, because I felt healthier, because I was safe with him, because it was so restful hearing him talk, because he listened to me, because I was alive.
‘Because, even if it isn’t true, I feel like somebody who might matter.’
‘But it is true, angel,’ he said. ‘You matter like crazy. That’s why I chose you.’
Thinking about the truth of it made me happier.
That day and the next there were knocks on the door of his Airstream trailer.
‘Doc – you there?’
Someone needing help.
Everyone called him ‘Doc’ or ‘Doctor Millroy,’ and it seemed he was often called upon to cure the fairground people of their ills. Everyone at Foskett’s had some sort of medical problem. The acrobats had the most serious ones, and were prone to sprained ankles, sore backs, muscle aches, and blistered hands. Banged fingers were common among the roustabouts, Portugees from the woodlots, who were hired locally. The food people tended to have burns, from having been splashed by their Fry-O-Laters, and the people who looked after the animal pens had bites.
Floyd Fewox was one of those emergencies, a blistered shin from the hot muffler of his Harley, which he rode on the Wall of Death. He limped into the trailer carrying a fat black cat under his arm the way an old woman carries a handbag.
‘I don’t heal people’s pets,’ Millroy said.
Out through the door went the cat, yowling as it hit the ground. And that was when Floyd Fewox showed Millroy his injury, though he kept glancing over at me. It was as though he had a dead animal hanging in his pants leg for when he rolled it up all I saw was raw skin and dead flesh and burned hair, a trampled lump like a road kill where his leg should have been.
‘I wrote a book once,’ Floyd Fewox said, and it sounded like a get-even threat. ‘I could show you a copy. You’d probably be scared. It’s really frank. You don’t believe me.’
His spiky graying hair was stuck in little bunches like doll’s hair to his scalp, and it was growing in neat scabby rows, as though it had been planted. Even his hair’s sticky wildness did not cover these plugs and punctures and you could not look at his hair without thinking of all the real baldness underneath. He had yellowish Italian skin, and his nose was twisted sideways, as though he had tried to straighten it but failed, leaving it looking pinched. He wore high boots, greasy jeans with a silver studded belt, and a tattoo on his arm that said Born To Raise Hell. His sweaty skin steamed of beer. He was stubbly, he smelled, he wore a filthy tee-shirt lettered Harvard.
‘I used to teach at Harvard,’ he said. ‘They said I was trouble. You don’t believe me.’
At first I did not see that he had missing teeth, and so I suspected Floyd Fewox was deliberately trying to frighten me when he suddenly widened his mouth in a gappy smile. He worked his lips at me as Millroy scissored open his pants’ leg and bandaged his shin.
‘If you’re looking for trouble you came to the right place,’ Millroy said.
Floyd Fewox was munch-mouthed – his floppy lips got in the way when he talked. The black holes where his teeth should have been made him look violent, but also weak and nasty, like an old man with a grudge.
‘Folks call me Harley,’ he said. ‘They don’t realize I’m an educator. You got a name, babe?’
‘Get out,’ Millroy said and jerked the man over to the Airstream door and flung it open. He moved the man easily, using his fingers like pliers and pinching his elbow.
Afterwards, Millroy said he was sorry he had let the man into the trailer, but he had learned something important.
‘I did not truly know that man until I saw the way he looked at you,’ he said. ‘You see how I need you?’
And the way Millroy disposed of Floyd Fewox in the darkness outside – I heard this rider on the Wall of Death begging Millroy not to hurt him and then calling his cat – made me confident that no harm would come to me. I had never known anyone so strong as Millroy.
‘Are you a real doctor?’ I asked.
‘Of course not. Real doctors are unhealthy. They die from the same diseases as their patients. They’re like priests, who commit the same sins as the people they preach to – commit sins with them, for that matter. Funny how they’re all in the same boat. People who use the word sin are sinners. Ill-health is the issue – it begins there, and where science and religion should overlap they diverge, and that leaves people helpless. Christian Science – were you going to mention that, Jilly? I am very sorry but you’d be wrong if you did. How can you take any religion seriously if it leaves out nutrition? A fat priest is a sinner, a sick doctor is a quack. I am a healer.’
‘Gaga used to make me go to church every Sunday,’ I said. ‘Mashpee Baptist, across from the Town Hall.’
‘I never found a church I agreed with. They all seem to lead straight to damnation. Start believing them and you’re lost.’
He was energetic and seemed very happy, talking this way, as though he had been turning these thoughts over in his head for ages but this was the first time he had actually spoken them out loud. He seemed relieved, eager to have me listening to him, and I was proud that he had chosen me to hear him.
‘People are obsessed by the way they look,’ he was saying. ‘But that’s the exterior. What about the inside, which is much more important. You have to know the condition of your stomach and your gut. Do you realize how dramatically people’s lives would be changed if they looked in a mirror and saw their kidneys and their liver and their lungs? Your innards are knowable, but no one wants to look.’
