The Magic Kingdom (36 page)

And spotting the wise-guy kid straight off,
that
was a treat. Who’d heckled hell out of his breakfast show that time, who’d made a scene at the fried eggs and balloons.

(Which was what was so great about being a human being, thought Mickey Mouse and the girls, Mickey Mouse and the boys—the reasons, the fine tracery of the reasons. The swirl of motive. Like snowflakes we are, thought Benny Maxine, like fingerprint and tooth record.)

But chiefly scaring the shit out of people, the difference in their artistic temperaments. (Artistic differences, they had artistic differences. Gee, thought Lamar Kenny, still comparatively new in the business and already I got artistic differences!) Yet, however impressed, even flattered, he may have been that they existed, it was their artistic differences that ticked him off most. For openers, he thought, he didn’t have a handle on just what he was dealing with here. The kids were a new wrinkle. That was clear enough. But fad or trend? Flash in the pan or wave of the future? He didn’t really know what was going on. From the time the original wise-guy kid had first given him the business, he’d been asking around. No one seemed to know if anything was up or not, though all had remarked the influx of terminally ill kiddies. He supposed the park was involved in some sort of market research and imagined that this group had
something
to do with it. He’d heard, for example, that someone fitting the description of the odd little lame duck over there in the wheelchair had made a fuss at the Haunted Mansion the other day. (Though not from Matthew, you may be sure, who was almost certainly in on it, whatever it was, and who he hoped had not only turned to tiger butter but was rancid as well, gone off inside the pup tent like a bomb.)

Because he didn’t need the aggravation. Your death acts—here today and gone tomorrow—his hunch was, would never catch on, though he couldn’t deny the outrageousness of the concept. Only where was the art? What did it take, after all, to display the dying? If you asked him, it was a little like public hangings. Sure, the poet was right on the money and there was nothing new under the sun. As a matter of fact, if you asked him it wasn’t even in very good taste. Though he certainly saw the point, what they were getting at. The old triumph-of-the- human-spirit bit. Folks showing their lesions and cancers, exposing their stumps, sniffing their gangrene. There really was no business like show business. Well.

The first thing, he supposed, was to check them out, find out if they were for real. (Because didn’t it stink, at least a little, of fraud and freak show?) He knew what the girl could do, of course, the one on the bed, but now he’d find out about the rest of them too, what the shouting was all about.

He turned to Janet Order.

“All right,” he said, “let’s just see if that shit comes off!” He tossed her a damp washcloth. “Oh, please,” Mickey Mouse said, “you couldn’t get chalk off a blackboard with such halfhearted efforts.”

“I’m halfhearted,” said the hole-hearted child.

“Here, let me,” said the Mouse, taking the cloth back from the kid, vigorously rubbing her blue skin with it.

“You’d lay hands on a customer?” Pluto growled. “On a
customer?”

“And how about you?” the Mouse shot back. “How about you, Mister Magic Fingers? You hypocritical dog, you!” Who was steamed anyway, who knew he’d been had the minute he walked into the room. Calling in his marker, Gale had said. For the times he’d pulled guard duty for him when Lamar had gone off to talk to the clubs. Calling in his marker. Calling in his
mark
was more like it! Telling him it was just to get his own back, furious because Colin had set him up, because, or so he’d said, the woman was in on it too. To get his own back, and maybe those manuals. Merely to devil them with implication and outrage, to bear down on the two of them with the full moral authority of Mickey Mouse and his faithful friend. (Faithful friend was a good touch. Faithful friend had a bit of genius to it, what, he supposed, had ultimately sold him.) Though why hadn’t he thought to ask him what he hadn’t thought to ask him? Why hadn’t he thought to ask him, “Then why not bring Minnie?” Because maybe Gale was no dummy. Because maybe he would probably have come right out and said what was on all their minds anyway: that Mickey and Minnie weren’t married, that there was something a touch suspicious if not outright unsavory about that relationship. That if they slept together—and after a fifty-year engagement who could doubt it? a Mouse wasn’t made of steel—without benefit of clergy, how could they hope to have any sort of moral edge over Colin and the woman? Anyway, he hadn’t even thought to bring it up. And understood he’d been had as soon as the wise-guy kid opened the door for them, as soon as he’d taken in—or been taken in by—all the wise-guy kid’s wise- guy cohorts, that little league of the year-to-live.

