George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  “Not the fire eaters or sword swallowers, not the geeks—they had geeks then—or any of the rest of those who had trained their appetites or reamed passages in their throats and bellies to bank their snacks. They were just more athletes. Not even the fat ladies or giants. Bulk couldn’t be feigned but it could be cultivated. You could grow a fat lady as you grow a rose. And height, though unintentional, was merely excessive, the stockpiling of what otherwise was not only a normal but even an attractive quality.

  “No, the brotherhood was attracted to monsters. It sought out bogy, ogre, eyesore, sport——all those unfortunates whose busted bodies were the evidence that they came directly from the pinched hand of God Himself. It wanted the alligator woman and the dog-faced boy, the pinhead and the Cyclops, the Siamese twins and the hermaphrodite. It wanted people with extra thumbs, too many toes. Too many? There could never be enough!

  “They were from up North. I don’t know how the paranormals found out about Cassadaga. Perhaps they read the trades. They’d have done that. They do it today. What we do, our gifts, has never been that far removed from show business. My colleagues would not only have kept up with the trends but followed the gates too——of vaudeville, mud show, circus, nightclub and novelty acts. They’d have read all about it when the circus came to De Land to set up permanent winter quarters. Or maybe it wasn’t the trades. Maybe they just used their talents for divination, telepathy, second sight, all their occult, mystic jungle telegraph.

  “There was a sort of gold rush. Cassadaga became a kind of boom town, some Sutter’s Mill of the extraordinary. I have some of their early correspondence with the freaks, though most didn’t bother to write; they just came. It’s very strange stuff. Even the envelopes are strange. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? They had no addresses for them. Christ, they didn’t even have their names!

  “ ‘To the young fourteen-year-old-girl,’ they would write on the front of the envelope above the De Land destination, ‘with the gray hair and withered body of an old woman.’ ‘For the man,’ they’d write, ‘born with sores.’ ‘The lady with green blood.’ ‘Personal!’ they’d write.

  “The letters themselves were always elaborate concoctions of sympathy, buttressed with the writer’s credentials and followed by a request for an interview with a view to the misfit’s throwing his lot in with the writer’s. They couldn’t expect to be paid much of course, at least at first, but if the spiritualist was correct in his assumptions about the unfortunate lusus naturae—spiritualists were wonderfully euphemistic with these freaks and death’s heads—then perhaps they could get to the bottom of things together, and settle once and for all the nagging, age-old question ‘Why me?’ ”

  Why me? George Mills thought.

  “You’d be wrong if you assumed my paranormal friends sought the freaks out just to juice up their failing acts, that they were in it simply for the money. Well, you’d be partly wrong.

  “Because they really did believe that the body’s disgrace, that cleft blood and blighted flesh and faulted bones brittle as toothpick—there was one fellow, the Glass-Boned Man, who would permit children to shatter his fingers for a dollar; you could hear the snap as his bone fragmented; there wasn’t much to it; the bones in his arms and hands were fragile as Saltines; the sound was real, but it was an ever depleting resource; the bones became smaller and smaller chips; after a while all you could hear was the muffled grinding of sand—were the outward, visible signs of inner psychic energies. These were your real McCoy Cains, your truly marked. Marked and marked down, too——discounted, slashed from the human race itself, whom chipped genes and bombed biology had doomed. Such things count. There’s compensation. Surely that centered eye of the Cyclops wore a honed vision, and the ping-pong ball brain of the pinhead felt what it couldn’t know.

  “Superstition? Medieval? Just one more way of rubbing luck like paint off a hunchback? All right. Maybe. Even probably. But they put them through it, our forefathers did, and went through it themselves, too. It was almost as if they had to test them out, to prove to themselves that the dogfaced boys and the pinheads, that the alligator girls and glass-boned guys hadn’t any more real psychic powers than a dollar’s worth of loose change before they ever dared to use them in the act or teach them the scam.

  “Because there really is such a thing as hypnotism and these folks, the paranormals in all their infinite varieties, were past masters of the art. They had some sessions, believe me.

  “ ‘Where do you come from?’

  “ ‘Hartford.’

