The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  “Excuse me, I’m sure!” said Janet Order indignantly, the syllables carried out of her mouth in bubbles that accommodated them like language in cartoons. Released, they dispersed, bumped by the current, buffeted, snagged, a random, wayward detritus, a debris babble. I’m, she read, cuse sure! me Ex.

  Oh, dear, she thought, bothered that she’d been unable to make herself clear and seeing herself as they must see her, feeling a trespasser now, a poacher in this peaceable kingdom. But I didn’t mean, she dreamed, holding her tongue, biting it so that the words could not escape only to reassemble into that frightful syntax.

  Which was when the sea serpent swam up close to inspect her. Which was when the seals grazed her sides, the sea robins and orcs. Which was when the manatee brushed against her gently. Which was when Triton did, and the naiads and nereids. Which was when Leviathan smiled and Janet Order realized that of all these fabulous creatures it was she, the little blue girl, who was the most fabulous of all.

  In the seat next to Janet’s, Mary Cottle slipped a Gaulois from its pack and lit it, discharging the sweet, vaguely fecal smoke into the air about her. Mary Cottle enjoyed harsh cigarettes and often even treated herself to cheapish cigars in her Islington flat, rather enjoying the crossfire of fusty smells. She thought they made the place seem more lived-in somehow. She would smoke a pipe, too, at least until it was broken in, and, on holiday on the Continent, in Italy and Yugoslavia, in Spain and behind the Iron Curtain, was careful to observe what the peasants smoked, the old-timers she meant, their severe tobaccos—not the imports, not the better-grade domestic brands of the trendy teenagers and working-class young people in the cafés—and chose these, preferring to purchase them loose at the kiosk, even forty or fifty at a time, pleased by the street merchant’s grimy hands, stained by newsprint, by the cheap colored inks of the magazines they handled, the diesel and industrial fumes to which they were exposed, selecting the rough burleys and dark, synthetic latakias and spiked, ersatz Virginias, dense, bitter, aromatic as mold. She might have smoked this sort of tobacco even more often—even the cigars, even the oppressive pipes—but discovered early on that that sort of thing made her oddly attractive to men, exciting them in some strange way, almost as if she gave off a musk, some suggestive, cabaretish spoor of Weimar, prewar Berlin. And women, too. Thinking her butch, mistaking her serene expression for smug, dikey complacency.

  Beside her the child stirred uneasily in her sleep and began to cough, gasp. Mary Cottle patted her gently awake while in her dream Janet Order, choking, reasoned that she’d been underwater too long and struggled to the surface, bruising past the astonished sea gods and monsters, past Triton and Poseidon and lovely, curious Amphitrite. It was fortunate, she thought, that it was only a dream. In real life she’d learned to float but never to swim, though on doctor’s orders she was brought frequently to the public swimming baths for therapy, there to float in the water, lifted from gravity and all the ordinary exertions of life, while her mother or one of her brothers looked on from the side.

  Because everything has a perfectly reasonable explanation.

  It was the smoke from Mary Cottle’s cigarette which in Janet Order’s dream had triggered the transposed bubble-speech and set off the choking of her jigsaw heart and wakened her. Only after Janet was thoroughly roused from sleep did Lydia Conscience come out of hiding and return to the picturesque deck of the African Queen.

  “Did you see her?” Lydia asked the mate.

  “Who would that be, mama-san?” the crusty old sailor asked.

  “The little girl.”

  “Blue kid?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hell of a swimmer,” the man said.

  “Is she?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the mate said, “hell of a swimmer! I tried to throw her a line but she wouldn’t take it.”

  You’d have had to look quickly to see Mary Cottle crush her cigarette out in the tiny ashtray built into the armrest of her seat on the 747 and fan away the smoke. And almost have had stroboscopic vision to have caught at all the momentary flicker of concern that passed across her face.

  “Are you all right? Shall I fetch you some water?” she asked Janet when the little girl’s coughing had begun to subside.

  “Yes, please,” Janet said. “That would be lovely.”

  The drinking water that came out of the taps was too tepid and the cups themselves too small, so Mary went forward to ask the stewardess for a glass and some ice. As she passed Rena Morgan she looked down at the sleeping child and felt a kind of gratitude to her for declaring straight off that if Mary was a smoker she thought she’d better change seats rather than run the risk of having her chest and sinuses fill with mucus. It would be better all round if she didn’t have to sit in the smoking section, she’d added apologetically. And because Mary was upset—everything has a reasonable explanation—that Janet had so nearly choked in her sleep she decided to slip into the lav for a moment to relieve some of the tension.

