PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo, in 1967. His subsequent novels include The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace, The Mosquito Coast, O-Zone, Millroy the Magician, My Secret History, My Other Life, and, most recently, A Dead Hand. His highly acclaimed travel books include Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Fresh-Air Fiend, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and The Tao of Travel. He divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian Islands.
Books by Paul Theroux
FICTION
Waldo
Fong and the Indians
Girls at Play
Murder in Mount Holly
Jungle Lovers
Sinning with Annie
Saint Jack
The Black House
The Family Arsenal
The Consul’s File
A Christmas Card
Picture Palace
London Snow
World’s End
The Mosquito Coast
The London Embassy
Half Moon Street
Doctor Slaughter
O-Zone
The White Man’s Burden
My Secret History
Chicago Loop
Millroy the Magician
The Greenest Island
My Other Life
Kowloon Tong
Hotel Honolulu
The Stranger at the
Palazzo d’Oro
Blinding Light
The Elephanta Suite
A Dead Hand
CRITICISM
V. S. Naipaul
NON-FICITION
The Great Railway Bazaar
The Old Patagonian Express
The Kingdom by the Sea
Sailing Through China
Sunrise with Seamonsters
The Imperial Way
Riding the Iron Rooster
To the Ends of the Earth
The Happy Isles of Oceania
The Pillars of Hercules
Sir Vidia’s Shadow
Fresh-Air Fiend
Nurse Wolf and Dr Sacks
Dark Star Safari
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
The Tao of Travel
Part One COUNTY FAIR
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two PARADISE PARK
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part Three DAY ONE
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Part Four THE BIG ISLAND
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
I am that bread of life.
– John, 6:48
And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last:
I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.
Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter.
– Revelation, 1: 17–19
What he liked best was taking things apart, even books, even the Bible. He said the Bible was like an owner’s guide, a repair manual to an unfinished invention. He also said that the Bible was a wilderness. It was one of Father’s theories that there were parts of the Bible that no one had ever read, just as there were parts of the world where no one had ever set foot.
– Charlie Fox
I was supposed to meet my father at the Barnstable County Fair, and in a way I did, though he was not Dada. And I hated riding that awful bus from Mashpee to the fairground, though I did not have to take it back. How was I to know that it was my own Day One, and that it would end in magic, after that morning had been so wicked?
I had walked from Gaga’s in Marston’s Mills to Mashpee, where Dada was living with Vera, his Wampanoag woman, and when I got there he was black-out drunk and she was gone. I looked at Dada lying on the floor and made sure he was not dead. He was usually drunk on his day off, but he had promised to be at the fair today. It was nine o’clock on a hot Saturday morning in July. The bus shook and farted on the broken road. I sat on the back seat so nervous I sucked my thumb the whole way.
Millroy was the magician there, famous for making an elephant disappear in a box on stage. I had seen him once with Dada and not forgotten. He invited a small girl from the audience and turned her into a glass of milk and drank her.
‘Jeekers.’
Dada had snorted and said, ‘It’s just a trick, Jilly.’
But I was still thinking, Jeekers.
I walked past the Fun-O-Rama, past the Thunder-Bolt, past The Wonders of the World posters and the Live Freaks banners (Pig with Human Hands and Human Feet, Wolf Boy), past Circus Foskett with Yoyo the Clown and Popcorn the Wonder Dog, past Mister Softee, Sno-Cones, Hot Peanuts, Swine Show, and Elephant Rides and Chubby Checker! – Live Tonight! to the tent with the colored banner of the bald-headed mustached man, ‘Belteshazzar – Master of the Magicians’ – Millroy.
When I went in, Millroy looked up in the middle of his magic and his eyes rested directly on me, among all those people, and seemed to lighten from brown to green. Afterwards I got to know that look well: his eyes got a grip on you and, as he said, the rest was simple. I sat down and stuck my thumb back into my mouth.
‘I do magic in daylight,’ Millroy was saying.
It was as though he recognized me from the last time with Dada and had heard me, back then, say Jeekers. It made him drop something. He was not fazed.
‘This is my first day with my new hand.’
He plucked the hand out of his sleeve, squinted at it, then jammed it back on and began juggling with it – three different objects. He juggled a bowling ball, a lighted propane torch, and a rat-tatting chainsaw, all at once. He filled his mouth with five ping-pong balls and threw his head back and blew them around, and then swallowed them, still juggling, still staring.
‘I’m doing all this without a net!’
No one had ever stared at me like that before. He was leaning, too.
‘Are you Annette?’ he said to me.
The people laughed. I was fourteen but even so, small for my age, just under five foot tall, size two dress – not that I ever wore a dress, most of my clothes being off the kids’ rack usually, junior jeans and little tee-shirts and size four-and-a-half sneakers. No bust, and hips like a boy, and short hair. Why would anyone stare at her?
I was so transfixed by him at first I did not hear anything that he was saying. Then I saw him pulling a paper bag from his trouser cuff.
‘Would you say I have bags in my pants?’
His eyes were still on me. He was tall and slender, balder than the picture of him out front but with a bushier mustache, gentle in his movements, and he gave the impression of strength without bulk, lots of will-power, mind over matter, a real magician. Watching him, I wondered what had happened to that girl he had turned into milk and drunk.
