Millroy the Magician

by Paul Theroux

  How had he expanded Day One so quickly? But he denied that it was big, and because he had nothing on the West Coast he could not say that it was truly nationwide.

  ‘It’s a manageable size and it’s a straightforward retail operation. The first one was the hardest. After that it’s just delegation, repetition and good quality control – pure, basic Day One food in a wholesome environment. The only thing we have in a can is the program.’

  It was still a weekly pre-recorded show, full of cooking and confessions, but fewer and fewer bursts of magic.

  ‘It’s got to stay simple,’ he said. ‘We can’t let it dazzle and devour us.’

  Summer came. Millroy sent Day One Sons and Daughters to diners in four cities. He visited them. ‘Quality control.’ He did not say much about them. I did not know whether they were going badly and he was quietly concerned, or whether he was embarrassed by the suddenness of their success, creating Day One cities with his own Day One cookie cutter. I decided that it was his success that made him so secretive, because he was uncomfortable making so much money. What did you do with it?

  All this made me feel smaller, and made him seem large and mysterious and busy.

  Left alone in the diner while he traveled, and more or less in charge of the Boston Day One, I got to know the Sons and Daughters better – the ones who were still here, and the others from hearsay. They all had scary stories to tell – of fathers drunker and sicker than Dada, of grannies crazier and crueler than Gaga, nastier people than I had ever heard of, worse than the worst people in the Mills or in Mashpee. But it was not their intention to frighten me, these Day One Sons and Daughters. They were only answering my questions. And they knew about each other.

  LaRayne’s brother Tooty got busted for pushing a teacher out the window. Then in reform school another dude slashed Tooty so bad with a broken bottle his eye got cut out and now it’s glass. He pops it and sucks it to gross you out.

  That was Troy speaking. But Troy himself had had a hard time, according to Peaches.

  Troy’s old man was set on fire and died that way. They burned him down.

  I asked why.

  He was dealing crack and maybe the crack was bad, or else he was skimming money. Bad drugs deal. Listen, Little Guy, it could also be mistaken identity. Who knows? But better not to ask. Know what I’m saying?

  No wonder they were happy here, being fed and paid by Millroy the Magician. This must have seemed so peaceful to them.

  And Tuppy and Ike, they both gay.

  Millroy knew that?

  The Big Guy knows everything.

  T. Van had scars on his hands and his arms.

  Them there’s bite marks, he said. His full name was T. Van Dyer. From teeth.

  You did not want to know more than that.

  We were changing a tire on Millroy’s Ford one day, Tomarra Weatherless and I, and after I jacked up the car with the long crooked-handled wrench, Tomarra said, I hate them things.

  I asked, What things?

  My father went whacko with one of them monkey wrenches.

  Knives, guns, broken bottles and wicked sticks of wood figured in these stories, and so did large destructive fires. There were wrecked houses, crashed cars, policemen, jails, drugs, theft, alcohol, death and injury. It was no mystery to me now why they obeyed Millroy and considered the Day One Diner their home.

  Dedrick had some kind of breakdown and cut his sister Jevette real bad.

  What happened to him?

  He’s still trying to work it out.

  ‘Don’t your folks wonder why you left home?’ I asked Shonelle Bigart, imagining the Bigarts having breakfast without her today.

  ‘If my mother kicked me out of the house, which she did,’ Shonelle said, ‘why would she wonder, if she already knows the reason, you see what I’m saying?’

  Daylon Jefferson said he never went home. How could he? He had no home, only that old lady Bodette, who was always in the bag.

  ‘We got thrown out into the street,’ he said.

  They were sad stories the Sons and Daughters told. If you asked for more, they obliged.

  So we lived in a junk-heap seventy-eight Chevy Country Squire, four-door, in a parking lot on Warren Street. Anyway the radio worked.

  But usually they kept their past lives to themselves, as though talking about it was unlucky, or made it seem worse – which it certainly did – or it might give me the wrong idea, and I might end up pitying them or thinking I had had it easier in my own past life, which was probably true.

