The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  But that would have been then. An aspect of the conditional. Alternative time. But now, in the here-and-now of Disney World, he is perfectly delighted with the shops. It is, for him, rather like being plunked down in the very center of those colored supplements in the Sunday paper. (Because he has been rarely to shops. Even his clothes—it would have been too much of an ordeal for him to undress in changing rooms—have been first brought home by one of his parents for him to try on. He has been to the gift shop in hospital, of course, and has often enough been visited by the cart volunteers—he supposed they were volunteers: nurses laid off, people in maintenance, the National Health having no money to pay people to push the cart; he supposed they were volunteers—have brought to his ward with its meager inventory. He could count on his remaining fingers the times he has ever actually bought anything and to this day does not remember, if he ever knew, the correct posture for giving money or accepting change. Even in Heathrow, his first time in an airport, they hadn’t let him browse W. H. Smith’s immense stall and hustled him past the duty-free shop. Though he had his look, of course, spied in passing the window displays, cartons of cigarettes, bottles of liquor he recognized from the adverts, cameras he’d drawn the like of in his sketchbooks.)

  “All right,” Mr. Moorhead said, “if you think you’re up to it.”

  “I do. I do think I’m up to it. Ta, sir. Ta, Mister Moorhead.”

  “What about you, Janet? How do you feel?”

  “Shipshape,” Janet Order said. Shipshape, she thought, the very color of the seas they ride upon.

  “All right. As an experiment, then. But remember, you operate on the buddy system when you’re by yourselves. Under no circumstances, no circumstances, may you leave the hotel. And no sweets. If you’re thirsty you may take water. Have you money?”

  “The twenty dollars you gave me in London, Mister Moorhead,” Noah said.

  “Well, that’s quite a lot. You mustn’t spend it all. We’ve another five days yet, plenty of time to think about what sort of souvenirs you’ll be wanting to take home with you.”

  “When may we have the rest of our money, Mister Moorhead?” Noah asked timidly.

  “Why, when I give it to you.”

  The children started toward the door.

  “You’re quite sure you’ll be fine?”

  “Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

  “Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

  “At the first sign of weakness, the first, you get word to me. Don’t try to return to the room. You’ve your pills that I gave you?”

  “Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

  “Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

  “You know each other’s symptoms? You’re alert to the danger signals I told you about?”

  Janet Order nodded; unschooled Noah, uncertain about the words Moorhead had tried to teach him—stenosis, atresia, dyspnea, syncope—but who remembered in a general sort of way what bad things to look for in his blue buddy, did.

  So for him it’s like being plunked down right in the very center of those bright-colored supplements in the Sunday paper. He tells this to Janet Order.

  “No smart remarks, nine knuckles,” the little blue girl says.

  “Look at it all,” Noah says, and thinks with pride about the sort of customer he’d make.

  “What, this junk?”

  “My mum would love this.”

  “Film? Your mum would love a box of film?”

  But he’s not listening. He’s lost not only in his first shopping spree but in the first experience he’s ever had of any sort of shopping at all. Within ten minutes he has bought the box of film, a bottle of shampoo, an antihistamine he’s seen advertised on television, a flea and tick collar, and a pair of infant’s water wings. He has spent more than twelve dollars (and guessing incorrectly—he’s not too embarrassed to ask Janet, he’s too excited by the actual act of spending money to remember that she’s even there: if she is struck by stenosis, atresia, dyspnea, or syncope just now she is almost certainly a goner—he waits for the clerk to take the money from his hand and almost forcibly wrenches his change from her own) but isn’t bothered because he still has, in addition to the change from the twenty dollars that Moorhead advanced him out of the hundred each child has been promised for spending money, the fifty his dad had slipped to him at Heathrow and which he’s not even mentioned to Moorhead. (It’s the long-term and higher maths he can’t do, those which perhaps even he knows he has no use for.) And returns to the same clerk five separate times, once for each of the five items he has purchased. Janet, beside him, is almost breathless. She’s never seen anything like it, this frenzy, and wonders if she’s in the presence of some seizure Mr. Moorhead has neglected to tell her about.

  “Come away,” she says. “Come away, Noah. Please, Noah. We’ll find another shop. There are these other shops we can go to.”

  She feels her breathlessness—the dyspnea—and is almost prepared to squat down right there in the middle of the store. (Squatting sometimes restores her breathing, though it’s an act that embarrasses her, conscious as she is that people seeing her will be listening for grunts, looking for little blue turds beneath her skirt when she rises.) She has her Inderal ready to hand when Noah can suddenly see her again.

  “Other shops?”

  Clumsily, he holds five paper bags, which another clerk, noticing his deformity, offers to put into a large plastic carrier that he can hold by its handle.

  “Other shops?”

  “Would you like me to take one of your parcels, Noah?”

