Millroy the Magician

by Paul Theroux

  ‘They’re angry because I wouldn’t sell out,’ he said. ‘They wanted to trivialize me when I became famous. I wouldn’t get involved in “Delicious Diets for Thinner Thighs.” ’

  He snorted, he pounded his stomach with his fist.

  ‘I wouldn’t cooperate, and so they feel they are obliged to portray me as a hypocrite, like all the others – Brother Bakker, Brother Swaggart, Brother Gantry, Father Mapple, or some Flannery O’Connor preacher shrieking about damnation. They have to prove I am a sinner. They don’t understand that all my darkness is behind me, and I am frank about that – I talk about it all the time. But, no, they are trying to crucify me.’

  ‘You’re not afraid,’ I said.

  ‘Of course not. Because I have seen the truth, and gathered it into my hands.’

  ‘And eaten it.’

  ‘Truly, muffin. I have taken it into my body.’

  He sounded confident but on the next Day One Program his mood was different. He produced a globe of the world – this planet earth popped out of his hands like a beach ball – and he spun the globe on one finger and spoke reflectively.

  What is the commonest bird in the Bible – commoner by far than the dove?

  He waited, and then chucked the round earth up and cast a shadow on the studio wall behind him with his hands – a big bird with a hooked beak. These were the sorts of tricks that made me remember that old woman Rosella saying He used to do children’s parties.

  The eagle, he said, catching the globe. The American eagle.

  The rest of the program was about the hope in America – our fresh food, our wheatfields, our wonderful plumbing, and his mission of ridding America of obesity and constipation and colorectal cancer, of reversing the aging process, and giving each of us two hundred years of life on earth. He quoted the text from the Book that spoke to him of the American revival.

  Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things, he said, holding up crocks and platters of Day One food, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

  It was one of his most popular programs, ‘the American eagle program.’ People wrote and requested the video, the fact sheet, and the recipes.

  Yet a doubt remained in Millroy’s mind.

  ‘That’s the worst of it –’

  He said this a few days later – he often did this, picking up the end of a thought and saying it out loud, so you had to connect it yourself.

  ‘That they might succeed. Crucify me. That I might be driven out.’

  I remembered him bouncing a globe of the world on that wonderful Hope-in-America show, and reminded him to make him feel better.

  ‘There is nowhere to hide in America,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows Millroy’s face.’

  It sounded terrible, and he was still talking.

  ‘It is a measure of how vast a thing I have created, that it has crowded an entire country with its power. Millroy is everywhere.’

  He was way up and then way down. Was it my fault? Never mind, I thought. I just watched it get worse.

  One bad situation came up with Troy. Millroy often said to me, ‘Is he watching you?’ or sometimes directly to him, ‘Son, where are your eyes?’

  The Son Troy just smiled and said, ‘I am working, Big Guy. I got no time for jammin.’

  All the middle-of-the-night conversations made me sleepy, and one day I dozed off in the kitchen, squatting behind the stairs, my arms folded to hold me up, my head tipped onto my shoulder. I was dreaming that someone was breathing on my face and whispering.

  I woke up to find it true – Troy’s face in mine and his hand holding my hand too tight. His mouth was open, his tongue quivering, and he looked as though he was going to lick my face.

  ‘I want to smoke out your secret, Little Guy,’ he was saying in a whisper.

  Millroy must have heard that. I can hear the grass grow. Anyway, he saw Troy, probably through the wall, through eight inches of brick and plaster. And he smelled it, had the very temperature in his nose, the awful heat of it, he said.

  He came out quietly, as though his feet were not touching the floor, and he moved towards Troy like a knife blade and stood before the murmuring boy. Blood streamed from the rims of Millroy’s eyes and there was fire in his mouth, flames instead of teeth.

  ‘Awp,’ Troy stammered, trying to speak, and he was paralyzed – could not speak or stand.

  Millroy placed his hand above him, and though he did not touch him Troy was knocked flat. He rolled over and began scrambling on all fours, like a startled woodchuck, but he could not go far this way. He was blocked by the counter and got slowly to his feet.