  That didn’t happen to me, they seemed to say. That happened to someone else. This is my life now.

  They were like Millroy. The more I heard of their stories, the less I knew them, and I felt like a stranger. The question Who are these people? usually made me feel lonely.

  They admired Millroy, even idolized him. He is the Boss of Diss, Willie had said. Sometimes I pray to Millroy, Tomarra told me. They saw him as more than strong, as almighty – he could destroy anyone. It made them fear and respect him. His magic thrilled them.

  We were dishing up barley soup, Peaches and I, one morning when Millroy had just left for quality control in a Day One city.

  ‘There are people you meet and you’re, “Hey, I want to be like them,” ’ Peaches said. ‘But the Big Guy is so different. Suppose he’s right – we live for two hundred years. Even so, as long as you live you’d never be like him.’

  The soup brimmed and steamed in the earthenware bowls, and we served it with thick slices of rye bread and ‘cheese of kine.’

  ‘That is why I am staying so right with him,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave him, because he is where it’s at.’

  We were still serving and she was still thinking.

  ‘He is the man,’ she said.

  At first this gave me goose-pimples. After that, I thought: Is that why I am still here after a whole year? I had never looked at Millroy that way, but after Peaches said it I began to think it was true. We could never be like him – that was why we needed him, and would go on believing, and would never leave.

  ‘He is a learning experience that you go on learning,’ Peaches said, licking slopped barley soup from her thumb. ‘He is someone special.’

  There were tears in her eyes as she stopped talking and went on thinking about Millroy, and she reminded me of Stacy when she looked at Millroy with moony eyes, and Hazel DeHart (Sometimes I touch my body). Never mind Day One food and living for two hundred years – they were all in love with Millroy.

  Except me. But hearing them made me proud that I had known him for so long – that I had been the first person he had chosen. I remembered when he was unknown, nothing in the newspaper, nothing on television, when we had lived in a trailer park in Buzzards Bay, sorting the stones out of beans, and him saying so seriously All I want is that you be regular, and I had thought, What’s that supposed to mean?

  Willie Webb was right. I was one of Millroy’s secrets. No one knew who I really was, Jilly Farina from Marston’s Mills, hiding all this time from Gaga and Dada, with a new name and different clothes, not a girl anymore, but a boy, Alex – call me Rusty.

  A secret, or maybe one of Millroy’s tricks, a person he could make disappear – smiling one minute, gone the next, up his sleeve the rest of the time. Wasn’t that my life with him so far? When I was needed, whango! up I popped, blinking in the bright light, straightening my shirt. And here he is – I came or went, according to his wishes. And not only me, but everyone who believed in Day One. He gave us life. That was a scientific fact, just as he said.

  When he disappeared he made the world vanish. He came back and we sprang to life.

  ‘Going out to Denver,’ he said to me one day.

  My arms flopped down straight to my sides and my spirit began leaking out of my punctured soul.

  Take me with you, please.

&
nbsp; ‘Do you want to come with me?’

  We had been together long enough for him to know that my silence meant yes.

  Then, to the airport, my first time ever in a plane, the smell of carpets and plastic and reheated meat, two old women showing us how to wear yellow lifejackets, and then the plane thumping like a sled through wispy white rags of cloud that were holding up the giant metal wings and leaving long streaks of spittle on the windows.

  Wind shear, Millroy said.

  Four and a quarter hours of this, jammed in, five across, elbow to elbow, Millroy talking.

  This is a sealed container, and when you consider all these bodies you can just figure how germ-laden the air is.

  A plastic card in the seat pocket in front of me read: In Case of an Emergency, and showed a picture of a cartoon person praying with his head between his knees.

  Forget that, muffin. If we go down, we’re history.

  I looked out the window and saw the land like a faded map with ponds and lakes like discs of tinfoil beneath us. I picked up the airlines magazine and flipped to an article about cuckoo clocks in Switzerland.

  And the radiation at this altitude can fry your cells.

  My hanky was on my nose, when Millroy reached over and plucked it away and made it vanish in his fingers.