He wore a tight black suit and riding boots. When he held something like a playing-card or even a bowling ball he did so with the tips of his long fingers. He had a hooked nose, too, and the way he stared and showed his teeth he looked like he wanted to take a bite out of me. I had seen that his eyes had changed color, but they changed again, went paler, and became like a bird’s blinkless eyes and pierced me.
Millroy was stuffing a big flapping chicken into the paper bag, but I was so intent on him I did not hear what he was saying. The bird was fat with feathers but did not look twitchy and stupid the way chickens do – this one seemed slow and agreeable, like an old friend. Millroy twisted the top and punched the bag on its bulge, flattening the thing, and leaving him holding shreds of paper.
‘That was Boobie, and that gives a whole new meaning to the expression, “chicken out,” ’ he said, looking in my direction. ‘Now let’s brighten this place up.’
A bunch of flowers popped from his sleeve, and he tweaked another nosegay from his breast pocket. One more bunch exploded from underneath the lapels of his coat. He arranged this bouquet and while we clapped he wiggled a ribbon of silk from between his fingers, then yanked it – one silk scarf knotted to another in an endless chain – and while he went on yanking he rolled up his sleeves. Where was this thing coming from? By the time the question popped into my mind the scarves lay in a tall pile on the table.
‘What was that?’ he said. ‘That sound?’
These questions were all directed at me, and I almost spoke up, because just then I heard a clucking sound.
‘Get out of there, Boobie, you Chinese chicken!’
He moved his hands over the head of a small girl in the front row and pulled an egg out of her ear and another from her mouth.
‘Got that bird worried,’ Millroy said.
We all laughed, but he was looking straight into me. I kept my thumb in my mouth and locked my finger onto my nose. Millroy was so close I could see his face and the skin on his bald head were pebbly with sweat, and he was trembling and a bit breathless, as though this performance was taking most of his strength.
The clucking came again like the monotonous words in a foreign language.
Millroy said, ‘That’s funny. Come up here, sugar.’
Gently pinching her small hand with two long magician’s fingers he lifted the small girl to her feet and guided her to the stage. She was about nine, with skinny white legs and falling-down socks and braids.
‘What’s your name, honey?’
‘Who, me?’
‘Yep. You standing there with your teeth in your mouth.’
‘Lynette Trumpka.’
‘That’s a real pretty name, Lynette. But, say, you got a chicken anywhere on you?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Smile – or if you can’t smile, make a funny face,’ Millroy said, still seeming to be talking to me.
‘I’m psyched,’ the girl said, and everyone laughed.
Millroy walked Lynette Trumpka around the stage so that we could all see she was wearing stiff little pedal-pushers and a ketchup-stained tee-shirt that had come untucked.
‘Hey, what’s this?’ Millroy said, and pulled two more eggs out of her ears. ‘You sure you haven’t got a chicken somewhere?’
The little girl shook her head – nope, she didn’t.
‘Okay, Lynette, you’ve been a good sport, so take a bow.’
As she bent over, Millroy pulled a struggling chicken out from one leg of her pedal-pushers and Lynette went rigid. It was the chicken he had called Boobie and it flapped and squawked until Millroy gripped its yellow legs, and then it relaxed and looked as plump as a feather duster.
‘Fatso,’ Millroy said.
With his fingers sinking into its feathers he weighed Boobie the chicken in his hand.
‘But that reminds me,’ he went on, and leaned towards me. ‘This is the greatest country in the world – hey, I’ve got a personal tribute to the USA coming up at the end of Act One – but, listen, hasn’t there got to be something seriously wrong in a country where the poor people are fat and rich people are skinny?’
Still plumping Boobie in his hand, as though he was thinking hard, made him more serious rather than more ridiculous, and this seemed a true question to which there was no obvious answer. But what did it have to do with magic?
‘What does this have to do with magic, you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘The answer is’ – the chicken interrupted him, clucking a three-syllable word – ‘right, Boobie – ev-ree-thing.’
He fed the chicken with some corn kernels, and he swallowed as the chicken pecked at them in his palm.
‘That sure makes me hungry,’ Millroy said, approaching a man in the front row. ‘I could use a chicken-pot pie around now, and here’s the chicken.’ Smiling at the man he said, ‘You are Kenneth Lesh from Hatchville and I need your carrots and your turnips and your hat.’
The man was so surprised at hearing his full name uttered by Millroy he stood up flustered and touched his hat, which was an old farmer cap saying Wirthmore Feeds, as Millroy drew a carrot out of one of the man’s ears and a turnip from the other, then lifted off his hat. Before the man could protest, in went the chicken and the vegetables and two of the eggs he had gotten from the little girl Lynette Trumpka, cracking the eggs and chucking the shells along with the goo. Milk squirted in from his fist, and snapping his fingers he produced a sprinkling of flour.
‘Bleached flour and refined sugar,’ he said. ‘And let’s not forget a pinch of salt and a stick of butter. It’s an American recipe.’
Meanwhile the hat was struggling and squawking.
‘Now let it cook.’ A match flared from his fingers and he tossed it in.
We were laughing while the farmer down front, Kenneth Lesh – if that really was his name – was looking grumpy about his ruined hat and his humiliation.
