Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux
It’s in the book, he said, leaning on the open page of the book and admiring the bitten hunk of bread in his hand. It tastes good – it’s good for your body, good for your soul. A two-fold bonus – it reduces your bowel transit-time and grants you salvation. You can’t ask for more than that –
He said It’s in the book a few more times, and finally You could look it up.
Normally, watching television, Millroy talked to me, or made remarks (‘Wicked case of Smoker’s Face,’ ‘Notice the woven hair’), or he asked my opinion about the show. But this morning, watching The Day One Program, he paid no attention to me. Instead, he kept glancing at Willie and Stacy and Berry and Kayla, and now and then he said, ‘What do you think so far, Sons and Daughters?’
They all said it was great and did not even take their eyes away from the TV screen for fear they would miss something – instant bread, or a shoelace turning into a snake.
Millroy became quiet again and very interested in the program when he saw himself hoisting a large metal box onto the counter. It had lights and dials and it looked like a large boom box with a four-foot length of black tubing coiled around it. Millroy lifted off the tubing and switched the thing on. The dials lit up and a sound came out of it, a bubbly purr with a vibrating sigh.
About time we did an emission check.
Hearing this, Millroy nodded at the TV set.
After all, we’ve been sticking a lot of different things into our mouths.
Millroy had begun to smile again at his image on the TV screen.
There was a small black mouthpiece on the end of the rubber tubing. Hesitating a little, as though it might be dangerous, Millroy fitted it under his nose. It covered his mouth and made him look like an insect.
His eyes popped as he breathed hard, and while his face was at one side of the screen, the face of the lighted dial was on the other, the needle trembling inside a green stripe.
Looks fine, he said. Emission accomplished.
He reached beyond the camera, as though into the room, seeming to beckon.
Come here, he was saying. Just for a minute. Won’t hurt a bit.
The back of the cameraman’s head appeared, as he moved from behind the camera and slipped off his earphones. He looked uncertain and unprepared in his faded shirt and baseball hat, and he laughed in a terrified way as Millroy hitched him to the machine.
The human body is just like an automobile engine, Millroy said, which is why I devised this machine. The food we eat is our fuel. Our breath is the exhaust. Toxic or unhealthy food creates a noxious gas – carbon monoxide and nitrogenous wastes in vapor form. All sorts of gaseous compounds, and – uh-oh –
The needle of the dial had jerked sharply into the red stripe and it jolted each time the cameraman exhaled.
I know what you had for breakfast, Millroy said, and the man looked very guiltily aside. Into the screen Millroy went on, But Rick doesn’t look unhealthy, does he? You see, the damage is all inside so far. But just how serious is it?
The man named Rick seemed bewildered, and because he was not working the camera, the lens simply stared at him, and at Millroy, who was tapping the big book.
I want you to move this book with one hand.
At first Rick hesitated, and then he seemed impatient to get it over with. He put his whole hand around the spine, as though picking up a sandwich, and then he faltered and a gasping noise came out of his mouth, and he compressed his face with effort. But the book did not move. You would have thought the book was bolted to the counter. Rick made another helpless noise and walked away, and then the camera wobbled and focussed on Millroy and you knew Rick had gone back to work.
Pinching the enormous book between the finger and thumb of one hand, Millroy hoisted it a foot off the counter, holding it horizontal. It was a feat of strength, yet he was smiling gently as he performed this wonderful piece of leverage.
This is not magic – this is faith. And if you live your faith and eat right you will truly be guided by this book. This is the book of life. The book of food. The book of meals and miracles.
And still as though defying gravity he turned the book lightly in his fingers, and only then at the end of the show did he reveal that it was the Bible – the Book, as he called it, and when you saw his mustache move you knew he was saying it with a capital letter.
I was lost in the darkness of my body, but the Lord spoke to me saying, ‘Change your ways, Fatso!’
The Day One sunrise music played, and the shimmering sun covered Millroy’s face, as a message appeared on the screen inviting viewers to write for a fact sheet, with recipes, or to use the ‘help line.’ The last line was the name and address of the Day One Diner, on Church Street, in Boston. Join us.
In the Day One Diner, watching the next show, The 700 Club, being advertised, Millroy switched off the TV. He stood and kicked his chair back with his heel and he stretched, seeming to expand with confidence.
‘We’re open for business,’ he said.
The Day One Diner was empty, the TV was blind, we were silent – there were as yet no believers, no eaters.
In that new quiet place, in the white silence, I felt happy and pure and innocent, and did not know why. Then a customer walked in and ordered something he had just seen on Millroy’s television show. Soon after, there was another man, and the spell was broken. On that first day it was as though the world had begun to leak through the door and eat.
25
I kept thinking that: The whole world is leaking through the door, and as the door flapped and banged, the world began to flood and brim inside the Day One Diner. It was Millroy’s program. People came – curious ones, crazy ones, lonely ones. The hungriest came first, and then it was everyone, and we were no longer innocent and empty.
