Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux

‘What do you think?’

  ‘Wicked interesting.’

  I felt small, round-shouldered, weak, powerless. Millroy could raise the dead, spirit stolen goods back to their owners, fumble up gold from the mouths of fish. You would think, from the way he walked, that this Big Island of Hawaii was mostly his, as though he had dreamed it and breathed it into being, the way he had anything he wanted. The island belonged to him. Even the people were his – he could control them, he could destroy them.

  He could destroy me. And I was afraid most of all because I did not want him to control me the way he manipulated other people. I saw power in his fingers and his eyes that I had never seen before.

  Was he made of flesh? Was he human? I had never spent so much time with him all at once. So I knew him better.

  ‘I don’t want any other life, any other place, anyone but you, on this black beach,’ he said.

  I felt stifled, I feared him more. I had to drag air into my mouth to breathe.

  The worst of it was his soft voice and his hard hands.

  ‘Come here, angel.’

  When I did not go to him right away, he crept towards me on his large silent feet and towered above me and cast a shadow over me, and I could hear his lungs working perfectly.

  ‘Did you ever see a nugget of gold come out of the mouth of a fish?’

  Of course not. And anyway, when had Millroy ever boasted before – reminding me of the amazing thing I had just seen? He was not satisfied by my respectful silence and so he touched me – my arm. His touch made me pity my little arm.

  ‘Isn’t this a great place?’

  His hands were iron hooks hesitating on the surface of my skin.

  ‘Maybe learn Hebrew and Greek. Plenty of time. Just sit under these trees. Translate the Book myself.’

  He was very near to me. His whole body purred.

  ‘Consider these people. This is a microcosm of the whole of America, only the weather’s better. It’s a garden, a kind of paradise. Ample herbage,’ he said. ‘Maybe start a global short-wave radio service. Late-night programs about food and scripture. Mellifluous voice. “This is the Day One Broadcasting Network, coming to you from the Big Island of Hawaii.” ’

  Not hooks on my arm but claws, and when he leaned towards me his nose was like the beak of an eagle, sharp and hovering, a weapon with two watchful nostrils.

  ‘But these people aren’t regular – you can see that. They have a low-residue diet. They eat Spam, they eat pig meat and Hula Dogs. I want to start all over again with these fat people, even if it takes years.’

  His talk of the future made me freeze, and right on cue an overripe mango thumped onto the ground.

  ‘Who did that?’ Millroy asked, meaning he had. He picked it up and peeled it and said, ‘Get some of this into your mouth, angel.’

  He was so eager to please me I felt trapped. He wanted to take me for walks to the nut farm and pick melons and eat flowers. ‘Let’s swim,’ he said, and I suspected that he wanted me to see him walk on water.

  It was unusual for him to be out of sight. Most days he hovered over me like a big bird. But one morning he was nowhere to be seen. With him occupied elsewhere, I was alone, and for those hours I felt safer, happier – the sunshine blazing on the water, the rustle of the thick red leaves in the wind, the clucking of the palm trees, the screechy birds. Millroy was right – it was a kind of paradise. Never mind the big cane spiders and the cockroaches.

  When the wind dropped, when the surf eased, when the birds took a breath, I could hear island music, island television, and the bumping of rusty cars on the narrow Opihikao road. Around noon there were food shouts, someone calling to his friend to get some shaved ice at Yamamoto’s, or a plate lunch in Pahoa.

  Then I was happy. It was always summer here. I belonged here and even knew the place a little. Millroy’s hovering had prevented me from getting to know the island well. He had taken over my life. I had not minded that in Boston, when he ran the Day One diners and the TV show, but these days – ever since the sudden storm on the plane – he seemed inhuman, like a god or a prophet, and that made me feel like nothing.

  Just before lunchtime, Millroy popped up smiling.

  ‘I had a blockage in my bowel.’

  I was not alarmed by those words. I had heard him say such things before. Talking about cramps and muscle control he had seemed human to me.

  ‘I have been trying to expel it since six-thirty this morning.’

  Even that five hours of struggle did not seriously worry me. He was still smiling, as though he had just chased the neighbor’s dog out of the yard – the old Millroy.

  But he crossed the room to where I was sitting by the window, looking at a dark seesawing ship in the deep sea, crooking my head to squint through the spindly branches of the candlenut tree – the leaves browned by salt-splash, the bruised and uneatable fruit.

  ‘I’ve been in there straining and deep breathing,’ he said, clenching his hands to illustrate this. ‘It’s a species of labor.’

  This new information was the recent Millroy that I had begun to fear so much. Did he need reminding?

  ‘You always said it shouldn’t be work.’

  Perhaps he was testing me.

  ‘Not that kind of labor, angel. I mean giving birth, gathering all your muscular intensity to extrude this blockage from your body.’

  Now I was simply threatened by his smile.

  ‘Like having a baby?’

  I was so worried by what he had just said, and by his eager face.

  ‘Sure. Ever think about that?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  And now I had something else to disturb me.

  ‘What are you looking at, angel?’

  ‘The ocean. That ship.’

  The way it bobbed like a toy and how the sun shimmered on the foam around it.

