Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

(Now the cat has his tongue because this queen has once again kindled the disparities, stunned and bewildered him by the Mutt and Jeff arrangements of the world, the absolute unapartheid provisions and tableaux he so yearns for and dreads, the surreal displacements of his heart.)

“What I want,” he begins carefully, “what is needed—”

“May I go with them, Ma’am?” It’s the little boy. He’s seated to Eddy’s side and slightly behind him, one leg comfortably crossed over the other, swinging freely, at once as poised and at ease as an assistant brought back in an illusion. “With Mister Bale and the sick children? The little dying boys and girls? May I, Ma’am? May I? To Disney World? On their dream holiday? Oh, I hope so. I hope I may! There’s nothing to do in the palace.”

“Disney World? Dream holiday? What’s Clarence saying, Mister Bale?” asks the Queen.

“Well, that’s my idea, Your Majesty. What I was leading up to. They’re terminal, you see. One little fellow is in the last stages of progeria. That’s a sort of premature old age. Charles Mudd- Gaddis. He’s only eight but he already wears bifocals and suffers terrible constipation. He’s feeble, of course, but he has all his faculties. He’s very alert. Really. He’s sharp as a tack. We should all be in such shape at his age.”

Queen Elizabeth stared at him.

“What I mean—” Bale breaks off helplessly to watch the Queen, who has opened her purse and begun to rummage through it as if looking for her compact, a handkerchief, her car keys.

“Continue, please, Mister Bale,” Her Majesty says.

“Well,” Eddy says, “there’s this eleven-year-old girl in Liverpool who’s already had a hysterectomy. They should have been tipped off by the hot flashes, but even so they wouldn’t have caught it in time.”

The Queen has found what she’s been looking for. “Yes?” she says when Bale pauses.

“I know the names of almost all the terminal children in England, Ma’am,” Eddy tells her, “and who would qualify for the dream holiday — who would benefit, I mean. Twenty thousand would do it.”

She takes a checkbook and gold pen from her purse. The checks are imprinted with her image and look rather like pound notes. Bale notices that they’ve already been signed; only the amount and name of the payee remain to be filled in.

“Of course there are lots of arrangements to be made,” Eddy says nervously. “I mean I’ve got to decide whether to remove my mourner’s band in the presence of the children. There’s plenty that remains to be worked out.”

She is writing his name on a check. “You will be wondering why I am never without my handbag. Very well, Mister Bale, I will tell you. You having shared so much with us,” she says slyly, barely glancing at him. “We clutch it this way because of the muggers,” she says, and tears the check out of the book and hands it to him. It is for fifty pounds. “Don’t cash it,” she says. “Show it round. The money ought to come pouring in. When you have what you think you need you may send the check back. You needn’t deliver it personally. Just put it in the post.”

“It isn’t for keeps, Your Majesty?”

“Nothing is for keeps, Mister Bale.”

“You want it back? Fifty quid? You want it back ?”

“Does the pope shit in the woods?” asked the Queen of England.

He put his staff together like a collection, like partisans, like a crew in a caper. And liked, even as he recruited them, to think of them that way, something faintly illicit about what he could not really think of as trained specialists so much as a band or gang, some troupe of adventurers, a rash ring of the madcap, spunky-emboldened, stouthearted, suspect. Bale’s lot: his soldiers of fortune, his heart’s highwaymen. Though this was a ruse, a bit of deception he had got up for his own benefit, something Foreign Legion, if not about their bona fides then about their character, left over in his head from a time he had gone to films. Almost telling them when they agreed to join him in his venture — thinking of it as “venture,” too, “operation,” “undertaking,” the code words more satisfying to him than the “dream holiday” label the press had taken up — that they’d have to put by the hard stuff till they’d pulled this one off, that if he so much as smelled anything stronger than tea on their breath they’d be thrown out quicker than snap, and a severe warning that they’d have to lay off the birds — this last to a male nurse who’d tended Liam at the London Clinic and was almost certainly a poof. And nothing on the side, he would have warned: no private swindle, no skimming the cookie jar, no dipping into the private stock. One smutch on the escutcheon and out, he wanted to say. When they got back to England, he wanted to say, could barely keep himself from saying, they could do as they pleased. He was no parson himself; no one had elected him pope. They could go on a bender or fish pox in the stews, he didn’t care. They could bash up old ladies or belt cripples about. (This to Nedra Carp, a woman who, briefly, had been Prince Andrew’s nanny. He hadn’t thought of bringing a nanny, just the private pediatric nurse and erstwhile casualty-ward physician — a pediatrician — he’d met when Liam had been a patient at Queen Mary’s in Roehampton. He had the idea when he saw the woman on television. The children would like that, he thought, having the hero of the Falklands’ personal nanny.) Oh, yeah, he wanted to say, they could talk low bosh or play the berk. They could turn bloody kosher as far as he was concerned, but one smutch, one, and he’d have their guts for garters and their bones for toothpicks. They’d never work with terminal kiddies again, not while Eddy Bale drew breath! And hard cases, bullies and killers from the bottom bins, psychopaths, sociopaths, enemies of the people, enemies of God! Bale’s private fiction: Bale’s desperado wheelmen and demolitions experts, his lookouts and strong-arm guys pitched against the human! (Almost telling them this rubbish, his own low bosh almost out of his mouth, a strange wickedness on the tip of his tongue, all he could do just to mask it at the last moment in the sober turns of his conversations with them. Because I am mad. Am I mad?)

Actually the group was practically blue-ribbon, worthy as the blue-ribbon cash he had put together after the Queen had given him his seed money.

Colin Bible, the male nurse from the London Clinic, is a tallish, decorous, handsome man, his appearance in his impeccable hospital whites and almost slipperlike shoes oddly nautical, not so much jaunty as vaguely languorous, like the summery deck clothes of actors on private yachts in films. He has that same spoiled, fine blond hair and would look windblown, Eddy imagines, in sealed rooms. And a quality in his expression of some just-disturbed petulance, ruffled as his hair and as suddenly smoothed back, as if he is obliged to welcome surprise guests. Colin had been his son’s favorite, breezy with the boy, exaggeratedly swish, his broad effeminacy laid on as an accent in a joke and designed, Bale and his wife were certain, to give the boy the impression that it was to Liam alone he spoke this way. It was Bible who insisted, even in the last week of Liam’s life, that the boy required exercise and, when the doctors left — the technicians from Radiology to photograph his bones, from Hematology to draw his blood, from Nuclear Medicine to inject him with substances they would subsequently read tracings of on big, complicated machinery — he would pop into the kid’s room, look comically round to see if anyone was left (managing in quick strobic glances to give the impression that even Ginny and Bale were gone, who were always there, who in that last week did not even return to their flat except to change into fresh clothes, even then never going back together, the one fetching for the other and, in the last days, not going back at all, taking their meals not in the Clinic’s small coffee shop, or even from the vending machines, but ordering from the hospital kitchen, paying the same inflated prices—“They don’t make their money,” Ginny once joked, “on the operations and tests. They make it on the goddamn lunches and dinners”—choosing their next day’s meals from the same menu the Clinic’s dietician showed their dying child), and call out, first conspiratorially, then loudly, “Walkies, Liam. Walk ies, walk ies!”