  Colin Bible watched Mary Cottle pass. I don’t know what she thinks she’s up to, he thought, but she’s definitely not gay. Who had an eye, almost an instinct, for such things, blessed with a sort of perfect pitch for sexual preference, not one ever to be fooled by appearances, the drag shams of gender—bearing and behavior, effeminacy and manliness, only a sort of jewelry, Colin thought, only posture’s and gesture’s dress code. And who on more than one occasion had been spared embarrassment, rebuff, even beatings or arrests because of his gift. A sexual geologist, a sexual prospector who worked only the real veins and never wasted effort where it wouldn’t pan out.

  Thank God for Colin, Colin thought, pleased to be settled and to have settled, grateful for all the sedentary inducements and consolations of love, to be out of that rat race of the heart, grateful not to have to scrounge for companionship, done with flirting, dating, the extended, lifelong adolescence that was the mark and curse too of the single condition. He thought of his flatmate with a certain gratitude and feeling over and above their feelings for each other, and was aware, too, of a kind of unaccountable peace until he became conscious of the great speed at which they were traveling, their black, tremendous altitude, the dark, dangerous ocean beneath them. Always before, unless they were on holiday together, it had been his lover who had borne the risks of travel, who had been the flier, off to Paris for a conference with his artisans, to eastern Europe, to Africa—he’d spent two weeks in Uganda with Idi Amin to get that tough customer to agree to pose for his portrait in wax—to Utah to obtain for Madame Tussaud’s the artistic rights to Gary Gilmore’s execution by firing squad: all over the world arranging the compliance of principals, the cooperation of families. “Headhunting,” Colin called these expeditions. Bible had remained behind. Like a fireman’s wife, a cop’s, like a war bride.

  And though he was not really worried, it was nice once and again to be oneself at risk, there being a certain comfort in being the benefactor rather than the beneficiary. He had received with rather more humiliation than dread those policies, mailed from Heathrow and usually delivered the same day, that named him legatee in the event of Colin’s death by misadventure. The pound that would get him a hundred thousand should his friend’s plane crash and Colin die had seemed to make of their relationship a joke dependancy, and Colin’s larky notes accompanying the instrument and usually scribbled across its faint third copy—‘Bye, darling, buy yourself a new dress!—did not much mitigate Bible’s feeling of having suffered an indignity, a flip deprecation. (Who knew well enough the terms of Colin’s real will, the thicker-than- water arrangements of sedate and serious death. Who, indeed, had been a witness to the document. Everything to the sister in Birmingham, to her two boys should she precede them, to a network of uncles, aunts, and cousins, complicated as an aristocracy, should the nephews die, Colin himself bringing up the rear of a very long file.) He no longer bothered to open these envelopes, allowing them to stand at the bottom of the pile of correspondence which would accumulate
during his friend’s absences.

  “Really, Colin,” his friend scolded him on finding the unopened envelope, “you oughtn’t be so cavalier. This is an important paper. Insurance on my life should my plane have gone down. You’d have stood to gain a hundred thousand.”

  “Ta,” Colin Bible told him, “but if you really want to buy me a present, why don’t you just get me a ticket on the pools?”

  After that, the policies Colin sent from Heathrow became more and more elaborate. Not only did the premiums and benefits go up but the contingencies they covered became increasingly diverse. Not only would Colin collect if Colin were killed in an automobile accident, if he were taken from him in a train or bus crash, but if he died in a hotel fire, if his plane was hijacked, if he was kidnapped or poisoned or sustained injuries inflicted by terrorists. There was a triple indemnity clause if he died in a foreign hospital that was no longer accredited.

  “Really, Colin,” Colin said, “I don’t understand you. I really don’t. Do you know what a good all-in policy sets one back? Fifteen pounds! With the riders I take out it comes almost to twenty.

  “And don’t look so indifferent, dearie! Do you have any idea how they drive in some of those countries? Have you even the foggiest how volatile the wogs are? Just the sight of a white skin inflames them!”

  “Me too,” Colin said.

  “It’s no joke. I could go like that.”

  “Don’t you dare go like that.”

  “Be a little more businesslike in future, please, Colin. There are real risks.”

  “Don’t tell me about risks,” Colin answered, angry now. “I’m a nurse. I work in hospital. Don’t go all bogeyman on me and threaten me with your spoiled food and terrorists. You know why I don’t open those envelopes? Your snide remarks. ‘Get your hair done!’ ‘Towards a decent suit for the funeral!’ Who do you think you are, talking to me that way?”