  “ ‘No, before that. I’m going to take you back to the time of the womb. What do you see?’

  “ ‘Pussy.’

  “ ‘You’re no longer in the womb. This is before conception now. I’ve set you down on the astral plane among the primary emanations. Describe what it’s like.’

  “ ‘——’

  “ ‘I command you to describe the dematerialized world.’

  “ ‘Ain’t no worsteds, ain’t no wools. Ain’t no cotton, ain’t no silk.’

  “ ‘At the count of three you’ll wake up refreshed.’

  “Sure they were disappointed. So were the dwarfs. (There were dwarfs now, they’d gone over to dwarfs, had graduated downward in birth defect, some unevolutionary, pulled-horns substitute that covered over the scabs and open sores and inside-out arrangements of ordinary physiological disfigurement.) You’d have been disappointed yourself. The desire and pursuit of the mysterious is a lifelong life. The occult is a hard taskmaster. Like mathematics or physics or astronomy or any other science. Like painting or music or sculpture or any other art.

  “So of course they were disappointed. But a little relieved, too, not to have ready to hand a key to the astonishing secret of life, its nagging riddle: ‘Why me?’ Because people, God bless them, are terrified of the strange. It may be that you’ve seen a man in a bear suit. On the street, say, or at a game between halves. You know that the man is a man, the costume a costume. But when he comes to you to dance, you pull back, you shy. You’re pulling back now. Has such a thing happened?”

  He thought of Madam Grace Treasury’s bruised cosmetics.

  “How much more effective when the costume is shriveled skin, limbs that don’t size, a dubious sex? Power is only amok scale, the gauges off true and the needle in red. Send in the dwarf.”

  George looked up but there was only Professor Sunshine, talking to himself.

  “ ‘How far can you expect to go in the circus on your little legs?’

  “ ‘Go ahead, I heard it all. Go ahead, I’ll help you out. I sleep in a crib, I eat in a high chair. I got a dong the size of a safety pin and I bite my wrists when the Campfire Girls come to town. Go ahead, I heard it already. I have a tiny appetite. If the thermometer reads 98.6 I’m running a fever. If I work hard, someday I can make it in the small time. I’m a little late for an appointment.’

  “ ’isn’t it humil—’

  “ ‘—iating for me when some broad picks me up and puts me on her lap? Nah, I got high hopes. Go ahead.’

  “ ‘You can read my mind. Evidently you have second sight.’

  “ ‘Nah, I’m shortsighted.’

  “Because they were runt realistic. All wrong, you’d suppose, for our founders’ purposes. But think about it. Who would have been better? My God, somebody had to be in control. Somebody had to hold in check those airy fairy elements of our fathers’ style. Who’d be better with their sideshow hearts and their eye for a mark than those little rationalists?

  “And wasn’t it just good sound show business after all to make it appear that the dummy was in control and not the ventriloquist? Wasn’t that as much a part of the program as an intermission? You don’t horse around with what works. So all that was left was to teach him the fundamentals, show him what had already been shown to the phony red Indian, that marked man whose time had gone, and the nigger slave and gypsy before him, and let the midget take it from there. (They were midgets now, dwarfs being still too
deformed for the public taste, something too bandy and buckled in their being, their botched, bitched bodies; you don’t want to scare the customers half to death, you know, and a midget was just a little scaled-down man; a midget was almost cute, but still tight enough to the terror, close enough, enough nicked by it to leave its mark.)

  “ ‘I can give you fifteen weeks back to back between Thanksgiving and the middle of March. Circus goes out again in April, but I got to have some time off before rehearsals start up that last week in March. Oh yeah, I don’t know if you’re Christian or not, Reverend, but Christmas week’s mine.’

  “ ‘Christmas week?’

  “ ‘I take the Mrs and the kids to their grandma’s in Memphis Christmas week.’

  “ ‘The Mrs? Their grandma’s?’

  “ ‘The Mrs, yeah. The little woman. The little ones, sure. Their grandma in Memphis. Right, the little old lady.’

  “ ‘You’re married?’

