The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  Which there was, wasn’t there, Ed, only not what we expected, or anyway expected back in those days when we were both new to the game and didn’t know the score.

  Because you learn. Sooner or later you do. I did. Because standing over their cribs to see if they’re still breathing doesn’t keep them alive. Hard work does.

  Though I’ll spare you this part lest you take it into your head I’m complaining, which I’m not. Because things even out, they really do, and there’s a certain clean democracy about everything. I’m thinking of those nine months of ungovernable dread, the seven I knew I was pregnant plus the two retroactive ones when I feared I might have done Baby some thoughtless injury just because I didn’t know he existed yet. Because if those nine months were unbearable to me, and if it’s true that you can never really share them, never really catch up, I ought to tell you that you can’t share or catch up either with the times of greatest joy, those seven or eight or nine months when I knew he was out of the woods, or I was, that I was past my postpartum funk, that his soft spot wasn’t going to sink in on itself and the crankiness was no cry of madness or doom but only some inexplicable inner teething, say, maybe just ordinary run-of-the- mill boredom, and we lay, infant Liam and I, gurgle to gurgle and coo to coo and skin to skin.

  I was his mother, Eddy, I was his mum. I saw him raise his head, turn over, crawl, pull himself up, stand without holding on, take a step, walk. I heard him say “biscuit,” I heard him say “mum.” I pushed him in his pram. I was with him on the pleasure-ground, on the commons, on the heath. I took him to the Bingo, I took him to the high street. I took him to the kiosk, I took him to the caff. Oh, Eddy, we went everywhere, everywhere, Liam and his mum. We went to the tinsmith, to the coster and chandler. We rode in estate cars that the salesman would drive. I showed him the fishmonger, the chapman and publican, the chemist and cutler, the cooper and smith. We browsed at the stationer’s. Estate agents opened houses for us. We had the builders in. And took the air at the poulterer’s. Haberdashers and milliners set out their wares for our inspection. Everyone did, showing their goods, pitching their hope at us in the lively open market that’s the world.

  All for Liam’s baby benefit, Ed, to train his urge and craving to their cheer. So that we went everywhere and did it all not just with whomsoever but with whatsoever the greengrocer and tradesmen equivalencies are for arcade and for bourse. Ever so much better than playing House it was, our sprightly little game of playing Planet, playing Life.

  He wasn’t a baby now. He was a little boy. And had seen enough, I think, of what was only merchandise.

  For perhaps a month we’d been going to the parks, Liam rough and tumble with the kids, for when they showed him a toy, at least at first, I think he thought they meant to sell it to him, for him to buy it from them, and so he’d act standoffish, reluctant, disinclined, and ask with almost inattention, nonchalance, just what they thought they wanted for that thing, shaking his head whatever they told him, whatever they said, as I hadn’t even known I’d been teaching him to. “Too dear, too dear,” he’d say, driving his hard bargains like nails in the very air.

  “No, darling, no sweetheart,” I had to explain, “they only want to play with you.”

  I was his mother, Ed, ever so much longer than you were his dad. No, wait, I was. Because everything has a reasonable explanation, Eddy. No, wait, it does. It has to. Those dreadful nine months he was in my belly like rotten cheese, say, or something you eat that gives you bad dreams. And the four or five months it took his soft spot to heal, the two or three I couldn’t get used to his crankiness, couldn’t get used to him—because motherhood’s not natural, Eddy, it’s not, whatever they say; how could anything that dangerous, difficult, and strange be natural? How can spending all that time with something, all right, someone, but someone who doesn’t speak your language yet and who doesn’t have enough of his own to tell you his name or say his address, be natural? And how can it be natural to be at the constant beck and call of anything, all right, anyone, anyone who lives within those barbarous parameters of shit and hunger and sleep and all the rest of the time, all the rest of the time, on bliss and on grief like a dancer up on point? Natural? How can it even be good for you? And then our years on the town; then—well, everything, the time I put in on call even when he napped.

  You were at business. I had possession, enjoyment, holding in fee simple and fee tail, in freehold and seisin, in dubious privilege and precedence, my mum’s natural seniority, my tenure: all motherhood’s time-serviced squatter’s rights.

  Jesus, Eddy, he’d have had to live another dozen years for you to catch up with me.

  Which he couldn’t, didn’t. It being hard enough for him to make it through that first dozen. Which he barely could, barely did.

