Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“I got you into this,” Gale told him.

“You bet,” Lamar said.

“I won’t let you down.”

“He won’t let me down,” Lamar said. “Big deal. Top Disney dicks crawling all over the place watching us, and he won’t let me down. Loyalty! Follows me everywhere as if he really was Pluto!”

Back at the hotel, Nedra had taken the children to the game room.

Colin, off to see what could be done about changing their tickets, called to say that they didn’t have to be changed, that Rena would be ready in time for their flight the following day.

“What are they doing to her, do you think?” Eddy asked Moorhead.

They were sitting in the Coconino Cove, a bar just outside the Pueblo Room.

“They’re embalming her. It’s not generally done in Europe, but it seems to be mandatory in this country.”

“Embalming her,” Bale said. “What is that actually?”

“Well,” Mr. Moorhead said, “it’s pretty much what you’d think. They treat the corpse to prevent decay and putrefaction.”

“Putrefaction,” Bale said. “She was barely thirteen years old, for God’s sake.”

“She was old enough to fall in love,” Moorhead said. He finished his gin and ordered another. “It’s what killed her.”

“Yeah, you said.”

“It was the unforeseen complication.”

“How do they do that?”

“Do what?”

“Prevent decay, prevent putrefaction.”

“With preservatives.”

“What, like in the rashers and bangers, you mean?”

“The Egyptians soaked their dead in brine and filled the body cavities with spices and aromatic substances.”

“That’s nice,” Bale said. “A little attar of roses, a splash of Nuits de Paris.”

“Then they drain the blood from her veins with a hollow needle called a trocar, which they use in conjunction with a tube called a cannula.”

“Secrets of the ancients revealed,” Bale said.

“To prevent the body from shriveling and turning brown—”

“Like an apple,” Bale said.

“—they pump formaldehyde into the cavities in combination with alcohol.”

Eddy set his drink down.

“They apply cosmetics. They apply masking pastes.”

“Hey,” Bale said, “I just remembered, there’s something I have to do back in the room,” and left the bar, returned to the room, and took Ginny’s letter out of his suitcase.

I was his mother, Eddy [Bale read], I was his mum. I’m the one carried him those nine months, who lost her figure and still wear stretch marks like chevrons — my corporal, as it were, punishment, as it were.

Have the decency. Spare me your shock and outrage. Keep to yourself your reservations about my taste and sensibilities. Four years like these down one’s craw and anyone’s taste would have soured, SHOULD, have soured, if, that is, any sensibility is still there to function at all. I don’t need any crap just now.

It ain’t all been dainties and plum puddings, has it, Eddy, our crusade? Passing the hat, doing our buskers’ shuffle up and down the kingdom’s avenues? For press and for public passing the hat, passing the hankie, touching it to the collective eye, the collective nose. God, Eddy, how we Hyde Park-cornered them with our despair, with our need and our noise. Our cause! Cause and affect! Anyway, our hats in our hands, our hearts on our sleeves, and our knees on the ground. Beggars! Beggars, Ed! Always for Liam, of course, never ourselves, of if for ourselves, then for the abstract motherhood and fatherhood in us, or if for Liam, then for some soiled and abstract childhood in him, some sentimental fiction of good order, natural birthright, the ought-to-be.

“Well of course,” you’ll be saying, “Well of course, you silly git, of course we’d a right to expect better than we got, of course Liam did. Of course it’s good order, birthright, and proper dispensation for kids to grow up! Nothing sentimental there. No fiction about it. Childhood diseases are one thing — mumps and measles, chicken pox, croup. Maybe a broken bone or a tooth to be pulled. Rashes in summer from lessons botched in leaf identification. The coughs and sniffles and low-grade fevers. All the rocking-chair temps. The mustard plaster and the asafetida. Oils of clove and the hanging garlics. All the cuddle comforts — Epsom salts, vaporizers, and the Vicks reliefs. Your only scaled suffering, what the traffic can bear.

“But car crash and brain damage,” you’ll be saying, “paralysis? Your tumors and cancers and drowning accidents in surf?”

Don’t get me wrong, Eddy. I think so too. I was his mother, I was his mum. And lived nine months longer than ever you did with superstition and fear, the 4 a.m. credulities, all the toxic heterodoxies of lying-in, all pregnancy’s benighted, illiterate dread. Guilty for fried foods I’d eaten years before, the shadow of sugar incriminating me, of butter and egg yolk and marble in meat, all that candy, all those fish ’n’ chips.

Even signs of life startling. “My God,” I thought when he kicked, “he’s got only one leg!” And “Christ!”—when I puked—“I’m upchucking bits and pieces of my kid!”

Doing bargains with God, you see: “If he’s missing a finger, take it from his left hand, Lord,” “Make him deaf rather than blind, blind rather than simple.” “If he has to be ugly, don’t give him bad teeth.”

Jesus, the stuff I thought! “I’d rather he be homosexual than nearsighted.” “If he’s fat I hope he’s tall.” “I prefer he be bad at games than not have a sense of humor; I’d rather he didn’t get the point of jokes than be stingy.” “It would be better if he were a poor Tory than a wealthy Red.”

That’s not the half of it, of course. The half of it was another bargain, the half of it was this: “Let him have one leg, Lord. Take the fingers from his right hand and make him this deaf, blind, simple, rich, fat, Red. Rot his teeth, God, and let him be short, this clumsy, mean and ugly, humorless, nearsighted fag. Just let him be born alive!”

Not just let him live, Eddy. Let him be born alive. Because if he was born alive I took it for granted he’d live. It never occurred to me it could be otherwise. What did I know about vicissitude who could strike such bargains? Who assumed you paid the price of admission up front and were never bothered again; who suspected, perhaps even expected that at the outside there might even be trouble, hard times, say, but to whom it just never occurred that she’d still be alive herself and have to witness out-and-out tragedy?

But he was perfect, our Liam. From the beginning one of those rare, good-looking babies, alert and cheerful, sturdy, well. So even-tempered that if you didn’t know better you might believe him actually thoughtful, actually circumspect. And wasn’t his gaze clear? And wasn’t his grip strong? As if he was trying to chin on the world with those perfect, tiny hands? Pull himself up, have a look round?

I was his mother, Eddy. I was his mum. And counted his limbs and totaled his toes, his fingers and features, doing the sums of my baby son like some holy arithmetic, as if I were a religious telling her beads, say, or as if I were counting my blessings.

But nervous…no, stunned, in the presence of such glory. The postpartum depression you hear about — I was his mother, I was his mum — is only a sort of stress, only a kind of strain, just the ordinary and decent apprehension of responsibility. His soft spot, for example, his fontanel, that dangerously malleable skullcap of infant membrane which I couldn’t help but think of as a kind of quicksand, some treacherous maelstrom of the vulnerable it half scared me to death to clean, to go near with water, a washcloth and soap.