Millroy passed his fingers across the hat and then turned it over on his table, and when he lifted it up there was a deep crusty chicken-pot pie steaming on the table-top. He broke into the crust with a spoon and brought it out filled with pieces of chicken meat and blobs of fat in the dripping gravy and yellow chicken skin.
‘That’s death in a spoon,’ he said and closed his hand over it, and when he flexed and opened his fingers it was gone.
We laughed hard but did not know why because we did not connect this to anything he had said earlier. As for the hat, it was empty and clean – no damage done, he showed us the inside, and he handed it back to the puzzled farmer. But where had that clucking chicken gone?
‘I’m still hungry,’ Millroy said and pulled a sword out of the top of his trousers. ‘Get the point?’
This was a real sword of glittering sharpness about a yard long silver and gold, with a tassel swinging from its handle. Millroy flourished it and whacked it against the table leg, chunking off a cookie of splintered wood. Then he looked up at me, and I stared back with my thumb in my mouth, my fist in my face.
‘This is one way of getting iron into your system.’
He gargled and threw his head back and shoved the whole blade into his mouth, straight down, until the handle was jammed against his front teeth. His head was still tipped back, his stomach out, and he unbuttoned his black jacket and his shirt and waggled his finger at the point of his sword pressing against his belly just below his breast bone. I half expected the sword point to pop through his skin
When he slid the sword out of his mouth the cheer from the audience was louder than ever. He put his hand up for silence, and we all went quiet again out of respect.
‘Still awful hungry,’ Millroy said and flung a lighted match into a saucer on the table. The spark gasped and flared into torch-like flames.
Using a pair of tongs he fed himself fiery sponges, and he chomped on them, then made a torch and chewed on those flames. Smoke and fire flew out of his mouth and seemed to singe his mustache. He was sweating, his head gleamed, his eyes were red in the firelight. I had seen that long sword go down. I could see that these were real flames he was eating, and I was near enough to feel the heat.
Soon there was no more fire – Millroy had eaten it all. He smacked his lips as though he had just had a meal and said, ‘Delicious – and better for you than some stuff I could name. But fire-eating makes you thirsty.’
He opened his hand and revealed a pitcher brimming with water.
‘Remember the wedding feast at Cana – the very first miracle, according to John? Watch closely.’
Still glancing at me, now a bit suspiciously, as though I might be wearing something of his, he poured a stream of water from the pitcher into a glass, and as it splashed in it turned a winey red.
‘But just to show you I’m not a one-trick pony, here’s a variation that John didn’t mention,’ Millroy said. ‘Maybe Jesus didn’t know it, or was still working on his technique.’
Now he had a pitcher of red wine and some of this he poured into an empty glass and it turned clear and colorless.
‘Wine into water – a much better idea in these days of alcohol abuse,’ he said, setting these pitchers and glasses aside.
He smiled at our applause and lifted a square pane of glass onto the little table and tapped his knuckles on it, and then placed a circular crystal fishbowl on that, giving it a little spin. To the water in the fishbowl he added the red wine from the second pitcher and he carefully wrapped the top of the fishbowl with clinging plastic. He sloshed the red liquid to show us it was sealed, and as it moved in the fishbowl the mingled water and wine had a swimming stripeyness, like a drowned flag.
Millroy rolled up his sleeve again. Just the sight of his muscular arm seemed to be a warning that something big was coming. And it was. He shoved his bare arm through the plastic and pulled out a length of silk streamers, and kept pulling until it was hundreds of feet long and a yard wide, and we clapped like mad.
But he was not finished. Music played – Stars and Stripes Forever – as he dug into the fishbowl again and hauled out a succession of banners that turned out to be a huge American flag which he hung up on the back of the stage, all this patriotic bunting covering the back wall, where there had only been empty space before. And he reached into the folds of the enormous flag and using both arms lifted out a live bald eagle, which he held up for us to see.
Our cheering drowned the music, but Millroy did not seem to hear it. He looked dignified, holding the flapping eagle, and he turned to me, and stared as he had before, and leaned over to where I sat in the second row.
Popping my thumb out of my mouth made the sound of a cork being yanked from a bottle.
Even through the cheering crowds his voice was distinct, as he said, ‘I want to eat you.’
So I stayed for his second show.
Waiting for Millroy’s second act to begin I walked around the fairground, looked at quilts, watched draft horses pulling slabs of cement, peeked at the baby pigs that had been born at the Swine Show tent earlier that morning. Yet after what I had seen, nothing else looked the least bit interesting to me – not Robinson’s Racing Pigs, not Popcorn the Wonder Dog climbing a ten-foot ladder and jumping off, not the giant stuffed panda prizes at the Skee-Ball stand. I spent the last of my money on a root beer float, a chilli dog, and a twist of fried dough, and then went back for Act Two.
There were boxes and cabinets on stage, their flat surfaces shiny with sequins and painted red and decorated with signs of the zodiac. What caught my eye was a wickerwork coffin with belts in the middle and handles at each end, a lovely object so finely woven that when Millroy heaved it up slowly it stretched and mewed like a live thing that had been disturbed.
‘Know what the word “tangibilized” means?’ Millroy asked.
We said no in a sort of moan.
