The Magic Kingdom (15 page)

The monorail made its steady slot-car yardage. There’d been a balls-up. The Cottle woman had vanished, and now Colin Bible was bringing the boys back to the hotel by himself. After the rapid melt, in its way quite as astonishing as the freak snowstorm (and practically no trace of moisture left, as burned off as fog, as over and done as morning dew), there’d been a palpable rise in all their spirits. Even Moorhead, rubbing his hands (and thinking of Jews, anxious to be out among them), had seemed overcome by a pumped and racing enthusiasm that Colin (who’d nursed for the man, who’d followed his orders, who’d attended his low-keyed talks about the special needs of dying tykes—Moorhead’s own odd and discrepant term—and who felt without particularly liking him a rapport that was almost a kind of affection that people of different castes in related fields often have for each other) had never seen. The doctor had practically burst into lecture.

“We’re foreigners in a foreign land here, and it’s only proper we begin by paying our respects to our hosts. That’s what all those tourists are about tramping up and down Whitehall, you know. Taking each other’s photographs with Parliament in the background and nosing out Number Ten. This isn’t a seat of government, of course, but I’ve been studying the guides and I should say we ought to begin on Main Street, U.S.A.”

Which the children had loved, which they all had. Falling in at once with the cobbled ambiance of the place, its pretty High Street shops and brisk Victorian roofs, touched by the gold-lettered nimbuses of the names in the second-story windows, by the horse-drawn trams and open double-deck buses, trim as sunlight, by the gaslights and the bandbox atmospherics of its boater feel, its emporiums and ice-cream parlors and all the sweet, from-scratch, holiday aromatics of its candy treasuries. They were overwhelmed by nostalgia, even the youngest, by the vague and unspoken consanguine textures of its British- seaside-resort equivalencies. They moved briskly, swept along by that boater feel and bunting mode, almost sensing wind at their backs, almost smelling taffy, almost sniffing salt. This could be Blackpool, some thought. This could be Brighton, thought others.

They’d enjoyed, too, the Hall of Presidents, sitting politely through the brief historical film that preceded the main show, even Mudd-Gaddis’s aged cynicism in abeyance, even Benny Maxine’s cultivated scorn suspended. “Shh,” said Nedra. “Hush.” Though she needn’t have bothered. No one was making very much noise. For one thing, they were too comfortable, sitting back in the deep, soft seats, breathing the air conditioning like oxygen, all of them, the sick and the well, in that perfectly balanced state of absorption and anticipation, the easy doldrums that surround an entertainment and seem to fill time and make even the preparations and directions, soft warnings, and signals between the ushers and guides an organic part of the proceedings, as pleasant to watch, as interesting to overhear, as anything that follows, other people’s work an extension of the performance.

Yet none was prepared when the patriotic film ended and the curtains rose on the automatons, the curiously detailed machines that were at once as stiff and fidgety as people caught in some fret of life, the shuffling and bitten-back coughs of a group photograph, say, a public ceremony.

“They’re these androids,” Nedra Carp said in a whisper. “They’re not real.”

“Actors,” Tony Word said.

“They’re actors,” Noah Cloth conceded, “but like that frog actor you see on the telly they got over in France who plays like he’s a machine.”

“But there must be forty of them up there,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Sure,” Benny Maxine said, “it’s a chorus line.”

“They’re robots. I think so,” Janet Order said.

“They’re these special computers,” Rena Morgan said.

“They’re real,” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said with all the authority of his years.

“They’re real? They’re
real?”
Benny challenged. “Don’t you read the papers, don’t you keep up? That one’s Ronald Reagan. There’s Nixon, there’s Carter. You think there’s this band of statesmen, this troupe of artiste presidents engaged in theatrical entertainments?”

“They’re real,” Mudd-Gaddis repeated.

“Sure, Grandpa,” Benny said, “they went all out.”

And when Lincoln began speaking, Colin Bible could only feel shame for his friend back in England, for the pale dead figures in the pale dead waxworks, for all the pale unresurrected heroes and villains here mocked.

Remarkable anatomical detail, thought Mr. Moorhead. But how could anyone ever have thought that Roosevelt was Jewish, I wonder?

Let them wonder, thought Eddy Bale.

“They’re
not
real,” Colin Bible said, choking back his sob, as taken with the fret of life as any of the machinery on the stage. And moved, terribly moved. He never told me anything about this, Colin thought. He never told me because he loves me. The nit wanted me to be proud of him. And there, in the Hall of Presidents, in the solemn silence that had replaced the quiet debate that had buzzed throughout the auditorium, Colin
was.
Proud of being loved like that. He’d say nothing to Colin. He wouldn’t mention the matter. And if
Colin
brought it up he’d make a joke. “What,
them?”
he’d say. “Circuits and circuitry. They were put together by electricians. They were turned out by Japanese,” he would reassure him.

