Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

Everything has a reasonable explanation.

So Charles Mudd-Gaddis in Bale’s and Colin’s, Lydia Conscience in the nanny’s and Mary’s, and Tony Word in Mr. Moorhead’s room, meet in each other’s sleep.

They gather on a Sunday afternoon in one of the public rooms in the Contemporary Resort Hotel, which Mudd-Gaddis believes to be a nursing home where he has been stashed by his family. By what, that is, Mudd-Gaddis guesses, is not the remains of, so much as in a certain sense accounts for, what is his family now, his family informed by time and evolution, an increment of new additional relation which, try as he may, as he does, he can’t keep straight. Though he’s certain it’s all been explained to him, and repeatedly too, and probably even patiently — they are not unkind here; stashed or no, this is no Dickensian charnel house and the doctors and staff are as pleasant as they are efficient; he’s no complaints on that score, or on the other either, for that matter — the stashed business, he means; he’s a man of the world, or anyway was; in their shoes he’d have done the same, because what can you do, what can you actually do when people get so old they can’t take care of themselves any longer? When they get so old (talk about your second childhoods) they become incontinent and piss their pants and shit their sheets and move about (though it isn’t as if they actually could — move about, that is — they can’t, and have to be pushed in wheelchairs, lifted in and out of them like, like — what? — socks in a drawer, laundry in a hamper) under some stink of the personal, the inclement intimate? So old they can’t cut meat or butter bread. Of course you stash and warehouse them, though he knows it’s a waste of breath, of time and money. It’s a joke, really. A joke and at the same time a tribute to the basic decency of people that they even bother to explain. All right, so they slow their normal speech patterns and maybe raise their voices. He can understand that too. Because what the devil would you expect? Would you expect otherwise? Would you talk Great Ideas with an infant? And if you did, if you could, but it was this hard-of-hearing infant, this deaf infant, wouldn’t you raise your voice? It’s a wonder to him how they find the patience. It’s a wonder to him they don’t go all shirty every once in a while and send up the old fart. “I’m Jim and that’s Bill. You remember Bill, don’t you, Dad? He was your fireman on your postmistress’s side. I’m your dustman on your papal nuncio’s, nuncle.”

Which is not to say he doesn’t have it coming. The deference. The weekly visits. However uncomfortable they make him feel, whatever trouble they put him to. Well, all that fuss and bother. Having to endure the shave, the indignity of the double nappies if he shits where he shouldn’t. All of it: the fresh shirt and starched collar (which gives him a rash like a bedsore; and that’s another thing, having to sit before them in his wheelchair perched on his sheepskin as if his arsehole might take the cold), the ordeal of the tie which, even though it’s no charnel house here and even though they’re gentle, is still no protection from the orderly’s breath which, even if it isn’t bad, could still carry the germ — so close they get when they do your tie — which could give him pneumonia. All of it. Though he’s the one who insists on this: the damn-fool mummery of the scents and talcums which, since his nose seems to be going along with everything else, he probably puts on, or rather that orderly puts on for him, too liberally. Which, face it, is maybe the one plus — he doesn’t count having to be diapered — in the whole business, sensitized and able as he is to respond to the pats and tickles of flesh on flesh even though those pats and tickles are administered by a poof male orderly and even though, unless they hang old men, he’ll never be tumescent again?

Because everything has a reasonable explanation and his visitors mustn’t get wind of his old man’s stench.

So he has these visits coming no matter that it’s a basinful for all concerned, no matter that they banjaxed each other or that all of them — he doesn’t exclude himself — usually just spend the afternoon sitting around and talking through the back of their necks.

It was quite a predicament. Being so old. So suspicious. Because maybe the real reason it’s no charnel house, maybe the real reason they’re so gentle and kind in this well-appointed palace of pensioners, is that they don’t want to cross him, that with all his other functions and faculties deserting him, he still retains the power of the purse, can write them out of his will — what’s left of his will? — with one stroke of the legal. Obviously they still believe him to be compos. Which may be the real reason he’s so polite to them, so gracious and agreeable, which may even be the real reason why he consents to see them every Sunday.

Because how could it possibly be love?

On any of their parts?

My God, he doesn’t even remember them from one week to the next!

And for their part, for their part, what was left of him to love? A nappied, sheepskin-assed old man who stank on top of perfume flowers that never grew in nature, and of the compost which never grew them underneath.

Lydia Conscience begins.

“How are you today, Charles?”

And old Mudd-Gaddis thinking: So that’s how it stands. Not Pop, not Granddad or Great-granddad either. So old. Not Uncle or Cousin-German. Charles. (Not friends, too young to be friends, never friends.) Relation reduced to the watered technicalities of lineage. So old. So old.

Tony Word sees the old boy’s rheumy eyes inspect him.

“Yeah, Charles, how are you keeping?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Mudd-Gaddis tells them politely. “And yourself? Yourselves?”

Lydia Conscience rests her engagement and wedding rings across her belly. “Very well, thank you, Charles.”

“No morning sickness?” he inquires alertly.

“My goodness no,” she tells him gratefully. “That passes in about two months. I’m long into my awkward phase by now. My ankles are ever so swollen. I tell my friends I feel like a cow and must look like the full moon.”

“No, of course not,” he hastens to reassure her. “She looks…”—he tries to think of the word— “radiant, positively radiant,” he tells Tony Word.

Who nods noncommittally.

“And how are you feeling?”

“Me? No complaints, no letters to the Times,” Tony Word says. “As long as I stick to my diet.”

Now Mudd-Gaddis, who has no idea what the little stick figure can possibly be talking about and who was just about to offer him some sweets out of the box he keeps for his Sunday visitors, nods and, covering his ass, adds, “Good, good. That’s very important.”

(Because with great age comes paranoia — so old, so old — and he knows he’s already made one mistake when he asked his stupid question about morning sickness, not his finest hour, because he’s given them something to jump on and maybe they think he can’t remember his own wife’s pregnancies, which he can’t, or if he ever even had one, and he’s on the verge of making another, a lulu, and it’s all he can do to keep from making it because what he really wants to know, what he really wants to do is cut the crap altogether and demand of them straight out, “Just who in hell are you people?” They look like kids, for Christ’s sake. Though to him, of course, everyone does these days. So old, so old. And why does the woman keep flashing those damned rings? So old. Still, he thinks, in the common dream the three of them share, it isn’t as if I were a complete twit. It’s plain enough she’s trying to remind me of something. My responsibilities, probably. I wish I’d better eyesight, though. From here the rings look like toys from the Cracker Jacks.)