Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“Is she all right?”

Benny rushed the door.

“Hey, listen,” Lamar Kenny said, leaning all his weight against the elevator door, “we were only fooling around, right? Hey,” he said, “listen.”

Benny Maxine plunged his hands past the wet and crumpled handkerchiefs in her bag and found Kleenex. He wiped her face, grooming her, picking away long strands of the jellied flow, bruising her, doing clumsily all the delicate currycomb frictions for the penalized child.

They never talked about it. He didn’t even know what cystic fibrosis was. Noah Cloth was her buddy, the osteosarcoma.

“What am I supposed to do?” Benny said.

“I’m so embarrassed,” she wheezed.

“Rena, what should I do?”

“What’s wrong? What’s she got?” Kenny asked.

Her breathing was labored, rasped, catching and coming out of her like the cry of stripped gears, like a knock in an engine.

“We’re broken,” Benny cried.

“Please,” she whispered, “can we go up now?”

“We have to go up,” Benny Maxine said.

“Hey,” the actor said, “I’m off,” and left the elevator and picked up the unmarked bag, the light luggage with his Pluto suit in it.

Moorhead said her system hadn’t sustained a real “insult.” That it hadn’t been an “event.” Only, he’d said, a minor “episode.” Doctors always said stuff like that, using words about what happened to their bodies that could almost have been dispatches from the front.

Benny was relieved, of course. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to any of them, particularly not on his watch. Dying kids don’t need any more responsibility than they already had. Which was why Benny had misgivings about this buddy-system business. He hadn’t signed on as anybody’s nurse. And, for his part, he hoped it wouldn’t be Lydia Conscience’s eyes he looked into when his time came. Hoped, that is, he wouldn’t be caught short by death, amongst amateurs; that ambulances would be standing by, doctors and nurses and all the close relations shaved and dressed and saying their farewells on full stomachs; that his emergency would come during proper business hours, after lunch, say, the weather and the day auspicious. That he’d have time to make a few phone calls.

Though he didn’t really believe in the possibility of a terribly premature death. Not really. Benny was a gambler, wise to the ways — at least he thought so — of house odds. Certainly fifteen-year-olds died. They died in car and plane wrecks, they were picked off by snipers, battered about by crazies in the streets, and some of them, he supposed, succumbed to Gauch- er’s disease. Ashkenazi Jews. But what even was an Ashkenazi Jew? Other than somebody who came from central or eastern Europe, he wasn’t sure. His family had been in the U.K. for almost two hundred years. Benny wasn’t even bar mitzvah. Whatever Ashkenazi acts, whatever Ashkenazi practices, whatever indigenous Ashkenazi dyes in the clothing and prayer shawls or Ashkenazi nutrients hung about in the Ashkenazi diet ought surely to have bleached out by now. Which was, Benny figured, where the house odds came in. Because after almost two hundred years surely it would have boiled down to half-life. What, hoist by some already rare, already attenuated and degraded and deflated gene? Snagged on some pathetic scrag of theological, geographical one? Not, for all his symptoms, for all his great liver and burgeoning spleen, not, for all the high sugar content in his cells, the sweet deposits there lining his blood like dessert, not, for all his bruised and brittle bones, bloody likely!

Benny was a true gambler. He lived with hope.

So when Moorhead said no damage had been done, that was good enough for Benny Maxine. He had his plan. The following morning it was a simple thing to ditch the tour, return to his room, and complete the call that Rena with her troubles and scruples had interrupted the night before.

He told a hotel operator that it was Mr. Maxine calling from 627 and said that though he’d written it down when she gave it to him he’d somehow managed to misplace Mary Cottle’s room number. Putting a low wink in his voice, he impressed the fact upon her that it wasn’t the 629 registration he was interested in but the other one. He’d hold while she looked it up. When she came back on the line and said she wasn’t permitted to give that one out, Benny chuckled. “What,” he said, taking his voice as deep as it would go, “an unpublished hotel room? What the devil, eh?” He said he thought he might just possibly have left it in his pants pocket and let it go out with the dry cleaning. Or, the more fool he, in the pocket of his pajama top, perhaps, and hinted at the great frantic pressures of dishevelment and abandon. “You know how it is, eh? You know how it is, I’ll be bound.”

“I can connect you with laundry service,” the telephone operator told him coolly.

Benny said that was damned decent but that now it seemed to him that that’s not what had happened at all. He rather remembered having scribbled it down on the financial pages of yesterday’s paper. Perhaps the girl who made the room up…?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “When a guest says that we can’t give a number out, we can’t give the number out.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Benny Maxine said. “I quite understand; it goes back to the English common law,” and took the operator into the conspiracy. “Miss Cottle and I are engaged, actually. I wanted to surprise her with this great bouquet of flowers just. I’m holding them now. They should be popped into water at once, but without my fiancée’s room number, of course…”

“Just pop over to six twenty-nine, why don’t you just?” she said.

“Well, the thing of it is,” Benny explained, “she’s staying there with her great brute old Aunt Nedra, who doesn’t know about our engagement yet, and—” The line went dead.

I’m smart, Benny thought, but I have to admit, there’s a lot I don’t know. He went over and over what he’d said to the woman, remembering his gaffes like a good dealer recalling every card already played.

Still, he knew now he was on to something, and before they left the hotel that morning he turned gumshoe and, at a discreet distance, tailed Mary Cottle everywhere she went. She went window shopping on the big concourse. She went to get sunglasses. She went to the newsstand for a paper.

If he hadn’t gotten on an up elevator he thought was going down, he might not have found it. The car was crowded. And when Benny looked at the panel above the elevator doors he saw that it would be stopping at every floor. It was very crowded. People pressed against his enlarged liver, his vulnerable bones. “Sorry,” he said, “sorry,” and got off on eight. Maids were making the rooms up, their big carts unguarded in the wide corridors. He went up and was about to take some extra soaps and shoe cloths from one when the housekeeper suddenly emerged from 822. She was emptying trash: gray and black cigarette butts, yellow tobacco the color of sick dog shit loose in the bottoms of the ashtrays, even the ashes odd, not entirely consumed by fire, balled, thick as slag, the crumpled packet of those cheap, stinking second- and third-world cigarettes she smoked only the final proof.

Bingo! thought the good and lucky gambler, Benny Maxine. I’ve found it! I’ve found her hidey-hole!

When the rash appeared on his arm, an even circle about two inches high that wrapped around his biceps like a red and gaudy garter, Eddy Bale removed the mourner’s band — to spare its sight from the children, he’d been wearing it under his left shirt sleeve like a blood pressure cuff — and, folding the cloth, put it into the pocket of his trousers. It was the third time he’d repositioned it, taking it in an inch or so when he’d transferred it that first time from his mackintosh to his suit coat on the day after the funeral, and taking it in again to place directly against his flesh. His shifting, meandering grief like an old river, his deferential hideout sorrow on the lam in his pants.