Millroy the Magician

by Paul Theroux

  ‘I was lost,’ he said.

  He seemed to be talking to himself but his confidence in this murmur also made him sound as though he was speaking to the whole world.

  ‘I was in the belly of Hell – weeds were wrapped around my head,’ he said.

  He switched off all the overhead lights by waving his hand, and he told his Jonah story of his fatness, how he had been imprisoned in the darkness of his body. We had heard this same story many times, but it was as though he was telling it for the first time.

  I was suffocated in fear, because the trailer was in darkness, and the way it moved and the way it sounded made us feel that we were rattling in the stifling darkness of a whale’s belly, growing pukier and more scared with every word.

  ‘Oh, no,’ someone said.

  Whup-whup-whup from outside.

  ‘Cut the lights on,’ Dedrick said, making a barf grunt.

  ‘Do you feel it?’ Millroy said. ‘I was in this darkness not three days and three nights like Jonah, but forty years, day and night, trapped in my fat and lugging it blindly wherever I went.’

  Meanwhile, Berry was driving like mad – the trailer shook, the table moved, the crockery clanked, the food in front of us that we could not see gave off rags of fumes, and it all made the darkness worse, because the simplest odors turn to stinks in the dark.

  ‘Everything lay around me, unseparated and decayed, and I thought that I was the beast – not that I was inside it, but that I had become the horrible drooling creature.’

  Here he switched the lights on, and we blinked and tried to listen.

  ‘Then I was dazzled by the word of God telling me what to eat. And I understood. I fasted, I starved, I purged myself. Finally, I filled my body with goodness, and my eyes were opened. What do you see in the word “create”? You see the word “eat.” ’

  He cupped his hands into a pair of parentheses and bracketed the platter with them.

  ‘From that moment, I was a magician.’ Once again he held up his Day One finger.

  And twisted this finger and detached it and dropped it, fthap, onto the crystal platter, where it lay as plump and ugly as a sausage.

  One of the Daughters screamed ‘Da!’

  ‘Day One,’ Millroy said, looking down at his broken-off bleeding finger.

  Now it was almost impossible to concentrate on what he was saying, while his big finger rolled, as the trailer swayed, and the thing paused and pointed and rolled again, the yellow accusing nail at one end, and the splintered white bone showing in the raw meat at the other, and two kinks at the knuckles, with a pad of hair, and a trickle of blood leaking from the flesh around snapped-off bone.

  The Sons and Daughters were either murmuring in fear or else silently weeping, but Millroy carried on, hardly seeming to notice.

  ‘As a magician –’

  And facing his mangled Day One finger you believed him.

  ‘– I stripped my body down to its chassis and I traveled the world. I lingered in countries where people die young – and even if they were shown the truth, the miracle would be denied them, because their food was garbage.’

  He smiled, remembering his travels, as the trailer, buffeted by wind, continued to shake.

  ‘I was the only person on earth who saw the truth in the Book, yet it was there for all to see,’ he said, and he laughed at his good luck. ‘Call it a vision – it was a humdinger, but why me?’

  On the word humdinger we looked again at the bleeding finger on the platter. We had heard Millroy say these things before, but in different words, and never when we were all together, around the same table, not to mention in a moving trailer, facing the torn-off finger that indicated Day One.

  ‘This is awesome,’ Stacy said.

  Millroy was saying, ‘I have seen the kitchens and toilets of the known world, too, and they are unclean. My journeys made me love America, and made me realize that I could never live anywhere else. I wanted to grasp with my fingers and satisfy my mouth with good things, so that my youth would be renewed like the eagle’s – what an amazing psalm, embodying the concepts of food, longevity and America! Meditate upon that.’

  But what we were meditating upon was the finger, and the finger was pointing back into our faces.

  ‘What a wonderful thing to be in America,’ Millroy said, ‘where we can be saved. As I have told you, God has placed his hand upon America!’

  His eyes were bleeding. If this was a trick, and not magic, it was the most terrifying way of convincing us that he was sad.