So what was he doing here? That still unfigured. (Which
was
what was so great about being a human being! Oh, how he thrived on it! Reason and motive.—Not unlike his act, really, the thinking ahead, one man dueling for two.—Life like the crossword. Nine down, fourteen across, and the unpuzzled life not worth living. So what? Above all, was this an opportunity or not? Was Matthew his friend after all, or was he one of the company men he knew thrived in these parts? Running his abscams, baiting his entrapments and setting them? What if he was only posing as
a faygeleh?
To sucker his trust? If so, it might be an opportunity. Maybe 822 was his very own Schwab’s Drugstore; maybe Matthew Gale was that secret talent scout he’d always been on the lookout for. If not…well, if not, it was all up with him anyway. He was impersonating a Mickey Mouse. Dressed up in the Mouse’s own official Mickey Mouse clothes, the vaguely impresarial tuxedo Mickey frequently wore these days. How many years could you get for that? Perhaps life, maybe the chair. (God, what it said for the star system, for perks and privilege! He’d heard, and would have suspected even if he hadn’t—the cast was pretty tight-mouthed about their salaries—that the matinee rodent made tons more money than he did, or the other characters either, of course, and knew for a fact that the Mouse didn’t, unless he was in a good mood, always speak to the rest of them, sometimes not even giving Min herself the time of day, arbitrary and temperamental as a soprano, which he was. So why hadn’t they gone all out? Why didn’t they provide Mickey with a separate dressing room? Was this management’s way of keeping their star attraction in line? Why else would they make it so easy for Lamar to get into the Mouse’s locker, with its rinky-dink high-school-gym-locker lock? Why, of course, Lamar thought: not to keep him in line but to impose that same moral authority that seemed to emanate from the Kingdom’s every pore. Mousketeers didn’t steal. Not from each other. Not from anyone. They were clean, reverent, helpful, loyal, and brave. Mousketeers were the cat’s pajamas morality-wise. It was what lent them their terrible authority. Not only why they didn’t speak but why, except for the younger children, most of the guests seemed to clam up in their presence.)

So what was expected? What? If he wasn’t being set up? (Which, increasingly, beginning to feel at home in 822, he felt he wasn’t.) What was expected? Ah, thought the trained actor, recalling Pluto’s words. “You’d lay hands on a customer? On a
customer?”
Was this an admonishment? Some secret cautionary? (And he
wasn’t
rank, hadn’t turned into tiger butter; nor, now he thought of it, had the Pluto suit ever stunk on any of those occasions when Matthew had worn it to cover one of Lamar’s absences. He knew for a fact Matthew admired him as an actor. And he wasn’t rank! Maybe he knew how to breathe, too.) “You’d lay hands on a customer? On a
customer?”
If that wasn’t a paraphrase of the ghost’s warning to Hamlet to spare Gertrude, why then
he’d
never heard one! So what?
What?
Something to do with death, he bet. (Because something of what they did here was always a
little
slanted toward death. The Haunted Mansion where Matthew worked, for example. All the nostalgia: Main Street, U.S.A., with its gas lamps and hitching posts, its nickelodions and penny arcades and horse-drawn trolleys. Liberty Square with its colonial modes. Frontierland with its stockade and squirrel-cap ones. Most of it fucking Yesteryearland, if you asked him. Even Tomorrowland. The past and the hereafter. And what about Snow White herself? Old buried-alive Snow White in her glass casket like those hatbox-shaped containers that keep pies fresh, doughnuts and sweet rolls, on counters in restaurants? And how about those Seven Dwarfs? Yeah, how about them? Sneezy, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, and Doc. Cholers and pathologies. Wasn’t there an analogue to be discovered between the dwarfs and these wise-guy kids? He’d seen what she could do with a handkerchief, what, out of the corner of his eye, he could see she was doing now. The girl on the bed was a shoo-in for Sneezy. And the kids who’d been whispering together, the girl with the belly and the boy who’d stared at his shoes when they’d been caught out, who’d let the belly speak up for him. The guy was a clear Bashful. Lamar couldn’t quite figure the little shaver in the wheelchair. His question about overdoing one’s nature had clearly been hostile. On the other hand, despite the commotion, he seemed to have dozed off. A sure Sleepy! And it seemed to Lamar there was something a bit vacant about the stare of the kid with the amputated fingers. A probable Dopey. The original wise-guy kid, the officious creep who’d mouthed off in the restaurant and with whom he’d had the run-in at the elevator: a distinct and definite Doc. The little girl who looked like she’d gotten herself knocked up? Happy? Which left the blue kid, who’d given him that sullen, halfhearted response and who, more importantly, was the very color of choler. Grumpy to the life!) So
something
to do with death.