And we were not anonymous anymore, happy with our secret existence of food and work and prayers, playing the game of being alone, so that we could live for ever. Strangers had joined us, and because Millroy was so persuasive and the food was so good, these strangers did not take long to like us. They were quick to believe Millroy – it happened all the faster because his message was something they could eat.
It was a weekly program, so Millroy had plenty of time to prepare for it and also to run the diner. On the second Day One show he said, My text for today is – fellow Americans – virtually everything you stick in your mouth is carcinogenic and deadly.
Within days we had too many customers to count. This made me fearful.
Millroy’s reaction was the opposite. He was more hopeful and eager when there were many people listening to him, and eating as he suggested. He said he had always liked large audiences. Other people made him bolder and more alive, and being alive mattered most to him. He liked the stimulus of these strangers, he said, and he greeted them as though he were greeting friends.
‘In a way I belong to them,’ he said to the Sons and Daughters. ‘Just as you belong to me.’
Kayla said it made her happy to hear this, and the others agreed.
‘Your dad is so cool,’ Willie said.
‘He is someone special,’ I said, ‘and he is everything to me,’ and I meant it.
‘I don’t like to use the words “my ministry.” No one appointed me. I started life as a traveler. I became a magician. I realized that I had a message, and that made me a messenger. I have seen so many things that my memory is a testament. I want to tell people what I have experienced within my own body. I can help open their eyes. I want to share my revelations with them. I want to save souls by saving lives.’
He did not wake up at night anymore and call out No!
But one night soon after we had the rush of customers he woke me with his voice murmuring in the darkness and said, ‘Don’t be afraid. I am the first and the last.’
You did not know what to say to that.
‘I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive f
‘Sounds good,’ I said, to remind him that I was listening and if he needed me to say something more I was willing.
‘The keys of hell and of death,’ he said. ‘Write the things which thou hast seen.’
But then he went back to sleep, no more mutterances, and in the morning he said he had the idea of more mirrors in the diner – in the doorway, the little lobby that served as an entrance and an exit. He said that optically correct mirrors were the key to understanding – big revealing mirrors, full-length and frank, showing you from all angles, especially the back. You walked in and were revealed.
‘We all with open face beholding in the glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory,’ he said on the next Day One Program, and you knew he was quoting. ‘Though we often befool ourself with mirrors, this is the truth, back and front.’
It was a shock for some people to see themselves from the side, he said, and which people recognized themselves from the rear?
‘Mirrors are an article of our faith. If I had a church it would be a hall of mirrors.’
Millroy was frisky – more excited than I had ever seen him.
It had all started that first morning, when customers had begun pushing through the door wanting to be fed. The world was hungry and wanted to eat, Millroy said, and he knew what was good for them.
I also realized that everything that had happened before had been a preparation for this – everything since the afternoon at the fair when he had put his throbbing nose into my face. That I want to eat you day had led here to the Day One Diner: all part of his plan.
Only now did I recall how, months ago, in his Airstream trailer at the fairground, he had said to me, If I were going to start a religion … It had seemed so odd a thing to say, like By the way, I am Moses, plus I want to start a new church, that I brushed the thought from my mind, and could hardly remember what else he had said. Yet these days I knew we were in the middle of it, deep in his religion, in the Christian cuisine of the Day One Diner, getting regular.
‘I saw this long ago,’ he said, standing in the diner’s kitchen. ‘All this –’
He was talking to Kayla and Berry, who found his confidence infectious, as I did. His frisky spirit made us willing.
His friskiness was evident in his appetite – eating and offering food – especially to the Day One Sons and Daughters. He lifted up spoonfuls of pottage, or yogurt, or melon balls.
‘Open up!’ he would say to Kayla.
She would hesitate, as anyone might with a fork in her face.
‘Get it into your mouth, angel.’
At this point Kayla would laugh, sounding terrified, and the laughter kept her mouth open.
‘Eat it,’ Millroy would say, a bit breathless from all the coaxing, his red face swollen with eagerness. ‘Go for bulk. Ezekiel knew about fiber. The Lord knew about complex carbohydrates. King David fleeing in Two Samuel knew about high residue.’
Millroy was excited and happy from the day of his first Day One television show. He knew he had been a success. He knew the diner would be a hit.
One night after the first busy days in the diner he sent the Sons and Daughters home with bonuses, to buy sandals. I see you all in sturdy sandals and leather footgear.
‘And this is your bonus, petal,’ he said to me after they had gone.
His back was turned, but then he came over to me carrying a dish of reddish stew he called parched pulse.
‘I like its thick loamy texture,’ he said, and stirred it and indicated with his eyes that I ought to sit down.
He got his wooden spoon into it and said, ‘Eat.’
Then he fed me, sitting across from me, his mouth open, his tongue quivering, as he eased the food into me on the big warm spoon.
‘Get that into you.’
I could have done it myself, I was thinking.
‘Open wide.’ His big hairy fingers had a grip on the spoon. ‘Chew slowly.’
Still he watched, swallowing saliva and talking juicily as I ate.
‘This is so fibrous,’ he said. ‘This is nutrition, sure, but a lot of it is going to go straight through you.’