  You could break an eardrum blowing your nose. Wipe it on your sleeve for now.

  Meals were passed out on plastic trays by the old women pushing metal carts.

  Don’t breathe, angel. There’s some possibly damaging slipstream food smells drifting around.

  He brought out Day One food for us, and we ate it together like picnickers, but after he finished he watched people eating, and his face shone the way it did when he saw people late at night through restaurant windows.

  ‘Water?’ It was one of the old women showing Millroy a pitcher of ice water.

  Millroy shook his head and smiled, and went on talking in his ventriloquist’s way.

  Never drink water on an airplane. It is heavily chlorinated and of course potentially fatal.

  I put my head down, like the cartoon man on the emergency card, and prayed until we landed in Denver, the plane thumping down and howling.

  Denver – Stapleton Airport – smelled different from Boston, thinner air, a drier dustier odor. The land was hot and bright, under a wide-open sky propped up on far-off mountain tops, and I could feel all that blue space like high-altitude pressure on my forehead and in my ears.

  A few minutes out of the airport and our rental car was heading down suburban streets, with bungalows and frame houses and brick houses with porches and bus stops and benches at intervals saying Your Name Here $25, and one bench nearer the city saying Day One. Millroy was naming all the things he saw, like a voice in a certain kind of movie.

  ‘Checker Auto Parts, Grease Monkey, Messiah Lutheran Church, Josephine Street, Gaylord Street, Cherry Creek, Footpain Clinic, Car Clinic.’

  A big bronze buffalo took his attention, and he stuck his head out of the car window to see the state house dome like a huge upside-down acorn made out of gold.

  Willie Webb and Stacy ran the Day One Diner here, with LaRayne and Ike. They frowned when they saw me. I knew they resented the special attention that Millroy gave me. Was that my fault? They were glad to see Millroy, and rushed out of the diner to greet him. They were confident, taller, stronger-looking, and strangest of all – in their Day One aprons and tee-shirts – they had shaved their heads, Sons and Daughters alike, as though to look more like Millroy.

  ‘He is the messenger,’ Willie said, introducing Millroy to the customers, who were respectful and who told Millroy how The Day One Program had changed their lives. ‘He is the Big Guy.’

  Millroy did not shake hands with them. Instead he smiled at them and said, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the stomach!’

  ‘The Klan is real active here,’ Willie said, over the welcome meal of Day One food we had in the kitchen. ‘Also Aryan Nation. Also another group of screamers called The Order.’

  ‘They put you in any personal danger?’ Millroy asked.

  ‘We are eating them out of existence.’

  Willie looked fearless, just as nimble as he had been before, but stronger and bigger, and his shaven head and popping eyes made him seem like a giant insect.

  ‘Remember this,’ Millroy said, ‘you will outlive them all.’

  The diner in Denver was the same shape and size as the Boston Day One – the original – and the Sons and Daughters had rooms in the back, beyond the office, where Stacy did the accounts.

  Judging from the reaction of the eaters, Millroy was famous here, and he surprised me by being happy the whole time. He spoke to the customers as though they were old friends, and they hung around smiling at him as he ate, waiting for him to say something more, but he just smiled back.

  ‘And who’s this?’ Willie said after Millroy had gone out back.

  Willie was staring at me.

  ‘That’s what we are all trying to find out,’ Willie said.

  I folded my arms and pretended not to care, but I was worried, and I felt very small, and again I began to wish I had not come here.

  Millroy spent ten minutes in the back, while I looked at the customers – youngsters with long hair, Indians with pony-tails, students, people with the sort of muscular faces you never saw in Boston. I marveled at how alike the diner was to the Boston Day One, also on a side street but in this newer brighter city. Glancing sideways, so as not to be too obvious, I studied the way the Day One Sons and Daughters had shaved their heads to look like Millroy, and I wondered whether I should do the same, cut it all off.

  ‘Watch,’ Millroy said to the eaters in the diner, just before we left.

