Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“I’m artistic,” the man explained irrelevantly. “I work for Madame Tussaud’s. I’m one of the new breed. Well, I suppose that sounds rather grand. All I mean is I’ve these bold ideas. Innovative,” he added nervously.

“Madame Tussaud’s was one of my favorite places when I was a kid,” Colin said. “I haven’t been there in donkey’s years.” He was still stroking his patient’s hair.

“You wouldn’t recognize the place. And once the new wing is in…do you recall the Chamber of Horrors?”

“Do I?” Colin Bible said. “I should say!”

“Jack the Ripper,” his new friend said scornfully. “Burke and Hare!”

Colin Bible shuddered.

“No,” the man said, “that’s just the point. They were merely aberrant.” He flushed reflexively. “I mean they had no social significance. What’s the point? They put fellows like that on display to titillate. What I’m after is something else entirely. I mean, would you like to know my dream, my vision for the place? God, I mean, just listen to the way I’m talking!”

“Of course I would,” Colin Bible said.

“Really? I mean you’re not just humoring an old poof, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Well,” he said, “those fellows, that lot, they were just our own parochial, historical sociopaths. Freak show, is all. Hydras and kraken. Rocs and manticores. Stuff that goes bump in the night. I mean, even Hitler — and there was a do just to get him in at all. I mean, can you imagine? The old-timers on the Board of Directors were dead against it. Even after they came round, they propped him up in full-dress regalia like an entirely proper führer. Why, he looks like a Caesar. Hitler!”

Colin Bible nodded.

“Well, what is the point? My notion is to show what he did. I want the Holocaust represented. I think that deserves a room all to itself. A large room. We could show the ovens, we could show the showers and the Jews, naked, their blue numbers burned into their wrists, not knowing what’s going to happen to them. We could show the wasted survivors pressed against the barbed wire in their penal stripes. Their mountains of gold teeth, their piles of shoes.

“Hiroshima. Just one wall of a building still standing, a shadow of vaporized flesh imprinted on it like a double exposure.

“We should show cancer,” the man said, tears in his eyes and the bent index finger of the hand that, seconds before, Colin had been holding pressed between his teeth. “And I’m not an old poof,” he said.

“I know that,” Colin Bible said.

“I’m not.”

“I know,” Colin said.

“Actually, sexually I’ve never been very active.”

“I know it.”

“I haven’t.”

“I haven’t either,” Colin Bible said.

“Oh, dear,” his patient said.

What he told him was true, but when Colin was discharged from hospital Colin Bible moved in with him and they became lovers. They had been together almost four years.

Nevertheless, it was good to feel the odd sense of self-reliance imposed on him by the remote dangers of the speeding aircraft.

At Heathrow he’d been too busy with the children to give much thought to Colin — they did not accompany each other much to airports, and he’d been taken by surprise when his friend had shown up in the departure lounge at the last minute — and had come upon the flight insurance desk quite by accident. I really ought to take some out, he thought impatiently. Colin sets store in such things. He thinks he’s sending you a dozen long-stemmed roses. The girl began to explain the various plans. “No, no,” Colin Bible interrupted. “Just your basic ‘My God, We’re Going Into the Drink,’ ‘Three Hundred Feared Dead in Air Disaster!’ coverage,” he said. Take care of yourself, he scribbled hastily across the top of Colin’s copy.

He could not account for it, but he was smiling.

The children slept, fitfully dreaming.

Little Tony Word, dying of leukocytes, of clear, white, colorless cells watering his blood and turning it pale, of petechia and purpura, the petty hemorrhages across his face like so many false freckles, of fatigue and fever and bone pain, of malignant cells buttering his marrow with contamination, of major and minor infections exploding inside his body like ordnance, of the inability of his blood to clot, of his outsized, improperly functioning organs, all the cheap cuts — his liver, his kidneys — of his compromised meat — of leukemia — of the broad palette of chemicals with which his oncologists painted his blood, going over it, careful as art restorers, chipping away at the white smear that poisoned it, bringing back the brisk, original color from their tubes of vincristine and prednisone and asparaginase and dexamethasone and mercaptopurine and allopurinol and methotrexate and cyclophosphamide and doxorubicin and other assorted hues — dying, too, of time itself, of the five- and six- and seven-year survival rate (Tony is now two years beyond his last remission but freckles have begun to reappear along his jawline and his renal functions are in an early stage of failure) — little Tony Word dreams of his low-salt meals, of the liquids and fruit juices he is forced to swallow, almost, or so it seems to him, by the pailful, of all the rind fruits he must eat, and which, because of the invisible germs and hidden dirts which might be on his mother’s hands, he must peel himself — the sealed orange, the difficult apple, the impossible pear, the ordeal of a grape, which he handles with specially sterilized toothpicks, as he does everything, to avoid the accident of cuts which will not stanch — encouraged, too, to prepare his own well-balanced, nutritious meals (though he’s not allowed to go near a stove), his boiled and scrubbed green leafy vegetables, washing lettuce, kale and cauliflower, broccoli, sprouts, cabbage; washing everything, eggplant and potatoes, shallots and mushrooms, then consuming the congealed pot liquor which he has to scrape from the side of the pot with a spoon and spread on toasted sandwiches (from which he first must tear away the crusts) just to be able to get it down, or drinking the broth, thick as barium, to get at the vitamins and minerals, and eating the flaccid vegetable flesh; preparing the meats, too, scrubbing (this much, at least, his own idea, the scared kid’s) his veal and ham, his steaks and chops, his joints and shanks, so that everything he eats, or so he thinks, tastes of a light seasoning of dishwashing detergent, learning to cook even at four and already at ten an accomplished chef, teased for this, for this only, not for his weak and sickly ways, his inability at games (which he would not have been permitted to play anyway), or even his high anxiety as a spectator sitting well back in the stands in the gymnasium lest he be hit by a stray ball, or far away from the sidelines when what they would surely snicker at him for should he call them his mates went outdoors to play, but because they know he cooks, have heard him brag of it who has nothing else to boast of (save his pain, save his endurance, save the one or two or, at the outside, three years he has left to live perhaps, and which he has never mentioned), seen him in the lunchroom chewing his queer veggie remnant sandwiches with their vitamin slime and viscous mineral fillings, have seen him fastidiously peel his fruits and drink his juices, his quart of bottled water from which someone else has first to remove the cap and then pour into a paper cup lest Tony cut his finger on the saw-toothed cap or the bottle opener or the drinking glass he was not even permitted to use accidentally break. So the small dying boy tosses and turns, dreaming his breakfasts of champions, his athlete’s meals, his health faddist’s strict dietary laws, sated in sleep, stuffed, full as a glutton, who has never been hungry, dreaming of food who is not hungry now.