‘I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to need some volunteers. Why more than one? Well, this might not work out. Might lose one. Might need a replacement.’
I was laughing against my thumb when Millroy took a stride towards me.
‘How about you, miss?’
In the same movement he lifted his hand and pointed to me, near enough for me to take hold of his finger, which I did, as he eased me out of my seat. He led me to the stage with his hot damp hand on mine. Was this magician nervous and if so why? It made me think again about his tricks. With a sweaty hand like that he might not do them right.
‘And this is your friend?’ he said, and beckoned another girl with his outstretched finger. She was younger than me, but about my size, and was black and wore jelly shoes.
I had never seen this girl before but we were both so nervous we kept our mouths shut and stared at the wooden floor of the stage while the crowd of people laughed at us.
‘Something I want you to do for me,’ Millroy said, leading the girl by the hand. ‘But first, what’s your name?’
‘Zula Firkins.’
‘Lovely little name. You’ve been eating marshmallows.’
‘Tons of them.’
‘Too bad. Now just hop into this basket, Zula, and we’ll get started.’
‘You going to do anything to me?’ the girl asked, screwing up one eye.
‘Not a thing, Zula,’ Millroy said. ‘I just want you to experience the interior of this Indian basket. I won this basket in a psychic duel with a saddhu some years ago in the pink princely province of Rajasthan, in India.’
But as soon as Zula Firkins was lying inside the coffin-shaped wicker basket and the lid was shut tight and the straps buckled, Millroy opened a box that was filled with swords. He drew out a long glittering one, that looked like the sword he had stuck down his throat that morning. He slashed it in a circle over his head, whipping the air, then he plucked a piece of wicker off the basket and whittled it smaller to show how sharp the sword was, and clamped his teeth on this toothpick. Everyone laughed in fear and excitement, and you thought of Zula Firkins flopped on her back inside the basket.
‘Watch me,’ he said.
He raised this sword over the basket, and then drove it into the middle, ka-shook, right up to its handle. He picked up another sword and did it again, and this one went in with a tearing of wicker, like someone slashing Shredded Wheat.
‘Go ahead. Take a sword and stick it in. What did you say your name was?’
‘Jilly Farina.’
‘You had a snack, Jilly. Root beer and fried dough.’ He inhaled. ‘And a hot dog.’
People laughed, but how did he know? I said, ‘I was wicked hungry.’
‘Weenie worship,’ he said. ‘That’s the worst part of county fairs. And what happened to your legs?’
Bruised when I had been thrashed with a strap by Gaga over a broken butter dish, but I hesitated to say so.
‘Never mind – don’t tell me,’ Millroy said. ‘I can’t stand violence. Now just pick up a blade, sugar, and start stabbing this basket.’
No eyelashes gave him eyes that were so pale and attentive that his gaze did not stop at my face but went so deep into me I felt he knew my whole life and every pure secret and sorrowful joy in my heart. He handed me a sword, which was heavier than I expected, and I pushed it through the long wicker basket into the thick body of Zula Firkins and it went slow as though making a hole, like a knife into meat.
‘Take that,’ Millroy said. ‘And that. And – oh, gee – something’s leaking out of the basket. Jilly, that gooey stuff – you suppose it’s blood?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, not wanting to look down, and the crowd howled at me.
‘Zula – you all right in there?’ Millroy called out.
No voice nor any sound came from the basket which was now bristling with swords.
‘I’ve been doing this trick for years,’ Millroy said, ‘and it’s only gone wrong a few times. I hope to holy heck that this isn’t another of them. What do you think, Jilly?’
Trying to shrug my narrow shoulders only made me feel smaller. I said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘I just love that,’ Millroy said. ‘Matter of life and death! “Dunno.” ’
His perfect mimicking of my voice and the way I blinked made me feel – not weak, but secure, protected – as though he had power over me.
‘Let’s look inside this Indian basket,’ he said. ‘That’s the only sure way to find out. Undo those buckles, Jilly, like a good sport.’
I crouched down and unfastened the straps, and then Millroy lifted the lid, propping the basket up. It was empty except for the sword blades, six of them, sticking through the wicker every which way and smeared sticky red.
‘Zula’s gone,’ Millroy said. ‘Zula’s disappeared!’
Humming insincere sounds of pity in his sinuses he yanked the swords out and wiped them clean with a bloody rag.
Millroy said, ‘You’re going to have to go look for her, Jilly. Think you can do that?’
‘I’m wicked nervous.’
He smiled at that and then whispered in a kindly way to me, ‘Let’s roll, sugar – boot it, you’ll be fine.’
It was my first step into the unknown at Millroy’s command and even then – more than climbing into a basket – it seemed like my willing but ignorant descent into a dark tunnel in which I trusted him to make me safe until I emerged from the other side, jarred and shrunk by a blinding light, into a space he controlled like a king yet one I had never known before. I hesitated, because the alternative was my retreating the way I had come, back to Gaga’s on the awful bus, back to my room, my small bed and my posters. Millroy’s eyes were on me, but I knew the choice was mine.
