The Magic Kingdom (18 page)

He didn’t even hear him when he came in.

“Hi, toots,” the fellow said, “been waiting long?”

If you tried to guess what annoyed Noah Cloth most about having to die, in all likelihood you’d have been wrong. His parents, trying to guess what went on in their little boy’s head, trying to poke past his terminally ill child’s view of things, suspected it was pain or the flat-out fear of death itself, sensibly reading the fierce denial of his condition as simple terror but, with it, some sense of ideal justice insulted, sullied, outraged, his shortchanged, short-circuited life a smear on his values, some ultimate slur of the ought, an aspersion on the otherwise. They saw him, that is, as noble, reading his reluctance to acknowledge symptoms or admit to pain as the reaction of a gentleman to that which was grossly one-sided and indefensibly unfair. They prized this in him, and though by keeping his complaints to himself for as long as he could he probably stymied their own and the doctor’s best efforts to help him extend his life, they cherished this aspect of their child’s character and doubled up on their losses, grieving an ever-escalated, ever-escalating grief, although they determined that when the time came they would try to be, must try to be, as good as their son, his match, for
his
sake his match. They would not be the sort of parents who turned their home into a shrine, preserving his pathetic bits and relics, his clothes, his pictures, his toys and braces and canes. It was their pledge to him—what they whispered in his ear when he boarded the plane at Heathrow—that they’d try to survive him with style, with tact and honor and class and grace, assuring him too that he’d not been wrong, that his fate was a quirk, almost apologizing, almost begging his pardon if it looked otherwise (indicating to Noah the line of wheelchairs, the special boarding procedures the airline insisted upon), assuring him that most children grew up to be adults, that most adults had children of their own and, after a reasonably long and happy life, did not survive them. Seeing his need and trying to comfort him. “It’s a blot, Noah,” his father said. “It’s a slip-up, son.” Noah, looking up at them from the wheelchair the airline would not allow them to push, trying to grasp his father’s words as he walked along beside the boy being rolled down the jetway. “Dad’s right, Noah,” his mum said. “What’s happened to you is a crook go, but in the long run, in the long run…” “Things average out, she’s trying to say,” his father finished. “They do, Noah,” his mum said, “so you mustn’t think it’s not a democratic business. Because it is, ain’t it, Dad?” “Oh, aye,” the father said, “turn and turn about. It really is. You’re the exception that proves the rule.”

In some ways they were right about their son: the pain, the fear, the outrage. But it was more complicated than that.

In a real way it came down to the fact that he would not live to make money.

He was almost unschooled (the woman at the hospice, who was good, not a psychiatrist or even a psychologist but a grand listener, a genuine death expert, interested in all the messages of death, would have been able to explain it even to unschooled Noah, would have been able to give back his reasons to him, not to reconcile him, never to reconcile him, but to sharpen his rage); even for an eleven-year-old—so much time in hospital, so much time blasted by radiation and smothered by chemotherapy, so much time sedated, so much confused by painkillers—he was unschooled. He didn’t read right, could barely follow the plot when people read stories to him, and looked for diversion in newspapers and their colored Sunday supplements, in the advertisements in magazines and on television shows, in the fat illustrations of picture books. It was this which had set him to drawing in the first place. He was not a natural artist or even a very dedicated one. He traced his drawings or copied them with a care that was literally painstaking, the crayons and drawing pens squeezed against his wounded joints, putting pressure on his decomposing wrist. Had he been more mobile he would have taken snapshots of the toasters and estate cars he drew, of the houses and cameras and lounge furniture, of the stocked shelves in the supermarkets, of the gas ranges, fridges, and central heating systems, of the coats, shirts, dresses, ties, and television sets, of the stereos, flatirons, cosmetics jars, of the boxes of candy and bottles of gin, of the computers and shoes, of the packets of cigarettes and tubes of toothpaste and all the other consumer goods that so fascinated him. Because what he could follow who could not follow a simple story line was the news on television, the bleak steady theme of growing unemployment, redundancies, angry men laid off, entire shipyards shut down, assembly lines, factories shut, services reduced and the people who supplied them sent home, and feared first for his father’s job, then for his father, because he was mortal too—gravestones he drew, monuments, wreaths—and then, because he was unschooled, couldn’t read well, do his maths, wasn’t getting the technical training so important to the current generation of workers and so, as the news reader told him almost every evening, absolutely indispensable to his own. Because where would he get money who couldn’t read, do his maths, had no skills? Because where would he get money for the foodstuffs he traced, for the fridge and cabinets which stored them, for the range on which they were prepared? Because where would he get money for the luxuries, the big-ticket items of consolation? So he drew them, copied them down from advertisements. By magic homeopathy to have that which he would never live to earn. “So,” the lady in the hospice—who really
was
good—would have comforted, “it isn’t really death you fear. It’s getting well.” “No,” unschooled Noah, the easing cosmetics of morphine withheld during these times when they spoke, would have answered, all the acuity of his stiff, unblurred pain on him like solid facts lined up and marshaled as the packages and canned goods on those stocked supermarket shelves he used to draw. “Not anymore. I hurt too much. The stitches from my first operations, that finger they cut off, my bones and my buttons, the stuff drying in my handkerchief. The light that falls across my sheet from the bed lamp, the shadows. All, all of it hurts me. I’m not afraid,” he would have said, “I’m not. May I please have my morphine now please?”

