Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux
‘You are nothing but a rotten thief,’ Millroy said, speaking so hurriedly that spit flew into Ed Veazie’s face. ‘How dare you talk that way in here. Did you hear him, Daughter?’
‘He is a thief,’ Stacy said, pronouncing it feef.
‘She sees right through you,’ Millroy said. ‘You are out of order.’
I had never seen Millroy touch another person in anger, not even Floyd Fewox, whom he hated. Then it was rats out of Floyd’s mouth, and snakes out of his ears, a kind of cruel magic. He held Veazie’s lapels so tightly, bunching them as he yanked him along, that the man was strangling, and Millroy was not hitting him but rather steering him so hard, tramping the man backwards, that if Veazie had resisted he would have got bruised or choked, or worse.
Nearer the door, Millroy jerked him off the floor and, bumping tables, pushed him out of the Day One Diner, roaring, ‘You’re a pickpocket!’
The people eating in the diner sat with their faces over their plates looking anxious and interested, a kind of thrill at all the commotion, but terror too, because Millroy was still bristling, and would he hurt them?
Millroy’s head was sweating, his face was reddish, his muscles tight, and he breathed gaspingly, his eyes shining with anger.
‘I should have used magic on him,’ he said, turning to us. ‘He was full of critters – vermin. I could have rendered him legally blind for two or three days. I could have taken away his voice by just pinching his windpipe in the right place. I could have given him an itch, stung him, made him cry.’
With his hand clapped over his head like a cap, Millroy seemed regretful.
‘Only I can’t do those things when I’m upset.’
After his anger drained away – it took until almost night-time – Millroy seemed smaller but more complicated, and none of us knew what to say.
He had woken us up, though, and I could see that the Sons and Daughters liked Millroy even more, seeing his strength. We had known even before he told Veazie that the Day One Program was not a product to sell, yet we were impressed by the way Millroy handled him. We had never seen him so forceful. It was not scary – far from it; we felt safer than before, seeing Millroy take a big man and bounce him out.
The Sons and Daughters were more respectful, and after that incident they took me aside and asked me – and I asked Millroy – could they move in: leave home and live with us in the rooms at the back of the diner?
His mustache flattened and negative noises came out of it.
There was not enough room, he said, and they did not have a good reason yet for leaving home. I understood him to mean that he did not want to be admired for his strength, he wanted simply to be listened to for his revelations.
‘I am a messenger,’ he said. ‘It should not matter if I were a fourteen-year-old girl, with my thumb in my mouth.’
And hearing that I slipped it out.
‘It is the message that matters.’
He was not proud of disposing of Ed Veazie. Why had the man come in the first place?
‘They’re getting the wrong message,’ he said.
He was also thinking of the shouters – Monstrous faults! and Cynical manipulator! and He’s out of his mind!
‘I must be doing something wrong.’
That same week another man ate in the diner and talked in a praising way with Millroy about the Day One honeycake, and then said, ‘But admit, you’re intentionally satirizing Christian Science, aren’t you? You could call it the Church of Christ the Cook.’
Reaching into the man’s startled face, Millroy seemed to be trying to release a rat from the man’s mouth, but if so he failed and in frustration spun him around and tipped him into the street so hard – Millroy bellowing – that the man stumbled and went down on one knee, his face going green.
That night, locking up after the Sons and Daughters had gone, I could hear Millroy sighing, each sigh like many words made into one strung-together sound.
‘Are you sure you haven’t got something on your mind?’ he said at last. ‘Is it the way I handled that man and the thief, Ed Veazie?’
The answer was no, I trusted him for his strength, but he asked me again, and so I decided to tell him.
‘I bumped into Vera Turtle two weeks ago.’
Millroy lapsed into silence, as though he was meeting Vera in his mind and thinking as he chose his next question.
‘Coming back from the fish market,’ I said, to be helpful, so that he could picture this better.
‘Just like that. A face from the past. Did she seem concerned about you?’
‘No. But she was wicked friendly. She offered me a hot dog.’
‘Poor Vera Turtle.’ He seemed to see her standing lopsided in the air.
‘Dada’s a security officer now. He works nights.’
‘And how do you feel about all this, angel?’
‘I’m good.’
‘It propelled your mind into the past,’ he said. ‘Into your former life.’
I nodded, I was afraid to speak, I thought I might cry if I opened my mouth. Dada and Gaga and Vera were small and feeble and far-off, and we had magic.
When I was sure I would not cry I said, ‘She thought she was seeing me, but she was seeing someone else. It was like Mister Veazie saying, “Who are they?” He didn’t understand.’
‘Mister Veazie,’ Millroy said, as though naming a monster.
‘I’m different now.’
‘You could go back if you wanted, muffin, at any time.’
‘No, I know what it’s like there.’
‘What about here?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why it’s good.’
‘How good?’
‘Wicked good.’
‘Life with me could get hard, you know. Even now it’s no picnic. All these crazy people.’
He had been pushing a sheet of paper around the table. He turned it over, a mass of writing in green ink, all shapes of words, large and small.
‘I get hate mail – this is a hate letter. Want to hear it?’
