by Paul Theroux
‘I wish I knew why,’ I said. But I thought it was what he had said before: I am not Elmer Gantry or Jimmy Swaggart – not an American hypocrite, nor a mountebank.
‘They want Millroy’s power,’ he said.
He straightened and seemed proud, and grew quiet, with listening eyes.
‘They know I have the secret of life.’
He turned to the plate-glass window at the front of the diner and smiled at the world.
‘I want them to have my secret! They don’t believe me. It is so simple. It is “eat goodness.” It is “chew it slowly.” ’
He nodded at his window on the world.
‘There are so many of them,’ he said. ‘But Millroy is winning.’
I said, ‘Mister Phyllis was in here while you were away.’
Millroy considered this. He looked around, as though seeing it all with Mister Phyllis’s eyes.
‘He doesn’t bother me. Never did,’ Millroy said. ‘He’s bitter. He is profoundly unspiritual. I can deal with him. But I can’t deal with the others and their photographers.’
I wanted to tell him about Rosella. But now he was thinking about photographers, and I knew he had a fear – more than a fear, something like a horror – of having his picture taken. In the past he had sometimes dealt with it by using magic – vanishing, or else making a flash with his fingertips, when the picture was snapped, that ruined the photo.
Why couldn’t he do that?
‘I can’t anymore. I tried,’ he said. ‘There was no flash, only my voice, a few choice words. I haven’t worked much magic. Something’s been missing.’
I knew from his gluey eyes what he was going to say next.
‘You, muffin.’
I nodded. Now I knew it was the truth.
‘And I’m surprised you haven’t seen all the awful lying pictures. “The Day One Church.” “The man who pretends to be a prophet.” “Moneybags.” “Bowel movements.” “Mysterious Millroy.” ’
‘I just saw good things,’ I said.
I could not admit that I had seen the attacks on him that had coincided with my running off to the Cape.
‘They say we pray in toilets.’
‘You told us to read the Book in the hopper.’
‘That’s different,’ he said, but he did not seem very sure. ‘That’s edification, not prayer.’
I said, ‘So people are talking about you?’
‘Not just talk. Millroy’s had dirty tricks. Someone found roaches in Millroy’s pottage. They were definitely planted.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘And I’ve had other plants,’ he said. ‘Mouse droppings. Other scats.’
‘That’s gross.’
‘I’ve had threats,’ he said.
‘What kind?’
‘“We’re going to break you.” “You’re defying the word of God.” “You’re the anti-Christ.” “You’re trivializing the scriptures.” “Taking advantage of young people.” ’
‘Reverend Huber? Mister Phyllis?’
‘“We’re going to crucify you.” ’
‘That is just so depressing.’
‘I’ve had parents in here.’
‘Did you say parents?’
‘“I am come to set a man at variance against his father and the daughter against her mother,” the Lord said, and now I know why. They are monstrous. I would not repeat some of the things they said to me.’
‘Parents of the Sons and Daughters?’
‘You guessed it.’
‘They neglected their children.’
‘Parents’ pride – think of it – the idea that it will become known that their children have deserted them. That they have failed as parents.’
He had seemed tired when he’d begun, but in defiance some of his strength had returned.
‘“And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” So true.’
I said, ‘I thought everything was working out pretty good.’
‘It is. Millroy is a success. The triumph of Day One has roused this fury against us.’
He turned to me as he said this, and he looked miserable, as though pleading for me to hold him.
‘I never wanted that fame – I only wanted to save myself. I don’t want to be crucified, and I feel it is going to happen. Unless.’
He lifted his eyes and kept his mouth open and I waited for him to finish the sentence.
‘Unless you stay with me and never run away again. I was lost when you went. I am a devil without you.’
He made his hands like bookends and held me gently by my narrow shoulders. There was such a smell of fear on his skin. His fingers were damp and twitching. His breath was snorting through his nose.
‘I feel you are my soul, muffin.’
Just his saying so made me strong, and I went another day without eating his food, so I felt even stronger.
35
Next morning he tried again at breakfast.
Through the wall I could hear the clunks and thumps of a normal morning at the Day One Diner, the Sons and Daughters serving food, the oven opening and closing, the spoons rattling like wind-chimes, the click and scrape of earthenware bowls being nested and stacked, the murmur of folks talking in the diner – our eaters never raised their voices. No sudden movements, nothing rough. Millroy had shown the Sons and Daughters how to walk with the least noise, a sort of rolling glide on the balls of your feet.
If you did not know it was a diner you might have thought a religious service was taking place, involving crockery and ceremonial tasting and processing back and forth with baskets – thumps and whispers so soft they sounded like waves collapsing on a beach, disturbing the flotsam on the tidewrack and sliding away, or like a freshet, or someone holy shuffling to an altar, the baptizing drip of someone being soused with water – anything but eating.
Every meal ought to be a spiritual experience, Millroy said.
All this breakfast-time, Millroy had me in the back with a bowl of oats and a wheaten loaf and melon balls, trying to get me to eat. I heard the warm diner sounds through the wall and for the first time I realized how they meant innocence and holiness.
