Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux
He was careful of Willie and made a point of correcting him, even being a bit harder on him than the others, because he saw him as the natural leader of the Sons and Daughters – the eldest, who had to be the most responsible, the most fearful of him.
The other bad news was that no other trailers in Wompatuck had been broken into. But there was good news when we got back to the diner – a message from Hickle and Hersh that cable television stations in five cities had decided to carry The Day One Program.
That was how it went – bad news, good news, something different every day. I had been used to not much happening in my life, but with Millroy there was always something – up, then down, then up again, all new.
‘That is the meaning of Day One,’ he said.
Until Millroy and I want to eat you, all I had known was Gaga’s, and school, and once in a while a visit to Dada’s in Mashpee. Before Vera Turtle Dada had had Cheryl, who played the acoustic guitar, and then Dada kicked it and it shorted out. In those days, I woke up in the morning at Gaga’s: cars passing the house, their engine noises clinging to our trees, the rooster crowing, someone’s chainsaw, a kid’s bicycle bell. Depending on the day of the week I knew everything that would happen, usually nothing, and the same went for tomorrow and the day after. And, almost always, tomorrow would be like yesterday. School was humiliating, I was shy and the wrong size, the sight of the yellow school bus made me sick and afraid. After school the thing was to hide from Gaga and not make her mad.
But with Millroy every day was Day One, new and full of surprises, and instead of drowsing through these winter afternoons in Boston I was fully awake. How did it happen that these several lives were rotating within me at the same time? I had not known I could manage all this activity, or that I would be so good at it.
We were not puppets. Millroy said, Be yourself, and made room for us. I was helping in the diner, dealing with paperwork, serving meals or ringing up checks, cleaning up with the Sons and Daughters, and running errands, like finding fresh fish. When Millroy could not be found, as on rehearsal and taping days – he was at the station – people spoke to me. They knew I was closest to him, though they did not know how close, and neither did I, except that he was the only person I trusted.
And that was also why, when the Sons and Daughters wanted to leave home, and they went to talk to Millroy about using the Airstream in Wompatuck, living in the trailer, sleeping there, eating here, they were glad when he said to them, ‘Better see Rusty about that.’
They were full of vague-sounding reasons.
‘I’m, like, “Why don’t we just move in?” ’ Stacy said.
Kayla said, ‘She goes, “This could be so cool for us.” ’
‘What it’s down to is,’ Willie said, ‘we could just use this space so bad.’
And when their minds were made up about moving into the trailer, they had even more reasons. They would show up earlier for work. It would be easier for them to stick to the Day One food program. They could keep the Airstream in good repair. They would not have people nagging them to eat junk food all the time.
I told Millroy this.
Millroy said, ‘We’ll talk about this tonight after we close.’
That was always a good moment, closing time, the diner in silence. Everyone was tired but fulfilled, ready to head home but a bit sorry to be separated from each other and especially from Millroy, after being with him the whole day. We usually sat together just after closing time, drinking mint tea for digestion and listening to Millroy talk about his early life, his world travel, his desperate times, his enlightenment, when he was trapped in the darkness of his body and God called him ‘Fatso.’
Tonight we sat around, the others delaying because of a snow flurry that swirled outside in the lights and floated down like pillow feathers.
‘I am hearing a lot of talk about the trailer, why you want to move in.’ He looked at the Sons and Daughters. ‘I don’t know whether you’re ready for that kind of responsibility. Rusty thinks you might be.’
I liked him saying that, because for a while it helped me stop saying to myself I am no one. I am Jilly Farina.
‘We’ll keep it in good shape,’ Willie said. ‘I might even find some more Sons and Daughters to join up with us.’
Millroy considered this, holding his nose like a horn with his whole hand.
‘We’ll do anything you want us to,’ Berry said.
‘It’s not a question of taking orders,’ Millroy said. ‘I just want you to respond to suggestions.’
‘We can do that easy,’ Willie said. His Day One baseball hat was on sideways and he squirmed, seeming impatient.
‘You have to speak for yourself, son.’
Millroy sniffed and made a face, and then he asked him to open his mouth, which Willie did.
‘Wider,’ Millroy said, slipping the emission check probe into it. ‘Now breathe normally. If you gasp or hyperventilate you’ll throw off my calibration.’
The wind rose and the snowflakes were blown against the front window, tumbling quickly down the flat panes of glass and gathering in a long white heap on the ledge at the bottom. Beyond them, they were lit like huge clusters of fluttering noiseless moths around each street-lamp.
We watched Willie clamping his teeth on the probe, his eyes bulging, his nostrils flaring as he breathed.
‘I’m getting lots of red in my chromoscope,’ Millroy said, his fingers resting on a small lighted screen. ‘You’ve been eating out, son.’
That meant sneaking food that was not Day One.
Willie yanked at the probe and said, ‘No way. I’m clean.’
‘Shall we have a better look?’
Willie smiled and said, ‘Okay, Big Guy, I’m down to that, but how you gonna work it?’ – because it seemed impossible. But Willie soon stopped smiling.