  “No,” he says sharply, angrily, almost greedily. But though they’re quite light he can’t manage them very well and twice they have to stop while Noah rearranges his packages. Which he does with his nose, with his teeth, which he keeps in balance by bringing his hands up and moving the bags from side to side with his face, all the while thinking, who cannot read—Who would fardels bear? Before they have reached the next shop along the hotel’s wide concourse, the sack with the shampoo drops to the hard floor and Noah starts to cry.

  “Look, Noah,” Janet Order tells him reassuringly, “the bottle’s plastic. It didn’t break. Why don’t you let me carry this one for you?”

  “You better not drop it if you know what’s good for you.”

  And in the store, which is a sort of Disney boutique, Noah’s strange frenzy returns. He seems neither irritable nor calm but somehow triumphant, rather, Janet supposes, the way explorers might look, discoverers at the headwaters of great rivers they have been tracing, men come upon new mountain ranges, waterfalls, archaeologists at digs yielding sudden, spectaular treasures.

  “Oh, Noah,” Janet Order says, and watches him as he performs what she does not know are his entirely personal maths, his customized sums. He flicks price tags, turns over china figurines to see the prices on their base. (How did I know? he wonders. How did I even know that that’s where they’d be?) He doesn’t bother to add the odd cents but counts by two- and five- and seven- and ten-dollar units, rounding the figures off to the next highest dollar, the sums to their next highest even number, adding on taxes, too, all the old asterisk attachments he’s seen beside the goods pictured in the adverts he’s not only looked at but studied, drawn, copied. Even unschooled Noah, who can’t read right, knows that’s where the catch will lie, in the fine print, the asterisk not only a trap but fair warning that a trap exists: “plus V.A.T.” and “Batteries Not Included” and “Allow Eight to Twelve Weeks for Delivery” like all smug arms-across-the- chest-folded caveat emptor. So adding on taxes too, adding on anything he can think of, not so much extravagant as preparing himself for disappointment who can’t read right or do any but the personal maths and who is going to die. (Nor does he understand American money, seeing it for the first time not when his father had slipped fifty dollars to him at Heathrow, since that had been sealed in an envelope, and not even when Mr. Moorhead had advanced them the twenty out of the hundred that had been promised, since that had been sealed in an envelope too,
and not even when he had torn the envelope open and patiently waited for the clerk to take the twenty-dollar bill out of his hand when he made that first purchase, but when he physically wrested his change out of the clerk’s astonished grip, having no notion at all of a dollar, a dime, a nickel, a penny. He has a vague idea of the United States as a rich and powerful country—on the news this evening they never mentioned redundancies, shipyards shut down, factories closed—and so supposes the dollar is worth more than the pound. To him it even looks more valuable, the high numerical face values of the paper bills, the portraits of the nation’s male rulers, that wicked- looking eagle, the green artillery of the arrows. Even the dull, flimsy coins suggest an indifferent sense of plenitude. And he has an impression of bounty, of infinite variety—the things in this shop that fall neither under the category of staple nor luxury and that seem to him products for which no real use exists—the Mickey Mouse candle holders, for example, the cartoon stamp books, their gauzy, transparent envelopes filled with pictures of Mowgli, Mr. Toad, Bambi, Snow White, the dwarfs on gummed stamps.)

  “Noah? What will you do with all this stuff? Noah?”

  But he doesn’t bother to answer and takes his purchases—he no longer pays for the items separately but waits until he’s made all his selections before bringing them to the clerk, not because he’s grown accustomed to shopping but because he sees that he has been wasting time, that it is more efficient this way—to the woman at the register.

  By the time they enter the next shop Noah Cloth has spent sixty-two dollars and fourteen cents and, because it would be impossible otherwise, has agreed to accept the plastic carrier. In this, in addition to his original purchases, are two china figurines, one of the Mad Hatter, the other of the Cheshire Cat, a Dumbo quartz wristwatch, duplicate Mickey Mouse sweat shirts, and a deck of playing cards picturing Minnie as Queen, Mickey as King. There is also a set of wooden coasters in which are etched the faces of Donald Duck, his little duck nephews.

  In the Contemporary Man, Noah buys casual beachwear for his dad: sandals, a bathing suit, sunglasses, a terry-cloth robe, a beach towel, a visored sun hat.

  The bill comes to seventy-three dollars and change.

  “Lend me money,” he whispers to Janet Order. “I’ll give it back to you when Moorhead pays up.”

  “Oh, Noah,” she says, “I haven’t that much.”

  “If you’re staying in the hotel,” says the salesman (who is no more salesman than Noah is customer; there is nothing even close to negotiation going on here, not transaction, not commerce, not even business; the merchandise, which is no more merchandise really than the salesman is salesman or Noah customer but only the counter or token, as is the money Noah exchanges it for, the to-him foreign denominations and queer seals and symbols scribbled across its face and back and which, however powerful, are merely power in some unfamiliar, unaccustomed language and thus unknown, unknowable, only the counter or token for the simple symbolic occasion of his old frozen dreams), “you can charge it to your room. All you have to do is show your guest card.”

  “I’m exhausted,” Noah Cloth says.