  Though you certainly tried to catch up, I’ll give you that Seizing, it turned out, on his illness. Making his disease your cause. Like an entertainer on the telethon, almost, so frenzied you were. La! La, luv, it couldn’t have been easy for you—my frame of reference isn’t even his sickness, you know; it’s that pregnancy, those seven lean months when I got so fat, my wary wait-and-see ways afterward—I know. It couldn’t have been easy. Or shouldn’t, shouldn’t have been. Taking poor Liam’s case, your case, over all their heads.

  Over the heads of the doctors, of the interns and specialists, over the heads of the experts and scientists and the National Health, over the heads of the odds-makers, over the heads of the nobs and the honorables, of the chairmen of boards, of the media, of the movers and shakers, over the heads of the very public that pitched in with its pounds and its pennies to stretch out his life, at last taking it over the head of God and—what I can’t forget and will never forgive—over the head finally of Liam himself. Who wanted to die.

  Then, before he could, you had your idea about all those other poor kids and had already begun your inquiries, and I knew I’d have to leave you once Liam was gone. I can’t live like this, darling. I can’t live like this, Ed.

  So. Well. That’s about it.

  Anyway, I shall have to stop now. I’ve called the taxi and expect it will be here quite soon. Although it’s funny. To tell you the truth, I haven’t the foggiest what I’m going to tell the driver. I’ve known for years, since Liam was first diagnosed, that we couldn’t live together once he was dead. But I don’t know where to go. I’m out of cigarettes. I shall have to get some. I’ll ask him to stop at the tobacconist on the Upper Richmond Road.

  Oh, and don’t you know yet, Eddy, that grown-ups are more interesting than kids?

  9

  On the strength of all this, Bale left 627 and drifted down to the Fiesta Fun Center, the hotel’s big game room, where Nedra Carp had been joined now by Colin Bible and Mr. Moorhead. The physician had left the Coconino Cove and was, or so it seemed to Bale, a bit unsteady on his feet. Colin, his duties as liaison completed between the Dream Holiday People, as they’d come to be known in the local press, the Orlando undertakers, and the travel agency making the arrangements with the two airlines that would be taking them first to Miami and then back to England, was recounting some of his difficulties. He’d had to pick out the coffin, a rather more ornate and expensive box than necessary, but one which could be paid for out of their contingency fund.

  The travel agent, he said, couldn’t have been more helpful. She’d handled nearly everything and been most sympathetic. “Really,” Colin said. “I quite felt sorry for her.”

  Bale looked about the game room at their half-dozen surviving charges.

  It was late in the afternoon. The children still wore the dressy clothes they’d worn to the service in the chapel. Except for Noah’s tie, which the child had undone, and the collar he’d unbuttoned and the shirttails that had come out of his pants, and the pants themselves, partially unzipped and hanging from his waist at an askew angle, and the unhealthy, excited flush on his face, the children seemed calm, almost staid.

  “Is that one going to be all right?” Edd
y asked. “His eyes, his eyes seem too bright to me.” Except for himself and the hotel’s caricaturist, no one seemed interested.

  Colin was still recounting the exploits of the afternoon.

  It seems the woman had broken down in tears when she’d had to explain the carriers’ policies regarding the shipment of Rena’s body. The domestic carrier had agreed to accept Rena’s passenger ticket as payment in full for her shipment as freight to Miami. They didn’t have to, they said, but it was an unwritten rule and they would. On the other hand, the overseas airline required an additional $2.63 a pound overage. The casket was 220 pounds. Rena was 95 pounds. It would come to $828.45. “But the unwritten rule,” Colin objected. Overseas airlines were bound by international agreements, the travel agent had said. There were no unwritten rules.

  “He seems awfully excited,” Bale said.

  “She was still on the phone when I took it from her,” Colin told them. “‘What about her baggage allowance?’ I demanded of the agent on the other end of the line.”

  The man told him that the first 62 pounds were free but that they must pay an additional $2.63 for each pound above that.

  “‘It never does,’ I said. The fellow didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Her luggage,’ I said. ‘It can’t weigh more than thirty or thirty-five pounds at the outside. We’ll be wanting a credit on the difference, mate, or we’re going to fucking sue you all over the goddamn sky!’ He still hadn’t a clue what I was on about. ‘I told you,’ I said. ‘The kid’s bags weigh maybe thirty- five pounds, the kid ninety-five pounds. You’re charging her for a seat, so according to the international agreements she’s entitled to her full baggage allowance. She’s got twenty-seven pounds coming to her. At two sixty-three a pound that’s seventy-one dollars and a penny. From eight twenty-eight forty-five. That’s seven fifty-seven forty-four. The name’s Bible,’ I told him. ‘Colin B-I-B-L-E. I’ll see you tomorrow at the weigh-in! Oh, and mister,’ I says. ‘What’s that?’ he asks me. ‘They’ll always be an England!’ I tell him and hang up.”

