Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux
Glaring at me, Willie said, ‘Maybe the Big Guy should have wised up and drank somebody else.’
He shoved the handbill at me as though he did not want to touch my fingers.
MILLROY – THE DEVIL
Millroy calls himself a Preacher, a Magician, an Entertainer, and a Doctor. These are criminal lies! Millroy never finished high school! He is a flat-out fraud. He is guilty of criminal deception.
MILLROY is a –
– LIAR: He has never earned a doctor’s degree or any other!
– BLASPHEMER: He claims the authority of the Bible for his Godless religion. He has distorted the Bible’s teaching and twisted the Word of God!
– SNEAK: He refuses to meet members of the press to discuss his hiring policies. He will not speak to parents or return their phone calls!
– INCOMPETENT: Millroy was fired from his last two jobs – Foskett’s Fairground Entertainment Inc. (who he still owes money to), and TV Station WMBH for ‘lewd, obscene, and offensive conduct … unacceptable in a children’s show.’
– TRICKSTER: He claims to be a magician but is not even a member of the Magic Circle and is a proven fraud.
– MURDERER: It has been established that the Day One diet can be fatal for people with weak or irregular hearts or respiratory ailments. It is estimated that Millroy has killed over 300 Americans with his diet.
– MOLESTER: Many of the young kids who work for Millroy were lured away from their homes against their will, and are forced to work long hours for nothing. They are frequently terrorized and assaulted by the man who calls himself a Prophet! He claims that the young boy he lives with is his son!
Millroy must be stopped! Call his number (617-DAY-ONES) and speak your mind! Don’t eat in the Day One Diner! Put an end to Millroy’s criminality!
It fascinated me, not because it was all lies, but because I could recognize the shadow of Millroy in it, all the possible rumors and misunderstandings. It was Millroy the Magician, painted black.
I passed the handbill to Berry.
‘We had the same one in Chicago,’ he said, and he looked at me the way Willie had, with hard unfriendly eyes.
T. Van began to read it.
‘It’s all garbage,’ Stacy said.
T. Van tried to reply. He stuttered and then, as though energized by his failure to get the words out, he burst through the diner door and attacked one of the men, pushing him so hard that the man stumbled and dropped his armload of handbills. Instead of kicking him, T. Van kicked the handbills, scattering them.
‘That big black kid hit me!’ the man said, looking pleased.
In the meantime, T. Van had found his voice and was saying, ‘I will mess you up good. I will kill you. I will cut you.’
Just then, Peaches went out and took T. Van’s arm and said, ‘Be cool, bro.’
‘Sister,’ he said helplessly and he began to sob, his face twisting with grief.
A silence had fallen on the diner as we watched this, and it was such a powerful silence, like the thickest wall of stone, we turned.
Millroy was standing in the kitchen reading one of the pink handbills.
He had appeared suddenly, had sprung out of the air, become tangibilized. Then he glanced through the sheet of paper, reading quickly, while we watched him, not knowing what to say.
‘I was expecting this,’ he said.
He had recovered from having gulped down the cloudy liquid which had been Morrie Arkle of Bub City Crabshack and Carmina Burrito. His skin was pink and firm, the smudges gone from his face, his eyes clear, and he was calm.
He said, ‘I have been in there for four hours, on the hopper. I am purged.’
Crumpling the handbill, but in a gentle way, simply gathering it and squeezing it like a hanky, he snorted.
‘I knew it.’
Was he smiling?
‘I’m surprised they waited this long.’
‘It’s lies!’ Dedrick said loudly.
‘In a way,’ Millroy said. ‘It happens to most messengers. It’s a horrible misunderstanding.’
He was smiling, he knew I felt the same, and he was startled by Dedrick’s outburst.
‘What are you doing here, Dedrick?’ he said.
‘I’m here to help you, Big Guy.’
He glowed with pleasure at the sight of all the Sons and Daughters looking healthy and so much like him. Millroy never seemed more powerful than when he had this look of serene humility.
‘And is that you, Willie Webb?’
‘We’re hurting out there, too,’ Willie said. ‘The wackos are after us.’
‘I will kill them,’ T. Van said. His eyes were glassy, he looked stupid and dangerous.
‘No,’ Millroy said, and got everyone’s attention with his smile and his easy manner. He seemed happy, and not just contented but fatherly in a way I had never seen in him before. Perhaps it was the sight of all the Sons and Daughters, gathered in the morning to protect him.
‘They are hassling us with these handbills and hurting business,’ Willie said.
‘They are dissing you,’ Dedrick said.
‘I am a public figure – the law is loosely applied to well-known people in public life.’
‘It says here you’re a murderer and a molester.’
‘Hyperbole,’ Millroy says. ‘That’s demonstrably false.’
‘What if there’s more?’ Willie asked, and he looked at me with narrow eyes.
‘I know I am not a criminal,’ Millroy said mildly, in the most reasonable way. ‘You know it. I don’t see this handbill as a problem.’
‘They are trying to trash you, Big Guy!’
