Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux
‘We were two lost souls, though we didn’t know that until we met. Now we are one complex organism.’
He was silent for a moment and my eyes were wide open in the darkness.
‘I believe we are a lot healthier for it,’ he went on. ‘This is a totally natural state of affairs, if you see what I mean.’
I did not know what to say.
‘You took charge of me. Our life will be different from this day onward. Great things are going to follow from this, Jilly Farina.’
And I was also thinking, If it gets real bad or strange I can always leave and go back to Gaga, and I felt that he knew I was thinking that and saying to myself Wait and see, and being patient.
Motionless, on my back, hardly breathing, in a dreamless and druggy slumber – that was how I slept, and so when I woke I felt reborn.
But Millroy was gone – I could not find him, and for the first time in this trailer I began to be worried for my safety.
I sat and fretted, and after an hour he appeared in his sudden out-of-nowhere way.
‘Have you just tangibilized yourself?’ I asked, trying to make a joke of my worry.
He shook his head. ‘Just been in the restroom.’
He smiled a knowledgable smile, but I thought, For over an hour?
‘I spend some of my most productive time in the booth.’
I had heard it called a lot of names but never that.
‘And so will you.’
I was patient because I was excited and felt safe and this was more life than I had ever known, but it was growing odder and odder.
‘I was also giving thanks,’ he said, and seeing me frown because I did not understand he said, as though explaining, ‘It’s Sunday.’
The Sunday Chubby Checker performance in the fairground arena took the place of Millroy’s magic hour and because of there being no afternoon show Millroy made more odd food, even odder – yellow bean salad, wood chips and barley paste, green melons, flat bread with bark mulch flakes, and grape juice with a kick.
‘I never ate stuff like this before.’
It did not even seem like food.
‘I don’t eat anything else,’ Millroy said, and turned his head and shortened his neck like a nuthatch.
I thought he was being funny.
‘Sounds good,’ I said, feeling desperate.
‘It gave me control over nine bodily functions.’
He had this way of saying things in English and even so you had no idea what he meant.
‘I didn’t know we had that many functions.’
‘If only you realized how I need you to say that,’ he said.
‘This is great for you,’ he said, slashing off a hunk of the bread that was bristling with bark mulch and stuffing it into his mouth. ‘They sure knew about fiber.’
‘You were going to tell me about those magic tricks.’
‘A lot of that is bodily functions, which is why it’s related to food.’
‘I was thinking about sword-swallowing,’ I said.
‘That’s a perfect example.’
Already he was snatching up the long bread knife that he had used to slash the flat bread. He threw his head back and wagged the blade until it was aiming straight down. Then he made a face, belched, and pushed the knife into his shadowy throat where the belch had come from. Was he smiling with the knife down his throat? He yanked the thing out and wiped the blade on his arm.
‘See what I mean?’
And he was swallowing and gulping as though he had eaten the front part of the blade.
‘Open that drawer. There’s chopsticks inside. Pass a couple over, sugar.’
They were black chopsticks with mother of pearl inlay in the form of blossoms, probably Chinese flowers. Millroy took them from me delicately, making the chopsticks seem very long as he plucked them up with his fingertips, and then he rotated his head until he was staring at the ceiling and tapped one chopstick into his right nostril and the other into his left, until about eight inches disappeared straight into his head.
He faced me, looking horrible, like a wild animal, the chopsticks looking fangy against his hairy mustache.
‘I can stick anything in there. It’s not an illusion. And it’s not magic. You’re looking at it. I’ve got complete control over these bodily functions.’
Saying that he raised his fingers and slid the chopsticks out of his nostrils, both together, and it was amazing to see them lengthen.
‘And I can get anything down my pharynx – just a matter of control. See, the esophagus is a funny little tunnel, and it can be helpful if you know how to use it. It exerts a sort of suction on all bodies that are introduced into it. I can swallow up to twenty-three inches. Long? Course it’s long – I can get eight inches into my stomach. Sometimes I stick a tube down, longer than that, because it flexes.’
‘What kind of tube?’
‘For cleaning out my stomach,’ Millroy said. ‘For doing inventory. Ever have one of those days when you’re feeling logy and you can’t remember all the food you ate? Well, my nasal tube would be real useful to you those days.’
If I did not know what he was saying how could I even begin to tell whether he was joking about that flexible nose tube ‘for doing inventory’?
‘Fire-eating freaks me.’
‘Control,’ he said. ‘I hold the fire close to my mouth and exhale a lot, making a flame-thrower. I blow out the fire as it gets near my lips, and I always use unleaded gasoline.’
He demonstrated using a flaming match, biting off the flame and swallowing the burned stick.
‘Roughage. I always say forget the cocktail sausage – eat the toothpick and you’ll be healthier,’ he said. ‘Strictly speaking, there is no fire-eating.’
‘Is there a chicken-pot pie?’
‘There is, but I sure didn’t bake it. I used a nesting container, with a flange, very cleverly separating the pie from the showmanship. In this case, fast talking, doctored eggs and a chloroformed chicken. A trick.’
‘Did you really change water into wine?’