  ‘Isn’t that tree in the way?’

  I liked the candlenut tree for its uselessness, just a skinny harmless planting you did not have to think about.

  ‘Kind of,’ I said, because I knew he wanted me to.

  Millroy came closer and covered me with a hug – his iron claws, his hooked beak, his fish-cold skin, his big clammy-gray eyes.

  I wanted to say Please! when he let go.

  ‘Now look.’

  The tree was blighted, the leaves had fallen, the fruit was burned, the branches and the skinny miserable trunk were a blackened skeleton.

  I felt unsafe again, only more so.

  ‘I am doing all this for you.’

  I nodded because I did not know what to say except I’m wicked grateful.

  ‘Get your notebook, angel. I want you to take some dictation. Let’s get going on my book.’

  He meant This Is My Body, which we had not worked on for days – and it was supposed to be our main project here on the Big Island. I found my notebook with gecko jimmies on it and opened it.

  ‘Ready.’

  ‘I love you,’ Millroy said.

  I wrote that down. I looked at it and waited for more. Millroy was breathing hard, and when I glanced up I saw that his eyes had turned the sharpest blue.

  ‘I love you,’ he said again.

  Just then I realized that I had been dreading his saying those words ever since we landed in Hawaii. For an instant I wanted to cry out – not a long scream but an ouch of pain. Instead, I just winced.

  He repeated the words as though I had not heard him, but each time he said them differently, as if the words were like searching fingers.

  I wanted to run for my life.

  42

  Once he managed to get I love you out of his mouth he kept it up, repeating it as though he had overcome his fear of it, the way some fearful people whisper a swear word the first time and say it louder after that, and then shout it. Maybe Millroy had been trying to say I love you for a long time, was what I thought. Now
he could not stop himself, never mind how I felt.

  ‘I love you, Jilly Farina.’

  The way he said these words made him seem monstrous and desperate, with swiveling eyes.

  If you could not say it back, what did it mean except: I want you body and soul, all of you, and that terrified me worse than any threat I had ever heard.

  ‘Quit it, please.’

  But no, he went on saying it.

  ‘Please cut it out.’

  And I winced, I was flustered, because the words seemed to have fingers and hands and lips and teeth. They had hot breath. I felt caught and mauled by their very sound.

  Millroy then said, ‘All I ask is that you give me a chance.’

  Not being able to think of anything to say, I began to cry, and – as always – crying made me feel small and skinny. I seemed to shrink with each sob. And what made my crying worse for me was that Millroy never did it himself.

  His I love you scared me most of all because I could not love him in return. He was Millroy the Magician. I had never stopped seeing him as the man who could turn me into a glass of milk and drink me. He was made of cold metal, he had unpredictable power. Why didn’t he know that it was impossible for me to love him, or that his love made me feel unsafe?

  He said, ‘I know how to make you happy.’

  If that was true it just made him seem more powerful.

  Stabbing the air with his fingers, he worked sudden magic, wildly – fumbled with his hands, flicked out flower blossoms with his fingertips, darted hummingbirds into the blossoms to suck, plucked open a bubble of light, twirling his fingers, and tangibilized a round mirror which showed me shimmering, older and fuller and beautiful.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Please stop.’

  He unscrewed a lightbulb and crunched it in his mouth.

  ‘Anything you say.’ He chewed pieces of glass with a sound like potato chips.

  I said nothing. I could not think of anything. What was more dangerous than a magician who was so desperate to have me? Seeing his cheeks bulging with glass, I pictured him crunching me.

  ‘I could teach you to do this.’

  He went on chewing the glass.

  ‘I don’t want to learn,’ I said, because if I had told him I was afraid he would have insisted.

  ‘I’ve been waiting all this time,’ he said. ‘For you.’

  It made me rigid, those simple words.

  ‘Just say yes,’ he said. ‘What is there to be afraid of?’

  ‘Everything,’ I said, with a dry mouth.

  He laughed at the idea of my seeing threats everywhere.

  ‘You,’ I said.

  He stared at me with yellow eyes, his hands upraised, as though about to make magic. I stepped away and got smaller. I feared that he would touch me and, touching me, break me in two.

  I slept badly, I could not eat, I began to pray that Millroy would be caught and taken away – arrested by the police who sometimes drove down the road to Kalapana, where the road turned into a smoldering lava flow. There was a rumor in Puna that Millroy was able to divert the molten lava that smoked and flamed at night. People believed him. I had believed him once.

  Millroy had made me different, changed the shape of my life, stolen me from my hopeless family, and I had felt safe with him. He had turned me into a young boy. This is my son, Alex. He had made me depend on him, and then amazed me by falling in love with me and wanting me to love him back. There was no one else, just the two of us in the house, listening hard for each other.

  He did not want to be my father anymore. I had known he was a magician, but I had not realized how much power he had until he flashed his whole light on me. Then I saw that he was difficult and dangerous and strange – a true magician – yet it was only when I was alone with him that I understood. I had no business being there.

  No more magic, I thought, please don’t freak me out.

  But I had no right to think it. What was I doing here? I needed someone else.

  ‘There is no one else,’ Millroy said.

