The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  It was a nice question.

  3

  The kid with Chédiak-Higashi disease was dead. A newspaper reported the story of Eddy’s group three days before its official release date. The child, recognizing Bale’s name on the envelope that had been addressed to his parents, was so excited by the prospect of going on the dream holiday that he tore open the letter without thinking. The discrete paper cut he did not even feel at the time—he was that excited—but the big sandy granules that invaded his white blood cells, and made them ineffectual in fighting infection, did him in.

  Janet Order also saw the letter before her parents did, and though she had a pretty good idea about its contents—like many of the diseased children, like Liam himself, she was exceptionally bright; she would, if she lived, be a teenager on her next birthday; her body had begun to fill out months before and already she’d had to abandon her training bra for the real thing; this didn’t particularly embarrass her and, indeed, she quite accepted the idea of becoming a young lady, taking an interest in her puberty, rather proud of it actually, attending her monthlies with a modest though becoming interest, enjoying, if not the discomfort of her periods, at least the opportunity to minister to them, to care for herself, dressing in the queer new tampons and flushing herself with scentless, lightly medicated douches, evaluating not only the different painkillers on the market but their most effective dosages as well, taking an almost ecological interest in the crop of sparse, light brown hair which dusted her mons veneris, and generally presiding over and servicing the new blockbuster secretions of her glands with a solicitude she had a few years earlier shown for her dolls—she did not open it, preferring to wait for her parents, meanwhile practicing the new biofeedback techniques, stretching, and deep-breathing exercises her physical therapist had shown her. In a few minutes her pulse had returned to normal and her pressure, which she had been taught to take by herself, was not, for her, especially elevated.

  Janet had a congenital heart disease, tetralogy of Fallot. In all other respects a bright and even beautiful child, she had been born with a hole in her heart and a transposed aorta, a heart like one of those spectacularly deformed vegetables one sometimes sees on Fair days: a potato in the shape of a white bread, say, or a cluster of Siamese-joined grapes. She was tall for her age, delicate but sturdily built, and had long, flaxen hair to her waist. In a black-and-white photograph one would have seen an unsmiling, even pouty, but remarkably attractive child. The pout was put on, a performance, not so much a sign of mood as, or so Janet thought, of character. She was, considering, a cheerful enough girl and sulked at the world only in those pictures, doing it, she liked to think, as a kind of truth in advertising, sending her sneers and sniffinesses, her frowns and scowls, to the people who would see these pictures, so as not to misrepresent herself; to discount her beauty or, rather, to signal its opposite, invisible in the black-and-white photographs. Because of her abnormality, the deficient oxygenation in her holed heart, the surgically attached aorta added on by the doctors like some displaced bit of afterthought architecture, she had been cyanotic from birth, her skin everywhere an even, dusky bluish color, dark as seawater.

  Additional operations had, as her parents had been warned, as she had, only been remedial, not treatment so much as a flurry of activity, battles fought over the inopportune ground of her tampered chest.

  Children teased her.

  “Ooh,” they might say, “dere goes a piece of der bloody sky.”

  “Yar. I’ve seen fledgling birds wot fly crost ’er face fer practice.”

  “Yar, well, dat’s because dey fink she’s one of deir own. Some great gawky bluebirdy her own self.”

  “Nah,” they might say, “wot dey fink is dat she’s a blueberry patch. Dey’re looking to snack off her.”

  Janet Order viewed these occasions as opportunities to correct the kids, to make, as she saw it, the world a better place in which to live. “It’s only a birth defect. You oughtn’t to laugh at birth defects, children,” she would say. “My skin is blue because when I was born my blood flowed through the hole in my heart to my body without first passing into my lungs. It’s the lungs that tint the blood red by adding oxygen, boys and girls.”

  “Bleedin’ ’eart ’ole!” they taunted. “’Ere coom Janet Order wif er bleedin’ ’eart ’ole!”

  What most concerned her, though, was their fear. For each child who mocked her, there were a dozen who couldn’t even look at her.

  “No, no,” she’d say, “don’t be afraid, touch it. Go ahead, touch my skin. Oh, I know it looks icy but it isn’t. It’s as warm as your own. Go on, touch it. I don’t mind.”

