Millroy the Magician

by Paul Theroux

  ‘But if it was,’ Millroy said to the man, ‘maybe you’d have some idea of what I was talking about.’

  He went on eating. He liked saying things that forced people to think – baffling them and then pretending not to notice their bafflement.

  No one argued with him today.

  ‘Except for Otis, the producers don’t like the show, for their own pathetic reasons,’ Millroy said. ‘But it works, so what can they do?’

  The new Paradise Park was proving to be very popular (‘I could have told them it would be’), but no one knew whether it was simply a good combination of children and stories, or all the toilet talk mixed in with Mealtime Magic. But because they did not know, they were afraid to change the new format that Millroy himself had been steadily changing.

  After three weeks, Paradise Park’s viewing figures exceeded those of Sesame Street, the other Boston children’s show, and Millroy was glad, because he hated that show.

  ‘Henson’s a puppeteer, not an educator,’ he said. ‘All those misshapen puppets and quacky voices. Their literacy is just whimsical and their notions of cultural relativism are actually subversive. It does matter what country you come from. They stick things in their mouth in Africa and China that are no good for you at all. No, Sesame Street’s a bad joke. We know what youngsters need.’

  That Friday, after the producers’ meeting, after the release of the viewing figures, after the meal at Fredette’s diner, we headed back to Wompatuck in the Ford, and Millroy was glowing with certainty.

  ‘Of course I let them blame me for the show,’ he said.

  His head was alight, and he seemed to know the secret of this gray winter world. Cormorants dropped on the black posts stuck in the water near the big ugly building of the Dorchester Yacht Club.

  ‘Because in the end they’ll have to give me credit for the show’s success.’

  Now we were passing the gas tanks that were candy-striped and conspicuous.

  ‘I think something good is happening, angel – something I have been leading up to my whole life.’

  Hearing that, I felt sure he was talking about more than a children’s program on morning TV. It was his I am a messenger voice.

  21

  Holidays seem to make even a humdrum event dramatic or strange by giving it specific decorations, like a Christmas wreath on the door of a burned-down house, or a Merry Christmas sticker on the bumper of a wrecked car. Holiday time was different, too, because of the days you had off, or the extra time you worked, and you usually remembered the weather, and always the music, and there were surprises. All this, Millroy told me. And I knew that Christmas was a time of disasters, drunkenness and tears. My birthday was the 20th, so close to Christmas I did not even mention it to Millroy. I turned fifteen but stayed the same size.

  ‘People are intensely together on holidays, or else intensely alone,’ he said. ‘And holidays always mark shifts in people’s fortunes. Ours, for example. Think of the Fourth of July at the Barnstable County Fair.’

  Now Christmas was coming.

  ‘I sense something in the air,’ Millroy said, tapping his nose, getting a sniff of the future.

  Thanksgiving and the alternative turkey show was past, and these days it was Christmas carols in the elevator at the TV station, and the producers asking Millroy about his plans for a Christmas show. Millroy said he would deal with it, of course, Christmas was his favorite time of year.

  ‘And I insist on using the word Christmas on the show,’ he said, ‘not the all-purpose secularity of “Happy Holidays.” ’

  There were more surprises, even for me – and I had thought, living with Millroy, that I had been prepared for everything.

  On one early December show, Willie Webb was talking about people who used to be fat, and how they felt now that they were the right weight.

  ‘And we’re going to hear from one of them,’ he said.

  I sat up and got curious about hearing a fat person’s story. I liked life histories that were full of facts, what their Dada said, and what they watched on TV, and what they ate for breakfast and especially what did they worry about? I wanted to hear one about a young girl who no longer lived at home, and how she was gladder than she ever had been, and the good things that had happened to her. I wanted to hear that everything had come out right. Millroy was a story-man in just that way, his struggle-stories were always successes, and they had as much magic in them as his conjuring.

  ‘Yo.’ Willie was nodding. ‘We have someone right here with us who used to be very fat.’