Millroy nodded, still softly smiling.
‘What did you expect, Willie?’
Willie said, ‘All I know is, there’s going to be more. And that’s why we’re here.’
‘I can say with perfect modesty that I have a certain piety. I am no one special. I was fat, and I was lost until I read the Bible and made a connection.’
‘But you got famous, Big Guy.’
‘As a jobbing magician on the county fair circuit, I had learned ways of putting an idea across. I can dramatize a thought. I can work a routine. I understand audiences. That’s all I did. But I was strengthened and left the fairground. I am not a prophet or a schismatic.’
‘What fairground?’ Jaleen said.
‘Barnstable County Fair,’ I said.
That interested them – that he had been a fairground entertainer, as the handbill had said, and that I had known it.
‘What doing?’
‘He was Millroy the Magician,’ I said. ‘I was his assistant for a little while.’
‘Bet you was,’ Willie said, sarcastically.
‘Pulling rabbits out of hats?’ LaRayne asked.
‘All of that,’ Millroy said.
‘He juggled chainsaws and blow-torches. He ate broken glass. He made an elephant disappear,’ I said.
‘So it’s true. You could have been a member of the Magic Circle?’ Berry said.
‘I am not an illusionist,’ Millroy said. ‘There’s tricks, and there’s magic.’
LaRayne said, ‘So what’s the difference?’
Millroy smiled and opened a cupboard and rummaged until he found a ball of heavy-duty twine and some duct tape, and a bicycle lock on a chain.
‘Restrain me,’ he said.
The Sons and Daughters gathered around him and tied his wrists, then got him to kneel in the closet, and knotted his wrists to his ankles. They twisted the chain around his arms and padlocked it, and taped it again, so that he looked like a package. Some of the Sons, such as Dedrick and Willie, looked fierce as they tore the lengths of tape and slapped them on, and pulled the chain tight. Most of the Daughters just looked on, seeming horrified. Before they taped his mouth, Millroy said, ‘Give me a strangulation twist,’ mea
There was no sound inside. I went nearer.
‘Back off,’ Willie said.
‘He could smuvva,’ Jaleen said.
But less than a minute later, the cupboard door flew open.
‘This isn’t magic – this is a trick,’ Millroy said, stepping out. ‘Let’s do breakfast.’
It was seven-thirty. We opened to the public just after that, there were fewer people than usual, and all the Sons and Daughters serving made the diner seem lopsided – more employees than customers. The eaters were uncomfortable, with the men passing out handbills at the front door. The morning was slow, lunch was quiet, the afternoon was dead, dinner looked promising but after a busy start the diner emptied, people leaving fast and no one else coming to take their places.
We were occupied serving food, but even so I had a sense of doom, from all the threats and glitches. And our being busy made me think that if a disaster struck us it would be worse than if our place were empty – more public and painful, more destructive, messier, noisier. I had noticed since coming back from Vera’s that many eaters in the diner these days seemed curious, and they lingered and glanced around, looking morbid and breathless, like those people who drive slow and snarl traffic near bad fires and car crashes.
The next day business was slower, fewer meals, and the men were still giving out handbills.
‘Juice them!’ Willie said. ‘Turn them into rats!’
But Millroy only smiled and called the police.
Every time I saw the color of the handbill I thought of certain words – liar, sneak, molester.
When the policemen showed up they said that as long as the people kept moving they could not make an arrest. One cop said, ‘This all you got to eat? Rabbit food and bark mulch?’
They left chuckling at the handbills showing Millroy’s picture, with all the vicious accusations.
In the darkness that night Millroy called out, and there was just his voice, and it seemed to be coming straight out of his head.
‘I could juice them, liquefy them, pour them into the sewer – who would miss them?’ he said. ‘I could pronounce a curse. I could cripple them, blind them, strike them dumb, turn them into little rubber johnnies. Stare at their handbills and set them ablaze from thirty feet.’
The darkness murmured back at him with sounds of uncertainty, like the tentative motion of soup about to boil, and then he began again.
‘I have the power,’ Millroy said. ‘But I don’t need to prove I am a magician. It is more important that I demonstrate that I am human.’
I could see him so clearly and understand him so well in the dark – could almost see his words in a white voice-bubble, like a character talking in a cartoon. He seemed to be trying to swallow, and I knew he had something on his mind.
He said, ‘I want our whole movement to be regular – the Church, the eaters, the show. We have to remove all blockage. We need a smoothly flowing operation all around.’
The silence in the darkness still simmered.
‘But it’s a free country.’
After a few more days of pink handbills and declining business, Millroy said, ‘I don’t like this. I hate their neckties. Is it supposed to be a test of my strength?’
Day One diners in six cities had shut down until further notice.
‘And I just realized something,’ Millroy said. ‘The way they walk. Look.’
Some of us looked out of the window at the men with the handbills.
‘See? That’s a threat-posture.’