  And sometimes, occasionally, once in a while, a brave soul would. He would touch it gingerly, laying the back of his hand against her blue cheek while Janet took his own pink hand in her two blue ones and guided it along the length of her blue arm, her blue neck and blue shoulders, soothing him, comforting. “There,” she’d say, “you see? It’s not cold. It’s blue like this because the lungs build up pressure and the patches burst where the surgeons keep sealing it and grafting blood vessels onto it like you’d patch an old tire. It could have been corrected, but they say I have this ventricular septal defect. You mustn’t be afraid.” But the child would think of Janet Order’s blue defect and shudder involuntarily in her temperate blue grasp.

  She had only grown kind. When she was smaller, and had played the secret games of childhood, the other children had been terrified of the blue surgical scars crisscrossing her chest like surfaced veins, of her blue behind and little blue mons. Wickedly, she’d teased them, cruel and comfortable in her blue power over them.

  On the day of the letter, tears were rolling down her cheeks when her parents returned. “This letter came. I didn’t open it but I think it’s about my dream holiday.” She handed the envelope to her father.

  “It is,” he said. “Oh, it’s grand news, Janet. In two weeks you’ll be leaving for Florida. Can we get her ready in time?” he asked his wife. “She’ll need some summery dresses, I should think. And a new bathing suit. What do you think, Doris? Can we get her ready? Oh, ducks, don’t cry. Don’t cry, ducks.”

  “Our Janet’s a big girl now,” her mother explained. “Sometimes when they’re extra especially happy the only way a big girl can show it is by crying.” Then she turned to her daughter. “But please, Janet,” her mother said, “you know it’s not good for you to become emotional. Your lovely brown eyes have gone all blue.”

  “I’m not worthy, Mummy,” her daughter whispered.

  “Don’t be silly, Janet. All those operations? You’ve been a dreadfully burdened little girl.”

  And then Janet Order confessed that her blueness had never been a burden and told her parents what she’d said to those little boys, whispered to them in those dank basements and dim potting sheds and in the obscure corners of the deserted common, frightening them, boasting of her blue bowels and blue pee, commanding their loyalty by the blue power of her blue tears.

  Noah Cloth, confined to hospitals at a time in his life when other boys his age were in school, could not read well or do his maths. His history was weak, his geography, most of his subjects. Only in art had he done well, and now he’d lost his ability to draw. Nine times he’d been operated on for bone tumors: in his right wrist, along his left and right femurs, on both elbows, once at the base of his skull, and once for little garnetlike tumors around a necklace of collarbone. Twice they had cut into his left hand by the bones beneath the skin of his ring finger. The first operation had been successful, yielding tiny growths of a benign jewelry, but when the surgeons went back in a second time, they discovered the boy had severe osteosarcoma and had to amputate the finger. They told Noah’s parents they must expect more malignancies, and a nice lady from a hospice came to explain what was what to the kid.

  Noah argued with the woman, asserting that there were just hundreds of bones in the human body that were dispensable, the bone in his ring finger, for exam
ple. He told her he could live a normal life, not indefinitely, of course, no one lived forever, and probably not without some inconvenience, every once in a while sacrificing a really important poisoned bone or so, but what he really feared, he said, was that one of these days the poison would find its way into his leg and they’d have to amputate it and replace it with an artificial one—he saw what went on; he’d spent lots of time on the rehabilitation wards—and he’d have to walk with a cane. He laughed and said he guessed worse things had happened at sea, but what if it was the right leg they had to cut off?

  “The right leg?” asked the lady from the hospice.

  “Well, sure,” he said, “then I’d really be knackered, wouldn’t I? Well, I mean I spent all that time on the wards, didn’t I? So I know about these things.” She wasn’t following him. “It’s the opposite limb,” Noah explained. “The cane goes in the hand opposite the wounded limb.”

  “I don’t…”

  “Oh, lady,” Noah Cloth said, and held out the hand with the missing finger. “It’s all right once you get accustomed, but how’s a bloke supposed to rehabilitate himself into a wood leg if he can’t even hold his cane proper? I mean, it’s what happened with my drawing pens, isn’t it?”