  I looked around wondering who that person might be and I saw that everyone else was looking too. In the middle of that searching and silence I heard my name spoken out loud.

  ‘Alex?’

  And I glanced up and saw Willie staring straight at my head.

  ‘Want to tell us your story?’

  I said, ‘What story?’

  ‘About the time you were fat,’ he said.

  About the time I was what?

  I had no story but as soon as I stood up and opened my mouth to deny it a story came out.

  ‘Yes, it’s true, though it’s probably hard for you to imagine me porky,’ I said. ‘But they used to see me and say, “Hey, it’s Chub, the basketball smuggler” – and they oinked at me. My belly was out to here and like a lot of fat people I had wicked body odor. I shook when I walked, and sometimes when I was nice and quiet I couldn’t stop my body from jiggling. I yawned all the time and I fell asleep on buses. I used to steal food. The only time I didn’t eat was at mealtimes, when there were other people around –’

  ‘Alex was in denial,’ Willie said.

  ‘There were other people around at mealtimes, and why would you want anyone to see you eating if you were so fat? The whole rest of the time I was, like, scarfing food. If I saw anything that would fit into my mouth I shoved it in, no matter what it was. I usually ate three cookies at a time, making them into a sandwich.’

  I was talking so fast I was almost out of breath.

  Willie said, ‘Come on down here, Alex, so that we can get a real good look at you.’

  I left my seat with the other children and went to join Willie and Stacy. Maybe Stacy had a fat story, too? But if so, she had to wait for me to finish, because I was talking all the way down, and I wanted Millroy to hear this, but where was he today?

  ‘I told people I had disturbed glands. I dreamed of dying, I was real suicidal, I looked about thirty-five. I heard there was this machine that sucked fat out of you – it could pump about a gallon of fat out of your thighs. I wanted the treatment so that I could go on eating.’

  I started to laugh, so that this would not seem such an awful and tragic story. But as I was telling it I believed it and grew sad, thinking of myself as huge and horrible and foul-smelling.

  ‘You should have seen me’ – I was still trying to laugh – ‘I looked like a burger. I hated seeing myself in a mirror but I learned to check out my reflection without getting upset. I looked very closely at my face in a very small mirror.’

  Pretending that I had a small mirror in my hand, I peered in, biting my cheeks and trying to shrivel my face.

  ‘After a while, I realized that being fat was making me a bad person. Ever thought of that? It turned me into a liar. I lied about my weight. I lied about food. I said I was on a diet, when I wasn’t. “I only had one of them cookies, Gaga” kind of thing. Being unhealthy can make you bad. I got into a program on fat acceptance. Then I thought about killing myself by sticking my finger in a light-socket. I got depressed when my finger wouldn’t fit, and depression made me eat more. I got even fatter.’

  Everyone was listening to this.

  ‘Jeekers,’ I said. ‘Fatness makes you tricky.’

  And I could tell that thousands of people were seeing me on their TV sets, fascinated and sad. I could sense them, and all those eyes.

  ‘Then I
heard Uncle Dick talking about Mealtime Magic. He goes, “It’s all in the Book. The Book is full of food, plus a lot of menu suggestions.” He goes, “Try it.” It’s fruit and fish and vegetables and nuts and beans.’

  With the mention of Uncle Dick and the Book there was perfect silence.

  ‘That was Day One for me,’ I said. ‘From that day onward, everything got better. I am happy, plus I’m healthy, inside and out.’

  I smiled and took a bow while the youngsters whistled and whooped, looking at how skinny I was.

  ‘What a neat story,’ Willie said. ‘Hey, thanks, Alex.’

  Yes, it was a neat story, but where had it come from?

  I was going to mention it at Norm’s Diner that same morning, but Millroy was teaching Fredette how to eat razor blades.

  ‘It’s not magic. It’s a real trick, because they’re not razor blades and you don’t eat them,’ Millroy said.