‘Only Jesus ever did that. It’s in the Book. John, chapter two. “And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, they have no wine.” ’
He was jiggling his glass of his own grape wine.
‘What you should notice is the technique here. Jesus turned water into wine without ever touching it. He just stood there. He told the servants to fill the pots with water. Then he told them to take it away and serve it. It is perfect magicianship – not even a wave of the hand, just words.’
He took a sip of his wine and then gave me some. It was syrupy, grapey, with a little fizz of sweetness.
‘What I did was pour a glass of water and alcohol into a glass containing an invisible smidgen of aniline red, which reacts with the alcohol and dyes the water red. Water into wine.’
He swallowed the grape wine and smacked his lips.
‘As for the other, wine into water, the so-called wine is just a chemical concoction – one gram of potassium permanganate and two grams of sulphuric acid in a potion of water. This fake burgundy is poured into a glass that contains a few drops of water saturated with sodium hyposulphite. That’s why it changes color. Wine into water.’
He laughed out loud when I told him that this chemistry and all those names sounded more complicated and mysterious to me than magic.
‘That’s because you haven’t had much of an education,’ Millroy said. ‘But stick with me and you’ll get A’s in chemistry. You’ll be mixing up these solutions all by yourself.’ He put his elbows on the table and leaned over, widening his eyes. ‘You’re going to be my assistant.’
Trying to imagine this, I did not say anything.
‘You’ll get to wear a costume.’
I liked that. He picked up his glass of grape wine again and took another swallow.
‘A
‘Sounds good,’ I said, and began to worry about the audience staring at me, and slipped my thumb into my mouth.
‘You won’t be able to suck your thumb on stage.’
I popped it out and remembered what I had meant to ask him.
‘What about the Indian basket and the stabbing? And the way I disappeared. How did you do that trick?’
Millroy was smiling and I realized that my thumb was back in my mouth.
‘That wasn’t a trick,’ Millroy said, raising his glass. ‘That was magic.’
And he poured the remainder of his wine into my empty glass, and as it burbled it changed color, losing its redness and its fizz, becoming colorless before my eyes.
‘Like that. Go on, have a sip.’
Water!
Another miracle – and my first full day was still not over.
‘Cut it out. Who are you really?’
‘No one knows me,’ he said. ‘That’s another reason I need you.’
A black-and-white movie I once saw on TV at Gaga’s opened in a small town like Marston’s Mills where a girl is working at the appliance department of a store and she catches a man’s eye. When she smiles back at him you know she is very lonely. He buys a washing-machine and all at once says, ‘Will you marry me?’ and just as suddenly she says, ‘Yes, I sure will.’ That same afternoon they get married and they ride out to his farm, miles from anywhere. They spend a happy night together, and the whole day is like a dream of love at first sight.
But wait. Next morning she wakes up alone and hears a commotion. It is her new husband down below in the yard screaming his head off. He is whacking a sledgehammer against the brand new washing-machine. ‘I told you I didn’t want this one!’ he is yelling, and the bride watches him smashing it to pieces. She just stands there looking down, wondering what she’s done, and scared to death, because of his terrible temper.
Was I going to be that girl? Later in the evening I heard music and said I wanted to go outside and look at the Fun-O-Rama. Millroy said no and that county fairs were not places for innocent youngsters – look at all the riffraff, the chain-smokers, the overweight motorcyclists wearing Nazi helmets, the women with tattoos, dropouts trying to hide, under-aged runaways heading away from home.
Like me, I thought.
‘Not like you at all,’ he said, reading my mind. ‘You are home.’ And his eyes penetrated me and I saw he was right. ‘Anyway, it’s closing for the night.’
‘The hot dog stand is still open.’
‘Crazos eat them. You wouldn’t eat those things if you knew what was in them,’ Millroy said. ‘Lips, tails, nails, hoof, and horn. Gut tubes, hair, bits of skin, fecal matter, udders, all the fat, all the blood and nastiness, the whole strangled animal.’
‘I guess I’m not hungry anymore.’
‘Of course not. You had a great meal. That was real food I served you.’
‘I don’t even know what it was.’
I knew I should not have said that.
Wearing a wonderful smile, Millroy said, ‘Then let’s have another look at it and I’ll tell you.’
He quickly poked the rubber tube up his nose, unspooled two or three feet of it into the front of his head, and fitted it with a plunger. He was soon pumping sludge that looked like old fruit salad into a dish.
‘It’s still breaking down,’ he said, pumping away. ‘What have we got here. Bread, bean salad, mashed pulses. Vegetable matter – hardly smells! It’s real food –’
‘It’s wicked interesting,’ I said, and squinted so that I would not see the brimming dish.
‘I can show you how to use this thing,’ he said, toying with his stomach pump, so fascinated he did not notice me looking sick.
A miracle was magic but it was also a shock, and nothing normal here meant I had to ask myself every so often, What have I gone and done?
4
Millroy’s life was like his magic – I learned that fast – everything was upside-down, or amazing, or plain odd. The longer you lived the less you knew, he said. ‘Most older people are totally ignorant. I am the exception.’