The thing creaked as I stepped in, and it went dark as the lid came down on top of me. I lay there holding my belly with one hand and sucking my thumb and thinking, Let’s roll, sugar – boot it, you’ll be fine. Next thing I knew Millroy was talking loudly to the crowd and I was being shaken into a cloth bag, head first, pitch dark, dusty, and no end to it, like crawling through a stitched-up grain sack, a suffocating dream of narrowness, with death at one end and birth at the other.
Meanwhile, Millroy was calling out, ‘Now you go find Zula, honey. She’s down there somewhere. And just to give you some ventilation I’m going to stick some swords into this basket – open it up a little.’
Ka-shook! Ka-shook!
I heard the blades going in, slicing through the wicker, but I did not feel a thing, only sniffed the thin dusty darkness, and still Millroy was talking.
‘Strange thing, losing a little girl. Be pretty darned strange if we lost both of them. Ha! But let’s have a look –’
The lid creaked open – I heard it not far off, and then I heard the crowd laugh in relief and surprise.
‘Why, hello there, Zula,’ he said. ‘Now you know the meaning of tangibilized. But where’s our friend Jilly?’
In a sulky voice the small girl said, ‘She ain’t no friend of mine,’ and I imagined her climbing out of the basket, the wicker creaking against her knees.
‘Let’s have another look,’ Millroy said.
The lid crunched, the audience groaned, and in my darkness I heard Millroy saying, ‘I’ve had serious lacerations, I’ve had puncture wounds, I’ve had splinters. But this is my first disappearance.’ He sounded worried and helpless. ‘Maybe she’s behind the table – no. Or the curtain – or this box. No, she’s gone, folks. She booted it. I am very sorry. I’ll try to do better tomorrow.’
I’m right in here! I yelled. But it was like the dream in which you panic yet your screech stays in your mouth. I tried again but I sensed that the sound was trapped inside the bag, if it was a bag.
Things went quiet, and after a while, I felt myself being hoisted gently off the floor and carried. When the bag was open I had to squint because of the brightness, the way hamsters do when they are born, blinded and squirming. I was in a small room, a trailer I knew by its tin walls and its narrowness, like the cabin of a sailboat, but a dog barking outside, the hurdy-gurdy music from the fairground and in the distance Chubby Checker singing Come on baby, let’s do the Twist, the evening show.
‘Time to eat,’ Millroy said, ‘and no weenie worship.’
The fragrance on his fingers was a small cut-open orangey fruit which he was holding to my nose.
‘Kind of revives you, doesn’t it?’
Filling my nostrils, it entered my head and soothed it with the sweetness of a blown-open blossom.
‘Comfort me with apples,’ he said. ‘They knew what they were talking about. Song of Solomon. Two five. By apple they meant apricot, which this is – here, have a bite.’
He put it into my mouth and watched me while I chewed it.
There was another stronger odor clinging in the close-together cupboards of the room, and Millroy knew I was wondering.
‘Pottage,’ he explained.
He passed his fingers over my face.
‘Because you don’t need meat in your mouth.’
I blinked at him to show I was listening and not frightened.
‘Or meat in your body,’ he added. He was smiling, inhaling, enjoying the odors. ‘Breads. Grains. Bitter herbs. Infusions. Soups. The odd spice.’
Chanting this list he might have worried me the way you are when a strong bald stranger with a mustache over his mouth blocks your way and utters a garbled sentence and you feel he is insane. Yet I was soothed as though by a promise of well-being and, still with the taste of the apricot on my tongue, sensed a hunger for the food he mentioned rise like yearning in my body and I wanted to eat.
Setting a steaming bowl of thick reddish paste on the table next to me, Millroy smiled again.
‘Parched pulses,’ he said. ‘They knew a thing about fiber.’
I ate two spoonfuls and felt more secure.
‘I don’t eat anything with a face,’ Millroy said.
Thinking hard, I said, ‘I love fried clams and quahogs and scallops.’
He muttered quow-hawgs. He muttered skawlips. He smiled. And I felt as I had in the show tent, when he had imitated the way I spoke – overwhelmed but protected by him, made safe by the way he knew me.
‘And I don’t eat anything with a mother,’ he said.
‘Sounds good,’ I said, but what did that mean?
‘I suppose we’ll have to call your mother and tell her you’ll be late.’
‘I don’t have a mother,’ I said.
He stroked his mustache the way you stroke a cat to calm it.
‘Mumma passed on,’ I said and I touched my face the way I always did when I said the word. He saw me do this and understood. ‘I have a grandmother.’
‘What’s your granny like?’
‘Everyone calls her Gaga.’
‘I know the type,’ he said. ‘And I know she’s not very kind to you’ – he traced the welts on my shins with his fingertips and just his touch seemed to soothe them.
‘She thrashes me,’ I said. ‘Gumpy used to stop her but he passed on too.’
‘I’ll come up with something,’ Millroy said, and he sighed.
‘She thinks I’m with Dada tonight.’
‘And where’s Dada?’
‘Drunk,’ I said.
‘What does he do when he’s sober?’
‘A whole bunch of stuff,’ I said.
‘Mumma, Dada, Gumpy, Gaga. The front-porch folks from Hell City, USA – everyone’s family. I know these people well,’ Millroy said, and he drew another long breath. ‘Maybe you would be happier here with me?’
His eyes were huge and damp and gleamingly mirrored my own face.