  ‘Get out,’ Millroy said, ‘and never come back.’

  The other Sons and Daughters watched but made no move. I heard whispers. What he do?

  Millroy’s long fingers trembled and extended over the terrified boy, who was pleading with his eyes.

  ‘Out,’ Millroy said, seeming to hold himself back for a moment. Then he let go and pointed to Troy’s leg, stunning it and making it collapse.

  Troy sobbed and almost fell and then dragged himself away, as Millroy wiped the blood from his eyes.

  ‘Anyone who raises a hand in anger will be destroyed,’ Millroy said.

  ‘Troy wasn’t going to hurt me,’ I said.

  Millroy leaned over and his red smeary eyes examined me closely.

  ‘I am so very glad that you believe that,’ he said, then hid himself.

  Another day there was a scream from table five, then a ruckus, and everyone on the front window side of the diner kicked back and jostled and shouted.

  ‘It’s a rat!’ ‘Aw God, a rat!’ ‘Get it away!’

  But it was not on the floor, where most of these people were looking – it was in an earthenware bowl, its head sticking out of some red pottage, dead and stinking, and grinning with yellow teeth, someone’s lunch.

  Millroy rushed out of his office before the shouts – when the first rat tremor stirred the air. He had poised himself at a little distance to do something, turn it into an orchid, liquidize it, anything, when T. Van punted it through the open front door, while screaming his head off.

  ‘Some devil has done this,’ T. Van cried out. ‘This is evil. They are trying to bring about the downfall of a great and righteous man!’

  Millroy had to comfort him, and he told us that this was not the work of Troy, whom he had sent away, and not of the devil, but simply of an unhappy person who did not want to know the truth. ‘It’s a plant.’

  ‘May I have a glass of wine with my meal?’ a man asked in the diner a few days after the rat incident.

  Peaches was serving him. She brought him some Day One wine – poured it from a jug into a cup and set it before him.

  ‘Now take me to the manager,’ the man said, pulling out an official-looking ID, which gave his name as Wayne Weible.

  Peaches burst into tears and was still crying when Millroy came out to ask what the problem was.

  ‘The girl is obviously under-aged, which is a violation of the Liquor Licensing Code. We’ve had complaints, and now we’re going to have to shut you down.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Millroy said. ‘Where is the liquor in question?’

  ‘This thing of wine,’ Wayne Weible said.

  Millroy said, ‘The specific gravity of this beverage is ought-ought-two, about the same as slightly fermented apple cider, which this much resembles.’

  He passed his hand across the mouth of the cup of wine and muttered a sing-song sentence.

  ‘You’re sure this is your cup?’

  ‘Yes. And if there’s alcohol in there you are in big trouble,’ Mr Weible said.

  ‘I happen to have a hydrometer handy,’ Millroy said, taking out the sort of glass tube with a rubber bulb at the end that I had seen Dada use on car batteries at the Gas and Go. Millroy poked it into the cup and said, ‘Just to spare you any embarrassment, shal
l we test it?’

  Mr Weible watched the liquid brimming against the numbers on the measurer inside the tube. He became very silent.

  Millroy said, ‘Who sent you here?’

  T. Van stepped up to the man, looking as though he was going to punt him like he punted the rat. But Millroy was cautioning him, and Wayne Weible scuttled away before any harm could come to him.

  ‘I could have turned that wine into water,’ Millroy said. ‘I could have turned that man into water and poured him into the hopper and flushed him from view, as I did with Father Ratto. And all you’d have heard was that man fizzing down the tubes and the mocking laughter of the drain.’

  But these intrusions made the Sons and Daughters jumpy, and the next day T. Van actually slapped a customer who had complained that his food was cold.

  There were more dirty tricks – pizzas and Star of Siam take-away food were sent to us, and expensive items from the Neiman-Marcus catalog, and bunches of flowers COD. There were unexplained explosions out back, and spray-painted words on our windows. There were surprise inspections of the toilets and the kitchen by the Board of Health.