  ‘But you can only truly have a sense of failure when you are rejected by those you love,’ he said. ‘Then you know what death must be like’ – he grasped and smudged his bloody eyes with the backs of his hands – ‘I must have failed you –’

  ‘No,’ Willie barked, and the others joined in, No no no.

  ‘Yes! Or I would not have been betrayed.’

  ‘Did we betray you, Big Guy?’ Dedrick said.

  ‘You said it.’

  Millroy stared in a hypnotic way at the yanked-off finger and his eyes were like raw wounds.

  ‘Because I don’t believe in the finger of fate.’

  His way of smiling made him look ferocious.

  ‘Don’t make me do magic.’

  ‘Why not just get rid of the kid?’ T. Van said.

  They all looked at me with hungry mouths.

  ‘That’s ugly,’ Millroy said. ‘I saw this child’ – he did not say boy or girl, but they all knew he meant me – ‘a face in a crowd, luminous with trust, like a light upon a hill. That was my strength – the trust of an innocent child. So we became inseparable, body and soul, and I was further strengthened. Can you understand how I would never violate that trust?’

  The Sons and Daughters kept their eyes and mouths on me, and I wondered whether they had guessed that I was a girl.

  ‘I regret that I am regarded as an enemy in the only country I love,’ Millroy said. ‘But I am more sorry that your faith in me has wavered. I expected more from America. I don’t mind scandal and disgrace, but there’s a worse aspect to being hounded out.’

  Kayla and Stacy had begun to sob in loud goose-honks. The other Sons and Daughters were muttering No No. And Millroy’s smile was not a smile.

  ‘I have nowhere in the world to go,’ he went on. ‘I have seen the world and it is desperate. I am being cast out, and driven to die in some terrible country. It is my worst fear.’

  He lowered his head and his deep voice rumbled and grew fainter.

  ‘Millroy wanted to outlive everyone now living,’ he said. ‘Millroy was never a prophet. Millroy is a messenger, and he had hoped to be a patriarch, doing push-ups among his people.’

  The wind shoved hard on the shell of the trailer, and everything moved except Millroy, who was leaning over the platter on which the finger, drained of its blood, had gone bluey-gray like an old pork sausage link.

  ‘Now I’m going to share a secret with you,’ he said, and produced a knife that blazed as he drew it out of his sleeve. It was more a dagger than a knife, and the curve of its bright blade made it look wicked and deadly. It was one that he used to slash the side of the Indian basket in his magician’s trick when someone was inside the basket, vanishing.

  With the rapid snapping motion of a Day One chef slicing an edible root, Millroy worked the knife over the platter and chopped the loose finger into small pieces, the blade chattering as the disks of meat and bone were dealt onto the plate. Then he shaved them from the table, and gathered them flat onto the widest part of the knife blade.

  All this time he was talking about his secret.

  ‘Millroy is not afraid of what the newspapers say about him,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t worry Millroy that journalists and commentators try to ridicule him. That’s what they are paid to do.’

  He lifted the knife blade, keeping it level, and looked at the raw salami disks o
f the dead Day One finger, and then peered into each of our faces.

  ‘I know that one of you is trying to undo Millroy,’ he said.

  There was a silence, Sons and Daughters holding their breath.

  ‘Not you, buddy,’ Millroy said.

  They all looked at me with poisonous eyes, wanting me to drop dead.

  ‘Step into the other room for a minute. I have to divulge a secret, buddy.’

  I got up and went into the back bunk-room of the trailer, where a small lamp trembled on the wall from the trailer’s rolling wheels. I stood in this feeble light, seasick from the swaying trailer, and hung on to the wall bracket. I shut my eyes. Something is happening.

  I could not hear anything except the roar of the wind battering the Airstream, but when I opened my eyes I saw that I was in darkness – maybe the jiggling had killed the bulb – but this black room made me see what I had missed before, a sliver of light at the edge of the door frame.

  Putting my eye against the lighted crack I saw the chopped-up finger on a plate. And at that moment our trailer must have been passing an eighteen-wheeler, because I heard a racket of heavy tires and the snap of canvas and a slipstream wind like a loud machine. Millroy was speaking, but I did not hear a word.

