Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“ ‘—’

“ ‘I command you to describe the dematerialized world.’

“ ‘Ain’t no worsteds, ain’t no wools. Ain’t no cotton, ain’t no silk.’

“ ‘At the count of three you’ll wake up refreshed.’

“Sure they were disappointed. So were the dwarfs. (There were dwarfs now, they’d gone over to dwarfs, had graduated downward in birth defect, some unevolutionary, pulled-horns substitute that covered over the scabs and open sores and inside-out arrangements of ordinary physiological disfigurement.) You’d have been disappointed yourself. The desire and pursuit of the mysterious is a lifelong life. The occult is a hard taskmaster. Like mathematics or physics or astronomy or any other science. Like painting or music or sculpture or any other art.

“So of course they were disappointed. But a little relieved, too, not to have ready to hand a key to the astonishing secret of life, its nagging riddle: ‘Why me?’ Because people, God bless them, are terrified of the strange. It may be that you’ve seen a man in a bear suit. On the street, say, or at a game between halves. You know that the man is a man, the costume a costume. But when he comes to you to dance, you pull back, you shy. You’re pulling back now. Has such a thing happened?”

He thought of Madam Grace Treasury’s bruised cosmetics.

“How much more effective when the costume is shriveled skin, limbs that don’t size, a dubious sex? Power is only amok scale, the gauges off true and the needle in red. Send in the dwarf.”

George looked up but there was only Professor Sunshine, talking to himself.

“ ‘How far can you expect to go in the circus on your little legs?’

“ ‘Go ahead, I heard it all. Go ahead, I’ll help you out. I sleep in a crib, I eat in a high chair. I got a dong the size of a safety pin and I bite my wrists when the Campfire Girls come to town. Go ahead, I heard it already. I have a tiny appetite. If the thermometer reads 98.6 I’m running a fever. If I work hard, someday I can make it in the small time. I’m a little late for an appointment.’

“ ’isn’t it humil—’

“ ‘—iating for me when some broad picks me up and puts me on her lap? Nah, I got high hopes. Go ahead.’

“ ‘You can read my mind. Evidently you have second sight.’

“ ‘Nah, I’m shortsighted.’

“Because they were runt realistic. All wrong, you’d suppose, for our founders’ purposes. But think about it. Who would have been better? My God, some body had to be in control. Somebody had to hold in check those airy fairy elements of our fathers’ style. Who’d be better with their sideshow hearts and their eye for a mark than those little rationalists?

“And wasn’t it just good sound show business after all to make it appear that the dummy was in control and not the ventriloquist? Wasn’t that as much a part of the program as an intermission? You don’t horse around with what works. So all that was left was to teach him the fundamentals, show him what had already been shown to the phony red Indian, that marked man whose time had gone, and the nigger slave and gypsy before him, and let the midget take it from there. (They were midgets now, dwarfs being still too deformed for the public taste, something too bandy and buckled in their being, their botched, bitched bodies; you don’t want to scare the customers half to death, you know, and a midget was just a little scaled-down man; a midget was almost cute, but still tight enough to the terror, close enough, enough nicked by it to leave its mark.)

“ ‘I can give you fifteen weeks back to back between Thanksgiving and the middle of March. Circus goes out again in April, but I got to have some time off before rehearsals start up that last week in March. Oh yeah, I don’t know if you’re Christian or not, Reverend, but Christmas week’s mine.’

“ ‘Christmas week?’

“ ‘I take the Mrs and the kids to their grandma’s in Memphis Christmas week.’

“ ‘The Mrs? Their grandma’s?’

“ ‘The Mrs, yeah. The little woman. The little ones, sure. Their grandma in Memphis. Right, the little old lady.’

“ ‘You’re married?’

“ ‘Fourteen years next June. Oh, and listen, I ain’t never worked double before. I always worked single or with the ensemble but.’

“ ‘The ensemble?’

“ ‘The ensemble, the troupe. Yeah. In the Grand Parade. The Big Finish! ’

“That’s the upshot. That’s how the midgets came to work with us for a time. Only a few winters, really. They called it off. Anyway, a midget always sounded a little like a record speeded up on a gramophone.

“But mostly, mostly they didn’t like coming all the way out here to work. To this joined caravan of a town. To us. To Cassadaga.”

And C. L. Gregor Imolatty was an authority on ectoplasm. He had converted his spare bedroom into an ectoplasm museum, the only one, he said, in central Florida.

“I couldn’t have done it,” he told George as they stood just outside the museum’s black door, “if it hadn’t been for my wife’s cooperation. Sylvia’s support has been invaluable. I tell all my visitors that. It gets them involved. Here’s what we’ll do. When we go inside I’ll give you the same talk I give my clients. I’ll deliver it just as I always do. I won’t change a word, but you have to stop me whenever you hear me say something you think might be fake. You got that? If you think I’m lying, stop me. Just go ahead and interrupt. Isn’t that a good idea, Sylvia? Isn’t that a wonderful way for the boy to learn?”

“We tried that with the Mortons,” Mrs. Imolatty said.

“You know you’re right?” Imolatty said. “I forgot about the Mortons, but the Mortons were afraid to interrupt me. I think they thought they’d hurt my feelings. You mustn’t be afraid you’ll hurt my feelings, George. You’re here to learn. You chime in now if you think I’m making believe. Just call out ‘Lie!’ or ‘Fake!’ or ‘Cheat!’ Cry ‘Stop!’ or anything else that occurs to you. All right. Here we go then. Oh. Usually I pause for a moment outside the museum.

“ ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I say, ‘we’re going inside now. You’ll notice that the door is painted black. In the museum itself the door, walls, ceiling and floor are all painted black. There’s a reason for that. Light is a stimulus, a reagent. It excites ectoplasm and, if sufficiently bright, could cause seepage. So we like to keep it a little on the dark side. You’ll be able to see the exhibits perfectly well, but if any of you is carrying a flash camera I must ask you please not to use it.’ “

“Stop,” George said.

Imolatty gave him a puzzled look. “Why did you stop me?” he said. “It is dark inside. It is painted black. I don’t permit flash cameras.”

“Not that,” George Mills said, “the stuff about bright light making ex — exto—”

“Ectoplasm.”

“Ectoplasm seep out.”

“Excellent!” Imolatty exclaimed. “He’s very smart, isn’t he, Sylvia?” He turned to George. “You’re absolutely right. We keep it dark for other reasons. Light has nothing to do with it. What would happen to ectoplasm in the daytime if it did? What would happen when the sun rises, or even at night during an electrical storm? Let’s go in then.”

It was very hot in the dim room. “Thank you, Sylvia,” Imolatty said when the woman had flicked on the wall switch. He looked toward George again. “I couldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for my wife’s cooperation. Sylvia’s support has been invaluable,” he said.

“It’s long been acknowledged,” he went on, “that the ancients sought the so-called philosopher’s stone in order to transmute base metals into gold. What is perhaps less well known is that the alchemists’ researches drew them down other paths of the physical sciences and metaphysical arts. On this table, ladies and gentlemen, you may see some of the results of their experiments with crude, or secondary, ectoplasm. Naturally, I don’t pretend that these masses you see before you are the original work of those early experimenters. It would be remarkable indeed if such flimsy stuff endured over long centuries while whole cities have faded from the face of the earth, but — Did you say something, George?”