As though revealing the existence of a peculiar and possibly dangerous pet, Millroy chuckled softly as he uncoiled his stomach plunger, a snout at one end and a pink bulb at the other, and almost four feet of wobbly rubber snake in between. The worst of it was the small squares of rubber patches, the sort you would find on an old inner tube. Draped in his fingers the tube had the look of a wounded rubber reptile.
Willie was immediately terrified, because he recognized it from the first Day One Program. He stamped his feet, saying he was leaving, and then he was angry, and finally he said, ‘Why should I let you stick that thing up my nose?’
‘To find the truth,’ Millroy said. ‘But this is simply a suggestion.’ He dangled the tube in Willie’s face. ‘I am wondering how responsive you are.’
Tufts of snow had begun to stick against the big glass panes of the front windows, and it was now so late, so few people around, that the sidewalk was white with only scattered footprints. Snow was in motion in the car headlights and in the street-lamps and across the square, whirling in front of illuminated signs.
‘You think I’m afraid of that thing?’ Willie said.
Millroy said nothing, but when he cradled Willie’s head and worked the tube up the boy’s nose, and plunged, Willie began to cry. He sounded pitiful, and his crying told you he was a young boy. He was shocked, too, and he clutched at his Day One tee-shirt.
I watched – Millroy had taught me the usefulness of the stomach plunger – but the others covered their faces or looked away.
A boiling sound came from Willie, thick bubbles percolating in his throat as he gagged. All this time the snow had been falling beautifully through the square, the separate flakes blowing and lifting, making the shifting wind visible.
‘Hamburger,’ Millroy said, frowning at the tin basin. Then he shook his head and flung the patched apparatus into the sink.
‘I’m no good,’ Willie said, and when he cried once again he seemed much younger and weaker, not tough or funny or angry anymore, but a child who would go on sobbing until he was consoled.
Fr
Willie kept sniffing and sobbing, as though he was wounded, and he wiped his drippy nose until the back of his hand was gleaming.
‘But you’re going to be all right now.’ Millroy knew that from now on the boy would be obedient. ‘Oh, sure.’
There was a sudden knock at the door, and a hurried rattling of the knob, which was even more startling than it would have been at that late hour, because of Willie’s ordeal – the puking and sobbing.
The knocker was a policeman, with snow on his shoulders and on the visor of his cap, calling out, ‘Open up!’
‘Come right in,’ Millroy said, unlocking the door.
‘What’s happening here?’
The policeman wore a large yellow raincoat that flapped and dripped when he unhooked its front. He was breathless from the freezing wind, with red cold-splotches on his face, and he growled in disgust when he smelled the tin tray.
‘A tummy upset,’ Millroy said.
‘You kids all right?’ the policeman asked, ignoring Millroy.
We said we were fine and even Willie was smiling, although he was very pale.
‘You don’t look too good,’ the policeman said to Willie.
Willie said, ‘He just made me better,’ meaning Millroy.
Millroy smiled. He had made his stomach plunger vanish.
‘Fix you some food, officer?’
He clapped the lid onto the basin of vomit and, when he slipped the lid off, a bowl of fruit gleamed where the tin basin had been – pomegranates, apples, grapes, melons, plums.
‘What is more reassuring or vitalizing to the human spirit than the sight of nourishing food?’ Millroy said. ‘Go on, take a piece of fruit.’
Before the fuddled policeman could react, Millroy uncovered another dish – a chafing dish of bubbling pottage over a little flame.
‘Think you’re so smart,’ the policeman said. ‘I could book you for violating the fire ordinance. That there’s an open flame.’
He meant the chafing dish where a tin of canned heat flickered.
Millroy picked up this flaming can of Sterno and sipped it and then drank it down.
‘Not any more,’ he said, gasping after his deep swallow.
The policeman squinted at him.
‘What about them knives?’
They were Day One daggers, the sort that Aramaic people used for cutting fruit and meat – a pounded tempered damascene blade with a bone handle. Millroy special-ordered them from the same company that made the earthenware bowls and cruses and jars and baskets and woven mats and sandals. The knives had been stacked because it was the end of the day. They had just been washed and polished, and their blades glittered.
‘Them are oversized,’ the policeman said, pointing at them with his black nightstick. ‘Them are illegal.’
Snatching the largest knife, Millroy tilted his head back and poked it down his throat, and then pulled it out and wiped it on his arm.
‘Harmless.’
Now the policeman was frowning and pinching his own face in frustration.
Millroy palmed a Day One dagger, he whimpered, he opened his hand, he showed the policeman a cucumber.
‘“And the daughter of Zion is left, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers,” ’ Millroy said, snapping the cucumber in half. ‘Isaiah, one-eight.’
‘This guy should go on TV,’ the policeman said, for now he was dazzled, and it was as though he had forgotten why he had come into the diner in the first place.
‘He is on TV,’ I said. ‘He’s famous.’
The policeman left soon after, wrapping himself in his yellow slicker and stepping into the snow, grumbling the whole time.
Willie’s eyes were glazed – not just from having had his stomach pumped, but from his attentiveness. He had never seen Millroy’s magic up close, and the magic had been done to him – he had changed, he was silent and upright and obedient. And the others had a look of smiling admiration that made them seem small and loving.