  I had no privacy, even in my thoughts.

  ‘I have loved you from the moment I saw you,’ Millroy said.

  All those months, a year and a half, him in his diner watching me, talking to me while I lay on my cupboard shelf in the darkness. I never dreamed this moment would be so big, angel. And now I was so embarrassed, as though only now he was telling me how long ago he had seen me naked and, reminded of it, I felt ashamed and unprotected. That whole time he had been watching me, but what could I do about it now?

  It was hard to be here on this island with him. Even when I was alone I felt his eyes fastened on me, pressing on my head like his thumbs, a sense of squeezing fingers.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, one of those times, looking around.

  But it was not him, it was a stranger, one of the island people looking at me from below the black cliff.

  The man was looking past me at Millroy, who was out back hammering a piece of wood on one of his new beehives.

  I saw someone again the next day, the finger pressure on the back of my skull made me turn – another stranger.

  I might have felt better if we had gone on making our regular trips into town – to Pahoa, to Kurtistown, to Mountain View, or to Hilo, where we had bought the pickup truck. But no, this stopped, we did not even go to smoldering Kalapana or to Opihikao, which was one church, one store, and two barking mutts.

  ‘We’ve got everything we need right here,’ Millroy said.

  It was as though he wanted to keep me in a box.

  We had no flour, no wheat, nor barley, nor any honey yet. We had plenty of lentils, red and brown, we had melons – paw-paws, guavas and pineapples. We had other fruits and fish, we had nuts of three kinds, we had beans of all sorts to parch. Millroy encouraged a boy named Cal from a local farm to bring him butter and honey.

  ‘What about bread?’

  ‘“Butter and honey shall ye eat, that ye may know to refuse the evil and choose the good.” Isaiah makes no mention of bread, angel.’

  He fingered up gobs of it and licked it, looking wise; later, instead of buying flour he produced loaves out of an empty basket with a flash of blue light and terrified me.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he asked me one morning at the beach.

  I shook my head. He was holding a live fish.

  ‘I coaxed him out of the sea. The creature was scrabbling up the pebbles on its fins.’

  We ate, we purged, we prayed – the Day One routine. ‘And furious dousings’ – we bathed. Millroy said there was no need to go anywhere except the beach. Before we set out he squinted right and left to make sure there was no one around.

  There were hidden houses nearby but the rest was a lonely and remote place, this stretch of coast. I was used to the low dunes and unsurfy shore of the Cape. There was often someone, a fisherman or a barnacle-hunter, sometimes a surfer on the beach. Millroy was not worried by them, yet it was clear to me that he did not know what to do with these people. Turn them into milk and drink them? Liquidize them and pour them into the Pacific? Stuff them into an Indian basket and make them vanish? Frighten them by pulling live creatures out of their ears?

  More people began to appear at the edge of our black cliff, occasionally just their heads sticking up, their faces and white eyes, looking curious. People paused when they passed the house.

  ‘There’s always someone out there.’

  ‘Don’t worry, angel.’

  ‘I’m not worried.’

  ‘I love you.’

  Only that made me feel unsafe.

  Soon it was Millroy’s turn to be confused.

  I said, ‘We should get a TV. There are tons of them on sale in Hilo.’

  ‘That’s the last thing I would buy.’

  ‘Everyone’s got one.’

  He did not reply. He made a disgusted sound in his nose, a g
runt that swelled to a roar.

  Then I knew why.

  We had a strict Day One routine: walking the cliffs after breakfast, scrambling on the black beach, taking a nap or rocking on the lanai porch after lunch, walking the beach again after dinner, which was always early because Millroy said you needed at least four hours of residue formation before bedtime. Eating too late or at the wrong time is as much of a life-shortener as eating badly.

  We were heading back to our house one evening just after sundown. In that part of the Big Island, houses were camouflaged during the day, but they sprang up in the dark, their lightbulbs shining through open windows. Their TV sets winked and flickered, washing the house walls in blue light. No one could see out, but you could see in.

  We were walking slowly side by side, neither of us mentioning the lights we both could see. The wind had dropped, the leaves on the palm trees were motionless and picked out like ragged umbrellas under the moon, and even the ocean was stiller and soupier than usual.

  Our feet made chewing sounds on the gravelly beach, and then came a human murmur from up ahead, echoing in the bluish lights of the house behind the hedge.

  Lost in the darkness of my body – imagine. It was my experience of wilderness, until I realized I was eating poison, the carcinogenic diet that all of you call food –

  ‘No, I am not throwing my voice,’ Millroy said.

  I was so glad he made a little joke of it – he could have done so much angry damage if he had wanted.

  Before we passed by the house he hesitated and could not resist squeezing through the hedge and creeping up to the window to see who it was, watching this Day One re-run. Standing on my tiptoes I got a glimpse of his face on the TV screen.

  It was another shock here. I had started to think that everything that had happened before, all the Day One business, had been a dream – unreal, anyway. There had been so much of it, all the changes, all the people, the food, the money, all that walking away. Then a moment ago I heard his voice through the trees, and now I saw his big bald head and bushy mustache and wise doctor’s voice, and I was frightened, because it had all been true.