  “Now you know how I feel,” Moorhead said, when Colin had told them all this under his breath.

  “What?” Colin Bible asked the physician.

  “I said now you know how I feel.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The son of a bitch,” Moorhead said. “‘Well, at least she’ll get a Florida death certificate out of it.’ Imagine the son of a bitch saying a thing like that to me. ‘At least she’ll get a Florida death certificate out of it.’ The son of a bitch.” He was talking about the doctor who’d signed Rena’s death certificate. Moorhead, who wasn’t licensed to practice in Florida, hadn’t been permitted to sign the document.

  Bale was watching Noah, who’d been rarely to shops and who didn’t know where he would get money for the big-ticket items, who couldn’t read well or do his maths. He was watching Noah, who would not live to make money.

  When Rena died, the little boy demanded that Moorhead turn over the rest of the hundred dollars he’d been holding for him. The doctor had heard about the incident in the shops but had given him his eighty dollars without a fuss.

  Now all of them were watching Noah, who’d been changing five dollars at a time and taking his quarters to play each game, to play skee ball and air hockey, to play Asteroids and Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. He did not seem even to be conscious of his scores but cared only about how many games he could play. But it was taking too long. Now he was depositing his money in as many machines as he could, pressing whichever button activated the first ball or the first sorties of invading terror craft, the initial extraterrestrial overflights, but without waiting long enough to use his joy stick before going on to whatever machine happened to be unoccupied. Soon children who were not even part of their group were watching him. Nedra Carp watched with her arm lightly about Janet Order’s shoulders. The caricaturist made rapid charcoal sketches on sheet after sheet of paper. Noah turned to the spectators and indicated with a gesture that they come forward and play on his quarters. He put money in the soda machines but didn’t bother to retrieve his drinks, in the gum and candy machines but, seeing he’d run out of change, went to get more before returning to the vending machines, and only then after making another deliberate sweep of the room. He pumped quarters into machines that were still activated and invited kids to come up and take the soda and candy and gum, as he’d invited them to play out his time on the arcade games.

  “Noah,” Nedra Carp called. “Noah? Noah, dear.”

  “Don’t you think we ought to stop him?” Eddy asked Mr. Moorhead.

  “No,” the doctor said, “I shouldn’t think so.”

  Bale looked at Colin.

  “He’s on a roll, mate,” Colin said softly.

  “Now that was a shopping spree!” Benny Maxine told the little boy when he was all out of money.

  “Wasn’t it just?” Noah said, beaming.

  “You’re de bloke wot broke de bank at Monte Carlo.”

  “Aren’t I just?”

  Bale left the arcade and stepped into an elevator. A guest turned to him.

  “Floor?”

  “Eight, please,” Bale said.

  He thought he could smell her strange, strong cigarettes in the hallway. “May I come in?” he asked.

  Mary Cottle shrugged and stepped aside to let him pass.

  He sat down on a chair by the table.

  “They cleaned this place up.”

  “They offered me a different room,” she said. “I didn’t want it.”

  “No.”

  “Too many swell memories.”

  “Yeah.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed, facing him.

  “So?” she said.

  He repeated what Colin had told them about the casket, about the $2.63 a pound overage the airline was charging.

  “He made them apply twenty-seven pounds of her own body weight toward the cost of the overage? Jesus!”

  He told her about Noah and the machines, about the sketches the caricaturist had made.

  “The kid hired someone to draw him spending money?”

  “No,” Eddy said, “Colin commissioned them,” and explained Bible’s scheme for getting effigies of the children into Madame Tussaud’s.

  “What I don’t know doesn’t hurt me,” Mary said.

  “Sure it does.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “I guess.”

  “Could I have one of those?”

  “You said you thought they were too harsh.”

  “Not by half.”

  “No,” she said.

  “I can’t have one?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I mean, you’re right. They’re not too harsh. Not by half. Not by two thirds. Five eighths, nine tenths.”

  He leaned forward to take a light off Mary Cottle’s cigarette. “Cheers,” he said.

  “Cheers,” she said. They touched the tips of their cigarettes.

  “This time tomorrow,” he said.

  “We’ll be on our way home.”

  “We’ll be standing in a queue. We’ll be showing our passports and explaining about Rena and mopping our brows. We’ll be extricating our underwear from the cheeks of our ass.”

  “Look,” she said, “is that snow? Is it snowing?” She pointed her cigarette past his head but Bale didn’t turn around.

