by Paul Theroux
‘You will receive all the attention you deserve,’ Millroy said.
The letter was from Big Brother Bert, of the TV show. He wore a buttoned-up sweater and never smiled. The lights blazed off his glasses so that you could not see his eyes.
Millroy said it was not the one he had been expecting. This reply suggested that Millroy might be five years old. I too am very concerned about good eating habits, and I hope you tell your Mom and Dad that you want to eat right.
More letters arrived. One was from the president of the United States, a big gold eagle on the flap. Reverend Huber handed it over without a remark.
‘I was going to write to the Surgeon-General,’ Millroy told me afterwards. ‘I wanted him to consider banning all food advertising on television. Most of that stuff’s as bad as cigarettes or alcohol. Then I figured I’d go directly to the President.’
Your letter to the President is one of many thousands received by the White House on an average day, it began, and it was not so much a reply as a thank-you for writing.
Millroy did not mind. ‘I’m on file,’ he said. ‘That’s the important thing.’
He had also begun to write letters to the programs, giving his reactions and explaining his thoughts about the food habits of Americans today.
Thank you for your communication. We wish it were possible to provide a personalized reply to each and every letter we receive, they usually started. They were from the characters who appeared on the programs and the people in charge.
‘They think I’m a nut-bag,’ Millroy said. ‘You don’t think I’m a nut-bag, do you, angel?’
‘No,’ I said, and he knew I meant it. ‘You’re amazing, and I also think you’re kind.’
‘I’m regular,’ Millroy said. ‘It’s all to do with time. For most people time is an avenger – the enemy. But I eat right, so time is my friend.’
He had time for everything, he said, which was why he not only watched all the TV shows but also wrote letters to them. Besides the President of the United States, he wrote to the Governor of Massachusetts, the local Board of Health, the Mayor of Buzzards Bay – on urgent matters of health and personal hygiene.
‘This could be the big one,’ Millroy said one morning when a letter came from Paradise Park. It was different from the others. We would be most interested in hearing more about the presentation you mention. Please get in touch with our program secretary …
Nearly always the letters thanked him and signed off for good. This was the first letter I saw in which Millroy was encouraged to write back.
Because of this sympathetic reply, he watched Paradise Park every morning.
‘I smell breakfast, I smell Reverend Huber’s bacon, I can hear the snap of his Rice Krispies and the thud of his Real Good Fries. Does he know the Seventh-day Adventists invented American breakfast cereal?’
He was watching the show with the windows open. Mr Phyllis had shrunk on the screen to the size of the tiny puppets called the Mumbling Humptulips, who lived in Paradise Park with the Frawlies and all the rest of the little people.
‘Gaga used to fry up eggs and bacon all the time. I liked the smell.’
‘It’s a misleading aroma. It is blood and the meat of strangled animals. You would have been so much better off with this.’
He meant the breakfast he had just finished – home-made wheat loaves, fruit and nuts and his drink of juiced grapes.
‘They’re all getting the wrong message,’ he said. Mr Phyllis was now his normal size, talking with his face against the TV screen. ‘Children who listen to adults like that will grow up to look just like them. They’ll be just as weak and tricky. Muffin, the wrong people are in charge.’
He changed channels – Sesame Street, noisy cartoons, Big Brother Bert, The Jingle Family and their Dog Fred, Balloony and Muttrix, Reasons to Believe, Doctor Walter Malone, The Chippies, The Hour of Power – brightly colored animals, fat-faced people, loud music, shouting.
‘People don’t know how to live. They are taking the wrong road. It’s pathetic.’
‘What should they do?’
I knew that he wanted me to say that.
‘They should be asking themselves questions like yours, sugar.’
He was smiling. He looked at me with gratitude, that You saved me expression.
‘They should listen to me,’ Millroy said. ‘Start all over. Get back to basics. Declare Day One.’
I was not surprised when the letter came from WBNT, the station that broadcast Paradise Park.