  The Tax Department called. We were behind on our payment of sales tax, they said.

  ‘We pay all taxes on time.’

  ‘They want an appointment to audit your books.’

  ‘Millroy has no books.’

  He sulked, he looked as though he was going to vanish any second.

  ‘For trying to save Americans from physical and spiritual destruction, I am being persecuted. I have had to endure threats. They are trying to bring me down.’

  ‘Who’s the person?’

  ‘Not one person – legions of them. Because I will not allow them to cash in on this,’ he said. ‘For some it is a religion. For others it’s a weight-loss program – thinner thighs, flatter tummies. For still others it’s a chance to market their diet drinks. And then there’s the ones who think that because I am an American preacher I must be a villain. I am trying to stay pure, so I am being battled.’

  Another man came. His name was Morrie Arkle. He wore a dark suit, he was smiling as he waited for Millroy, he said ‘Hi’ to me. He looked patient and polite.

  ‘We are currently interested in your lease,’ he said to Millroy in the back. His tongue snagged on his front teeth as he lisped, and he was fat, with beefy bosoms.

  ‘Who is “we”? I only see one of you.’

  ‘I represent Bub City Crabshack and Carmina Burrito,’ he said. ‘We heard you were closing down. We like your location.’

  ‘I am not closing down,’ Millroy said.

  ‘We had hopes of locating a franchise here,’ Mr Arkle said. ‘One of our Bub City units.’

  While only I watched, Millroy uttered one furious word and worked his hands over Morrie Arkle and turned him into a glass of cloudy liquid and drank him.

  ‘You saw that, angel?’

  I nodded, I could hardly believe it.

  ‘I am still winning,’ Millroy said, wiping his mouth as I watched.

  But he was sick as a dog all night.

  As soon as I woke I went out and looked for someone to tell it to, because I wanted to see their face when I said, Millroy liquidized that pestering stranger and drank him, and now he’s seriously ill, and no wonder.

  I wanted to tell someone who loved Millroy for his magic.

  Millroy had groaned all night and his skin was soft and pale like bread dough. He had thumb-print smudges all over his face. He looked at me with suffering eyes that seemed to say Remember this, too –

  And there was someone to tell that next morning to – Willie Webb, the Day One Son, from the diner in Denver.

  ‘You still here?’ he said. He was unfriendly. I could not think of anything to say in reply.

  His head was so closely shaved it was shiny, and he looked strong and confident, transformed by the Day One diet into a smaller darker Millroy.

  ‘What is going down here?’ he said.

  But he was too loose and distracted to listen, and before I could tell him what Millroy had done, he was talking again.

  ‘The Big Guy is in wicked bad trouble,’ he said. He turned his back on me and looked for Millroy, who I knew was in his restroom and had been for hours.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe because you’re still here,’ he said in a snarly way, sniffing and blinking, hating me.

  36

  Then, still early the same morning, the day after the drinking, that Willie Webb showed up sniffing and looking righteous, some fat men in tight suits gathered on the sidewalk in front of the diner before we opened, and they passed out pink sheets of paper, handbills headed Millroy – The Devil, while the man himself was out back, moaning.

  ‘This is not the coolest time to be locked in the function room,’ Willie said, eyeing the men in suits with the handbills.

  ‘Who are those guys?’ I was used to eaters who were friendly and kind. These older, bossy-looking men looked like villains to me, just in the clumsy way they walked without smiling.

  ‘You’re going to find out,’ Willie said. ‘We got them in Denver and all over. It’s all down to, they after the Big Guy. Maybe you know why.’

  I said I had no idea.

  ‘That’s funny you don’t know, Little Guy.’

  ‘We apprehensed them in Denver,’ Stacy said. She had come back with Willie.

  I told him about Wayne Weible, and the phone calls, and the man Arkle from Bub City Crabshack and Carmina Burrito.

  ‘We were getting fried,’ Stacy said.