For a moment I thought he was going to take out the flexible rubber tube and force it up his nose and spill some soupy chunks out of his stomach for us to admire. But he was so intent on what he was saying, and so urgent for me to understand, that he had stopped coiling the gauze bandage that he had cut for Floyd Fewox’s shin. He was leaning on the table flap and I was thinking how hard it was to know someone’s true expression when they had a big mustache covering their face – even a
smile was guesswork on the part of the watcher.
‘How can you have a religion that forgives sins and purges you of evil, and yet leaves out the stomach pump and never mentions regularity?’
‘You’re wicked interested in that, huh?’
‘Overwhelmingly. It’s impossible to have a sincere interest in food without an accompanying and just as powerful interest in your bowels singing like a harp. America won’t be strong until America understands the magic of health.’
‘Like your water into wine?’
‘You could call that a chemical reaction,’ he said. ‘This is magic.’
He put his hands on his face, and wrenched with his fingers until he had dislodged something from his mouth that I first took to be a rosy mottled fruit. It was his tongue, pink and twitching in his open hand, like a whole muscle, a hard sausage of flesh. He held it out to me, panting from the effort of it, and then he whimpered – his mouth a great gaping hole, his eyes blazing with ecstasy – and the thing vanished from his hand, leaving a slight ripeness of breath in the air.
At last – that one flourish had exhausted him – he said, ‘See what I mean?’ and went straight to bed, sealing himself in his cubicle.
In the morning, as though remembering an unfinished thought, he said, ‘And I did not understand myself until I saw you. Now I know who I am and what I can do.’
He disliked elevators, he said, and other people’s locks. He said things like ‘I picked that up in Mexico’ – or ‘Egypt’ or ‘India.’ He could play hymns on the harmonica with his nose, jamming the instrument against his nostrils, and snuffling. He believed that music had healing powers; certain notes and chords, especially the sound of crickets, not only healed you but induced visions and opened up hidden parts of your mind.
He said, ‘Once you have healed a person they are related to you. Once you have fed a person they are a part of you.’
He had a powerful sense of smell. ‘I like your flavor,’ he said to me. He knew from a whiff of my head that Gaga smoked. He said he could judge a person by his or her odor – their whole life was in that aroma – and could forecast weather by inhaling. He did exercises – push-ups, sit-ups, chin-ups, jumping jacks.
‘I could never perform magic if I were not as healthy as I am. Houdini? Mainly an illusionist and escape artist. No spirituality. His secret? He was a great physical specimen. I would like to be more akin to St Joseph of Copertino, who defied gravity and could levitate himself by physical strength and the power of prayer – the philosopher Leibniz saw him in 1677 floating in mid-air, the height of the tree-tops.’
Millroy made it a point to drink two gallons of distilled water every day. He was very clean. He preferred showers over baths. He had an aversion to public swimming-pools, public bathrooms, and restaurants. ‘For starters, I could never use anyone else’s cutlery.’ He said he could not exist without his own trailer. ‘I need to be near all my own facilities.’ He was neat, he was handy, he could sew, he made all his own trick boxes and caskets. He repeated: I eat nothing with a face. Nothing with legs. I eat nothing with a mother. I take no meat into my body. No meat into my mouth.
He regarded the County Fair as dangerous and the other performers as cheap, vulgar or plainly criminal. After that one encounter with Floyd Fewox he kept me away from all the other employees. He was suspicious of adults. He trusted children. He liked me.
5
In less than a week Millroy’s trailer seemed like home, except happier and more familiar than anything I had known except the long-ago comfort of Gumpy’s lap or Mumma’s arms – Millroy’s food, his talk, his big, belly-shaped Airstream, all smooth and buttoned-down silver, like a cradle, like a coffin, very quiet, very clean. ‘You could eat your dinner off that floor.’ My first thought after his crunchy vanishing trap of the Indian basket had been: What if he won’t let me go? Now my great worry was that he would send me back where I came from. It frightened me to think of him saying, Go away – get out of here.
His Airstream was parked beyond Robinson’s Racing Pigs and the pulling arena, behind the draft horses and the dumb clanking blue-ribbon cows, the steaming animal pens and the dripping dung of the chicken cages and the tables and shelves of prize vegetables in the distant and dustier corner of the fairground, nowhere near the Fun-O-Rama or the other trailers that Millroy called ‘the gypsy camp.’
The more familiar Millroy and his trailer became, the wilder the fairground seemed. I felt dangled there, just floating, as though I was snorkeling across all that strangeness. It excited me to see it, and soothed me when I surfaced in the silent winking windows, safe in the belly of Millroy’s trailer.
Hugging a big wrinkled doctor’s bag of creaky leather to his chest, Millroy said, ‘We’ve got a little repair work to do, angel.’