  “You’re not so tough.”

  “It’s that same freak weather.”

  “Funny,” he said. “I don’t feel the least bit purified.”

  “Me neither,” she said. “Not the least bit. Purified.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I’m not so tough.”

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Oh, Bale,” she said, “we lost one.”

  “It’s not as if she had a life expectancy,” he comforted.

  “My God,” she said, “we were gone a week. We lost one.”

  “I’m making my move,” he said, and le
ft his chair and got up to sit beside her on the bed. He stroked her face.

  “Do you have anything with you?”

  “What, a condom, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” he said. “What about you? Aren’t you on the pill?”

  “No,” she said.

  “An IUD?”

  “No,” she said.

  “A diaphragm? Foam?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, and started to move away.

  She pulled him toward her. She undid his shirt, his belt, the button on his trousers. She raised her dress, she lowered her underpants.

  “Will it be all right? Neither of us is protected.”

  “We lost one,” she repeated, and Eddy helped her the rest of the way out of her dress. He undid her bra and held her breasts. He sucked her nipples. She placed a hand in his shorts and withdrew his penis. She held it between her palms and rubbed. “This is how you start a fire without matches,” she whispered. Bale growled softly. “Easy,” she said, “take it easy.” She wanted him huge, immense, colossal. She wet her little finger and slipped it into his anus.

  “Oh,” he gasped.

  “Easy,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Has it been long?”

  “Yes,” he said, “yes.”

  “Yes,” she said, “take it easy.”

  She wanted him prodigious, vast, whopping, stupendous. She wanted his cock engorged, his balls filled with come. She wanted her tubes to dilate, her pudendum to run with grease. “Take it easy,” she murmured, “ease off, take it easy, take it easy.”

  Then, at what instinctively she felt was exactly the propitious biological moment, she reached out and seized him, she reached out and brought him to her. She raised him on top of her and guided him into her body. She wrapped her legs about his buttocks and alternately squeezed, released, and squeezed, pressing his body deeper inside her own with each contraction, rocking him, inching him along her clitoris, easing him through the zones of her flesh and up the boneless scaffold of her sex, thinking, who’d not lain with men in years, who’d held them off with their activating poisons, the white agency of her soiled, provoked chemistry, all the radical synergistics of their deadly, complice, conspired force, who’d used mechanics, gadgets, gravity, vibrators, even her moistened fingers like so many machines, who’d explored her own almost articulated nerve endings till she knew them like the strings that raised and lowered the joints of puppets, thinking Now! Now! Now! Thinking of monstrosities, freaks, ogres, and demons, conjuring werewolves, vampires, harpies, and hellhounds, conjecturing maneaters, eyesores, humpbacks, and clubfoots. Thinking Now now now now now and inviting all cock-eyed, crook-backed, tortuous bandy deformity out of the bottle, calling forth fiends, calling forth bogies, rabid, raw-head bloody-bones. Now, she thinks, now! And positions herself to take Bale’s semen, to mix it with her own ruined and injured eggs and juices to make a troll, a goblin, broken imps and lurching oafs, felons of a nightmare blood, fallen pediatric angels, lemures, gorgons, cyclopes, Calibans, God’s ugly, punished customers, his obscene and frail and lubberly, his gargoyle, flyblown hideosities and blemished, poky mutants, all his throwbacks, all his scurf, his doomed, disfigured invalids, his human slums and eldritch seconds, the poor relation and the second-best, watered, bungled being, flied ointment, weak link, chipped rift, crack and fault and snag and flaw, his maimed, his handicapped, his disabled, his crippled, his afflicted, delicate cachexies with their provisional, fragile, makeshift tolerances. Invoking the sapped, the unsound, the impaired, the unfit. Invoking the milksop, the doormat, the played-out and burnt-out, the used-up, the null and the void. Adjuring their spirits in the names of Mudd-Gaddis, of Tony Word and Lydia Conscience, of Janet Order and Benny Maxine, of Noah Cloth, spending his money like a drunken sailor, and Rena Morgan, spent. On behalf of dead Liam and her own unnamed stillborn kids. Thinking, Not gone a week and we’ve lost one. Thinking, Now, now, goddamn it, now! And accepting infection from him, contagion, the septic climate of their noxious genes. Dreaming of complications down the road, of bad bouts and thick medical histories, of wasting neurological diseases, of blood and pulmonary scourges, of blows to the glands and organs, of pathogens climbing the digestive tract, invading the heart and bone marrow, erupting the skin and clouding the cough.