He wet his finger and skidded the letter closer to him.
‘“You are a despicable human being, spouting garbage on the airwaves. You have no right to use the name of Jesus to sell the gullible public on your crazy theories. You think you’re wise but you are an utter fool, but that is all right because great harm will come to you. You will get cancer and die a horrible death, and after that death eternal hellfire.” ’
Millroy crumpled the letter and threw it into the tin wastebasket, where it hit like something solid.
‘There are more like that.’
He looked neither fearful nor bold, but expressionless, as though he had expected this, and was immovable.
‘I’m staying,’ I said.
City noises: a police siren, traffic, laughter, a car driving over a pot-hole, its rims bumping, its springs saying ouch, someone’s TV on too loud, the sputter of the big street-lamp, the wind like arms hugging and shaking the diner, a plane overhead. Millroy’s eyes were blazing and he was biting his mustache and making me feel naked.
‘You are everything to me,’ he said in a shuddering voice, and I got worried all over again.
He must have been thinking about this the rest of the night because I heard him sighing down the scale and thrashing on the shelf of his bunk across the room. In the morning, when the Sons and Daughters arrived (they came at six or even earlier these days, and it was dark, this being February), Millroy said, ‘You could leave at any time, you know.’
Willie Webb said, ‘Sure I could, Big Guy,’ in a jaunty way, while the others just shrugged as though they did not want to think about it now.
We were putting out the breakfast for ourselves before setting up the diner for the morning opening. The ovens had been turned on at five and were fragrant with baking loaves of bread, and awaiting us on the counter-tops were vegetables
‘I’m not stopping you,’ Millroy said, presiding over the table from his chair in the middle.
In the glary light of the diner – darkness outside – we sat in silence, chewing breakfast and passing food: melons, honey, Ezekiel bread, almonds and pistachios, figs, apricots, barley porridge, grapes, and some mashed seed pods that Berry was poking with a spoon.
‘What’s this supposed to be?’
‘Carob – they’re nourishing,’ Millroy said. ‘Nice and bulky. I’m putting them on the menu. You know when John the Baptist was in the wilderness eating locusts and wild honey? That’s honey locust – not insects but carob, a type of acacia tree, see. John ate carob. Go on, you do it, too.’
Berry tasted it and smiled and said it was sweet.
‘You have to do what’s right for yourselves,’ Millroy said.
Now Willie and Stacy and Kayla were tasting the mashed carob on bread.
‘Cooking food and getting people to eat it can be the ultimate way of controlling people,’ Millroy said. ‘I am aware of that and because I know the risks of making you dependent I avoid them. You know that.’
Kayla, licking her fingers, said ‘Oh sure,’ and Willie went on chewing bread and measuring honey into little Day One cruses that Millroy had special-ordered. Stacy was smiling at Millroy in a moony way, hungrily. Ever since Millroy had jerked Ed Veazie to his feet and spun the stumbling man out of the diner, Stacy had been talking about leaving home and moving into the diner. I’ll sleep on the floor, she said. I don’t care.
‘It’s funny, really,’ Millroy was saying.
He covered a slice of bread with ‘cheese of kine,’ scooping it from a Day One earthenware jar, and handed the large slice to Stacy, who slipped some of it into her mouth and held the rest of it to her lips as she chewed, looking at Millroy lovingly.
‘“I am feeding you. I am responsible for everything inside you” – an awful lot of people use cooking and food that way,’ Millroy said. ‘“Eat and you are mine – I am creating you with my food” – don’t laugh, eating is a serious matter. Your folks are using that reasoning on you all the time.’
Listening to him, we had begun to eat, and now we were all chewing and swallowing, as though agreeing – munch-munch, yes-yes.
‘I won’t take advantage of you that way, but I need you to see the benefits of Day One. I don’t want blind obedience.’
Berry had an insolent and lazy way of eating, keeping his mouth open and making a noise, while the rest of us chewed with our lips together, breathing through our noses. The thick bread slices dripped with slow-moving honey and the fruit was so sweet it seemed to be filled with syrup and pulp.
‘Irresponsible people might ask you what I am doing. You can tell them that I am not controlling you.’ And he fixed his eyes on us. ‘What am I not doing?’
‘Not controlling us,’ Stacy said, with that same dreamy look of loving Millroy on her face.
‘I am not feeding you in that sinister manipulative way.’
‘Yeah,’ Willie said. His mouth was full. His cheeks bulged.
The rest of us agreed, and Millroy’s saying that reassured us, gave us more of an appetite, and made us feel even safer.
‘Keep it up, Big Guy,’ Berry said. ‘You making me hungry.’
Millroy had folded his hands and placed his elbow on the table, among the baskets and bowls of food, and the fruit tumbled all over the white tablecloth. Then the sun came up and shafts of light pierced the mirrors and warmed the room and that heat spread the aroma of baking bread.
‘We are discreet, sure, we don’t like prying eyes – but that’s for our safety and our sanity. It’s not sneaky. There’s no concealment here. You know you can trust me. We have no secrets. Ask Rusty.’
