Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

All this happening too quickly to account for. Everything happening too quickly to account for. The children squealing, the girls and the boys, scurrying for cover, almost knocking Mudd-Gaddis out of his wheelchair in the ensuing melee. Holding their hands over their heads for protection, the way, one imagines, their remote ancestors might have responded to comets in the sky, portents.

“Jesus!” they screamed.

“Oh, my God!”

“Help!”

Benny Maxine, no less frightened than the others (indeed, if anything, more so; in their wild, blind wake, brushed by their dark stampede, his tender, battered organs touched, rubbed, pushed, and pained by the adiabatic conflagrancies of their blacked-out skirmishes), wheeled about, found the wall switch, and fumbled light into the room.

Mickey and Pluto disappeared at once and, seconds later, there was a loud knock on the door.

“It’s them,” Lydia said. “They didn’t call after all.”

“Hah!” Rena Morgan said.

“Well, we’d best get it over with,” Benny said, and opened the door.

The Mouse and the Dog were standing there.

“Hi, kids,” said Mickey Mouse in his high clear voice like a reed instrument, like music toward the top of a clarinet. “We’re the good guys. We’re”—he raised his strange hand, like a fielder’s mitt with its four stump digits, against the side of his fixed grin—“these Moonies, sort of. But wholesome. Really, kids. Wholesome. I think so, anyway. Forty-eight highway, thirty-two city. Your mileage may vary. It probably does.”

He started to tell them more or less what Matthew Gale had told Mary Cottle. And was warming to his theme when he was interrupted by the dog pulling on his master’s arm, pumping it up and down as if he were raising bridges or flagging trains.

“I don’t see the lady of the house anywhere about,” Pluto said.

“It’s all right,” Mickey said, retrieving his arm, watching Rena and Benny and recognizing the girl magician and the wise-guy kid, rubbing both fielders’ mitts together. “These are nice girls and boys. Just our meat. Or mine, anyway. Mickey meat, you might say. Let’s stay on a bit, Plute.”

“Or the master neither,” said the dog.

“He thinks too much on masters and mistresses,” Mickey explained. “That’s his nature, of course, but sometimes you can overdo.”

“You can overdo your nature?” Mudd-Gaddis asked.

The Mouse looked him over. Terrific, he thought. A roomful of wise-guy kids. “Well, certainly, old man,” he said. “Ain’t that what makes tragedy? When we haven’t sense enough to get out of the way of our characters?”

Lydia Conscience and Tony Word were whispering together.

“What?” Mickey demanded. Tony Word looked down at his feet. “No, what?” repeated the Mouse. “Come on,” he said, “won’t you share with the rest of us? No? Don’t you know it’s rude to have secrets? No more whispering campaigns,” he scolded. “Is that understood?”

“He wants to know how you got on the ceiling,” Lydia said.

So part of it at least was a misunderstanding, a garble, a gloss. A little, that is, was farce, all the knockabout calisthenics of cross-purpose. Just so much was misconstrued, lost in translation. The children, the Dog and the Mouse, misunderstood each other. (Sure, they could be smeared across the ceiling like a slide show but they couldn’t see through walls, could they?) And then there was Kenny’s theatrical orientation. He was an actor. He’d had the floor. Of course he was angry. Boiling mad, actually.

Already boiling mad when the shill opened the door and Lamar recognized him, as well as the girl on the bed, the snot- nosed charmer from the elevator, so fast — better than the Vegas mechanics he’d seen, so fast, a little quick-draw artist — with her hands, which (he was a fair man) he didn’t begrudge her in the least. Only wondering whether Matthew Gale, sweating, he trusted — anyway, hoped — in Lamar’s Pluto suit there was in on it too. Some cast member, he thought ungenerously. (He hoped sweating. He hoped fucking melting, f’chrissake. Because it really was an art, being in that suit was, a question of breathing, like the difference between the singers who played the lounges and the ones who played Vegas’s biggest, most important rooms: only a matter of breathing, of phrasing. What separated the men from the boys, the sheep from the goats. So if Matt was in on it, if all this was happening in any way, shape, or form to set him up, he hoped to God the lousy faggot was turning to tiger butter inside the Pluto suit.) So he really didn’t begrudge her. He respected her, if you wanted to know. Or her skills, anyway. The ends she put them to was something else. The ends she put them to was another story altogether. Scaring the shit out of people was. What kind of a way was that? This was entertainment? Thanks but no thanks.

So, already angry when he walked in the door and saw them. Snappish and primed.

Not realizing, of course, or anyway realizing the wrong things because the nature of misunderstanding, of farce (without which there would be no ball game), is that you don’t know that that’s what it is. If someone had been there who could see all sides, it would have been a different story, but there was no one. Matthew Gale didn’t remember them from the Haunted Mansion. (The girls hadn’t been there anyway, and only Mudd- Gaddis, so excited then, now so sedate, would have made any impression at all.) He saw so many tantrums during the course of a day it’s doubtful he could have remembered anything. Oddly, Mudd-Gaddis might have if Gale hadn’t been hidden by Lamar’s Pluto suit, warm and moist now as a greenhouse, incidentally, and growing gamier by the minute. Or Benny Maxine, who’d had a run-in with Goofy and Pluto in the restaurant, who’d squeezed Goofy’s nose and pulled the bristles in his jowls and messed with his hat and, on behalf of his comrades, even bet the pooches that none of them would die. (Talk, he might have thought, about your Mississippi riverboat gamblers! I’m a bleeding sport!) But who’d either forgotten the incident or didn’t recognize in the whipped and cringing mutt right there in front of him — from itself cringing, from its close and closing circumstances — anything of the aloof, valorous pup of that first encounter. So there was no one. Lydia’s remark about the ceiling gobbledygook to the general, Lamar Kenny’s rage not only inexplicable but not even picked up. (The whispering, of course — he was an actor, he had the floor; you don’t whisper when an actor has the floor; why, that’s worse than heckling him — Mudd- Gaddis’s remark, which he took to be a sly dig about his acting; the little girl on the bed — Of the three girls, only Rena had failed to get up when the Mouse and Dog appeared on the ceiling.)

And spotting the wise-guy kid straight off, that was a treat. Who’d heckled hell out of his breakfast show that time, who’d made a scene at the fried eggs and balloons.

(Which was what was so great about being a human being, thought Mickey Mouse and the girls, Mickey Mouse and the boys — the reasons, the fine tracery of the reasons. The swirl of motive. Like snowflakes we are, thought Benny Maxine, like fingerprint and tooth record.)

But chiefly scaring the shit out of people, the difference in their artistic temperaments. (Artistic differences, they had artistic differences. Gee, thought Lamar Kenny, still comparatively new in the business and already I got artistic differences!) Yet, however impressed, even flattered, he may have been that they existed, it was their artistic differences that ticked him off most. For openers, he thought, he didn’t have a handle on just what he was dealing with here. The kids were a new wrinkle. That was clear enough. But fad or trend? Flash in the pan or wave of the future? He didn’t really know what was going on. From the time the original wise-guy kid had first given him the business, he’d been asking around. No one seemed to know if anything was up or not, though all had remarked the influx of terminally ill kiddies. He supposed the park was involved in some sort of market research and imagined that this group had something to do with it. He’d heard, for example, that someone fitting the description of the odd little lame duck over there in the wheelchair had made a fuss at the Haunted Mansion the other day. (Though not from Matthew, you may be sure, who was almost certainly in on it, whatever it was, and who he hoped had not only turned to tiger butter but was rancid as well, gone off inside the pup tent like a bomb.)