  And then he smiled, but he was the only one smiling. The others looked as though Millroy had just given them bad news. Delivered of his secret Millroy seemed lighter in spirit, but the secret had settled and soaked into the Sons and Daughters.

  ‘Now eat,’ he said, and hoisted the plate.

  What was on the plate no longer looked anything like a human finger or even parts of it, because it was all separated into harmless-seeming disks, like segments of a chopped-up stem.

  ‘What’s it taste like?’

  ‘Whatever you wish,’ Millroy said. ‘Wafer with honey. Fig bar. Parched pulse. Fish. Open up.’

  And grasping carefully, because he was missing a finger, he put one piece into the mouth of each Son and Daughter.

  ‘Repeat after me. “This is not meat. It is Millroy.” ’

  ‘This is not meat. It is Millroy.’

  In the swaying trailer at the bumping table, while I peeked through the crack, the Sons and Daughters each received a fragment of finger. They seemed startled and relieved at the taste, and it was as though they were swallowing air, just taking a breath.

  ‘This is not meat. It is Millroy.’

  After they had all eaten a segment, Millroy called out for me to return. The empty plate remained on the table.

  Millroy said, ‘It is not time for you, buddy.’

  The others had shut their mouths, and they smiled and looked sadly at me. The remains of Millroy’s secret lingered in the room, suggestions of it, like a dim echo of what he had said to them, or wisps of an aroma still hanging in the air.

  ‘Now eat these cruciform vegetables,’ Millroy said. ‘Get to work on these figs and this pottage. Notice that there is now wine in the goblets.’

  It was a complete meal and so it seemed ceremonial, the only sort of ritual that Millroy valued, eating together – him doing the feeding. We ate in silence, and I could see that the way the moving trailer shook and howled made everyone nervous. They were silent, and burdened, wondering what to do with whatever secret Millroy had told them.

  It was three in the morning when we swung by the Day One Diner again, and the Sons and Daughters stood up unsteadily in the trailer.

  ‘Now get out.’

  Millroy seemed so thoughtful, as we set off again in the Ford, pulling the empty trailer, that I did not dare to speak up. It was not until we were miles from Boston, in a tunnel of darkness that was probably New Hampshire, that I asked him where we were going.

  ‘That’s up to them,’ he said. He squinted into the dark beyond the yellow cones of his headlights.

  I was thinking Up to who? as the slanting stripes on the road put me to sleep.

  In my dream there were strangers clamoring at the windows of the Day One Diner, waving supermarket tabloids headlined This Man Is Evil, while Millroy glared at them from the kitchen, yanking his fingers off, one by one, like someone pulling off a pair of gloves, finger by finger. That woke me up.

  ‘We’re alone,’ Millroy said, hearing me yawn.

  Driving like that, just the two of us, I was reminded of how we had left the Barnstable County Fair that summer day with no idea of where we were going.

  But this was a dark and cold morning in late autumn. There was no dawn except a gray mist rising and growing silver above the hills, clouds squashed all over the low sky, and the clammy light that blackened the pines at the roadside. Here and there were white scarves of left-over snow. Millroy was not driving fast and yet there was something final in the way he gripped the wheel and faced forward, as though he never intended to return down this empty road.

  ‘I could not do this without you.’

  ‘Anyway, what are you doing?’

  ‘See? I need you to ask that question.’

  But he did not answer it.

  As sunlight lifted the sky the pine trees became greener. They grew straight on steep hillsides. Beneath us a black river flowed around the ice crusts of rocks, and crows, looking busy, screamed and beat their wings and settled on branches as though they owned the trees.

  Towards noon, we entered a small town of white-painted houses, with a simple white fence around the village green, more snow scarves twisted under bushes and trees, and a tarnished metal statue of an old soldier in a baggy uniform on a stone pedestal. Beyond the statue was a church with a golden arrow as its weathervane.