  And only a few weeks before, he’d begun to detect a sharp pain along the length of his right shin. Uh-oh, he thought, but said nothing to his parents or the doctors, and nothing either to the busybody from the hospice, because he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction and because, too, she only depressed him with her arguments.

  “Don’t you see, Noah,” she told the eleven-year-old boy when she called round at his house to ask him to die, “you’re denying the facts. Don’t you see how typical your behavior is? Kübler- Ross tells us that denial, rage, bargaining, and acceptance is the classic pattern of people in your circumstance. You can’t get past even the first stage. How do you expect to come to terms with your situation?”

  “Well, if I don’t,” Noah Cloth said, “I won’t die then, will I?”

  “That’s bargaining,” the woman said, pouncing cheerfully.

  “No,” Noah Cloth said evenly, “it’s rage.”

  The hospice woman left him a pamphlet.

  Which, since he couldn’t read, he threw to the corner of his bed, where his father found it when he came into Noah’s room later that evening. The father picked the pamphlet up to examine. “You know what this is about?” he asked.

  “No,” Noah Cloth said.

  “Do you want me to read it to you?”

  “Is it a story?”

  “No,” his father said.

  “Because there’s better stories on the telly,” Noah said.

  “This isn’t a story,” his father said and cleared his throat while Noah quietly began to grieve and his mother came into the bedroom to listen as the father read to the son about letting go of life, tough talk about the child’s fears, how it was important not to be ashamed to die. When his father finished he closed the book and looked at the boy.

  “It was a story after all,” Noah Cloth said, and drew a deep breath and felt a stitch. No bones there, he thought absently, ignorant still of what his disease might yet do to him—all its oyster irritabilities and abrasions, the little shards of malignant pearl piercing his lungs like studs, glowing like nacre, shining his breath like dew.

  “Some dream holiday,” Benny Maxine, the Gaucher’s disease, complained to Rena Morgan, the cystic fibrosis.

  “What’s wrong with Disney World?”

  “Well, nuffink if what you’re into is rides and a bunch of dwarfs and down-and-out actors what can’t get proper work all dressed up like animals wif their paws stuck out for a bit of graft every time you might want to take your picture wif dem. I’m at liberty to tell you dat’s not my idea. Benjamin Maxine, luv. Benny to me mates. I don’t fink I’ve ’ad the pleasure.”

  “Rena Morgan, Benjamin.”

  “Benny to me mates.”

  “Benny.”

  They shook hands solemnly.

  “No, that’s not my idea at all,” Benny Maxine said. “Not of no dream holiday it ain’t.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “What, the Wor-ruld? No fear!”

  “Well, maybe you’ll be surprised. Perhaps you’ll like it after all.”

  “Nah,” Benny said. “It’s some tarted-up Brighton, is all. Adventureland, Tomorrowland. The bloody Never-lands! Greasy great kid stuff is what I say!”

  “The Netherlands?”

  “What?” Benny Maxine said. “Oh. No, sweetheart. Never- Land. You know, where Peter Pansy flies his pals in the pantomime. Not the country, not the place wif the wood gym shoes and all the boot forests. You don’t talk the bull’s wool, do you, luv? Not to worry. We’re all Englitch ’ere. Just little dying Englitch boys and girls. Which is why I fink we should ’ave been personally consulted, drawn into the discussions, like, before they shipped us all off to Florida and the Magic Kingdom to put us on the rides and expose us to the dangerous tropic sun.

  (“Don’t look now, luv,” Benny whispered, and indicated with a gesture of his chin where Janet Order was sitting, “but that one could do wif a bit o’ old Sol!) I mean, how do they know where a poor little mortal loser like yours truly would like to take his dream holiday? No one sat on the side of my bed and listened to me talk in me sleep.”

  “Where would you?”

  “What, take my dream holiday?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What, if I had the whole wide world to choose from?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there’s no contest then, is there? I mean, look what we got ’ere. Africa, South America, Australia. Asia. You can’t forget Asia. There’s Mother Russia and China, too, in Asia.”