  “ ‘Fourteen years next June. Oh, and listen, I ain’t never worked double before. I always worked single or with the ensemble but.’

  “ ‘The ensemble?’

  “ ‘The ensemble, the troupe. Yeah. In the Grand Parade. The Big Finish!’

  “That’s the upshot. That’s how the midgets came to work with us for a time. Only a few winters, really. They called it off. Anyway, a midget always sounded a little like a record speeded up on a gramophone.

  “But mostly, mostly they didn’t like coming all the way out here to work. To this joined caravan of a town. To us. To Cassadaga.”

  And C. L. Gregor Imolatty was an authority on ectoplasm. He had converted his spare bedroom into an ectoplasm museum, the only one, he said, in central Florida.

  “I couldn’t have done it,” he told George as they stood just outside the museum’s black door, “if it hadn’t been for my wife’s cooperation. Sylvia’s support has been invaluable. I tell all my visitors that. It gets them involved. Here’s what we’ll do. When we go inside I’ll give you the same talk I give my clients. I’ll deliver it just as I always do. I won’t change a word, but you have to stop me whenever you hear me say something you think might be fake. You got that? If you think I’m lying, stop me. Just go ahead and interrupt. Isn’t that a good idea, Sylvia? Isn’t that a wonderful way for the boy to learn?”

  “We tried that with the Mortons,” Mrs. Imolatty said.

  “You know you’re right?” Imolatty said. “I forgot about the Mortons, but the Mortons were afraid to interrupt me. I think they thought they’d hurt my feelings. You mustn’t be afraid you’ll hurt my feelings, George. You’re here to learn. You chime in now if you think I’m making believe. Just call out ‘Lie!’ or ‘Fake!’ or ‘Cheat!’ Cry ‘Stop!’ or anything else that occurs to you. All right. Here we go then. Oh. Usually I pause for a moment outside the museum.

  “ ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I say, ‘we’re going inside now. You’ll notice that the door is painted black. In the museum itself the door, walls, ceiling and floor are all painted black. There’s a reason for that. Light is a stimulus, a reagent. It excites ectoplasm and, if sufficiently bright, could cause seepage. So we like to keep it a little on the dark side. You’ll be able to see the exhibits perfectly well, but if any of you is carrying a flash camera I must ask you please not to use it.’ “

  “Stop,” George said.

  Imolatty gave him a puzzled look. “Why did you stop me?” he said. “It is dark inside. It is painted black. I don’t permit flash cameras.”

  “Not that,” George Mills said, “the stuff about bright light making ex——exto——”

  “Ectoplasm.”

  “Ectoplasm seep out.”

  “Excellent!” Imolatty exclaimed. “He’s very smart, isn’t he, Sylvia?” He turned to George. “You’re absolutely right. We keep it dark for other reasons. Light has nothing to do with it. What would happen to ectoplasm in the daytime if it did? What would happen when the sun rises, or even at night during an electrical storm? Let’s go in then.”

  It was very hot in the dim room. “Thank you, Sylvia,” Imolatty said when the woman had flicked on the wall switch. He looked toward George again. “I couldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for my wife’s cooperation. Sylvia’s support has been invaluable,” he said.

  “It’s long been acknowledged,” he went on, “that the ancients sought the so-called philosopher’s stone in order to transmute base metals into gold. What is perhaps less well known is that the alchemists’ researches drew them down other paths of the physical sciences and metaphysical arts. On this table, ladies and gentlemen, you may see some of the results of their experiments with crude, or secondary, ectoplasm. Naturally, I don’t pretend that these masses you see before you are the original work of those early experimenters. It would be remarkable indeed if such flimsy stuff endured over long centuries while whole cities have faded from the face of the earth, but——Did you say something, George?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t? All right then.——but their writings have been preserved and are available to anyone who will simply take the trouble to look for them in our great public libraries. Working then from their original formulas, Sylvia and me have been able to duplicate their results in our lab. The three piles in front of me are various forms of crude, or secondary ectopl——”

  “Stop.”

  “George?”

  “They’re not.”

  “Not what?”

  “Ectoplasm.”

  “What are they?”

  “I don’t know. They’re not crude ectoplasm.”