‘I was right,’ he said. ‘It’s the big one.’
Thank you for your brief but effective synopsis of your presentation, the letter said. We would be very interested in meeting with you and discussing the matter further. Please call …
The envelope was addressed to Dr H. Millroy.
It was much too late for me to ask him what ‘H’ stood for. It was not for any name I knew – Max, or Felix, or any of the others.
We had no telephone, and so that no one in the trailer park might overhear him we drove to a public phone booth in Buzzards Bay.
Afterwards, Millroy said that he had spoken to three people – a Thin Voice, a Fat Voice, and a Smoker’s Voice. Fat Voice had the grumbellies. He was not being frivolous, he said. Physical facts revealed inner states, and even the spirit of people.
‘People are instruments of Divine Will,’ he piped up suddenly, on the way back to Pilgrim Pines. ‘Even when they are unimpressive they might be essential. A bum may be necessary to your enlightenment. Or a nagging woman. Or an epicene oldster in make-up wearing glasses and baggy pants on a TV show. Or a small girl who is no more than a face in the crowd.’
‘With her thumb in her mouth.’ I knew what he was saying.
‘An angel,’ he said, correcting me and looking thankful. He cleared his throat and went on, ‘The main thing is to obey the call without questioning it, and then do your stuff.’
12
We were in our suite at the Hathaway Hotel in Boston, Millroy prowling the rooms, while I pretended not to be nervous. It was not Millroy, it was not the desk clerk’s smirk as he said, ‘I’ll need Dad’s signature.’ It was all the rest. Hotel was only a word to me. I had never stayed in one in my life. Some things I had never done seemed so unbelievable that I did not even mention them to Millroy, who had done everything. Next to him I was nobody. I had felt this strongly on the trip up to Boston and told him, so that he would not be disappointed.
‘I’m nothing,’ I had said.
He had not denied it, which made me feel awful.
‘I’m a blank.’
‘Yes.’ And gave me his thankful face again. ‘I couldn’t have you any other way.’
We were headed up Route 3, Millroy at the wheel of the Ford.
‘See that?’
It was a large American flag flapping in front of a restaurant just off the road. Now, with the leaves turned and many of them blown to the ground, you could see what was behind the trees.
‘That flag’s not patriotism,’ he said. ‘That’s just an attention-getter, so that they can sell grease dogs, and fat burgers, and rubber chicken.’
All morning he had been talking, as though psyching himself up for his interview. He had always been talkative before his shows, and afterwards he went silent, fading in the trailer. He admitted that magic exhausted him, and his talking was often magic too, making you see something you had never seen before.
‘That house,’ he said – it had also been revealed through the trees by the fallen leaves – ‘all spiffed up.’
It was a brick-fronted mansion with Greek pillars and white window shutters and a black wrought-iron fence, and a fountain in front surrounded by beds of orange and yellow and purpley-blue flowers that might or might not have been chrysanthemums.
‘That is not a young person’s house, princess. An older couple lives there. They spend all their time
and money beautifying and renovating it, buying expensive shingles and the best landscaping and window treatments available. Because the older that people get, the more they spend on their house.’
He was now half turned in his seat glancing back at the house.
‘But why? They’ll be dead soon, so it’s a kind of tomb. A house of that kind is just an expensive sarcophagus.’
He shook his head, still smiling in disapproval.
‘How much better it would be if they renovated their bodies and made themselves healthy from within, instead of hiding in those pretentious houses. They would learn to love life then instead of being busy dying.’
He seemed confident, talking the whole time, a kind of soundtrack for the trip up to Boston. He dug some dried fruit out of his pocket, picked the lint off and offered me some – little leathery apricots.
‘This is one serious interview, no question about it,’ he said. ‘But who is interviewing whom?’
His blinkless eyes searched my face for a reaction.
‘Hah!’