But that would have been then. An aspect of the conditional. Alternative time. But now, in the here-and-now of Disney World, he is perfectly delighted with the shops. It is, for him, rather like being plunked down in the very center of those colored supplements in the Sunday paper. (Because he has been rarely to shops. Even his clothes—it would have been too much of an ordeal for him to undress in changing rooms—have been first brought home by one of his parents for him to try on. He has been to the gift shop in hospital, of course, and has often enough been visited by the cart volunteers—he supposed they were volunteers: nurses laid off, people in maintenance, the National Health having no money to pay people to push the cart; he supposed they were volunteers—have brought to his ward with its meager inventory. He could count on his remaining fingers the times he has ever actually bought anything and to this day does not remember, if he ever knew, the correct posture for giving money or accepting change. Even in Heathrow, his first time in an airport, they hadn’t let him browse W. H. Smith’s immense stall and hustled him past the duty-free shop. Though he had his look, of course, spied in passing the window displays, cartons of cigarettes, bottles of liquor he recognized from the adverts, cameras he’d drawn the like of in his sketchbooks.)

“All right,” Mr. Moorhead said, “if you think you’re up to it.”

“I do. I do think I’m up to it. Ta, sir. Ta, Mister Moorhead.”

“What about you, Janet? How do
you
feel?”

“Shipshape,” Janet Order said. Shipshape, she thought, the very color of the seas they ride upon.

“All right. As an experiment, then. But remember, you operate on the buddy system when you’re by yourselves. Under no circumstances,
no circumstances,
may you leave the hotel. And no sweets. If you’re thirsty you may take water. Have you money?”

“The twenty dollars you gave me in London, Mister Moorhead,” Noah said.

“Well, that’s quite a lot. You mustn’t spend it all. We’ve another five days yet, plenty of time to think about what sort of souvenirs you’ll be wanting to take home with you.”

“When may we have the rest of our money, Mister Moorhead?” Noah asked timidly.

“Why, when I give it to you.”

The children started toward the door.

“You’re quite sure you’ll be fine?”

“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

“At the first sign of weakness, the
first,
you get word to me. Don’t try to return to the room. You’ve your pills that I gave you?”

“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

“You know each other’s symptoms? You’re alert to the danger signals I told you about?”

Janet Order nodded; unschooled Noah, uncertain about the words Moorhead had tried to teach him—stenosis, atresia, dyspnea, syncope—but who remembered in a general sort of way what bad things to look for in his blue buddy, did.

So for him it’s like being plunked down right in the very center of those bright-colored supplements in the Sunday paper. He tells this to Janet Order.

“No smart remarks, nine knuckles,” the little blue girl says.

“Look at it all,” Noah says, and thinks with pride about the sort of customer he’d make.

“What,
this
junk?”

“My mum would love this.”

“Film? Your mum would love a box of film?”

But he’s not listening. He’s lost not only in his first shopping spree but in the first experience he’s ever had of any sort of shopping at all. Within ten minutes he has bought the box of film, a bottle of shampoo, an antihistamine he’s seen advertised on television, a flea and tick collar, and a pair of infant’s water wings. He has spent more than twelve dollars (and guessing incorrectly—he’s not too embarrassed to ask Janet, he’s too excited by the actual act of spending money to remember that she’s even there: if she is struck by stenosis, atresia, dyspnea, or syncope just now she is almost certainly a goner—he waits for the clerk to take the money from his hand and almost forcibly wrenches his change from her own) but isn’t bothered because he still has, in addition to the change from the twenty dollars that Moorhead advanced him out of the hundred each child has been promised for spending money, the fifty his dad had slipped to him at Heathrow and which he’s not even mentioned to Moorhead. (It’s the long-term and higher maths he can’t do, those which perhaps even he knows he has no use for.) And returns to the same clerk five separate times, once for each of the five items he has purchased. Janet, beside him, is almost breathless. She’s never seen anything like it, this frenzy, and wonders if she’s in the presence of some seizure Mr. Moorhead has neglected to tell her about.