  Millroy hung onto the steering-wheel and adjusted the rear-view mirror, and he clucked.

  ‘Looks like they failed.’

  One burst of a siren and a flashing light behind us: we were being tailgated by a police car.

  ‘Who failed?’

  ‘It was a test,’ Millroy said. ‘I told the Sons and Daughters where we were going. If they had said nothing, there was hope. Day One was theirs. But you see? It’s all over.’

  He had eased the Ford onto the shoulder and I heard the rumble of the trailer following as it bumped.

  ‘Was that the secret?’

  ‘Where we were going was my secret,’ he said. ‘But I wanted to learn their secret – what they think of me. Now I know.’

  There was a man in a blue uniform at the window. He looked in at Millroy and made a face.

  ‘You’re on television.’

  The policeman tipped his cap back. His badge said Woodstock and his black nameplate on his pocket was lettered Kendricks.

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘License and registration,’ the policeman said. ‘This vehicle’s been reported.’

  Millroy was smiling at the policeman, who wheezed and had Smoker’s Face, and an assertive belly and trembly fingers. He stank of anger and had the weary eyes of someone who ached for nutrition.

  ‘Please don’t restrain me,’ Millroy said.

  The policeman said to me, ‘You’re going to be all right, sonny.’

  Millroy had not prepared me for this – for one of the Sons and Daughters, or all of them, reporting him to the police. I heard the clink of metal, the policeman fumbling with a pair of handcuffs.

  ‘It stresses me – confinement,’ Millroy said, making a face and clutching the wheel.

  The policeman opened the door to let me out and then he efficiently clamped Millroy’s wrists to the steering-wheel. Unclicking another pair, he fitted them to Millroy’s ankles, and then removed the car key.

  The next sound I heard was Millroy’s nag-like humming in a sing-song protest through his nose.

  ‘Better come with me, kiddo.’

  But I had just thought to look in daylight at Millroy’s Day One finger, and he knew I was staring, because it was not missing any more.

  ‘It grew,’ he said, and flexed it, and w
ent on humming.

  I sat beside the policeman in the squad car while he talked on the radio, spelling Millroy’s name, and filling out a printed form on his clipboard, writing slowly, pinching his pen with his hairy thumb.

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ I said, but the policeman did not hear me.

  He was arresting Millroy because someone ratted on him. It did not matter who. So many people believed the lies in the papers, or else planted them. I agreed that Millroy sounded suspicious and seemed worse, and what was he doing with me? But that was just looks. Anyone who really knew him knew the truth, and would treat him as a hero, not a criminal.

  What made it almost funny was that this policeman was another person, along with all the reporters and the people who spread the lies, who could have been saved by Millroy’s message. They were trying to stop the very man who could have made them happier and given them a longer life. For their lies about Millroy they all deserved to be miserable and sick, and yet Millroy had always said that he was nothing, his message was everything, and that would last as long as the Book.

  As I was sitting there, thinking this, there came a sudden sizzling noise like the gust of air and tiny bubbles that fizz from beneath a bottle cap when you lift it with a church key. It made the policeman stop writing.

  ‘Excuse yourself.’

  ‘That wasn’t me,’ I said.

  He clicked his pen and began again, and there was another crack of wind, more explosive than the last one, from beyond the trailer.

  The policeman looked up and listened with his narrowing eyes. And then he jerked forward when he heard the glugging, like a collapse of liquid down a tube, and its watery swallowing. It was a loud flushing sound like sudden laughter, by the roadside, in this pretty little town in Vermont.

  He jerked the door handle and got out of the patrol car quickly, muttering to himself, heading for the Ford and Millroy.

  When I heard him swear loudly, a one-word moo, I was sure that Millroy had vanished again. Millroy the Magician.

  PART FOUR

  The Big Island

  39

  ‘Fasten your seatbelt, angel,’ Millroy said on the plane during mealtime – those metal food carts shaking in the aisle. He handed me a heavy buckle and the right side of the safety-belt. He wore a purple skullcap and dark glasses and had trimmed his mustache. You would never have known that he was Millroy.