He could smell success, I knew. I was getting used to his facial expressions, and the reasons for them. He did not boast – he beamed instead, and a warm light showed in his whole face, which looked like a Christmas ornament most of the time, he was so healthy and happy. He raised his hands and clutched the air with eager energy.
‘Meanwhile, the Reverend Baby Huber is leading the hymns at Pilgrim Pines – all that suffering, all that mercy and money. Pass the hat and don’t forget the barf bag. That’s the way to heaven, with the Sinister Minister.’
He went on talking, about life after death, how it was different for everyone, according to what you believed, and if you thought it was eternal darkness you would get eternal darkness, or if a paradise then it would be a paradise – ‘let’s face it, belief in the afterlife is just a test of your imagination.’
After that, Boston, the city, was sudden and ugly, and it had a sour soapy smell of food and gas, of dust and low tide. Our car went slower on the side street to the hotel than the people walking beside it on the sidewalk. We passed clubs and bars and movie houses.
‘Don’t look,’ Millroy said, after we parked the car, and he said nothing more, just frowned and sort of sheltered me with his shadow and his height as we walked through the noisy streets, Millroy carrying the bag, to the hotel. And then it was I’ll need Dad’s signature.
‘We’re short of double rooms,’ the desk clerk said, after Millroy had signed the card, ‘so we’re upgrading you and your son to a suite.’
Soon Millroy was prowling the room and I was pretending not to be nervous, thinking how I had never been in a hotel before, and how I was blank.
The suite overlooked the Public Gardens and was full of armchairs and tables and footstools, all of them with skirts. Two bathrooms, a desk, two TVs, flowers in vases, bowls of fruit, pictures in gold frames.
‘I hate ashtrays,’ Millroy said. ‘And other people’s restrooms can be traumatic.’
Away from his trailer, from his food and his facilities, he was edgy. He did not eat strange food, he did not trust strange plumbing, he did not sleep well in any bed but his own. And it was hard, he said, to work magic in unfamiliar places.
‘Never mind, we’ll be home tomorrow.’
‘But are these flowers real?’
Millroy snatched one and let me sniff it, and then he stuffed it into his mouth with a bunch of the flower’s green leaves. He chewed and swallowed.
‘Nasturtiums are a tasty flower.’
He was circling the room. He reached into the fruit bowl and broke off a cluster of grapes from a bunch and began eating them.
‘The Book’s full of grapes.’
He was striding and flinging his arms out as he talked, taking possession of the space. He went for the sofa, dug at the cushions, yanked them apart, heaved them up and made a bed – smacked his hand on it and lay down.
Now I noticed there was a live tree in the far corner of the room, taller than me.
‘Is this luxury? Maybe yes, maybe no. The thing is, I know what to do with it. I could be right at home here, whereas the average person would be totally lost, sitting in his underwear with all the lights off, bewildered by all the amenities and appliances. But I simply extend my hand.’
He opened the little refrigerator of the mini-bar and made a face as he took out a bottle of wine that was lying on its side.
‘Wine maketh glad the heart of man,’ he said.
He popped the cork and swigged some. He switched on the TV – a game show. He stowed his clothes in the dresser. He finished the cluster of grapes. He said, ‘Yours’ and ‘Mine’ at the doors to the different bathrooms, and he kept opening drawers – examining bags, matches, sewing kits, shoe-mitts, stationery, pens and postcards until he found what he was looking for – a book.
‘Room service,’ he said.
It was a thick brown book with tissuey pages. What was odd to me was that from where I sat I could see on the desk top a binder that was lettered In-Room Dining Menu, nothing like the thing that Millroy was holding. He flipped the pages of his book with a moistened finger.
‘Is that the Bible?’ I asked. ‘The Book?’
‘Yes and no,’ he said.
Yes and no?
‘It’s also the room-service menu,’ he said.
At times like this I wished for someone else to hear and see this man, he could be so unexpected.