‘I always feel a little desperate when I rely on magic,’ Millroy said. ‘The Lord usually performed miracles unwillingly, as you know.’
He was putting away the fruit, the chafing dish – all the paraphernalia he had produced in those few minutes when the policeman had challenged him.
‘But there is something hypnotic about magic.’
We just stood there waiting for him to tell us what to do.
‘It makes me tired, though,’ he said. ‘After all that, I have to go lie down.’
We were still waiting.
‘You can move into the trailer if you keep it clean and look after it,’ he said. ‘Willie’s in charge.’
Willie stood with shining eyes, straight and silent as a soldier, and grinding his teeth as though he was chewing a mouthful of walnuts.
‘What about Rusty?’ Kayla said. ‘He coming?’
‘That’s up to him,’ Millroy said.
I shook my head and said, ‘I’m staying here.’
The following week he appointed a clean-up crew for the Airstream and soon after the Sons and Daughters moved to the trailer park at Wompatuck.
More youngsters joined us, some moving in at Wompatuck and some still living at home, semi-detached from their parents, as Millroy put it – Daughters Bervia, Shonelle, Tomarra, Jaleen, LaRayne and Peaches, and Sons Dedrick, T. Van, Daylon, Troy, Tuppy and Ike.
‘Feel it?’ Millroy had said, clenching his fists and gritting his teeth.
They watched him with admiring eyes.
‘It’s more leaving energy,’ he said. ‘You are gathering yourself with a kind of binding intensity to thrust yourselves away from home.’
And they said yes, it was what they wanted, and most of them had dropped out of school or were unemployed, and one or two mentioned that they were sort of homeless.
‘You’re part of the program now,’ Millroy said, and he told them he was counting on them. ‘Program’ always meant Day One – the food, the prohibitions, the simple uniform, the exercises. No smoking, no drugs, no weapons.
There were some applicants whom he rejected. Some were too old, some smelled wrong – an odor of corruption, he said – and others were college students who would not commit themselves wholeheartedly to the program, or who were too influenced by their parents or teachers.
The ones he chose were especially glad, and they always said how they had seen him on TV, and many remembered how he had been on the famous show, Paradise Park.
Most afternoons Millroy shut the diner for an hour and led the sixteen Sons and Daughters through Park Square and the Lincoln-freeing-the-slave statue to Boston Common, where he supervised us in exercises, all of us doing burpees, push-ups and jumping jacks on the frozen ground, while people walked by and we imagined them saying, They must be Millroy’s people, and we were proud.
‘This too is a form of prayer,’ Millroy said, and he performed the exercises with us, but he did one-arm push-ups, or ‘uprights,’ making himself vertical, then raising and lowering himself by his arms.
Tuppy said that Ike was an athlete, but Millroy was not impressed. He did not like sports, because most of them were gladiatorial, and what did it matter how much exercise you got or what team you were on if you did not eat right?
‘But don’t say “af-leet,” ’ he said.
By now he had a system for introducing newcomers to Day One. He had them look in full-length mirrors, he took pictures of them and urged them to study the pictures, especially the rear view, the one they never saw, that everyone else saw, the lasting impression that bystanders had of you.
‘I am not deprogramming you. I am not disfellowshipping you. None of that manipulation
They called him ‘Big Guy,’ something they learned from Willie Webb, and they often asked Millroy questions.
‘But don’t say “ax him,” ’ Millroy said.
One day, Dedrick said, ‘I can’t do the diner tomorrow. It’s my ma’s birthday. I got to be home.’
‘This is your home,’ Millroy said.
‘What about Rodessa’s birthday party?’
‘Every day is a birthday here at Day One,’ Millroy said. ‘That is another meaning of Day One.’
‘My ma be real mad.’
‘Don’t think of her as your mother. Think of her as a woman whose house you live in at the moment.’
Dedrick fiddled with his baseball cap, because he had not expected Millroy to say this, and he had no reply.
‘What will you eat if you go to this party?’
‘There’s usually tons of food.’
‘Day One food?’
‘Ham, chicken, stuff like that. Salad. Cold cuts.’
‘Of course you can go,’ Millroy said. I knew that smile. It was not a smile, but a mask – defying the person looking at him to understand what lay beneath it. ‘But if you do, don’t come back. Ever.’
‘If I don’t go to this party, I will have such a wicked time going home again.’
‘It’s your choice,’ Millroy said. ‘I won’t influence you, son.’
Willie said in a complaining whisper to me, ‘He’s sweating Dedrick.’
‘I heard that,’ Millroy said, two rooms away, his voice knifing through the walls.
Dedrick suffered but Dedrick stayed that night and the next day at the Day One Diner. He said it was the end for him – his ma would be so mad. Millroy said no, it was the beginning. And because Dedrick could not go home, Millroy gave him permission to move into the trailer at Wompatuck.
‘You going to start catching my face on them milk cartons. “Have You Seen This Child?” ’
Millroy thought that was very funny.
‘You’ll outlive them all,’ Millroy said. ‘Two hundred years!’