And spooned it into me.
‘In a way, I would like you to be fat, but I know that’s wrong,’ he said. ‘I want to fill you up. I want to put it all into you. Be responsible for everything inside you.’
And went at me with his spoon again.
He was up early every morning, in the half dark before dawn, clattering in the Day One kitchen, boiling the beans he had soaked overnight, mashing lentils, parching pulses, baking Ezekiel loaves, brewing tea, culturing yogurt, setting out melon balls and honeycombs and the grape juice the Book referred to as wine – the first pressing of the grapes, foaming in a jug, but not fermented. He talked the whole time to himself – mutterances.
‘My herbage,’ he would say.
Clank-clunk, gurgle-gurgle.
‘My wheaten loaves.’
Bip-biddle-bip-bop.
‘Seethe my grains and pulses.’
He was proudest of the fact that this food kept fresh without refrigeration. He had bought and installed a refrigerator only to satisfy the Boston Board of Health.
‘Ice is the American vice,’ he said. ‘Cold water is a different story. Matthew speaks of the Lord handing out cups of cold water.’
After he had prepared the food for the day he sealed it in jars and bowls, many of them earthenware pots – ‘crocks,’ he called them – or in straw baskets. The food was reheated in the oven or microwave before it was served by the Day One Sons and Daughters.
‘The virtue of this food is its purity and simplicity. Its benefit derives from its plainness,’ he said, swallowing and gulping as he always did when he talked about eating. ‘It has been tested by generations in the Book, who are noted for their longevity.’
Most mornings he roasted a lamb, turning it on a spit, where it spattered and dripped, a blackened naked animal (‘Third degree burns, all over its body’), being cranked by a big doubtful man.
‘I am not happy about lamb,’ he said. ‘I am not happy about meat-eating at all, for reasons I would rather not go into.’
We served the lamb in thin slices with sprigs of rosemary or mint and side dishes of lentils. Millroy did not eat it himself and he urged us not to eat it. Choose fish, he said – the market on Boston Harbor had every type of fish goggling from the marble slabs. I bought the fish for the diner. I knew about fish, because I was from the Cape. It was my early-morning chore. I paid cash and usually got it cheap.
‘I am looking for guidance on lamb,’ Millroy said.
Some customers ventured into the Day One Diner simply because our OPEN sign was up and they were hungry. They first looked through the front window. You saw them staring – at us, then at their own reflection, Millroy said. Many of these people were bewildered by our food – not enough variety, they said, funny tastes, needs salt, too simple. They did not understand the menu. They said, ‘Is this all you got?’ They ordered strange food and they were sometimes disappointed. They were confused by the taste. They whispered and went away.
‘What’s this supposed to be?’ was a common question.
Real food does not even look edible to people who have never seen it before, Millroy said. Which was why their bodies were monstrous and they died young.
And other people left the diner the minute they saw they could not smoke in it, or that we did not serve coffee.
‘This is Day One,’ Millroy explained to anyone who would listen – and he had ways of encouraging them to listen, fixing them with his eyes. ‘Eat this food. All of it is nourishing and pure. It will give you clear skin and a long life. A little cautious? Then just try some slices of Ezekiel or wheaten loaf with broiled fish and a puddle of honey, then finish with melon balls and a pot of warmed nuts. It is who
He seldom mentioned the Book in the diner. He urged us to speak up for the virtues of the food, or just smile.
‘This is not my pulpit,’ he said, meaning the diner. ‘Americans lost their faith when they started to eat junk food. They don’t need me to preach here. This food is communion. When people prosper and are regular they will believe. They believe their bowels.’
People either tried the food and never came back, or else they ate and returned again and again, every day even – and they were from the local colleges – University of Massachusetts students from across the square, and youngsters from Simmons, Emerson, Boston University, Harvard, MIT. We knew them by their sweat-shirts. There were secretaries, too, and they were mostly young. Many were lonely people who came because the diner was so warm and bright, and the food was inexpensive.
‘I was like you once,’ Millroy said to the people who came every day, and it gave them heart to hear this from the tall powerful man, with the mustache and shaven head – Millroy the Magician. He was calm, he was a good cook, and that reassured them too, just the way he smiled and seemed to be in no hurry. Occasionally, with the most casual movement of his hands, he worked magic for them, little vanishing tricks.
‘I am enjoying this,’ he said.
We were busy, with a steady flow of customers. No tipping – that was popular. Our prices were reasonable. The portions were large. The diner was clean. The strongest aroma was that of freshly baked loaves of bread. My wheaten loaves. He had rigged a contraption that funneled this aroma into the diner, and he liked watching people inhale it and smile.
‘We’re paying off our loan,’ Millroy said. ‘We can’t ask more than that.’
It was important to him that the diner paid its own way. But all it had to do was break even. Millroy’s television money was his real income. The Sons and Daughters were given whatever money they needed, not a salary but an allowance – ‘a stipend,’ Millroy called it, a lump sum each week, with ten percent knocked off as a tithe to the diner.