Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“Oh, Charles,” Lydia Conscience says, “you’ve no will. You’re a pauper. What could be in it? You’re this charity boy, Charley. You’re stony broke.”

“I’m not rich?”

“Poor as a pebble,” Lydia Conscience says.

“How do you explain all this, then?” He indicates the well- appointed public room.

“What, the hotel lobby?”

“It’s a hotel lobby?”

“What’d you think it was, old-timer, the Albert Hall?” Tony Word asks, winking at Lydia.

“Why do you come then? Why do you all come every Sunday?”

“Oh, that was foolish,” Lydia says. “Pique, I suppose. When I found out about the others, that they went off by themselves, I thought the three of us might try to do something about it. That maybe we could ally ourselves against them.”

So it is love, Charles thinks. “We will,” he declares. “All for one and one for all! The Three Musketeers!”

“Mouseketeers,” Tony Word says cheerfully.

“We’ll see,” Lydia says.

So it is love. A kind of love. Love of a sort. At least friendship, the seesaw, shifting allegiance of mates.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation. Everything. They are dying. They sleep fitfully, tossing and turning on their symptoms, waking to the slightest disturbance, even to Nedra Carp’s, Eddy Bale’s, and Mr. Moorhead’s light permissions.

the end of the third day they’d been to all six of the lands in the Magic Kingdom. They’d been to Main Street, U.S.A. They’d been to Liberty Square, Adventureland, and Fantasyland. They’d been to Tomorrowland and to Frontierland and by now were tired of Benny’s dark joke. “‘From whose bourne no traveler returns,’” he would say whenever the last two sections of the theme park were mentioned. By

Moorhead permitted them to go on the tame rides only — the aerial tram, the little one-eighth-scale railroad, the trolleys, jitneys, and double-deck buses, the Jungle Cruise and Cinderella’s Carousel, the paddle-wheelers and WEDway People- Mover. The Grand Prix Raceway, Big Thunder Mountain, Starjets, and Space Mountain were off-limits to them. So were the Mad Tea Party, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Mission to Mars, and Peter Pan’s Flight. “Thrills and chills,” Benny would warn the others, sizing up a ride from its description in his guidebook and shaking his head, anticipating Moorhead’s decision. Thus a good part of their days was taken up in being shuttled from one part of the park to the other, simple sightseers. Even at that, four of the children — Lydia, Charles, and Tony Word were exceptions — had balked at riding the double-deckers. Again, Maxine had been their spokesman. “We’re Brits,” he called up to the driver and argued with Bale, “and didn’t cross the sea to the New World to ride no double-deck bus, which besides what it ain’t authentic in the first place it don’t even have no wog for a conductor in the second!”

They spent a lot of their time watching shows and riding in cars that ran along tracks past special effects of one sort or another. It was all rather like being in a kind of passive museum. Only Colin still seemed fascinated by the audio- animatronics, and when some of the children (by this time a little embarrassed at being always moved to the head of the line — as a precaution Moorhead had ordered Tony Word and Janet Order into wheelchairs — but unable to stand for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time) objected to the queues, it was Bible who volunteered to stand in for them. Mudd-Gaddis, Lydia Conscience, and Noah waited on benches or on chairs under awnings at outdoor cafés — usually at these times Moorhead went off to scout other attractions for them while Eddy Bale and Mary Cottle pushed Tony and Janet in the wheelchairs and Benny and Rena, still eager to take advantage of their invalid status, accompanied them — and Nedra Carp shuffled back and forth between Colin and the children, alerting them to the status of the queue.

“How was it, Benny?” Noah asked when Maxine and the others came out of It’s A Small World.

“Thrills and chills,” Benny Maxine said.

“Was it, Benny? Was it?”

“Nah,” Benny said. “I guess it were all right, mate. There was all these little dolls from the U.N. singin’ an’ dancin’.”

“Fascinating,” Colin said.

“Cor,” Benny said, pointing to Janet and Tony in their chairs. “If we got to keep looking at this stuff it won’t be wheelchairs we’ll need, it’ll be glasses.”

They went to Tropical Serenade; they went to Country Bear Jamboree. They spent time in theaters watching movies — something called Circle-Vision 360 wrapped them in the spanking, startling imagery of the world: Tivoli, New York, the Alps and Rome and the Valley of the Nile, Jerusalem’s old stones and India and more — and looking at the exhibits of big corporate sponsors: Kodak, Eastern Airlines, RCA, McDonnell-Douglas.

And they were getting edgy.

“Don’t you wish you had a wheelchair?” Lydia teased Noah.

“Yeah, I wish I had one to roll you about in.”

“Bitch!” Lydia Conscience hissed at him under her breath.

“Pimp!” he breathed back.

“Mister Moorhead,” said Lydia Conscience one afternoon, “may I have a new buddy for the buddy system? I don’t think Benny remembers my symptoms. I mean I think I’d feel better if I switched with Janet.”

“If you switched with Janet it would throw everything off,” Moorhead objected.

“What if I have an attack? I don’t think he’s responsible,” she whispered.

“Those assignments were made with great care,” Moorhead said.

“There ought to be a drill then,” she said, and, to calm her, Moorhead reluctantly agreed. He called Benny over to explain the situation.

“Lydia’s upset,” he said. “She doesn’t think you’d know what to do in an emergency.”

Lydia feigned an exacerbation and Benny Maxine moved to her side. He undid the buttons at her collar. He moistened a handkerchief and applied it to her forehead, her temples.

“He hurt my stomach.”

“I didn’t even touch it.”

“He hurt my stomach, Mister Moorhead.”

Because they were not only edgy but fragmented now as well. Some in wheelchairs, others out, the rides forbidden them, their staggered attendance at performances, the snacks they took at different times, and the separate memories of the world they’d seen projected, thrown up around them like a wall.

Only Lydia still suffering an aftertaste of the dream; Charles, who’d shared it, musing only that life was a lot more interesting to him asleep than awake; and Tony Word recalling with not a little pride that he’d not come off badly at all, that in fact he’d acquitted himself pretty well, considering. (The others, who not only had not been in the dream but who hadn’t even been sleeping at the time, nevertheless went about for upwards of a day, a day and a half, with the queer conviction that someone — a person or persons unknown — had been talking about them behind their backs.)

Because Eddy Bale had been right. Kids do love to explore hotels. They are in ecstasy in elevators, they do fancy pushing buttons.

And it had begun just that innocently, Benny Maxine choosing Rena Morgan for no better reason than that she seemed game — a jolly good sort, a damned decent chap. (And, of all the children, quite frankly seemed the strongest, maybe the only one who could keep up with him.)

And even suggested that she bring her passport along. Just in case.

“Just in case what, Benny?”

“Better safe than sorry, luv.” And showed her his, tapping the dark blue document as if it were a letter of credit, some official carte-blanche ace-in-the-hole talisman.