  “Is that where you’d go, Asia?”

  “Monte Carlo,” Benny Maxine said.

  “Why that’s only in the south of France.”

  “Monaco. It’s in Monaco.”

  The little girl giggled. “And isn’t as big as Regent’s Park, I shouldn’t think.”

  “A choice seafront property,” Benny Maxine said.

  “What a queer place to choose,” Rena said. “Whatever would you do there? Get your postcards franked?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. And send them off to you and Little Girl Blue over there in Mickey Mouseland. ‘Yours truly,’ I’d sign them. ‘The Kid Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo!’”

  “You wi-ish!”

  “Hey, you’re pretty lively for a snotnose, ain’t you?”

  For her giggle had shaken loose some of the immense reserves of Rena Morgan’s clear, cystic fibrotic phlegm. Benny watched for a moment. “You got a bad cold there, luv,” he said, offering his big clean handkerchief. Which, shaking her head, she declined, opening instead a rather large and attractive flowered canvas drawstring bag which, or so it seemed to Benny, appeared to contain nothing but handkerchiefs, men’s handkerchiefs, bigger than his own, some of them already crumpled. She poked her hand into the depths of the bag, plunged her wrists past the wet linen, and withdrew an unused handkerchief. Then, taking hold of it by a corner, she flipped it once and the whole thing came unfolded, unfurling like a flag, rolled carpet, an umbrella. She didn’t press the handkerchief to her face, she didn’t even actually blow, but allowed it to pass under her nose in a continuous, unbroken movement, like someone sliding corn on the cob past her teeth, Benny thought, or like paper moving beneath the keys of a typewriter.

  “Sorry,” Rena Morgan said, crumpling the now-drenched handkerchief and dropping it into her bag. She seemed quite recovered.

  “That’s a great trick,” Benny said. “How you unfolded that hanky.”

  “I secrete too much mucus. It’s disgusting,” she said. “I’ve cystic fibrosis.”

  “Well, we all got our cross, don’t we, or we wouldn’t be sitting here in de West bloody London Air Terminal waiting to be taken off to bleedin’ Heathrow in the bloody limos like it was already our bleedin’
funerals, would we?”

  “You shouldn’t curse.”

  “I’m fifteen years old.”

  “I don’t think age has anything to do with it.”

  “Yeah, and I don’t think age has anything to do with where a person would want to spend his dream holiday.”

  “Think?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You didn’t say ‘fink.’ You can pronounce your th’s.”

  “A diller, a dollar, a ten o’clock scholar.”

  “What’s your cross?”

  “Oh, my cross. My cross is the Magen David.”

  “I never know what you’re talking about, Benny.”

  “I’m a yid. I’ve got this yid disease. Gaucher’s, it’s called. I’ve got this big yid liver, this hulking hebe spleen. I’ve this misshapen face and this big bloated belly. It’s the chosen disease of the chosen people.”

  “What does it do?”

  “What does it do? It makes me beautiful and qualifies me to meet Donald Duck in person.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It’s weird,” he said. “It’s very weird. Sugar accumulates in my cells.” He lowered his voice. “See my fingers?”

  “You bite your nails.”

  “For a treat. I chew my thumbs. I lick my palms. I’m candy. I squeeze sweetness out of the juice of my tongue; my saliva’s better than soda pop. Look.” He unbuttoned his shirt sleeve. Indistinct crescents of teeth mark made a random, mysterious graffiti all along his arm. “I’m caramel, I’m cake, I’m syrup, I’m mead. I’m treacle and jam, I’m bonbons and honey. It’s incredible. I’m bloody fattening. But nah, it don’t hurt. Only when my bones break. I’ve got these peanut-brittle bones. Like tooth decay, only in the marrow.”

  “Oh, that’s horrible,” Rena said.

  “Yeah, well, we’re all ’orrible ’ere. That blue kid? The one that looks like someone’s school colors? And what’s’isname, Cloth, the one with the cancer, that they keep sawing at and carving on so that even if he lives he’ll end up looking like a joint for somebody’s Sunday dinner?”