Then the phone rang and Millroy stiffened and someone – probably T. Van – yelled out loud, disturbing the peacefulness.
‘Anyone named Jilly Farina in here?’
Millroy fixed his close-set eyes on me and looked woeful, as though this was the end.
‘Who on earth could that be?’
When your shoulders are very small it is hard to shrug and be believed. I tried it and then said, ‘Vera?’
Outside, in the diner, T. Van was smacking the telephone receiver into his palm.
‘I might be able to help,’ I said to him.
‘Go for it.’
‘Oh, God,’ Vera said, when I answered. ‘I just knew it. I says to myself, “Jilly must be at that famous restaurant of his.” So I comes down to the Tradun Post and calls information. I was right, wasn’t I? It’s some kind of cult.’
‘Bull,’ I said. ‘It’s an eating program based on principles and suggestions you find in the Bible. It has been proven effective against low-grade infections and digestive disorders and even cancer. It has reversed the symptoms of serious diseases and halted the aging process. Doctors believe in it.’
‘It’s mind control, Jilly.’
So strange, her calling me that name while I was here in the diner with the people who knew me as Alex.
‘Malvine is going out with a lawyer. If you’re trapped he could get you out.’
‘It’s voluntary,’ I said, trying to keep my voice down. ‘There are no financial contributions. In fact, we all earn money – so much per day for every day in the diner, minus ten percent tithe.’
‘Tithe is a contribution.’
‘Tithe doesn’t have to be money. You can tithe spearmint or herb
s – Jesus said so in the Book. Or cumin. Jesus sprinkled it on his food like pepper. Everyone did.’
‘You don’t sound like the Jilly Farina I know.’
‘That’s because you never knew me, Vera, and neither did Dada or Gaga. I want you to forget you ever knew me and get on with your life. If you want to do yourself a favor, avoid all manner of fat and the blood of strangled animals, and study your stools. Your body is a temple, Vera, and it can stand for two hundred years.’
‘I want to help you, kiddo,’ she said.
I almost laughed, thinking of the things she drank and how she ate pork knobs and chicken parts and Red Hots and everything else.
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘When are you coming home?’
‘I am home,’ I said, and felt happy.
This had all been whispering from me, and now I cupped my hand over my mouth, so that none of the Sons and Daughters would hear me. Vera was still talking as I slid the receiver onto the hook and went out back.
Millroy was at the table with my untouched bowl of oats, his hands in his lap, looking miserable. Millroy the Magician seemed the wrong name for this sad man sitting limply in the chair, with his chin sunk on his chest.
‘That was Vera Turtle,’ I said, and hearing myself saying her name made me sad for her.
Millroy said nothing, did not even nod.
‘She thinks you’re using mind control on me.’
He misunderstood my tears.
‘That means you’re leaving me,’ he said in a despairing voice.
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and asked, ‘Who is Rosella?’
Millroy looked at me sharply, startled by the sound of the name.
‘She showed up while you were away. When Mister Phyllis came. He brought her to the diner that night.’
Something was happening behind Millroy’s eyes – he was seeing it all: the late-night visit, me alone crawling out of the hatchway, Mister Phyllis’s granny face, Rosella taking charge, how she looked at me, what she said. All this was motion in his head that caused flickering and eye movement, and as it passed, Millroy seemed to know me better.
‘I really liked her,’ I said.
Millroy nodded – he knew that, too.
‘Afterwards, I was, like, “That’s probably his wife,” ’ and I was falling apart inside as I said it.
His silences and his penetrating eyes made me nervous, but I had to know.
‘Hey, are you married and everything?’
There was another terrible silence before he said, ‘No. But she was the first Mrs Millroy.’
‘Did you, like, love her and all that?’
‘She was my greatest friend. And friendship can be more powerful than love – at least I thought so then.’
I had known that he missed me while I was gone, but now I was convinced that he was alone. He needed me, just as the old woman Rosella had said. She had not misled me.
‘You are giving off leaving energy,’ Millroy said, looking gloomy. ‘I can feel it.’
Instead of answering him I snatched up the spoon and dug it into the bowl of oats and began to eat.
A warm pink light glowed on Millroy’s face and shone on the skin of his bald head. He smiled, he sat up straight, he seemed to swell. Then he lifted one hand and made a fist, and opened it, and there perched on his fingers was a frantic parakeet. He snapped his fingers and the bird was gone in a blaze of explosive light, the kind that frustrated photographers when they tried to take his picture. He twisted his mustache and brought out a spoon, which glittered like gold. Magic.
‘Let me do it,’ he said.
He fed me – I let him – and when he said he was strengthened, I believed him. For the first time since I had arrived back, Millroy looked like a magician.
Later on, he locked himself into the restroom and stayed there for four and a half hours.