  “My adorable floozy.”

  “Now there’s a policy I’d treasure! Floozy insurance. Herpes riders.”

  “I don’t cheat on you, Colin.”

  And he probably didn’t, Colin thought. Like himself, Colin was a decorous man. Even before they’d found each other, neither had been a chaser. (That probably explained his lover’s will—Colin’s inability to put down in writing or acknowledge in law what had been an open secret for all the time they’d been together, that their arrangement was serious, a commitment, a pledge, a relationship, a devotion lacking in nothing save what would stand up in court. It explained the Birmingham sister, the nephews, the uncles and aunts and distant cousins, all Colin’s trophies of vague, treasured legitimacy. Perhaps it even explained the ever more complicated travel insurance Colin took out each time he went away on business. Possibly he even intended, wanted, or was simply just willing to die out of town, as if the disasters he insured against, the bizarre deaths he underwrote in Heathrow, were only the ordinary extension of the sort of agreement undertaken by flatmates, like a side bet, say.) So Colin was no chaser. Indeed, it had only been Colin Bible’s extraordinary sensitivity to the sexuality of other persons which had brought them together in the first place.

  They’d met in hospital. Colin had come in for minor surgery but had been having a bad time of it: painful though not dangerous—thank God—complications. Colin Bible had been taken off the pediatric ward and transferred to orthopedics during a temporary shortage of nurses there. He recognized at once that the man was homosexual, and Colin, seeing how uncomfortable his new patient had become from being forced to lie in one position, asked if he would like a back rub.

  He ejaculated while Colin was still applying the lotion. The nurse hastened to reassure him.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Colin told the man. “It happens all the time.”

  “Extraordinary,” his future lover explained hastily. “I haven’t a clue why I should have behaved that way. That sort of thing has never happened to me. You must know special contact points—being a nurse and all. You must accidentally have rubbed against one of them.”

  “It’s the skin,” Colin lied. “The skin’s especially responsive after trauma.”

  “You must have a very bad impression of me.”

  “No,” he said, and did something he hadn’t imagined himself capable of. He violated his professional ethics. He leaned forward and kissed his patient. He stroked his hair. The man didn’t move.

  “I’m artistic,” the man explained irrelevantly. “I work for Madame Tussaud’s. I’m one of the new breed. Well, I suppose that sounds rather grand. All I mean is I’ve these bold ideas. Innovative,” he added nervously.

  “Madame Tussaud’s was one of my favorite places when I was a kid,” Colin said. “I haven’t been there in donkey’s years.” He was still stroking his patient’s hair.

  “You wouldn’t recognize the place. And once the new wing is in…do you recall the Chamber of Horrors?”

  “Do I?” Colin Bible said. “I should say!”

  “Jack the Ripper,” his new friend said scornfully. “Burke and Hare!”

  Colin Bible shuddered.

  “No,” the man said, “that’s just the point. They were merely aberrant.” He flushed reflexively. “I mean they had no social significance. What’s the point? They put fellows like that on display to titillate. What I’m after is something else entirely. I mean, would you like to know my dream, my vision for the place? God, I mean, just listen to the way I’m talking!”

  “Of course I would,” Colin Bible said.

  “Really? I mean you’re not just humoring an old poof, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well,” he said, “those fellows, that lot, they were just our own parochial, historical sociopaths. Freak show, is all. Hydras and kraken. Rocs and manticores. Stuff that goes bump in the night. I mean, even Hitler—and there was a do just to get him in at all. I mean, can you imagine? The old-timers on the Board of Directors were dead against it. Even after they came round, they propped him up in full-dress regalia like an entirely proper führer. Why, he looks like a Caesar. Hitler!”

  Colin Bible nodded.

  “Well, what is the point? My notion is to show what he did. I want the Holocaust represented. I think that deserves a room all to itself. A large room. We could show the ovens, we could show the showers and the Jews, naked, their blue numbers burned into their wrists, not knowing what’s going to happen to them. We could show the wasted survivors pressed against the barbed wire in their penal stripes. Their mountains of gold teeth, their piles of shoes.

  “Hiroshima. Just one wall of a building still standing, a shadow of vaporized flesh imprinted on it like a double exposure.

  “We should show cancer,” the man said, tears in his eyes and the bent index finger of the hand that, seconds before, Colin had been holding pressed between his teeth. “And I’m not an old poof,” he said.

  “I know that,” Colin Bible said.

  “I’m not.”

  “I know,” Colin said.