He disliked calendars and clocks: ‘They give you an erroneous view of time.’ The healthiest rest-posture was balancing on your head. The best way to eat was standing up straight so that your belly was not creased and the food could go down more easily: ‘You need a good flow of air in your gullet to digest your food.’ Sitting in a chair was unhealthy and was a prime cause of many diseases. He claimed he could hold his breath underwater for almost an hour. He said, ‘I wish I lived underwater.’ He ate black seaweed, and the parts of plants that other people threw away – the tops, the greens, the seeds, the skin. When he-was excited he did not shout, he whispered – his whisper could be heard fifty feet away. The lion roaring loudly from its cage in the Foskett’s Zoo enclosure, Millroy said, was not angry but frightened. Millroy’s skin had an odor of almonds and sometimes of tomato vines. He hated dogs and cats: ‘I hate their helplessness. I hate the junk they eat.’ He stared at plants, putting his face against them. ‘I am watching them grow.’ He said his bald head and big mustache were indications of his strength. He was always saying, ‘Punch me in the stomach – go on, hard as you can,’ and when he was hit very hard he said, ‘That was better than a handshake.’
‘But you are much stronger than I am, Jilly Farina,’ he said.
Most of what Millroy said was the opposite of the little I knew. I was small, I was fourteen, I had no friends outside school. Until I had met Millroy I had been alone, living in a kind of cozy boredom – school, television, chores at Gaga’s in Marston’s Mills – her muddy yard and kitchen garden, her duckpond, the chicken run, all the stinks. I knew the world was somewhere else.
‘You have power,’ he said. ‘You just don’t know how to use it.’
‘But you have total control over nine bodily functions.’ Wasn’t that what he had said?
‘That’s just my way of compensating. It’s sad really.’
Then why was he smiling?
And listening to what he said I had to keep reminding myself that he was Millroy the Magician at Barnstable County Fair.
This was Monday morning, at lunch – crunchable beans, loaves of sawdust, two honeycombs – before his first show. Eating made him think hard about food.
‘Virtually everything that people eat is bad for them,’ he said. ‘In a way, you can’t blame them. Most food in supermarkets is carcinogenic. Cancer in a wrapper.’
He had a theory, he said, that some food stayed inside you – never left, just rotted in your guts and destroyed you. There were people, old before their time, and fat, and just looking at them you saw that they contained the residue of most of the meals they had ever eaten.
It made me think of Gaga and, like many of Millroy’s theories, it helped me see people differently – not as good or evil, nor weak or strong, nor even happy or sad, but with all those possibilities, because I imagined their insides not their surfaces, and most people were roomy and deep, they held everything. Their dark stomachs and sacks and lungs, and the pipes and sponges of their guts, were filled with the syrupy mixtures they had fed themselves through their mouth-holes. Humans did not explode – they just kept on expanding. They were like bags with legs, and whatever they had inside they themselves had stuffed there. I saw people as containers, and that was why they looked simple, but weren’t.
‘They show people on TV that are a hundred years old,’ I said.
‘Two hundred should be the goal,’ Millroy said. ‘And more is possible. Never mind the Hunzas. Look at Peleg and Isaac. What did they know that we don’t? No one ever asks.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘Because I already know the answer,’ Millroy said. ‘It’s eating right. It’s bitter herbage like this’ – he was holding a clump of gr
‘I get it – it’s like my friend Missy McClung from school. She’s this wicked pious Seventh-day Adventist, and she’s a major food freak, too. She always brown-bagged it for lunch and it looked like meat, but when you asked her what it was she’d say “Leenies,” or “Veggie-links,” or “Linkets,” or “Nuteena,” or a “Chik-chop.” The kids used to laugh at her.’
‘They should have laughed at themselves for gobbling weenies, and bacon and sugar and all the rest of it. But as far as I’m concerned they’re all burgers, every last one of them, even your friend Missy and her Chik-chops. I’m way ahead of them.’
He waved them all aside with his handful of herbage.
‘But you’re still young enough to be wise,’ he said. ‘I knew it the moment I saw you – still pure. Not a kid – that’s an awful word – but a young adult.’ He munched a bite of herbage. He went on, talking and chewing. ‘I love looking up at the faces and seeing young people. Adults have no business going to a magic show like mine – they hardly know what’s happening. If I ran this fair I wouldn’t let them in. They’re just burgers.’
‘The police would make you.’
‘I’d use my head. I’d price them out. Twenty-one bucks a ticket. Something like that. They’d stay away. Give the youngsters cheap seats. They’d mob the place. They love the show. They laugh, they scream, they cry. No silly questions. Heck, I’ve had burgers come on stage during a performance and interfere. “It’s a trick” –’
I thought of Dada last year, his exact words.
‘– or, “It’s all done with mirrors,” or “Hey, let’s see what’s up your sleeve.” Rude? You wouldn’t believe some of the things. One particularly annoying burger, very persistent, very insolent and interruptive – I made him disappear. I’m not sorry.’
‘What did the people say?’
‘They loved it. Thought it was part of my show.’