  “Cobwebs! They’re cobwebs, George! Ordinary cobwebs! All scrunched and rolled like a fine, thin dough. Do you remember, Sylvia, how we collected this stuff?”

  “Oh, those filthy rooms!” Mrs. Imolatty said.

  “They were dirty.”

  “The rubbish was all over my dress, in my hair, everywhere.”

  “It was a mess all right,” Imolatty admitted. He turned back to George. “Good for you, George!” he congratulated him. “You’re not letting me get away with a thing. You’re a clever boy. The alchemists never experimented with ectoplasm. No, they were too greedy. I doubt if they gave a thought to ectoplasm.

  “That low box on your right, the object rather like a foot bath at a public swimming pool, is a sort of ‘planter’ for ectoplasm. The woolly, grayish substance you see there—just a minute, George—is not itself ectoplasm, but is latent with a dormant form of ectoplasm which may sometimes be released through the process of agitation or ‘bruising’. Watch the planter. Look closely now.”

  Imolatty stepped into the box and began a silent shuffle in place.

  “Stop.” George said.

  “Are you watching closely?” Imolatty said. “Can you see what’s happening?” he asked breathlessly.

  A silverish froth had begun to bubble up in the ectoplasm planter, a queer chalk brew.

  “Stop!” George cried. “Stop!”

  “There,” Imolatty said. “You may try it yourselves, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “I told you to stop,” George said.

  “So you did. Why?”

  “Because it’s not true.”

  “What’s not true, George?”

  “Everything. It’s not true that stuff’s ectoplasm.”

  “Brillo pads, George! Soaped Brillo pads! I wear crepe soles moistened beforehand. That’s very good, George. The folks on the tour never catch on.”

  “What if they touch it?” George Mills asked angrily. “Supposing they touch it?”

  “Isn’t he smart, Sylvia? He’s smart as a whip. ‘Better let it calm down, folks,’ I say. ‘Agitated ectoplasm’s dangerous, too hot to handle.’ ”

  “Stop!” George said.

  “Caught out again, by golly!” Imolatty said. “Right you are, George. It isn’t too hot. All right, ladies and gentlemen, suppose we turn our attention to some of the museum’s major acquisitions.”

  He led George and the woman t
hrough the black, hot room, not a guide now, a curator, with the curator’s furious pride, his curious, almost fanlike, supportive stake, his enthusiasm intimate reciprocity between speaker and topic, scholar and subject. He revealed background, rattled off commentary, footnote, marginalia, joyous gloss——all enthusiasm’s inside information, George Mills all the while muttering then practically shouting, “Stop, Stop! Stop!”

  “Yes? Was there a question, George?”

  “That glass case is empty. There’s nothing in it.”

  “Yes?” Imolatty said.

  “You said it’s pure ectoplasm.”

  “Pure primary ectoplasm. Yes?”

  “It’s empty.”

  “No, George. I’m afraid you shouldn’t have stopped me that time. I get that one.”

  “There’s nothing there.”

  “Nothing but pure primary ectoplasm, no.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “That’s right. Because it’s pure. It doesn’t have that faint yellowish cast primary ectoplasm sometimes gets. Do you remember, Sylvia, that batch we had once?” He turned back to George. “We’d gone after some stuff—incidentally, ‘stuff’ isn’t slang in this instance but a perfectly acceptable, even scientific, term for primary ectoplasm—to bring back to the museum. This was in the early days and we didn’t always understand what we were doing. We set out before breakfast and had gathered the ectoplasm before noon——”

  “Oh, Clement,” the woman said, “you’re not going to tell that story, are you? The boy will think we’re fools. I declare, whenever Clement wants to embarrass me he trots this story out.”

  “We were kids, Sylvia. What did we know? Besides, I was as much the goat as you were. Anyway, to make a long story short, we’d collected all that we needed——”

  “More than we needed.”

  “All right,” Imolatty said. “More than we needed. As it turned out more than we needed. Our mistake, you see, was to gather the stuff while it was still light. You can’t see the yellow cast of impure primary during the day. It just looks like more sunlight.”