When he came out he said, ‘Maybe plant an organic garden. Grow, package and sell food from the Book. Edible flowers. Marigolds, calendulas, borage, sunflowers, chive blossoms. Hyssop from Numbers. Tithing herbs. All kinds of beans. Company motto – “We know beans.” ’
The next edition of The Day One Program was full of magic. Millroy swallowed a length of rope, and gulped down a pair of scissors, and then he puked out short snipped pieces of the same rope, and pulled the scissors out of his pants. He made Day One meals in hats – cooking the food, producing it on camera, and eating that too, all of it.
Then, there seemed to be one of the greatest displays of magic Millroy had ever managed on television, a tangibilized man. Or was it? Just at the end of the show, there was a commotion. An angry man in black, looking like a priest, began shouting in the studio.
‘Welcome, Father Ratto,’ Millroy said.
‘You are the anti-Christ!’ the priest yelled, and he started to do damage to Millroy’s pedestal.
He looked Italian, he was small and beaky, he had yellow eyes and Smoker’s Face and dark teeth the color of Moxie tonic, and his black gown flapped as he rushed around pecking at Millroy like a crow at a window.
Was this magic or an angry person who had managed to get into the studio? Never mind – you did not ask.
Millroy transfixed Father Ratto with his eyes, then dropped a silk cloth over the priest’s body, and when he spoke one word – ‘Drink’ – the silk collapsed and a glass of dark fizzy liquid was in his place. He had liquidized the angry priest.
Then Millroy tangibilized a porcelain hopper and poured the dark liquid in. As he closed the show, he pulled the chain.
‘That’s all for today, people.’
Now I knew what he meant when he said I need you and You are my soul.
By returning to the diner I had given him strength. I would not have believed it if I had not seen it all happen. But Millroy swore it was so, it was proved by everything he said and did after that – the way he defied the threats, the photographers, the parents, the dirty tricks. And the Sons and Daughters vouched for it, too, for his power that resumed with my return, the day I agreed to eat and to stay, when I told Vera, ‘I am home.’
I could see the difference that I made to him, and to all the rest of them. The Sons and Daughters were happier, Millroy was in charge again, and I felt strong, too, stronger than I had ever known myself to be.
But how and why? Millroy was a famous man with his face in the paper. I was small-for-my-age fifteen-year-old Jilly Farina whom everyone thought was skinny Alex or Little Al.
Millroy always said, Have faith. Eat as I eat. Then all will be revealed.
I had not expected it to work for me that way, and when people asked me if I thought I was going to be strong and live for two hundred years I said, Kinda, because who knows? But then I had power. When I felt it happening to me, the surge of strength through my body, I was happy – I wanted to laugh, I was reborn, I felt as though a light inside me had been switched on.
‘Don’t let it scare you,’ Millroy said at night in the dark.
‘I am not scared, I am confused. Why do I matter so much?’
There was a silence that meant he was amazed I did not understand.
‘Because you are innocent.’
‘You mean, not guilty?’
‘No. The opposite of innocence is experience.’
At first I said nothing. But he was waiting.
‘Inexperienced. That’s me.’
‘It’s like being holy,’ he said.
I was wishing that Vera could hear this, because it was more than I could explain.
‘Just accept it,’ Millroy said.
So that was it: he needed my innocence, and as long as we were together we were both strong in peculiar ways, and if we were separated we would be weak and destructible.
‘Please don’t leave me ever again,’ he said softly.
‘No.’ I had plenty of reasons to stay, but the be
st was that I had nowhere else to go.
At some other dark hour of the night he woke me again with his voice, and I could not tell whether he was praying to God or thanking me.
Yet I had walked back into a new situation: he had more success and more trouble now. He told me flat-out that the more successful he had become the more danger he was in. Everyone thought they knew him, but they did not understand him.
‘They think I want to lead them,’ he said. ‘No. I want to join them.’
When he walked down the street people saw him and they hollered ‘Day One!’ and stuck up the Day One finger.
Millroy was accosted by parents who wanted to know what had happened to their children. I worked the phones, so I knew he had incessant threatening calls: You be sorry … Where my daughter, Molynthia? … You going to get so damn busted up …
‘Yo,’ they said when I picked up the phone, and I knew it was a parent or a relative.
Dedrick’s mother Rodessa threatened to burn down the diner unless her son was allowed to come home.
‘Day One is his home,’ I explained.
Millroy was whispering this to me.
‘And he is physically in Chicago, Illinois.’
‘You are going to be physically in the hospital if I don’t find my Dedrick damn soon,’ the woman said.
‘Will you deal with this, Daughter?’ Millroy said to Peaches.
Peaches took the phone, and listened, then said, ‘She says she’s coming down to torch the whole premises. That’s what she says.’
The woman was calmed down, but we were not less worried when she did not show her face. She was another angry person, and her threat was on our minds. She could easily burn us down.
I went on working the phones.
‘I want to talk to Millroy.’
‘I am Doctor Millroy’s executive assistant. How may I help you?’
Millroy was grateful. His gratitude made me stronger. The other night, when he sounded as though he was praying? Now I was sure he had been thanking me.
The newspapers and magazines still called, the ones that had already written about him. They wanted more. People magazine, Longevity, Today’s Health, the National Enquirer, the others. Millroy refused, but they still wrote stories about him.