  That was the beginning, but in that same hour two or three more Sons and Daughters showed up – returned silently, like birds gathering on a tree, and they were much sleeker than when they had first joined Millroy here. At first I was glad to see them but they took no notice of me, and as though by a prearranged signal, the rest of the Sons and Daughters appeared, minutes after Willie Webb, having left Day One diners in their cities – Kayla and Berry, Jaleen, LaRayne, Tuppy and Ike, looking strong, their heads shaved, even the girls.

  This is the baldest room in Boston, I was thinking, all these hairless Sons and Daughters, like monks or little Millroys.

  Sometimes on the Cape, at Gaga’s, crows would flap around the oaks and strut on the roof, and caw, and peck at their reflection in the windows. They would gather all around the house, blackening the porch, making me feel it was their house now, like the crows were taking over, each caw meaning: Get out.

  The sudden showing up of the rest of the Sons and Daughters seemed to make the men with handbills out front more threatening, and it was as though they had guessed that trouble was brewing.

  ‘The Big Guy is overdue,’ Willie Webb said out loud in his new abrupt untrusting way.

  I was looking past his shining head at the strangers outside the diner handing out the pink sheets of paper.

  ‘He’s still feeling kind of sketchy,’ I said. ‘I mean, sick.’

  It was odd hearing Willie Webb demanding to see Millroy. He had been the first Son and he knew how to talk to Millroy directly – so different from the others who needed me to pass their messages, or interpret for them. Already, in Millroy’s absence, Willie was taking charge.

  After a while, what I had said to him sank in, and Willie got interested again, because Millroy had never been sick before, only tired after he worked magic. But this was like a human illness, digesting that obnoxious man, who must have been more disgusting and dangerous than Millroy had guessed.

  ‘So what’s happening?’

  I was glad he asked, and glad too that the other Sons and Daughters heard him and came closer to hear me.

  ‘A man named Morrie Arkle from Bub City Crabshack and Carmina Burrito came in yesterday asking Millroy if he could buy out his lease,’ I said. ‘He was kind of, like, “As you’re closing down.” ’

  Willie raised an eyebrow at me
as though he was not impressed, and said, ‘He tried to hassle the Big Guy?’

  ‘Millroy must have suspected it. He took that man into the back room and juiced him,’ I said. ‘I saw the whole thing.’

  They were squinting and muttering, reminding each other of how they had seen Father Ratto liquidized on TV. But they seemed to suspect that this magic of Millroy’s might be a trick.

  ‘Make him into a glass of water?’ Stacy asked. ‘Something like that?’

  ‘Yup. Only it wasn’t water,’ I said. ‘It was human juice, sort of cloudy liquid, like old chicken broth.’

  Now I remembered the floating blobs of fat scum on the juggling surface, looking like last week’s soup.

  ‘He get sick from juicing that man?’

  ‘From drinking him,’ I said, and watched their admiring eyes.

  ‘Big Guy!’ Tuppy said.

  And T. Van got a sweaty head, just trying to picture it in his mind.

  ‘About two quarts,’ I said. ‘He drank it all.’

  ‘That is boss!’ Berry said.

  I said, ‘Except he never got sick before. Something is happening.’

  ‘You know it,’ Willie said, and he unfolded a pink sheet of paper, one of the handbills.

  I got a glimpse of Millroy and Devil and felt sick myself.

  ‘We been seeing these in Baltimore,’ LaRayne said. ‘And now you got them.’

  ‘They’re here, right enough,’ Dedrick said.

  The men outside were tramping the sidewalk, in a slow shoe-squashing walk, taking fat tottering steps, and panting like the sort of angry Christians who disliked Millroy. They gave out the handbills to anyone who would take them.

  ‘What are we going to do about them?’ I asked.

  Even glancing at the handbill in Willie’s trembling fingers I could see at once the news was bad. Millroy’s name appeared at the top in big letters, and there was a picture of him looking evil. Certain words in different typefaces stood out, seriously ugly, such as molester and criminal and liar.