Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

Because he didn’t need the aggravation. Your death acts — here today and gone tomorrow — his hunch was, would never catch on, though he couldn’t deny the outrageousness of the concept. Only where was the art? What did it take, after all, to display the dying? If you asked him, it was a little like public hangings. Sure, the poet was right on the money and there was nothing new under the sun. As a matter of fact, if you asked him it wasn’t even in very good taste. Though he certainly saw the point, what they were getting at. The old triumph-of-the- human-spirit bit. Folks showing their lesions and cancers, exposing their stumps, sniffing their gangrene. There really was no business like show business. Well.

The first thing, he supposed, was to check them out, find out if they were for real. (Because didn’t it stink, at least a little, of fraud and freak show?) He knew what the girl could do, of course, the one on the bed, but now he’d find out about the rest of them too, what the shouting was all about.

He turned to Janet Order.

“All right,” he said, “let’s just see if that shit comes off!” He tossed her a damp washcloth. “Oh, please,” Mickey Mouse said, “you couldn’t get chalk off a blackboard with such halfhearted efforts.”

“I’m halfhearted,” said the hole-hearted child.

“Here, let me,” said the Mouse, taking the cloth back from the kid, vigorously rubbing her blue skin with it.

“You’d lay hands on a customer?” Pluto growled. “On a customer?”

“And how about you?” the Mouse shot back. “How about you, Mister Magic Fingers? You hypocritical dog, you!” Who was steamed anyway, who knew he’d been had the minute he walked into the room. Calling in his marker, Gale had said. For the times he’d pulled guard duty for him when Lamar had gone off to talk to the clubs. Calling in his marker. Calling in his mark was more like it! Telling him it was just to get his own back, furious because Colin had set him up, because, or so he’d said, the woman was in on it too. To get his own back, and maybe those manuals. Merely to devil them with implication and outrage, to bear down on the two of them with the full moral authority of Mickey Mouse and his faithful friend. (Faithful friend was a good touch. Faithful friend had a bit of genius to it, what, he supposed, had ultimately sold him.) Though why hadn’t he thought to ask him what he hadn’t thought to ask him? Why hadn’t he thought to ask him, “Then why not bring Minnie?” Because maybe Gale was no dummy. Because maybe he would probably have come right out and said what was on all their minds anyway: that Mickey and Minnie weren’t married, that there was something a touch suspicious if not outright unsavory about that relationship. That if they slept together — and after a fifty-year engagement who could doubt it? a Mouse wasn’t made of steel — without benefit of clergy, how could they hope to have any sort of moral edge over Colin and the woman? Anyway, he hadn’t even thought to bring it up. And understood he’d been had as soon as the wise-guy kid opened the door for them, as soon as he’d taken in — or been taken in by — all the wise-guy kid’s wise- guy cohorts, that little league of the year-to-live.

So what was he doing here? That still unfigured. (Which was what was so great about being a human being! Oh, how he thrived on it! Reason and motive. — Not unlike his act, really, the thinking ahead, one man dueling for two. — Life like the crossword. Nine down, fourteen across, and the unpuzzled life not worth living. So what? Above all, was this an opportunity or not? Was Matthew his friend after all, or was he one of the company men he knew thrived in these parts? Running his abscams, baiting his entrapments and setting them? What if he was only posing as a faygeleh? To sucker his trust? If so, it might be an opportunity. Maybe 822 was his very own Schwab’s Drugstore; maybe Matthew Gale was that secret talent scout he’d always been on the lookout for. If not…well, if not, it was all up with him anyway. He was impersonating a Mickey Mouse. Dressed up in the Mouse’s own official Mickey Mouse clothes, the vaguely impresarial tuxedo Mickey frequently wore these days. How many years could you get for that? Perhaps life, maybe the chair. (God, what it said for the star system, for perks and privilege! He’d heard, and would have suspected even if he hadn’t — the cast was pretty tight-mouthed about their salaries — that the matinee rodent made tons more money than he did, or the other characters either, of course, and knew for a fact that the Mouse didn’t, unless he was in a good mood, always speak to the rest of them, sometimes not even giving Min herself the time of day, arbitrary and temperamental as a soprano, which he was. So why hadn’t they gone all out? Why didn’t they provide Mickey with a separate dressing room? Was this management’s way of keeping their star attraction in line? Why else would they make it so easy for Lamar to get into the Mouse’s locker, with its rinky-dink high-school-gym-locker lock? Why, of course, Lamar thought: not to keep him in line but to impose that same moral authority that seemed to emanate from the Kingdom’s every pore. Mousketeers didn’t steal. Not from each other. Not from anyone. They were clean, reverent, helpful, loyal, and brave. Mousketeers were the cat’s pajamas morality-wise. It was what lent them their terrible authority. Not only why they didn’t speak but why, except for the younger children, most of the guests seemed to clam up in their presence.)

So what was expected? What? If he wasn’t being set up? (Which, increasingly, beginning to feel at home in 822, he felt he wasn’t.) What was expected? Ah, thought the trained actor, recalling Pluto’s words. “You’d lay hands on a customer? On a customer?” Was this an admonishment? Some secret cautionary? (And he wasn’t rank, hadn’t turned into tiger butter; nor, now he thought of it, had the Pluto suit ever stunk on any of those occasions when Matthew had worn it to cover one of Lamar’s absences. He knew for a fact Matthew admired him as an actor. And he wasn’t rank! Maybe he knew how to breathe, too.) “You’d lay hands on a customer? On a customer?” If that wasn’t a paraphrase of the ghost’s warning to Hamlet to spare Gertrude, why then he’d never heard one! So what? What? Something to do with death, he bet. (Because something of what they did here was always a little slanted toward death. The Haunted Mansion where Matthew worked, for example. All the nostalgia: Main Street, U.S.A., with its gas lamps and hitching posts, its nickelodions and penny arcades and horse-drawn trolleys. Liberty Square with its colonial modes. Frontierland with its stockade and squirrel-cap ones. Most of it fucking Yesteryearland, if you asked him. Even Tomorrowland. The past and the hereafter. And what about Snow White herself? Old buried-alive Snow White in her glass casket like those hatbox-shaped containers that keep pies fresh, doughnuts and sweet rolls, on counters in restaurants? And how about those Seven Dwarfs? Yeah, how about them? Sneezy, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, and Doc. Cholers and pathologies. Wasn’t there an analogue to be discovered between the dwarfs and these wise-guy kids? He’d seen what she could do with a handkerchief, what, out of the corner of his eye, he could see she was doing now. The girl on the bed was a shoo-in for Sneezy. And the kids who’d been whispering together, the girl with the belly and the boy who’d stared at his shoes when they’d been caught out, who’d let the belly speak up for him. The guy was a clear Bashful. Lamar couldn’t quite figure the little shaver in the wheelchair. His question about overdoing one’s nature had clearly been hostile. On the other hand, despite the commotion, he seemed to have dozed off. A sure Sleepy! And it seemed to Lamar there was something a bit vacant about the stare of the kid with the amputated fingers. A probable Dopey. The original wise-guy kid, the officious creep who’d mouthed off in the restaurant and with whom he’d had the run-in at the elevator: a distinct and definite Doc. The little girl who looked like she’d gotten herself knocked up? Happy? Which left the blue kid, who’d given him that sullen, halfhearted response and who, more importantly, was the very color of choler. Grumpy to the life!) So something to do with death.