He was still licking his finger and scraping at the pages. Finally he found the page he wanted, and he read, ‘“We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely. The cucumbers and the melons and the leeks, and the onions and the garlic.” ’ He smiled at the open book. ‘Numbers, eleven-five.’
Millroy picked up the telephone.
‘Room service? This is suite forty-two twenty-five. I’d like to order dinner for two.’
Melon appetizer, fish of the day – it was fresh scrod – with leeks, and a mixed salad of cukes, garlic, and onions.
When it was delivered by a silent paunchy man in a dark uniform pushing a steel trolley, Millroy was still holding the Bible and smiling. The man unsprung the trolley, turning it into a table, and set up our meal.
The man glanced at me, because I was staring at him, and I was thinking how Millroy had taught me how to look at people, how the ones in the food business could be unhealthy, what a strange thing that was, and how he would say this man was a living contradiction, dishing up health but unhealthy himself. Even ‘paunchy’ was a Millroy word.
‘This is Alex,’ Millroy said, as though challenging the man to deny it. And he still clutched the Bible.
Looking furtive – perhaps it was the way Millroy was swinging the Bible at him like a brick – the man excused himself in a foreign accent, and backed out of the room.
‘I was saved by a Gideon Bible,’ Millroy said to me.
He ate, cutting his food carefully, like someone carrying out a delicate operation, poking, slicing, forking, lifting and scrutinizing. He hated sauces. He never put food into his mouth until he had squinted at it, every forkful.
‘I was trapped inside my huge body,’ he said. He spoke in his magician’s voice, sounding wise and powerful. ‘I was blinded by the darkness of my body, in a limitless wilderness of insensible fat. I was miserable.’
He was eating, but slowly and very small amounts, and speaking of fatness he seemed to be talking about someone else, someone far-off and monstrous, because he was slender and strong and bright.
‘I was fat. Picture me fat –’
I could not manage it.
‘Cheeks out like this’ – he plumped them for me – ‘face full of pork. I taped out at just under three hundred. I was a burger. Lost? You have no idea.’
But he was slender, his skin was clear, the dome of his head glowed with health, his legs and arms were muscular – ‘a lot of magic is muscl
e-power,’ he often said – and when he walked the body of the room shook, not his body. With a fat person it was the other way around.
‘Know what a great meal was to me then? It was first finger-foods, dead eels or fish eggs on toast or weenies with toothpicks, and two so-called cocktails, nine-to-one martinis, followed by thick milky soup, say cream of rabbit, and you could just about taste its long ears. It was wine with the fish course, and the fish was fried in animal fat. It was more wine and an animal entrée, something beefy, a chunk of it, with the blood still running out of its severed circulatory system. It was surrounded by pale boiled vegetables. This was all followed by dessert, a lardy cake, black coffee, and hundred-proof brandy. Can you conceive how lethal that concoction is?’
He was still eating slowly, which was surprising, because the next thing he said was, ‘I’d almost be willing to eat a meal like that again just so I could pump out my stomach and actually demonstrate to you what a mess it is. Practically indigestible. Probably no sooner get it onto the table and it’d explode, spontaneous combustion, baboom!’
He had not pumped out his stomach to show me the contents for several weeks, nor had I thought of it, but from time to time I tried to picture what a stranger would say if he witnessed Millroy the Magician pumping chewed food out through a nose tube and poking it seriously on a plate, and this was one of those times – I still could not imagine the stranger’s reaction.
‘I ate because I was bored. I smoked and drank because I was bored. I buried myself in fat. I hadn’t read Psalm 45. Ever looked at it? I did not know that the “oil of gladness is low in cholesterol.” ’
He sniffed a morsel of fish and his eyes registered the smell, their color wavering like two little meters. Then he clamped his teeth on the morsel and tugged it off the fork.
‘Loneliness is the worst illness in the world. And everyone is lonely who does not have the ability to see – I hate the word God, let’s say Good. A person thinks “I am alone, I am no one, I don’t matter” –’
