Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

At the precise moment that Lydia Conscience was hiding from the blue girl, Janet Order entered the dream. Lydia was nowhere about, nor did Janet know that Lydia — she was that neat — had ever occupied it. But noticed the water first off and dove into the stinging river downstream of the African Queen, the rumpled mate blowing warning whistles at her, cupping his hands and shouting directions she couldn’t hear but perfectly understood when he threw a line to her. Which she wouldn’t take. Preferring instead to wait until the water became chilly enough to justify her appearance. Only when she saw the hippo did she realize that it was a jungle river.

“Grab it,” the mate shouted when the tiny steamer came abreast of the girl. “Grab the life preserver, kid.” Blushing — the rosiness of her modesty added to her natural color and turned her a deep shade of purple — Janet Order dove under the dark, muddy water and swam away from the boat. There, along the warm bottom of the jungle river, in the soft medium of a swirling, rising mud, in broken earth’s cloudy dissolution, through all erosion’s rich rots and deltic rusts, Janet Order, her eyes adjusting to the decomposing silts and sediments and lees, all the fermenting dregs of all drenched dirt’s loamy planetary brew, swam. The badly hearted child — she’d seen her x-rays, her blunt, boot-shaped heart, the mismanaged arteries and ventriculars like faulty wiring or badly tied shoelace — relieved of gravity, flew through the water, her breathing easy as a fish’s, as the heavy hippo’s or the two dreamy cubs, oblivious, abstracted, stuck at their mother’s teats as at soda straws. She swam past the stalled propellers of the little steamer and came into an area not so much clearer as less perturbed than the one she had just come through. Here the mud and motes of the river bottom no longer swirled but lay fixed in the strata of water — she perceived that water was subtly stratified as rock or sky — as in aspic. Indeed, when she stuck out her finger to lick a particularly delicious-looking piece of mud-studded water, she seemed somehow to compromise the delicately balanced layers of the river. The water trembled, entire panes and levels of it smashing around her like so much glass. “Oh, my,” Janet said, seeing too late the DO NOT MOIL signs posted all about the warm jungle river. Everywhere fabulous creatures, their sleep disturbed if not by the intruder herself than by her thoughtless liberties, came out to see what had happened to upset the balance of nature. And although nothing was said, she sensed herself scolded by the coral, scorned and disparaged by the haughty sea horse, upright and stately as an initial on a towel. Microorganisms abused her: plankton and a tiny grain of sand which one day would irritate itself into a pearl and was just now slipping into the shell of an oyster. She was snubbed by great whales and silently upbraided by sharks. Reproach glittered like tears in the eyes of sirens and mermaids. Drowned sailors speechlessly gave her the rough side of their tongues.

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

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

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

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

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

Because everything has a perfectly reasonable explanation.

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

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

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

“The little girl.”

“Blue kid?”

“That’s right.”

“Hell of a swimmer,” the man said.

“Is she?”

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

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

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

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

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