Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

But the children weren’t put off. That didn’t happen, at least. Bale’s fears, his theme-park notions of Heaven, his awry orientation and sense of the surreal didn’t send them into decline. And if they shared his misgivings about the place’s skewed geography, if it offended their sense of the orderly that Italy was a stone’s throw from Asia or that China shared a border with Mexico, they never let on. The mutualized climate didn’t bother them. That they didn’t have to deal with mountains or cross seas seemed not to trouble them. Nothing seemed to trouble them. They were not upset, or even perhaps aware, of the simple symbolism of their arrangements. They spent their lives like sober sailors.

And if they seemed less excited than they’d been, Eddy put it down not to boredom — they weren’t bored — but to something like the mildest loss of innocence, becoming acclimated perhaps to being in a new country, their jet lag smoothed over, their travelers’ up-front awe cleared up.

The fact was that they were concerned about getting to, or getting back to, Mary Cottle’s room.

Except for Eddy, who didn’t know about it, they were on their best behavior, the adults as well as the children, at the peak of their conscientiousness. Working, though not all of them knew this — Eddy, of course; Mary Cottle herself — as a group without even knowing it.

For the first time, buddy aligned with buddy without being reminded. Janet Order and Tony Word, Rena Morgan and Noah Cloth, Benny Maxine and Lydia Conscience formed into pairs. On line, they held each other’s hands tight as tickets. And Eddy Bale, touched, wondered what he’d been worrying about. They seemed sweet, totally without airs, like school children on field trips, their diseases oddly muffled by their patience and courtesy, something faintly disadvantaged about them still, long- suffering but not fatal, reduced to a sort of poverty, perhaps, some vaguely respectful, intimidated sense of the out-of-their- element clinging to them. They might have been on queue at the water fountain or waiting to board a bus. Whatever, they seemed subdued, serious as beggars making their manners. They didn’t so much as whisper among themselves, let alone bray out the loud public jokes Bale had half expected. That they were physically mismatched — Janet and Rena towered over their tiny charges — only managed to make them seem even more settled, almost married, as if the difference in their ages and heights signified some acute mutual acceptance, the way a wife guiding a blind husband seems somehow even more intimately connected to her partner than if the man were sighted. It was the same with Lydia Conscience and Benny Maxine. The underage, gorbelly girl, pregnant-seeming behind her great tumor, and the teenage boy looked like joined, hand-in-hand lovers, overwhelmed, perhaps, and certainly too young for their circumstances, but as bonded and content as youthful, dangerous killers on a spree.

Behind the children, watching over them, Nedra Carp and Colin stood beside each other while Mr. Moorhead went bustling from pair to pair, checking, but decorous and proper as a maître d’.

And, looking all of them over as they waited to be handed into the cars that would carry them up the seventeen stories of Spaceship Earth (Future World’s great landmark, a huge sphere, pocked as an immense golf ball), Eddy Bale felt a strange pride in the odd group. It’s because they’re taking it so well, he thought.

Careful not to become separated — they recalled the fuss when they had — the children instinctively gave way, voluntarily allowing others to precede them even if it was not their turn.

My, Eddy thought, watching in the theatrical gloom, his congratulatory pride incremented by the dark, by expectation and a suffusion of love. My, Eddy thought, flooded with his curious content, his madness peaking now, spiking like a fever, how good they all are!

He was pleased even by the serendipitous symmetry of the arrangements. One adult to each pair of buddies — Nedra sat between Janet Order and Tony Word while Colin Bible took his place in the cars with Rena and Noah, and Benny and Lydia Conscience were with Mr. Moorhead — the partners seemed less disadvantaged now, neither ill nor poor nor out of place. It was the adults, he thought, that lent them force, a scant air of there being something premeditated about their quiet good manners, not long-suffering as he had thought but placid, vaguely exhibitionist. And then he had it. Why, he thought, they might be Saturday’s children, here by court order, official decree, sentenced by a judge and their own mixed loyalties, perfecting their expressions, balancing them like books, all the smoky nonchalance of the indifferently loved, rehearsing the customs of visitation and doing God knows what secret sums of custody in their heads, sneaking glances at their watches, timing what was left of the morning, the long afternoon, and wondering if it was time yet to go to the restaurant, how long the line would be at the movies.

Eddy Bale, comforted by his imagination — divorce was a better doom than doom — moved beside Mary Cottle, who’d taken charge of Charles Mudd-Gaddis in his wheelchair, pushing it along the platform like a child’s stroller each time the line inched forward and new people climbed into the cars. In the dim light he accidentally brushed her hip and asked if he could take the tour with them. Mary shrugged and he got into the tram with Mudd-Gaddis and Miss Cottle. Snug, he felt snug. The two grown-ups, the little boy, made a cozy family.

The tram pulled away from the platform, began its long climb, while Eddy speculated about their collective calm, their take-what-came inscrutability.

He didn’t know, couldn’t have known, that they were disinterested, being pulled past the highlights in this palace of highlights, being drawn up the mammoth geosphere as up a well, the history of civilization illuminated on either side like river views from an open boat, like Paris shoreline gliding across the vision in a bateau mouche.

He did not know, could not know, their indifference, absolute now — only Mudd-Gaddis pointed, only Mudd-Gaddis, alternately delighted and fearful, squealed — to humanity’s transitionless breakthrough breakthroughs, detached, drifting through time as across the panels of a comic strip, seeming to slow down for each milestone as if they were pulling into a familiar train station along their route home, sliding past the cave paintings, beasts stylized as jewelry, primitives squatting over their Neanderthal fire like low gamblers at dice. They moved alongside Egyptians chiseling hieroglyphs like great strange keys and, farther up, caught glimpses of ancient Greece’s legitimate theater, its antique declamated tragedies. They traveled Rome’s blocky old roads and saw the great libraries of ruined empires. They saw monasteries where medieval monks, like secretaries taking painstaking dictation, copied out gospel. They passed Gutenberg’s print shop — and didn’t know, couldn’t know, Colin Bible’s held-tongue, bite-bullet pangs at each special effect: the movable type on Gutenberg’s press — and pressed on into the glories of the Renaissance. And were plunged into the twentieth century as into din. A telegraph clicked like a castanet. They saw the stop-press banner hieroglyphs of newspapers. Radio was in it now, TV, computers. And, still climbing, rose into space, the comfortable room temperature of the heavens, galactic swamps swirling above them like fingerprints of starlight, space platforms like futuristic chandeliers.

At Journey Into Imagination they watched a sort of electronic puppet show — to him, they seemed riveted; how could he know? — and saw rainbows stripped as you’d strip paint, and led electronic orchestras, and walked across a floor that turned their footsteps into music, and stared, his distorted kids, into distorting mirrors. He watched a 3-D movie with them and saw them draw back as objects leaped out at them from the screen.