And even Eddy Bale, breathing easy because they’d come through the first morning and a piece of the first afternoon. They were doing it properly. Even lunch had been easy, a piece, thought Bale cheerfully, of cake. Moorhead had found a sort of juice bar, and the children had snacked on the juices of fresh fruits and vegetables. Two or three had had yogurt. So Bale, whatever it was that made him reluctant and kept him indoors, the old tourist misgivings that almost ruined his and Ginny’s honeymoon on the Costa Brava and made him sit upright in cabs, his greenhorn temerity stilled, his sucker-oriented agoraphobia, actually—though Mr. Moorhead by simple dint of status outranked him, Eddy was still the leader of this expedition—made a decision. They would split up. It made more sense. More bang for the buck, as the Americans put it. (As Bale did. Putting “as the Americans put it” before even “more bang for the buck,” drawing them in not with the slang so much as the Britishism, drawing them in, consolidating and federating them, reminding them in this southerly latitude on this thick spit of land if not who they were then at least where they were from.)

So Bale delegates Mary and Colin to lead Charles, Tony, Noah, and Ben to the Haunted Mansion. Which, it turns out, is not all that much unlike one of the lesser stately homes of England, more particularly Mr. Moorhead’s. It is, surprisingly, the wizened little in-and-out memory-damaged Charles Mudd- Gaddis who points this out to the rest of them.

“It’s the very place,” Benny Maxine said.

“Well, not the
very
place,” Colin Bible said.

“Awfully
like,”
said Noah Cloth and out of habit held up a fingernail to bite which had been amputated along with the phantom finger it had grown from seven months before.

“It’s sort of eighteenth-century,” Mary Cottle said, “but it’s Dutch.”

“Mister Moorhead is Dutch,” Tony Word said.

“Mister Moorhead is? How would you know something like that?” Colin asked.

“Well, he told me,” Tony Word said. “That one time we went there.”

“They were testing us,” Benny Maxine said. “To see if we were compatible.”

“Compatible?” Noah Cloth said.

“If we could get along,” Benny said. “Be good companions.”

“And he showed me these wooden shoes. That he said were his great-grandad’s.”

“We’re compatible,” Mudd-Gaddis cackled.

“Only I was afraid to touch them,” said Tony Word.

“We’re compatible,” said Mudd-Gaddis, who was enjoying a respite, a period of lucidity.

“There could have been splinters.”

“We’re compatible. We’re children who die,” said Mudd- Gaddis in his hoarse, old-man’s wheeze.

When Noah begins to cry, when Tony does. And Charles Mudd-Gaddis, his lucidity shining, his head clear as crystal, seeing the bright, sharp angles on causes, effects; restored, it could be, to his true, rightful age, seeing
everything,
even that what he feels now, at this minute, the perfectly furnished ripeness of his eight seasoned years, might only be a trick; his sluiced and dancing chemicals misfiring, some neurological overload, some snapped and brittle synapse, his remission only some long-shot bit of coincident, collusive senescence, quite suddenly rips off his wig and hurls it to the ground. “
Yellow,”
he snarls. “I had brown hair. My hair was
brown!”
And begins to stamp on it. Frightened Maxine reaching out to calm him, restore him, unaware of course that he is already restored, that his compatible, furious friend, kicking at the ripped yellow hair, tromping it, wiping his shoes on it as though it were a mat, stumbling on it in his aged, broken gait, is beyond reassurance.

“This won’t do, old chap,” Benny says, taking his arm. “No, this won’t do at all. Come on, old boy. Come on, old fellow. This really won’t do. Tell him, Miss Cottle,” Benny says, imploring the woman, tears flowing now from his own eyes. “Please, Miss Cottle, can’t you do something?”

Whose right hand covers her mouth in shock, in horror, whose left already clutches her crotch, palming a handful of fabric there, Colin Bible sees, as if she’s had an accident.

They were quickly surrounded by cast members. (Mary Cottle, despising scenes as much as arrangements, thinking: They’d have come anyway. Having our number. They’d have come anyway. Something telltale about us even in repose. They’d have come anyway.)