  He was holding a big metal spoon, pinching the tip of its handle. As he held it the spoon began to droop and then slowly to bend, like a thick spring coiling. When it had stopped bending and was wound tight he handed it to Willie, who showed it to the excited customers.

  ‘Bless you, Doctor Millroy,’ a woman called out when we drove off, and she tried to touch him.

  ‘I find that sort of person very worrying,’ Millroy said. He was rattled when people touched him, and especially women.

  It was the same day, late afternoon, only a few hours in Denver, but I was glad to leave and so was Millroy.

  ‘Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard, Jack in the Box, Taco Bell, Nutri-Systems,’ Millroy said.

  His Day One briefcase was on his lap, packed with green bricks of money – Millroy would have nothing to do with banks: this was a money run as well as a surprise visit.

  ‘Be nice to get back to our own facilities.’

  We are passing over the city of Cleveland, Ohio, the pilot said on the loudspeaker on the way back.

  ‘That’s a Day One city,’ Millroy said.

  I had not known that at all.

  ‘Some day this will be a Day One country,’ Millroy said.

  He was energetic, generous, flushed with success, his briefcase bursting with cash. Never mind, the next time Millroy visited a Day One city I stayed behind, in Boston.

  31

  Most of our food was stored in the cellar of the diner down the dark hole that Millroy called ‘the hatchway.’ Things were put away so carefully there they seemed hidden, and because of my size and the narrow trap-door I was usually the one who squirmed into this hole to bring scoops of food up. For Day One reasons we did not use the refrigerator.

  Millroy hated ice.

  Two mentions of ice in the Book and both of them are silly questions.

  He liked quoting the parts of the Bible that were pointless to show that he was not a fanatic or a fundamentalist.

  In Psalms we read, He casteth forth his ice like morsels. Who can stand before his cold? Then he laughed. Anyone with a good breakfast inside them can stand before his cold!

 
The Sons and Daughters loved it when he talked this way. Yo. Big Guy dissing the Book, woop woop woop.

  Job asks, Out of whose womb came the ice? Millroy said, with a grin. Answer – no one’s womb. The water froze when the temperature dropped. This is the same confused Job who said, Man that is born of woman is of a few days and is full of trouble. You can’t take him literally – the man’s depressed!

  Millroy did not believe that ice had any useful purpose – it deadened taste, it gave you cramps, it was not Day One. Who needed it? Our refrigerator had no ice-maker, and the refrigerator itself we never plugged in anyway, since there was no food to go bad. We shopped for fresh vegetables every day and bought our fish wet and slimy from the market. We no longer served meat.

  ‘No muscle. No sinew. No flesh.’

  Early on, the Sons and Daughters had grumbled more than the customers.

  ‘No ice cubes? How can you drink Coke with no ice cubes?’

  That was Dedrick, long ago.

  ‘We don’t drink Coke,’ Millroy had said.

  But when the Sons and Daughters found out we drank greenish inky wine, and sometimes a lot of wine, they stopped grumbling and asked for more.

  ‘And ice in wine is unheard of,’ Millroy said.

  The refrigerator had been installed to satisfy Boston Board of Health requirements for a food service permit, but ‘the hatchway’ was the answer to Day One needs.

  Bags of beans and parched corn and unbleached flour and crates of melons and sacks of dates and figs – all this and more filled the cellar space with a dusty humming aroma. The space could only be reached through the trap-door in the kitchen floor, and then down a steep wooden ladder. The entrance was narrow, but I was small, so I was the one who went down with the bucket and shovel-scoop to bring up pounds of ingredients – beans for soaking, flour for sifting, nuts and dried fruit to be washed.

  The hatchway’s trap-door was set in the middle of the kitchen floor, where people walked. The trap-door could only be lifted when the kitchen was empty – very late, after the others had gone.

  Tonight, I was working the graveyard shift, and I was in the hatchway hole, up to my skinny waist in darkness. It was late, the kitchen was closed, the last eaters finishing their meals, the Sons and Daughters done with the mopping and already on the bus back to Wompatuck.