Their shoulders were hunched, their heads down, their walk a kind of clumping. By now we knew them by sight and could tell that they were people who ate anything that fitted into their mouths, and smoked, and drank raw liquor, and got pale and misshapen, fat or stringy, and had that look of ill-health that Millroy said was like sin, because of the way they stuffed themselves.
‘Polyphagous – you can see that,’ Millroy said. He was smiling. ‘But it’s sad. It’s like being threatened by invalids. You feel too compassionate to hit back.’
Millroy still looked powerful and seemed strengthened by the presence of so many Sons and Daughters.
‘I am not alone,’ he said.
He was especially glad that the Sons and Daughters had come back, each one bigger, older and more confident, sleeker and harder than before, with a glow of health and youth, looking similar with shaven heads, no longer awkward, and seeming as much like a sports team as an army or a family.
‘My Daughters look so beautiful bald,’ Millroy said.
‘We got hassled by the Klan in Chicago,’ Berry said. ‘They came out of Skokie and burned some crosses at our facility.’
‘That group I told you about in Denver, called the Order,’ Willie said. ‘They showed up and made a fuss in the diner.’
‘That was before the handbills,’ Stacy said.
Millroy was smiling his crooked smile.
‘I like it when we are opposed,’ he said. ‘It is a test of how strong we are. Yes, this handbill is a test.’
I was thinking: This is a family and it is the only family I want. And I waited for them to be kind to me.
‘Some TV people showed up at our diner one morning,’ Tuppy said. ‘They wanted us to diss the Big Guy. Yeah!’
‘We had Sixty Minutes.’
‘Nightline wanted to do us.’
‘The Devil is a liar,’ Ike said.
Millroy said, ‘There is no Devil.’
In the midst of all these young people he was like a prophet or a patriarch with his disciples, and he seemed to get strength from them, and ideas, and revelations.
The subject of his next Day One Program was: ‘There is no Devil.’
No Devil, he said. There is you and me. There is truth and falsehood. Eat well and be regular and you will see Good.
His face bulged against the screen, very close and confidential. We watched it together in the kitchen of the diner, a dozen or more Sons and Daughters, like old times.
We are strong from within and will live, each of us, for two hundred years. Nothing on this earth can destroy us.
‘You believe that?’ Willie Webb said to me. ‘That there is no Devil?’
I said yes.
He said, ‘You wrong. The Devil is not a spook. He is a ordinary dude, put on earth to make trouble. Dude could be anyone. Could be you.’
On his own initiative Willie gathered the other Sons and Daughters, and did not confront the men with handbills, but crowded them and outnumbered them. Get in their face, Willie said. It was wonderful to see the sure-footed and healthy bodies of the Sons and Daughters closing in on the clumsy opposition, and they never stopped smiling. They had been inspired by Millroy, which made them all the more intimidating, and as he told them, their overwhelming gladness was a more powerful weapon than anger. They did not lay a finger on any of the men, and at last the men vanished. Afterwards, the Sons and Daughters went out and scooped up the handbills scattered in the street that people had thrown away. Seeing them working together made me all the more eager to help as part of their group.
But Willie said, ‘We don’t need you. Get back, Alex.’
‘You’re out of here, Little Guy,’ Dedrick said.
Millroy was so pleased by the way the Sons and Daughters stood up for him that he did not notice that I had been rejected.
‘A big thing has happened to these children,’ he said, watching from the front window of the diner. ‘They are gaining control of their functions, muffin.’
Getting control of me, I was thinking, because they had started to scare me. And what about my functions?
But Millroy was still praising them.
They now had spirit, he said, and they had gained control of enough bodily function
As for the media coverage, he said that this notoriety of Day One had raised awareness all over America.
‘If need be, I could broadcast an appeal and organize an army. How could we lose?’
Yet the magazine articles were still appearing – The Diet Prophet, The Church that Keeps You Regular, Millroy’s Money – The Truth about Day One.
‘It’s all trash,’ I said.
And Willie Webb still glared at me with his There is going to be more expression, as though I was responsible for it.
‘This struggle is character-forming,’ Millroy preached to us. ‘It’s like something in your body, a small poisonous worm that bloats and turns into blockage. You have to sit calmly and ruminate on it and expel it with force.’
But what Millroy called ‘raised awareness’ was plain bad publicity. Business was poor – affected by all the coverage we had (‘and no one likes going into an empty restaurant’). They were happier than they had ever been. I just kept wishing that they had let me join them and be a part of their group. They were ruder to me than ever. Millroy’s telling them they had power and control of bodily functions made them worse and more stuck up and aggressive, but I said nothing, because Millroy seemed so pleased.
It had all worked out as he had said. It had been a test of our food, our strength, our will-power, our belief in Day One. This campaign against Millroy, which had been going on ever since he had become famous, now seemed at an end. The magazine articles were feeble and facetious, Millroy said – we were winning there, too. No one cared to read about The church that lays down complicated rules for going to the toilet, or What next for the Millroy church?
‘We’ve won,’ Millroy said.
‘It is time to go back,’ he said. ‘Back to your Day One diners. Regroup, re-open and prosper.’