When signs showing the Reverend Baby Huber’s face went up on the National Guard Armory one street over from Park Square, and, in big letters, Come to Life – First Annual Boston Prayer Fair, Millroy said, ‘We have to see this.’ He closed the diner early, he led us there, the Sons and Daughters and me.
Green-and-white Yankee Division National Guard banners hung from the timber rafters over the Prayer Fair, where there were booths along one wall, and stalls selling certificates and tapes and hats and bumper stickers that said Try God. The booths sold food – hot dogs and burgers and chicken and fried onion rings and Huber’s Real Good Fries.
‘Smell them?’ Millroy said – he was smiling, he was enjoying this. ‘Big buckets of hot wings.’
A choir on stage was singing as we came in, and when they finished the hymn. Goin’ on a Long Journey, Bye and Bye’, Huber began to pray out loud, looking up at the rafters and the banners and speaking to Jesus.
Millroy turned to us, the expression on his face saying Listen.
‘And Lord,’ Huber was saying, as though he had just remembered something else to ask for, ‘if you don’t mind another solicitation, vouchsafe these good people to be filled with thankfulness and lovingkindness and do not depreciate their goodly gifts – nay, let them open up and flow freely.’
Money, Millroy said, without opening his mouth.
Huber prayed for the people to join him on the stage, where they were divided into groups – ‘teams’ he called them – and they cried, while Huber encouraged them, crying himself with big splashing tears.
Millroy was biting his mustache to prevent himself from laughing out loud.
‘And Lord,’ Huber said, still remembering things, ‘we earnestly enjoin you in your goodness –’
At last, some men in long green gowns climbed down from the stage, kicking at their gold-embroidered hems and carrying heavy wooden boxes with belts and buckles and a slot in the middle.
‘Release unto my stewards your worldly materiality,’ Baby Huber finally said. ‘Breathe deeply and expel these earthly riches, filling the Lord’s chests, to make the Devil mad and to gain the wealth of heaven!’
People pushed and plunged forward to force dollar bills into the mouth-slots of the wooden boxes.
The choir sang ‘The Devil is a Liar’.
‘Give the Lord of your material wealth! Make the Devil mad!”
Yet what does he give them in return? came out of Millroy’s compressed lips. And you can see they’re hungry.
‘Are you in atonement?’ one of the men in gowns said, serving up a box for us to put money into.
‘Hear that, Sons and Daughters?’ Millroy said. ‘The soft voice of the serpent.’
Then Baby Huber saw Millroy and raged, ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness.’
‘That’s a good Day One text,’ Millroy said on the way out, leading us past the stewards, those men in green gowns. ‘A person who eats willy-nilly is like a whited sepulchre.’
Stacy was making a What’s that? face.
‘A pretty coffin,’ Millroy said.
‘Yo, that preacher was screaming at you,’ Kayla said.
Millroy just shrugged. ‘Impotent rage. He is making himself ridiculous. That is ignorant, passive religion. But, hey, Baby Huber came a long way. Eight months ago he was running a trailer park in Buzzards Bay – just a manager, burning weenies on his outdoor grill.’
‘How do you know that?’ Berry asked.
‘I had a trailer there myself,’ Millroy said. ‘I was hooked up to his facilities.’
‘So I guess you came a long way too,’ Willie said, looking a little sly.
Millroy stopped in the middle of his muscular stride and hovered over Willie and said, ‘I am on my way back – a return journey. Remember that, son.’
Millroy’s mention of the trailer at Wompatuck – that it was his own, that it was furnished, that it was a big Airstream, that it was hooked up and empty – made the Sons and Daughters ask more persistent and then blunter questions like, why couldn’t they just move there and live in it?
‘You expect us to go home every night and not eat,’ Willie said. ‘But every five minutes someone’s trying to make me eat a hamburger or a bunch of ribs.’
Millroy nodded – pondering.
‘I’ve been feeling it,’ he said.
We looked at him.
‘Leaving energy,’ he said. ‘You want to leave home. I’ve felt that energy binding within you.’
The following Sunday after The Day One Program we went in the Ford, down the expressway to Wompatuck, all of us, to look at the trailer. We had not seen it since moving into the diner. Millroy had just padlocked it and left it, trusting that it would be safe.
But as we drove towards it we knew that something was wrong – the door was half open, the mesh of the screen poked out, one window smashed. None of us spoke up, but it was a sure thing that the trailer had been broken into, not badly vandalized, but searched – drawers pulled out, the TV stolen, papers on the floor, the paneling broken open, as though someone had been looking for a particular thing. My clothes were gone – girls’ clothes, no good to me now.
The sight of this vandalism made Millroy silent, and he looked sorrowful and guilty, as though he deserved it, and knew who had done it, and could have done nothing to prevent it.
‘Yo. Big Guy,’ Willie said, looking amazed at the mess.
‘Been some lootering,’ Berry said.
‘Yes, we are reaching a very wide public,’ Millroy said, ‘and this is one of the unfortunate consequences.’
‘We could clean it up, so it’s livable again,’ Willie said, and he started to pick through the litter of paper and glass.
‘That’s physical evidence – don’t meddle with it,’ Millroy said. And when Willie stepped away, he went on, ‘Take your time, son.’