‘Go on, angel, eat some more.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, choking a little, and still with unchewed food in my mouth, I said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to swallow until you tell me where I’m supposed to sleep.’
My gagging gave me tears in my eyes, which Millroy could have misunderstood.
‘In your own sweet safe room,’ he said. ‘Will you stay?’
‘If you promise not to hurt me, and if you teach me some magic.’
Millroy took my hand – did not grip it but let it rest on his soft fingers the way he had held the fragrant apricot.
‘I’ll never hurt you. We’ll be strong, and we’ll always be friends,’ he said. ‘I know what you’re thinking. But don’t worry, I’m not a nut-bag.’
Swallowed up by this stranger Millroy was how I felt that night in the darkness of the trailer in my own locked room, and because I had been swallowed I felt different here, as though I existed but was blind and blundering and had to be led around in this stomach. It was not as simple as his saying We’ll be friends and going to sleep. He said the choice was mine, I could call Gaga and tell her where I was, I could phone the police, I could get up and go home the next morning. But I was so sleepy.
‘I don’t want to let you go,’ he had said. ‘I’ve been waiting half my life for you.’
Saying that, Millroy the Magician looked human and weak and whiney in a way that I understood better than magic. Even without touching me he was tugging at me.
‘And I don’t want to leave this town without you.’
A person seeing me inside this strange man’s trailer would have told me I was stupid, but no – I felt safer here than I ever had at Gaga’s. There was something about the clean bright room and the good food he had served – I had never seen or tasted anything like it before and it had calmed me and made me trust him. There were no bad smells in the trailer, and it was quiet, it was clean, no clocks, no mirrors, no television set.
‘Why not sleep on it?’
His eyes settled on me again and held me in their motion, and as they cooled from gray to blue I began to dissolve in their yawning pupils and wished only to lie down and let myself fall through the deepness of slumber.
Sleepily I watched him step past me and, sliding a low drawer from the wall, he flapped out its hinged sides and tipped over its front until he had a shelf, which he propped and called a bed. In a false bottom he revealed a mattress and bedding. He folded out a partition like a pair of shutters, and in a matter of seconds he had created a cubicle. It was like one of those collapsing boxes or cabinets, like the Indian basket he used on stage to make solid objects disappear.
‘You will be safe here,’ he said.
Fool, most people would have said to me, but I knew better, I felt only grateful, and I knew that if there was a risk I had to take it. He was opening a door and nodding for me to step through. I took the step, I shut the door, I locked it, I lay down, and that was when I realized that I had been swallowed and that things would never be the same again.
He was outside, on another shelf, in another cubicle, also in darkness. At first I thought he was dreaming, and maybe he was, but he was speaking to me, his voice muffled in a lovely rumble.
‘Something has happened to us,’ he said. ‘Yesterday I was just a solitary man who did tricks at a county fair, and I needed someone to trust me. I found you, and now I am a man with responsibilities. And yesterday you were just a child.’
He released a long yearning breath that narrowed to a sigh, drawing itself fine like a wire that found its way through the cracks in my cabinet.
‘We were two lost souls, though we didn’t know that until we met. Now we are one complex organism.’
He was silent for a moment and my eyes were wide open in the darkness.
‘I believe we are a lot healthier for it,’ he went on. ‘This is a totally natural state of affairs, if you see what I mean.’
I did not know what to say.
‘You took charge of me. Our life will be different from this day onward. Great things are going to follow from this, Jilly Farina.’
And I was also thinking, If it gets real bad or strange I can always leave and go back to Gaga, and I felt that he knew I was thinking that and saying to myself Wait and see, and being patient.
Motionless, on my back, hardly breathing, in a dreamless and druggy slumber – that was how I slept, and so when I woke I felt reborn.
But Millroy was gone – I could not find him, and for the first time in this trailer I began to be worried for my safety.
I sat and fretted, and after an hour he appeared in his sudden out-of-nowhere way.
‘Have you just tangibilized yourself?’ I asked, trying to make a joke of my worry.
He shook his head. ‘Just been in the restroom.’
He smiled a knowledgable smile, but I thought, For over an hour?
‘I spend some of my most productive time in the booth.’
I had heard it called a lot of names but never that.
‘And so will you.’
I was patient because I was excited and felt safe and this was more life than I had ever known, but it was growing odder and odder.
‘I was also giving thanks,’ he said, and seeing me frown because I did not understand he said, as though explaining, ‘It’s Sunday.’
The Sunday Chubby Checker performance in the fairground arena took the place of Millroy’s magic hour and because of there being no afternoon show Millroy made more odd food, even odder – yellow bean salad, wood chips and barley paste, green melons, flat bread with bark mulch flakes, and grape juice with a kick.
‘I never ate stuff like this before.’
It did not even seem like food.
‘I don’t eat anything else,’ Millroy said, and turned his head and shortened his neck like a nuthatch.
I thought he was being funny.
‘Sounds good,’ I said, feeling desperate.
‘It gave me control over nine bodily functions.’
He had this way of saying things in English and even so you had no idea what he meant.
‘I didn’t know we had that many functions.’
‘If only you realized how I need you to say that,’ he said.
‘This is great for you,’ he said, slashing off a hunk of the bread that was bristling with bark mulch and stuffing it into his mouth. ‘They sure knew about fiber.’