The one in the black mourner’s band—it’s the Haunted Mansion—kindly offers to take them to the front of the line. While a handsome, well-built young man retrieves Mudd-Gaddis’s wig and, brushing it off, hands it to Colin, who, Mary Cottle observes, seems touched by the gesture. A girl affectionately pats Charles’s bald little head and, lifting him up, bypasses the people standing in line and carries him on her shoulders to a side door while the others follow, hustled along by the remaining cast members, openly winking, not at each other but at the children, at the two adults, flashing secret agreement, doling these out somehow—the winks—managing the delicate choreography of their high-sign arrangements so that no one is winked at twice by the same person or is even observed to have winked. Except that Mary Cottle sees the young man who had handed Colin Charles’s hairpiece wink at Colin and Colin return it, giving as good as he got, better. She sees the kid flush. I’m admired, Colin thinks guiltily. In a country where AIDS is rampant.

Inside, they stand, could be, along the building’s stitching, shabby as a kitchen in a posh restaurant, as anything backstage or where workers gather to punch out by time clocks. They can hear a babble of recordings, just make out the winding, canted, interlocking paths, vaguely like baggage carrousels in airports, of other tour groups, the black, open trains that carry them. They can see periodic flashes of special effects like a kind of heat lightning, like phosphorent bursts of insect. Afterimage burns along their retinas like wick: the laser bombardments, the fireball theatrics of warfare, all the burnt-out guttering torches and candles and tapers of haunted radiance.

The fellow in the armband signals a girl standing by a control board, who presses a button that halts the tour. She takes a microphone down from the wall. “We have to stop now to take on some ’late’”—she pauses, lowers a voice charged with joke menace—“visitors.” “Visitors” is pronounced like a question.

The machinery grinds down—it’s as if some solemn, tender armistice is taking place—and Colin, Mary, and the boys are helped in the dark into an empty gondola, are settled into seats that have some sort of built-in stereo arrangement. They begin their tour. Which is rather enhanced than otherwise—something has been done to the air in here, a tampered humidity like the wet, faint chill of a catacomb—by their having been plucked from the bright sunlight into the damp darkness.

Their faces move against cobwebs, break them like phantom finishers in a phantom race. The same raven seems to appear over and over. Resisting death, a suit of armor, its old fierce metals sweating, its hinges groaning, transcends rust, swells into life. The eyes of night creatures blink on the wallpaper. A teapot pours a poisoned tea. Specters, translucent as the tea, move in the air like laundry. A living woman is entombed in a crystal ball. All about them they can hear the wails of the dead, insistent and hopeless as the demands of beggars. It’s this note, the noise of desperate petition, that causes the children more trouble than the conventional props of death: the bats, the coffins set out like furniture. They’re still upset. Mary Cottle senses it; Colin Bible, still seeing the afterimage of
the
twenty-year-old boy who’d winked at him, who’d touched his hand a fraction of a section longer than he was required to when he’d handed him Charles’s wig, does.

“They’re trying to say something,” Noah Cloth whispers to his companion, Tony Word. “What is it, you think, they’re trying to say?”

“Dunno. It’s like the lowing of cattle.” Both boys shudder.

Only Charles Mudd-Gaddis’s trapped, soft screams go almost unheard among these professional spookhouse shrieks and cries of actors, the funhouse arias of the dead. If the others are upset, Mudd-Gaddis is terrified; if they hear him at all they mistake the sound for the low-priority complaint of the infant dead. He has been whimpering like this since the strong tall girl had raised him to her shoulders and carried him into the mansion, and who sits beside him now, holding his hand, mindlessly squeezing his arthritic joints, amiably mashing them while she makes her own soft noises at him, noises which he not only cannot hear but which he will not listen to.

Because, in darkness, his ancient eyes are almost blind; and outdoors was riding—his back to them, too—so high up on the big girl’s shoulders he dared not look down, did not pick up, and would not have accepted if he had, the hale fellow, semaphore reassurances of the cast members. Indeed, he is barely aware that the girl who sits beside him now is the same young woman who had swooped down on him in his rage and lifted him from the ground he had been stamping on and kicking at only seconds before, raised him, removed him from earth, torn him off that lying, hideous yellow wig he had been trying to muddy back to the brown he remembered. He is not in remission now, not enjoying a lucid moment, is uncertain, for that matter, where he is, and has the sense only that he’s somewhere underground, riding along a narrow-gauge track in a coal mine, perhaps, or being pulled on a sled, though he’s not cold, through the six-months’ midnight of the Arctic Circle. He is not in remission, does not enjoy the crystal clarifics of only twenty minutes before—though he remembers all that clearly enough, in perfect detail, in fact, not a single thing slipped or blurred, not one, even the at once humiliating and infuriating business of the wig as clear to him as if it happened years ago—and recalls the day he was seven years old. His whimpers a sort of nostalgia, his memory of the day so sharp and poignant the whimper becomes a snuffling, the snuffling a sob, the sob a cry.