  “Do you want me to call Mister Moorhead?”

  “I’m exhausted,” he says. “I think I ought to sit down.”

  “I’ll call Moorhead.”

  “I’ll just sit down.”

  “Where’s your phone? I have to call his doctor.”

  “This is better.”

  Janet Order feels Noah’s head. His temperature doesn’t seem to be elevated, his pulse is regular and strong.

  The salesman has already packed the beachwear away.

  “Yes, this is much better,” Noah says, his legs up, stretched out and comfortable in the wood-and-canvas lawn chair the salesman has set up for Noah to sit in.

  “Don’t go off, Noah. Technically,” she tells the salesman, “on the buddy system, you’re not supposed to leave them alone.”

  “I’m fine.”

  You’re daft, she thinks. My buddy is daft.

  “What does a nice chair like this usually run?” Noah Cloth asks the man while Janet is off making her call.

  I can charge it, he thinks when he hears the price, I can charge it to the room.

  “He doesn’t think it’s anything,” Janet Order tells Noah when she returns. “A little fatigue.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you rested up enough to go back to the room?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “All right,” she says and holds her arm out to assist him in getting out of the chair. When they go back up in the elevator together she doesn’t bother to tell him—he’s just a bonkers, crackers kid—that she has spotted Benny Maxine with Rena Morgan. It looked to her as if they were up to something.

  Lamar Kenny has spotted the little wise guy. He thinks maybe he’ll have some fun with him.

  With Tony Word asleep for the night and Noah and Janet gone off, Mr. Moorhead is left free to think about the Jew.

  There is a kind of villain—Moorhead has spent too much time on sick wards not to have noticed the type on kid’s cartoon shows; indeed, these scoundrels have actually been absorbed into the doctor’s bedside manner, become a source of preliminary chat with his small patients, a device to trivialize the physician’s presence—who seems to thrive on adversity, who again and again overestimates his own dark powers at the expense of his adversary’s light and more potent ones. Every defeat suffered by one of this sort somehow becomes the occasion for a greater gloating, a nefarious gibe, an unruly, unfounded optimism. In a way, Moorhead, who tries to steady himself by remembering that he’s been wrong before, puts himself in mind of such fellows. For one, he shares their incredible enthusiasm, their sense of invulnerability. He recalls his days at university, his theories, the confidence with which he strolled art galleries, diagnosing the portraits and statues there, a kind of cocky Grand Rounds. He remembers why he chose medicine as his life’s work, his aesthetic attraction to health, his old notion that children carried theirs as lightly as a man might his umbrella. Chiefly he recalls his cheerful, discarded overview: his old modeling-clay inclinations, his belief that health, not disease, sat at the core of life. Laid forever by those photos he’d seen of survivors from the camps, those too-intimate pictures, naked as surgery, of Jews, their maniac expressions and broken posture, bone projecting from bone in awry cantilever like an unkempt architecture of bruise and wound, their skin, slack as men’s garments on the bodies of children, their almost perceptible joints and sockets ill fitting their faulty scaffolding, the predicament of their swollen-seeming bones like badly rigged pulley, stripped gear.

  His idea was as simple as a before-and-after photograph. A superb diagnostician, he believed (as he believed he’d spotted the Mona Lisa’s incipient goiter and explained the famous smile as nothing more than the bitter aftertaste of iodine gushing from her overactive thyroid) that almost all illness was chronic, even congenital. If the admiration of health and well-being was what sent him into pediatrics in the first place, it was those pictures from the camps which—except for his brief tour on the casualty wards, almost as good an opportunity as an autopsy for getting close to the human body—caused him to stay there. The child, he knew, was father to the man.

  His mistake in the old days was that he’d put too much faith in those artists. They’d idealized their subjects as much as any of the blokes who illustrated those perfect organs—the perfect hearts and perfect livers—in the textbooks. (For all Moorhead knew, Da Vinci had probably reduced the Mona Lisa’s goiter and trained to a mysterious smile what could already have been a grimace.) So what was wanted were photographs, the kind the Germans had made, the kind the Allies had. Though what was really wanted was the complete record, photographs of the Jews before they were rounded up—it would already have been too late when they were in the camps, the debilitating ride in the cattle cars, the bad sanitation—family albums with their individual and group photographs taken in different, more relaxed settings: o
n the beach, at picnics and parties, at weddings, bar mitzvahs, baby’s first picture, rabbis at their devotions, all the candids of the daily round. (But still a sucker for good health, at least its appearance, his mind stuffed with images of perfect specimens, of strong, beautifully tapered athletes, women as well as men. Which accounted, of course, for his shyness with Bible. Had he been thrown in with the man it would have been no time at all before he asked him to strip for an examination, auscultated his chest, palpated and poked the fellow till he was black and blue, then asked if he might examine the bruises. Once, just once, he wanted to feel the ostensibly healthy kidney, hear the report of the seemingly sound heart. Which would have created many misunderstandings.)