‘You were going to tell me about those magic tricks.’
‘A lot of that is bodily functions, which is why it’s related to food.’
‘I was thinking about sword-swallowing,’ I said.
‘That’s a perfect example.’
Already he was snatching up the long bread knife that he had used to slash the flat bread. He threw his head back and wagged the blade until it was aiming straight down. Then he made a face, belched, and pushed the knife into his shadowy throat where the belch had come from. Was he smiling with the knife down his throat? He yanked the thing out and wiped the blade on his arm.
‘See what I mean?’
And he was swallowing and gulping as though he had eaten the front part of the blade.
‘Open that drawer. There’s chopsticks inside. Pass a couple over, sugar.’
They were black chopsticks with mother of pearl inlay in the form of blossoms, probably Chinese flowers. Millroy took them from me delicately, making the chopsticks seem very long as he plucked them up with his fingertips, and then he rotated his head until he was staring at the ceiling and tapped one chopstick into his right nostril and the other into his left, until about eight inches disappeared straight into his head.
He faced me, looking horrible, like a wild animal, the chopsticks looking fangy against his hairy mustache.
‘I can stick anything in there. It’s not an illusion. And it’s not magic. You’re looking at it. I’ve got complete control over these bodily functions.’
Saying that he raised his fingers and slid the chopsticks out of his nostrils, both together, and it was amazing to see them lengthen.
‘And I can get anything down my pharynx – just a matter of control. See, the esophagus is a funny little tunnel, and it can be helpful if you know how to use it. It exerts a sort of suction on all bodies that are introduced into it. I can swallow up to twenty-three inches. Long? Course it’s long – I can get eight inches into my stomach. Sometimes I stick a tube down, longer than that, because it flexes.’
‘What kind of tube?’
‘For cleaning out my stomach,’ Millroy said. ‘For doing inventory. Ever have one of those days when you’re feeling logy and you can’t remember all the food you ate? Well, my nasal tube would be real useful to you those days.’
If I did not know what he was saying how could I even begin to tell whether he was joking about that flexible nose tube ‘for doing inventory’?
‘Fire-eating freaks me.’
‘Control,’ he said. ‘I hold the fire close to my mouth and exhale a lot, making a flame-thrower. I blow out the fire as it gets near my lips, and I always use unleaded gasoline.’
He demonstrated using a flaming match, biting off the flame and swallowing the burned stick.
‘Roughage. I always say forget the cocktail sausage – eat the toothpick and you’ll be healthier,’ he said. ‘Strictly speaking, there is no fire-eating.’
‘Is there a chicken-pot pie?’
‘There is, but I sure didn’t bake it. I used a nesting container, with a flange, very cleverly separating the pie from the showmanship. In this case, fast talking, doctored eggs and a chloroformed chicken. A trick.’
‘Did you really change water into wine?’
‘Only Jesus ever did that. It’s in the Book. John, chapter two. “And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, they have no wine.” ’
He was jiggling his glass of his own grape wine.
‘What you should notice is the technique here. Jesus turned water into wine without ever touching it. He just stood there. He told the servants to fill the pots with water. Then he told them to take it away and serve it. It is perfect magicianship – not even a wave of the hand, just words.’
He took a sip of his wine and then gave me some. It was syrupy, grapey, with a little fizz of sweetness.
‘What I did was pour a glass of water and alcohol into a glass containing an invisible smidgen of aniline red, which reacts with the alcohol and dyes the water red. Water into wine.’
He swallowed the grape wine and smacked his lips.
‘As for the other, wine into water, the so-called wine is just a chemical concoction – one gram of potassium permanganate and two grams of sulphuric acid in a potion of water. This fake burgundy is poured into a glass that contains a few drops of water saturated with sodium hyposulphite. That’s why it changes color. Wine into water.’
He laughed out loud when I told him that this chemistry and all those names sounded more complicated and mysterious to me than magic.
‘That’s because you haven’t had much of an education,’ Millroy said. ‘But stick with me and you’ll get A’s in chemistry. You’ll be mixing up these solutions all by yourself.’ He put his elbows on the table and leaned over, widening his eyes. ‘You’re going to be my assistant.’
Trying to imagine this, I did not say anything.
‘You’ll get to wear a costume.’
I liked that. He picked up his glass of grape wine again and took another swallow.
‘A sequinned cape. High heels. A sort of slinky bathing-suit,’ he said. ‘Red lipstick.’
‘Sounds good,’ I said, and began to worry about the audience staring at me, and slipped my thumb into my mouth.
‘You won’t be able to suck your thumb on stage.’
I popped it out and remembered what I had meant to ask him.
‘What about the Indian basket and the stabbing? And the way I disappeared. How did you do that trick?’
Millroy was smiling and I realized that my thumb was back in my mouth.
‘That wasn’t a trick,’ Millroy said, raising his glass. ‘That was magic.’
And he poured the remainder of his wine into my empty glass, and as it burbled it changed color, losing its redness and its fizz, becoming colorless before my eyes.
‘Like that. Go on, have a sip.’
Water!
Another miracle – and my first full day was still not over.
‘Cut it out. Who are you really?’