  Then I was going to mention it on the ride back to the trailer park at Wompatuck, but Millroy began telling me about holidays (‘They are times for confessions and summaries and new beginnings’). Back at the trailer Millroy was silent, and I knew he was thinking about tomorrow’s show and did not want to be disturbed.

  I waited until bedtime, which was eight or so, the usual. I did not speak until he had put the lights out and had stopped fumbling with his pillow. He was at the other end of the trailer, on his own shelf, in his own cubicle, sighing, submerging himself in sleep as he had taught me to do.

  ‘I never was fat, you know.’

  He heard me but he said nothing.

  ‘I was small. I had a slim little figure. I wasn’t fat.’

  ‘Maybe “fat” is a figure of speech,’ Millroy said.

  ‘Like I’m supposed to know what that means.’

  Was his silence a way of telling me he was sorry he had said that?

  ‘And you sure didn’t make me thin.’

  ‘Are you the same as when we met, muffin?’

  That had to be a trick question, because the answer was no.

  ‘But don’t think about it,’ he said.

  It was always obvious to me when he was smiling in the dark. I could almost see his teeth showing bright white under his mustache.

  ‘That wasn’t my story.’

  ‘It’s yours now, muffin.’

  I could hear his brain buzzing, the wheels turning, the throb of the hubs, the wind in the spokes.

  ‘Maybe it was glossolalia,’ he said. ‘Speaking in tongues.’

  ‘Jeekers.’

  ‘Like Joel says, “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” ’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because these are the days of the latter rain, muffin.’

  ‘Jeekers.’

  ‘Aren’t the floors full of wheat and the vats overflowing with wine and oil?’ he said.

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘And ye shall eat in plenty.’

  So there was nothing I could do, but that was not what bothered me most. All that night I lay in bed wondering where I had gotten the story, and what if I got any more of them?

  My story was popular. Parents and children wrote in to say it was helpful. It made them feel better about themselves, they said. And they asked about Uncle Dick’s food – did he have the recipes, and what was the book I mentioned?

  On the next Mealtime Magic slot, Uncle Dick made figgy loaves and passed them around and said, ‘It’s not so much a diet as a way of life. Yet it is satisfying enough to be a religion,’ and he repeated some recipes.

  ‘If this show weren’t so popular you’d be in trouble,’ Eddie Mazzola said.

  Millroy just laughed, and because he laughed so seldom, when he did so he sounded like a cackling wizard. But there was nothing the producers could say – each week the show’s viewing figures increased even more.

  Then there were what Millroy called ‘administrative warnings’ – that Christmas was coming, that religious messages were not allowed on Paradise Park, and neither was talk about toilets, nor mentions of racial groups.

  Dedrick was the one who had described different races.

  ‘Ever wonder about the Japanese?’ he said. ‘They eat tons of fish. If you take a good look you’ll see that they’ve gotten to look like fish.’

  Because the children were laughing, he did not stop at that. From eating pork, the Koreans looked like pigs. Vegetarian Hindus had come to look like vegetables – skinny and lumpy. Dutch people looked pale and soft, like their own cheese. Americans looked like burgers –

  It was too much. Millroy was reprimanded – Otis delivered the administrative warning from Eddie Mazzola.

  ‘These youngsters aren’t racists,’ Millroy said. ‘And you know there’s a grain of truth in what Dedrick said.’

  ‘You mean you believe that stuff about people getting to look like the food they eat?’

  ‘How are your headaches?’ Millroy said suddenly.

  ‘Gone,’ Otis said.

  ‘Can you put your hand on your heart, Otis, and say that the Japanese don’t look like fish?’

  And when he was warned again about not submitting a script for the Christmas show, he just shrugged and said he was not worried. He judged the reaction at Norm’s Diner to be typical. The early-morning customers all watched the show, and Norman Fredette reported the things they said. They liked the children on Paradise Park for being themselves – funny, enthusiastic, and unpredictable. No puppets, no bullying Big Person, no fantasies.