  “Actually, sexually I’ve never been very active.”

  “I know it.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “I haven’t either,” Colin Bible said.

  “Oh, dear,” his patient said.

  What he told him was true, but when Colin was discharged from hospital Colin Bible moved in with him and they became lovers. They had been together almost four years.

  Nevertheless, it was good to feel the odd sense of self-reliance imposed on him by the remote dangers of the speeding aircraft.

  At Heathrow he’d been too busy with the children to give much thought to Colin—they did not accompany each other much to airports, and he’d been taken by surprise when his friend had shown up in the departure lounge at the last minute—and had come upon the flight insurance desk quite by accident. I really ought to take some out, he thought impatiently. Colin sets store in such things. He thinks he’s sending you a dozen long-stemmed roses. The girl began to explain the various plans. “No, no,�
� Colin Bible interrupted. “Just your basic ‘My God, We’re Going Into the Drink,’ ‘Three Hundred Feared Dead in Air Disaster!’ coverage,” he said. Take care of yourself, he scribbled hastily across the top of Colin’s copy.

  He could not account for it, but he was smiling.

  The children slept, fitfully dreaming.

  Little Tony Word, dying of leukocytes, of clear, white, colorless cells watering his blood and turning it pale, of petechia and purpura, the petty hemorrhages across his face like so many false freckles, of fatigue and fever and bone pain, of malignant cells buttering his marrow with contamination, of major and minor infections exploding inside his body like ordnance, of the inability of his blood to clot, of his outsized, improperly functioning organs, all the cheap cuts—his liver, his kidneys—of his compromised meat—of leukemia—of the broad palette of chemicals with which his oncologists painted his blood, going over it, careful as art restorers, chipping away at the white smear that poisoned it, bringing back the brisk, original color from their tubes of vincristine and prednisone and asparaginase and dexamethasone and mercaptopurine and allopurinol and methotrexate and cyclophosphamide and doxorubicin and other assorted hues—dying, too, of time itself, of the five- and six- and seven-year survival rate (Tony is now two years beyond his last remission but freckles have begun to reappear along his jawline and his renal functions are in an early stage of failure)—little Tony Word dreams of his low-salt meals, of the liquids and fruit juices he is forced to swallow, almost, or so it seems to him, by the pailful, of all the rind fruits he must eat, and which, because of the invisible germs and hidden dirts which might be on his mother’s hands, he must peel himself—the sealed orange, the difficult apple, the impossible pear, the ordeal of a grape, which he handles with specially sterilized toothpicks, as he does everything, to avoid the accident of cuts which will not stanch—encouraged, too, to prepare his own well-balanced, nutritious meals (though he’s not allowed to go near a stove), his boiled and scrubbed green leafy vegetables, washing lettuce, kale and cauliflower, broccoli, sprouts, cabbage; washing everything, eggplant and potatoes, shallots and mushrooms, then consuming the congealed pot liquor which he has to scrape from the side of the pot with a spoon and spread on toasted sandwiches (from which he first must tear away the crusts) just to be able to get it down, or drinking the broth, thick as barium, to get at the vitamins and minerals, and eating the flaccid vegetable flesh; preparing the meats, too, scrubbing (this much, at least, his own idea, the scared kid’s) his veal and ham, his steaks and chops, his joints and shanks, so that everything he eats, or so he thinks, tastes of a light seasoning of dishwashing detergent, learning to cook even at four and already at ten an accomplished chef, teased for this, for this only, not for his weak and sickly ways, his inability at games (which he would not have been permitted to play anyway), or even his high anxiety as a spectator sitting well back in the stands in the gymnasium lest he be hit by a stray ball, or far away from the sidelines when what they would surely snicker at him for should he call them his mates went outdoors to play, but because they know he cooks, have heard him brag of it who has nothing else to boast of (save his pain, save his endurance, save the one or two or, at the outside, three years he has left to live perhaps, and which he has never mentioned), seen him in the lunchroom chewing his queer veggie remnant sandwiches with their vitamin slime and viscous mineral fillings, have seen him fastidiously peel his fruits and drink his juices, his quart of bottled water from which someone else has first to remove the cap and then pour into a paper cup lest Tony cut his finger on the saw-toothed cap or the bottle opener or the drinking glass he was not even permitted to use accidentally break. So the small dying boy tosses and turns, dreaming his breakfasts of champions, his athlete’s meals, his health faddist’s strict dietary laws, sated in sleep, stuffed, full as a glutton, who has never been hungry, dreaming of food who is not hungry now.