‘No one knows me,’ he said. ‘That’s another reason I need you.’
A black-and-white movie I once saw on TV at Gaga’s opened in a small town like Marston’s Mills where a girl is working at the appliance department of a store and she catches a man’s eye. When she smiles back at him you know she is very lonely. He buys a washing-machine and all at once says, ‘Will you marry me?’ and just as suddenly she says, ‘Yes, I sure will.’ That same afternoon they get married and they ride out to his farm, miles from anywhere. They spend a happy night together, and the whole day is like a dream of love at first sight.
But wait. Next morning she wakes up alone and hears a commotion. It is her new husband down below in the yard screaming his head off. He is whacking a sledgehammer against the brand new washing-machine. ‘I told you I didn’t want this one!’ he is yelling, and the bride watches him smashing it to pieces. She just stands there looking down, wondering what she’s done, and scared to death, because of his terrible temper.
Was I going to be that girl? Later in the evening I heard music and said I wanted to go outside and look at the Fun-O-Rama. Millroy said no and that county fairs were not places for innocent youngsters – look at all the riffraff, the chain-smokers, the overweight motorcyclists wearing Nazi helmets, the women with tattoos, dropouts trying to hide, under-aged runaways heading away from home.
Like me, I thought.
‘Not like you at all,’ he said, reading my mind. ‘You are home.’ And his eyes penetrated me and I saw he was right. ‘Anyway, it’s closing for the night.’
‘The hot dog stand is still open.’
‘Crazos eat them. You wouldn’t eat those things if you knew what was in them,’ Millroy said. ‘Lips, tails, nails, hoof, and horn. Gut tubes, hair, bits of skin, fecal matter, udders, all the fat, all the blood and nastiness, the whole strangled animal.’
‘I guess I’m not hungry anymore.’
‘Of course not. You had a great meal. That was real food I served you.’
‘I don’t even know what it was.’
I knew I should not have said that.
Wearing a wonderful smile, Millroy said, ‘Then let’s have another look at it and I’ll tell you.’
He quickly poked the rubber tube up his nose, unspooled two or three feet of it into the front of his head, and fitted it with a plunger. He was soon pumping sludge that looked like old fruit salad into a dish.
‘It’s still breaking down,’ he said, pumping away. ‘What have we got here. Bread, bean salad, mashed pulses. Vegetable matter – hardly smells! It’s real food –’
‘It’s wicked interesting,’ I said, and squinted so that I would not see the brimming dish.
‘I can show you how to use this thing,’ he said, toying with his stomach pump, so fascinated he did not notice me looking sick.
A miracle was magic but it was also a shock, and nothing normal here meant I had to ask myself every so often, What have I gone and done?
Millroy’s life was like his magic – I learned that fast – everything was upside-down, or amazing, or plain odd. The longer you lived the less you knew, he said. ‘Most older people are totally ignorant. I am the exception.’
He disliked calendars and clocks: ‘They give you an erroneous view of time.’ The healthiest rest-posture was balancing on your head. The best way to eat was standing up straight so that your belly was not creased and the food could go down more easily: ‘You need a good flow of air in your gullet to digest your food.’ Sitting in a chair was unhealthy and was a prime cause of many diseases. He claimed he could hold his breath underwater for almost an hour. He said, ‘I wish I lived underwater.’ He ate black seaweed, and the parts of plants that other people threw away – the tops, the greens, the seeds, the skin. When he-was excited he did not shout, he whispered – his whisper could be heard fifty feet away. The lion roaring loudly from its cage in the Foskett’s Zoo enclosure, Millroy said, was not angry but frightened. Millroy’s skin had an odor of almonds and sometimes of tomato vines. He hated dogs and cats: ‘I hate their helplessness. I hate the junk they eat.’ He stared at plants, putting his face against them. ‘I am watching them grow.’ He said his bald head and big mustache were indications of his strength. He was always saying, ‘Punch me in the stomach – go on, hard as you can,’ and when he was hit very hard he said, ‘That was better than a handshake.’
‘But you are much stronger than I am, Jilly Farina,’ he said.
Most of what Millroy said was the opposite of the little I knew. I was small, I was fourteen, I had no friends outside school. Until I had met Millroy I had been alone, living in a kind of cozy boredom – school, television, chores at Gaga’s in Marston’s Mills – her muddy yard and kitchen garden, her duckpond, the chicken run, all the stinks. I knew the world was somewhere else.
‘You have power,’ he said. ‘You just don’t know how to use it.’
‘But you have total control over nine bodily functions.’ Wasn’t that what he had said?
‘That’s just my way of compensating. It’s sad really.’
Then why was he smiling?
And listening to what he said I had to keep reminding myself that he was Millroy the Magician at Barnstable County Fair.
This was Monday morning, at lunch – crunchable beans, loaves of sawdust, two honeycombs – before his first show. Eating made him think hard about food.
‘Virtually everything that people eat is bad for them,’ he said. ‘In a way, you can’t blame them. Most food in supermarkets is carcinogenic. Cancer in a wrapper.’
He had a theory, he said, that some food stayed inside you – never left, just rotted in your guts and destroyed you. There were people, old before their time, and fat, and just looking at them you saw that they contained the residue of most of the meals they had ever eaten.