I imagined scissors and bottles and knives from the clinks inside the bag.
He tied a bib around my neck, and slipped a plastic shower cap over my hair, and sat me down on a stool.
‘We’ve got a show to put on tonight.’
He knelt in front of me and unfastened the flap on the doctor’s bag and took out his bottles and tools and all the rest of it, arranging them on a little table – damp sponges and six different brushes and a dozen compacts of powder, tins of color, sprays, and tubes of lipstick. He worked on my features first using the brushes and sponges, and then his fingertips, like a blind man examining me, moving his fingers like spider legs, working the powder around my cheeks. When he finished my face he dealt with my eyes, dabbing them with mascara and drawing the color across my lids and all around. He did not speak, though his face was nearer to mine than it had ever been. He breathed, and the pressure of his breath, the scrape of the air through his nostrils, told me he was enjoying this. But he was so gentle, he touched me so lightly, I knew there was a layer of powder between his fingertips and my skin. I sensed very strongly that he was giving me a mask, making a picture on my blank face, but I also felt that his tender gestures were more like a blessing than just another of his tricks.
You listen for one thing and hear another. I expected Millroy to speak, my ears were open. I heard the chirpy whine of crickets under the trailer, the whistle of cicadas, and the fairground music which at this distance was no more than a thumping, like someone rolling a barrel. All the talking and shouting had combined to make a shrill crazy-house crackle, and it was hard to hear any of those sounds without imagining blinking lights. Then there was a cowbell, the scratching of more insects, a nagging dog-woof, the rat-tat of the shooting gallery. I was listening for Millroy, but Millroy was listening too.
He remained silent and seemed to grow sadder as he worked on me, and when he finally unsnapped one of the little compacts of powder, swinging the mirror disc from its hinge and holding it to my face, he shrugged, looking helpless.
‘Anything wrong?’ I knew he disliked mirrors but this seemed more serious.
He looked away and said, ‘I have to be very careful.’
But hadn’t he been careful? He had given me a new face. I was another person, older, smarter, brighter, with large lovely eyes and shapely lips, and a pale pretty face – no freckles, no marks. It was a happy face, and not a girl’s but a woman’s.
‘I don’t recognize myself.’
‘Gilding the lily,’ he said. ‘But that’s the point.’
‘Who am I supposed to be?’
He then smiled with more assurance and pleasure than I had seen so far.
‘Take a guess.’
But I knew. It was as though in putting this make-up on me he had given me more than a face – he had re-made me. And so, with this face and in this mood, I was his.
As he had promised, I became his assistant. He wrapped me in an old coat and put a floppy hat on my head and we set off for the evening performance, and he said, ‘You can’t imagine what these people are like. But if anyone asks, call me Doc.’
He kept his eyes dow
n, sort of tugging me and not looking either left or right. I tried to do the same but it was hard.
Dodging the animal pens, the staring cows and shuffling goats, the Elephant Ride – closed for the night: Millroy used Packy in his show – we moved forward into the Fun-O-Rama crowd and I saw immediately what he meant. These people were older than the ones that I knew from the day-time. Instead of children, there were lots of young rowdy couples, and greasy bikers, and prowling boys with their hats on backward.
Millroy seemed to hesitate and look up as we entered the midway, a wide strip with food concessions on either side – pizza stalls, burger wagons, the stands with signs in big flashing lights spelling out Hot Peanuts, Chilli Dogs, Texas Burger (Pork Knobs! Beef Nuggets!), Sno-Cones and Old-Fashioned Root Beer Float. At Fried Dough a man ladled brown twists out of a brimming pot of dark bubbling oil, and at Foskett’s Fluff a man spun cotton candy onto paper spikes. It was all steam and gas burners and sizzling fat, the splat of popcorn and the gleaming racks of burned and burst-open hot dogs.
‘They are dangerously compromising, their immune systems,’ Millroy said. ‘And it’s not just weenie worship. Look at that wedge of pie. Look at those Twinkies. Junk food is for people who believe in UFOs.’
Yet he had slowed down, and he was watching these eaters with such bright eyes and such a big disgusted smile he had hiked up his mustache and I could see his teeth.
People were looking at us, I could sense their inquiring eyes. People at Custom Air Brush and Handwriting – Personality – Love – Horoscope. They even turned from the shooting galleries, from the knock-down dollies and wooden milk bottles, Water Fun Gun, Frog Hop, the fishing games, the darts into limp balloons and playing-cards, Chuck the Hoopla, and rifles with popping corks. People looked up as they waited in line at Super Loops, Mirror Maze, Cobra, and Thunder-Bolt, and even the dizzier ones spilling out of Gravitron glanced up when Millroy went by with me in his shadow, feeling in my hat like a dwarf under a mushroom.