  ‘They’re winging it,’ Millroy said. ‘They’re all on their own now.’

  He had no control over the youngsters, he said, and the reason for the immense popularity of Paradise Park was that it was entirely a children’s show, youngsters saying whatever came into their head, and – except for a few magic routines that Uncle Dick performed – children devised all their own items.

  ‘They got creative.’

  Fredette and the rest of the customers at the diner believed what Millroy said, not because he was persuasive but because his food was on the menu of Norm’s Diner at last and they said it was delicious. His food was the proof of his message, and it made him believable.

  He said to Fredette, ‘I know you’re interested in learning magic, but this food is much more important than these tricks, and I think you’ll agree that it has a magic all its own.’

  Christmas came, not the day but the seasonal show, with no prior warning, no script in advance, just the word that something special was going to happen.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Millroy said to Otis on the way in. ‘The children are in charge.’

  It was a Wednesday. We locked ourselves into the studio for the rehearsal, and there was the usual confusion, five or six groups of youngsters working separately, Millroy passing from one group to the next, fixing them with his eyes, the youngsters singing, Millroy whispering.

  After the show started, Millroy did the Uncle Dick turkey trick that had been such a hit at Thanksgiving, bringing a roasted turkey back to life in his Mealtime Magic oven.

  First he showed the big basted bird on a platter, and he held it up.

  ‘Those drumsticks are the legs – this bird used to strut on those legs,’ he said. ‘That neck once supported a lively head. And look at those burned appendages – they were once real feathered wings. This creature was capable of sustained flight. Imagine, this roasted bundle of meat could actually fly in fresh air –’

  But not even Millroy’s vivid description of the flying turkey could help you see it flying in the sky. He seemed to realize that, because he soon slipped it into his oven – not an ordinary oven, but rather a magician’s tin box, with panels and flaps.

  ‘Perfectly empty,’ Millroy said in his Uncle Dick voice.

  He showed the inside of the oven and poked his whole arm through and wagged it up and down. Then he slipped the roasted bird in.

&
nbsp; ‘I ask you to energize this carcass through the power of prayer,’ he said. ‘Help me. This dead bird had third-degree burns over one hundred percent of its body and needs your prayers.’

  We concentrated hard. I made myself see a fat black turkey beating its wings over Marston’s Mills with the fleshy flannel of its red head flopping as it flew.

  Millroy passed his hands over the tin oven box and jiggled up the side panels.

  The live turkey gobbled and seemed to swell as it burst out of the box. It was all feathers and motion, and it was loud and live, a very proud bird, like the eagle I had once seen Millroy yank out of the folds of an American flag.

  ‘That turkey is saying thank you,’ Millroy said, and as usual what you saw most of was Uncle Dick’s arms and legs on the TV screen.

  Willie Webb gathered up the grateful turkey, and Stacy said, ‘Why should a beautiful bird like that have to die just so that you can have a merry Christmas?’

  ‘Yo. Eat an apple,’ Berry said.

  ‘There are so many other foods you can eat,’ Dedrick said. ‘Everyone likes squash and nut stuffing, which is nutritious and fibrous. Why not try making a meal of that. Gourds are pretty cool.’

  ‘How about barley soup and figgy loaves, bro,’ Kayla said.

  ‘Let’s see what’s in the Christmas Bread Truck this morning,’ Dedrick said.

  A whole assortment of new food was laid out on the Mealtime Magic table, and the back-from-the-dead turkey watched it all and even ate some of the stuffing.

  ‘That’s the best way to stuff a turkey,’ Willie Webb said.

  ‘So much for the eating part of Christmas, which everyone talks about every year,’ Dedrick said. ‘But what about the other part, that no one ever talks about?’

  I was thinking What other part? but the rest of the children seemed to know what he was talking about, because they were already wheezing and giggling.

  Millroy was nowhere in sight. He had gone as soon as he had brought the roasted turkey back to life. It was a sign of something. He was never more conspicuous than when he was out of sight.