“Come away,” she says. “Come away, Noah. Please, Noah. We’ll find another shop. There are these other shops we can go to.”

She feels her breathlessness—the dyspnea—and is almost prepared to squat down right there in the middle of the store. (Squatting sometimes restores her breathing, though it’s an act that embarrasses her, conscious as she is that people seeing her will be listening for grunts, looking for little blue turds beneath her skirt when she rises.) She has her Inderal ready to hand when Noah can suddenly see her again.

“Other shops?”

Clumsily, he holds five paper bags, which another clerk, noticing his deformity, offers to put into a large plastic carrier that he can hold by its handle.

“Other shops?”

“Would you like me to take one of your parcels, Noah?”

“No,” he says sharply, angrily, almost greedily. But though they’re quite light he can’t manage them very well and twice they have to stop while Noah rearranges his packages. Which he does with his nose, with his teeth, which he keeps in balance by bringing his hands up and moving the bags from side to side with his face, all the while thinking, who cannot read—Who
would
fardels bear? Before they have reached the next shop along the hotel’s wide concourse, the sack with the shampoo drops to the hard floor and Noah starts to cry.

“Look, Noah,” Janet Order tells him reassuringly, “the bottle’s plastic. It didn’t break. Why don’t you let me carry this one for you?”

“You better not drop it if you know what’s good for you.”

And in the store, which is a sort of Disney boutique, Noah’s strange frenzy returns. He seems neither irritable nor calm but somehow triumphant, rather, Janet supposes, the way explorers might look, discoverers at the headwaters of great rivers they have been tracing, men come upon new mountain ranges, waterfalls, archaeologists at digs yielding sudden, spectaular treasures.

“Oh, Noah,” Janet Order says, and watches him as he performs what she does not know are his entirely personal maths, his customized sums. He flicks price tags, turns over china figurines to see the prices on their base. (How did I know? he wonders. How did I even know that that’s where they’d be?) He doesn’t bother to add the odd cents but counts by two- and five- and seven- and ten-dollar units, rounding the figures off to the next highest dollar, the sums to their next highest even number, adding on taxes, too, all the old asterisk attachments he’s seen beside the goods pictured in the adverts he’s not only looked at but studied, drawn, copied. Even unschooled Noah, who can’t read right, knows that’s where the catch will lie, in the fine print, the asterisk not only a trap but fair warning that a trap exists: “plus V.A.T.” and “Batteries Not Included” and “Allow Eight to Twelve Weeks for Delivery” like all smug arms-across-the- chest-folded caveat emptor. So adding on taxes too, adding on anything he can think of, not so much extravagant as preparing himself for disappointment who can’t read right or do any but the personal maths and who is going to die. (Nor does he understand American money, seeing it for the first time not when his father had slipped fifty dollars to him at Heathrow, since that had been sealed in an envelope, and not even when Mr. Moorhead had advanced them the twenty out of the hundred that had been promised, since that had been sealed in an envelope too, and not even when he had torn the envelope open and patiently waited for the clerk to take the twenty-dollar bill out of his hand when he made that first purchase, but when he physically wrested his change out of the clerk’s astonished grip, having no notion at all of a dollar, a dime, a nickel, a penny. He has a vague idea of the United States as a rich and powerful country—on the news this evening they never mentioned redundancies, shipyards shut down, factories closed—and so supposes the dollar is worth more than the pound. To him it even
looks
more valuable, the high numerical face values of the paper bills, the portraits of the nation’s male rulers, that wicked- looking eagle, the green artillery of the arrows. Even the dull, flimsy coins suggest an indifferent sense of plenitude. And he has an impression of bounty, of infinite variety—the things in this shop that fall neither under the category of staple nor luxury and that seem to him products for which no real use exists—the Mickey Mouse candle holders, for example, the cartoon stamp books, their gauzy, transparent envelopes filled with pictures of Mowgli, Mr. Toad, Bambi, Snow White, the dwarfs on gummed stamps.)