Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

Mary Cottle shrugged and stepped aside to let him pass.

He sat down on a chair by the table.

“They cleaned this place up.”

“They offered me a different room,” she said. “I didn’t want it.”

“No.”

“Too many swell memories.”

“Yeah.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, facing him.

“So?” she said.

He repeated what Colin had told them about the casket, about the $2.63 a pound overage the airline was charging.

“He made them apply twenty-seven pounds of her own body weight toward the cost of the overage? Jesus!”

He told her about Noah and the machines, about the sketches the caricaturist had made.

“The kid hired someone to draw him spending money?”

“No,” Eddy said, “Colin commissioned them,” and explained Bible’s scheme for getting effigies of the children into Madame Tussaud’s.

“What I don’t know doesn’t hurt me,” Mary said.

“Sure it does.”

She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “I guess.”

“Could I have one of those?”

“You said you thought they were too harsh.”

“Not by half.”

“No,” she said.

“I can’t have one?”

“Sure,” she said. “I mean, you’re right. They’re not too harsh. Not by half. Not by two thirds. Five eighths, nine tenths.”

He leaned forward to take a light off Mary Cottle’s cigarette. “Cheers,” he said.

“Cheers,” she said. They touched the tips of their cigarettes.

“This time tomorrow,” he said.

“We’ll be on our way home.”

“We’ll be standing in a queue. We’ll be showing our passports and explaining about Rena and mopping our brows. We’ll be extricating our underwear from the cheeks of our ass.”

“Look,” she said, “is that snow? Is it snowing?” She pointed her cigarette past his head but Bale didn’t turn around.

“You’re not so tough.”

“It’s that same freak weather.”

“Funny,” he said. “I don’t feel the least bit purified.”

“Me neither,” she said. “Not the least bit. Purified.”

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not so tough.”

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Oh, Bale,” she said, “we lost one.”

“It’s not as if she had a life expectancy,” he comforted.

“My God,” she said, “we were gone a week. We lost one.”

“I’m making my move,” he said, and left his chair and got up to sit beside her on the bed. He stroked her face.

“Do you have anything with you?”

“What, a condom, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“No,” he said. “What about you? Aren’t you on the pill?”

“No,” she said.

“An IUD?”

“No,” she said.

“A diaphragm? Foam?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Oh,” he said, and started to move away.

She pulled him toward her. She undid his shirt, his belt, the button on his trousers. She raised her dress, she lowered her underpants.

“Will it be all right? Neither of us is protected.”

“We lost one,” she repeated, and Eddy helped her the rest of the way out of her dress. He undid her bra and held her breasts. He sucked her nipples. She placed a hand in his shorts and withdrew his penis. She held it between her palms and rubbed. “This is how you start a fire without matches,” she whispered. Bale growled softly. “Easy,” she said, “take it easy.” She wanted him huge, immense, colossal. She wet her little finger and slipped it into his anus.

“Oh,” he gasped.

“Easy,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Has it been long?”

“Yes,” he said, “yes.”

“Yes,” she said, “take it easy.”

She wanted him prodigious, vast, whopping, stupendous. She wanted his cock engorged, his balls filled with come. She wanted her tubes to dilate, her pudendum to run with grease. “Take it easy,” she murmured, “ease off, take it easy, take it easy.”

Then, at what instinctively she felt was exactly the propitious biological moment, she reached out and seized him, she reached out and brought him to her. She raised him on top of her and guided him into her body. She wrapped her legs about his buttocks and alternately squeezed, released, and squeezed, pressing his body deeper inside her own with each contraction, rocking him, inching him along her clitoris, easing him through the zones of her flesh and up the boneless scaffold of her sex, thinking, who’d not lain with men in years, who’d held them off with their activating poisons, the white agency of her soiled, provoked chemistry, all the radical synergistics of their deadly, complice, conspired force, who’d used mechanics, gadgets, gravity, vibrators, even her moistened fingers like so many machines, who’d explored her own almost articulated nerve endings till she knew them like the strings that raised and lowered the joints of puppets, thinking Now! Now! Now! Thinking of monstrosities, freaks, ogres, and demons, conjuring werewolves, vampires, harpies, and hellhounds, conjecturing maneaters, eyesores, humpbacks, and clubfoots. Thinking Now now now now now and inviting all cock-eyed, crook-backed, tortuous bandy deformity out of the bottle, calling forth fiends, calling forth bogies, rabid, raw-head bloody-bones. Now, she thinks, now! And positions herself to take Bale’s semen, to mix it with her own ruined and injured eggs and juices to make a troll, a goblin, broken imps and lurching oafs, felons of a nightmare blood, fallen pediatric angels, lemures, gorgons, cyclopes, Calibans, God’s ugly, punished customers, his obscene and frail and lubberly, his gargoyle, flyblown hideosities and blemished, poky mutants, all his throwbacks, all his scurf, his doomed, disfigured invalids, his human slums and eldritch seconds, the poor relation and the second-best, watered, bungled being, flied ointment, weak link, chipped rift, crack and fault and snag and flaw, his maimed, his handicapped, his disabled, his crippled, his afflicted, delicate cachexies with their provisional, fragile, makeshift tolerances. Invoking the sapped, the unsound, the impaired, the unfit. Invoking the milksop, the doormat, the played-out and burnt-out, the used-up, the null and the void. Adjuring their spirits in the names of Mudd-Gaddis, of Tony Word and Lydia Conscience, of Janet Order and Benny Maxine, of Noah Cloth, spending his money like a drunken sailor, and Rena Morgan, spent. On behalf of dead Liam and her own unnamed stillborn kids. Thinking, Not gone a week and we’ve lost one. Thinking, Now, now, goddamn it, now! And accepting infection from him, contagion, the septic climate of their noxious genes. Dreaming of complications down the road, of bad bouts and thick medical histories, of wasting neurological diseases, of blood and pulmonary scourges, of blows to the glands and organs, of pathogens climbing the digestive tract, invading the heart and bone marrow, erupting the skin and clouding the cough.

Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, she thinks, and calls upon the famous misfits, upon centaurs and satyrs and chimeras, upon dragons and griffins and hydras and wyverns. Upon the basilisk, the salamander, and the infrequent unicorn.

And upon, at last, a lame and tainted Mickey Mouse.

Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.

Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.