Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“I like Janet.”

“What a charitable girl as well!”

“As a matter of fact, Nanny, it’s something you said just now.”

“What? Something I said? I don’t know what it could have been then, dear, I’m sure.”

“That bit about bravery in men, patience in ladies.”

“Calm endurance, dear. Tolerant imperturbability. Forebearance, resignation, and submission.”

“Janet isn’t in the least submissive, and I shouldn’t have thought to have called her resigned.”

“Ah, but I was talking about ladies.”

“Yes. Bravery in men, patience in ladies.”

“Just so.”

“I think Janet Order is brave,” Rena said. “If I’d her complexion I think I should have it whitewashed, hide it away as I do my handkerchiefs.”

“Show consideration for the feelings of others, yes.”

“For myself, rather. People stare. She takes no notice.”

“Cheeky.”

“Courage.”

“If you say so, dear,” Nedra Carp said, returning to her imaginary knitting.

“I wonder if I could go down to the game room,” Rena said after a while.

“What, the game room? At this time of night? It’s almost gone nine. That Miss Cottle’s nowhere about. Lydia’s sleeping, but what if she should wake up? Of course I could leave a note.”

“No,” Rena said, “she might not find it.”

“Oh, don’t fear on that score. Nanny would leave it somewhere she’d be certain to find it.”

“She’s in a new place. She could panic. There might be something she needs.”

“Mister Moorhead’s just ’cross the hall. Mister Bale and that nurse are the next room over.”

“Do you suppose she’d think of all that in those first moments of terror?”

“And thoughtful too! I like that in my girls.”

“Nanny, I’m not thoughtful or considerate either. Nor charitable nor even all that clever.”

“And modest!”

“When I asked you that about Prince Andrew before, about his being brave — well, you know that’s a quality I very much admire.”

“What very lovely values you have, dear,” Nedra Carp said.

“It’s a quality I very much aspire to, Nanny,” the child said.

“That’s very noble.”

“That’s why I want to go down to the game room by myself.”

“By yourself? By yourself? But you’re dying, dear. It’s quite out of the question.”

“It’s because I’m dying that I have to be brave. I’ve this awful cystic fibrosis which the doctors can’t seem to control, and I go about with all this linen folded up my sleeves. I haven’t the courage to be seen blowing my nose, Nanny. I just thought if I went down to the game room by myself for an hour or so and let people stare — they know us here, you know, they see us traveling with our caretakers like this clan of the doomed, and after that scene in the restaurant this morning, and whatever it was that happened to the boys at the Haunted Mansion — healthy kids, kids my own age: well, I just thought they might think better of us, and of me — of me, I admit it — if they saw us one at a time once in a while. Please, Nanny. Please.”

“You’d play those arcade games?”

“Yes,” Rena said.

“They’re very stimulating. You could become overexcited.”

“I’ll just have to learn to control it.”

“What if someone teases you? Children can be quite cruel. It could bring on an attack.”

Rena opened her purse, showed Nedra a single white handkerchief. “This will have to serve then, won’t it?”

“Well.” Nedra considered. “This is a situation. For my part I think you’re already very brave. Thoughtful, charitable, considerate, clever. Lovely values, just lovely. You’re doing this as much for the others as you are for yourself. You are, aren’t you, Rena? You’re showing the flag, aren’t you, dear?”

“Yes, Nanny,” the child said, looking down.

“It isn’t an easy decision. I have to parse this,” Nedra Carp said. “You’re dangerously ill with a condition that makes you subject to devastating attacks. You mean deliberately to put yourself in harm’s way. Knowing full well that people recognize you, you mean to encourage one of your attacks by going to a place which would tax the resistance of even a normal child. Moreover, rather than provide yourself with your usual aids — I didn’t see your inhalator when you opened your purse just now, did I? — you mean to go down to that game room with a single handkerchief, one or two less than a child might carry who merely suffers from a common cold. Is that about it?”

“Yes, Nanny.”

“It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, dear, a dangerous game indeed.”

“But that’s just the point of it, Nanny.”

“Oh, I understand the point of it, child.”

“Yes, Nanny.”

“But do you understand that Nanny is responsible for you? Do you understand that if anything…well, untoward should happen to you during the course of this…adventure, Nanny could, and quite properly, be brought up on charges, and that almost certainly it would mean the end of the dream holiday?”

“Yes, Nanny.”

“Yet you’re still willing to put your friends’ pleasure and your nanny in jeopardy — and yourself, yourself too — just to prove some quite abstract point that no one is ever likely to understand? I do not make exception of your dear parents. Do you see the ramifications of all this, Rena?”

“Yes, Nanny.”

“Cause all that trouble all for the sake of a vague principle?”

“Yes, Nanny.”

“An hour is out of the question. If you’re not back in the room within forty-five minutes I shall have hotel security bring you back,” Nedra Carp said.

“Thank you, Nanny.”

“Well, spit-spot, child! Spit-spot! The clock is ticking,” Nedra Carp said, and Rena Morgan, her inhalator banging against the pocket in her skirt and the rolled handkerchiefs she kept like magician’s silks along the sleeves of her dress absorbing her perspiration, ran off to meet Benny Maxine, who was already waiting for her outside Spirit World, the liquor store where by prearrangement they had agreed to meet at nine.

Colin Bible lurked — lurked was the word for it — in the health club of the Contemporary Resort Hotel. He loitered by the urinals, skulked near the stalls, slunk along the washstands, and insinuated himself at the electric hand-dry machines. He looked, he supposed, like a madman, like someone, all dignity drained, in throes, the rapturous fits of a not entirely undivided abandon, as if, by avoiding eye contact, he preserved some last-minute, merely technical remnant of sanity. He knew his type, he thought uneasily, had often enough recognized it in the Gents’ at the great Piccadilly and Baker Street, Knightsbridge and Oxford Circus underground stations. He did not even lack the obligatory newspaper, the peculiar faraway cast — put on, assumed as a disguise — to his expression. Nor did he bother to make a show of busying himself, heartily pretending to shake free the last drops of urine from his dick or noisily opening and slamming the stall doors as if he were all preoccupied urge and dither. Neither had he rolled up his shirt sleeves, his hands and forearms thickly lathered as a surgeon’s. Or stood by the electric hand-dry machines, waving off excess water with all the brio of a symphony conductor imposing a downbeat. He was not happy to hide, didn’t enjoy his stealthy camouflage, took no pleasure from his furtive tiptoe masquerade. It was only that he didn’t have the nerve to make an overture of his own — unless turning himself into something coy and clandestine was itself an overture — and didn’t believe the guy would recognize him. He thought, that is, that he would have to be picked up all over again, winked at again, his hand brushed a second time. This was the reason he made himself so suspicious looking, why he kept himself under wraps in his best suit among the men in their gym shorts and jogging outfits, posing in it as if it were a raincoat, why he leaned like a flirt beside the stationary bicycle, why he prowled surreptitiously between the Nautilus machines and pussyfooted along the treadmill and gym’s small track. It was the reason he snuck back and forth by the weight bench, why he snooped in the sauna and inferred himself past the rowing machine. It was because he didn’t think he’d be recognized that he so ostentatiously lay in ambush — lost and shrouded, a burrowed lay-low, a smoke screen, anonymous, covert, sequestered, disguised and reticenced and secluded, an inference, a stowaway.