Only he must be careful to follow old Plute’s cryptic warnings, his tricky, understated guidelines. If not, he could kiss his opportunities good-bye. If not he’d be out on the street without even the mangy old doggy suit to cover him. Remember, then, it was strictly hands off the customers. It was absolutely gentle as she goes.

He glanced from Matthew in the Pluto suit to the Kingdom’s sickly new clientele, then moved smoothly into his audition in his soaring countertenor.

“You guys are something else,” said Mickey Mouse. “‘The Fated Follies.’ I love it!” He pointed to Tony Word. “How long they give you to live?”

Tony shrugged.

“Hey,” said Benny Maxine.

“An hour? A day?” Mickey insisted.

Tony shrugged.

“Hey!”

“Because if it’s less than a day you can forget about Rome. Know why?”

“Hey,”
Benny said, “
you!”

Tony Word shrugged.

“Because Rome wasn’t built in a day!”
roared the Mouse.

“Is he crazy? Why’s he saying these things?”

“Why’s he bullying sick children?”

“The Mouse is a rat.”

“All right,” Mickey Mouse said, “let’s see a show of hands. Who wants to be cremated? What, nobody? All right, who’s for being planted? Hands? Not anyone? Buried at sea then? Recycled? We’re running out of options here. Boy, you’re some tough kids to please.”

Pluto seemed to have slipped away. Mickey hadn’t heard him leave. Perhaps he was listening in the bathroom.

“Alone at last,” said the Mouse. “Let’s see, where were we? Right, we were discussing what’s to become of you. Or
I
was. You all seem a little shy about the subject. Oh, I know why, of course. This particular mouse wasn’t born yesterday. He’s been around the block a time or two. I’ll tell you the truth, though. I was never really into tragedy. Control was always my thing, my gift. My special talent, you might say. Well, I never had any enemies to speak of. Popeye has enemies; Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Tweetie-Pie. Heckel and Jeckel have enemies. The Pink Panther. But not old Mickey the Mouse. I
never
had enemies. And neither do the people I hang with. My duckies and doggies. Life’s too short. Hey, no offense.” He looked around at the unsmiling children. “All right, all right,” he said, “enough about me. What would you have wanted to be if you’d lived?” Doc, Dopey, Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Happy, and Sneezy stared at him, their ancient humors clogged, choked, stymied as ice, their deflected phlegms and cholers, their thickened bloods and biles subsumed in stupefied wonder. “Tch tch tch,” said the Mouse, “you kids, you poor kids. I don’t think I ever saw such losers. Where’d you grow up—on Fuck Street?”

Pluto tittered in the toilet. “On Fuck Street. Fuck Street! That’s some mouse!”

“This is terrific for the nervous system,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Oh?” said Janet.

“It makes it nervous.”

“Because really,” Mickey Mouse said, “I mean, it’s a raw deal. What, are you kidding? I mean,
all
the King’s horses,
all
the King’s men?” He stared directly at Benny. “Those are some odds. Still,” he said, “I suppose there’s advantages, silver linings in the shit. Sure. Of course. Why not? Run amok. Break a law. Pillage and plunder. Smoke if you got ’em. I mean, what’s to worry? Today
is
the first day of the rest of your life! You may never see Fuck Street again.”

“They may never see Fuck Street again,” echoed Pluto, laughing.

“You know, it’s strange,” the Mouse said philosophically. “It is. It really is. What goes on, I mean. I mean, people really
do
die. Your age. I mean there you are, you’re going along taking pretty good care of yourself. You look both ways before crossing, you don’t accept rides from strangers, you brush after each meal, then whammo! Whammo and blammo! Whammo and blammo and pow and zap! Kerboom and kerflooey, I mean. Mayday, I mean! But who’s going to hear you? And what good would it do if they could? No one can help. All right, maybe they take up a collection, maybe you get to be guests of honor at the watering place of your choice. Lourdes, the Magic Kingdom.

“But what’s strange, what’s really strange, is that after the melodrama, after all the best efforts and good offices of the go- betweens, the mediators, the maids of honor, the honest brokers, and best men, after the prayers and after the sacrifices, after the candles and after the offerings, worse comes to worse anyway. The unthinkable happens, the out-of-the-question occurs, all the unabashed, unvarnished unwarranted, all the unjustifiable unhappy, all the unwieldy unbearable. The unbelievable, the uncivil, the uncharitable, the uncalled-for. The undivided, undignified uncouth. The unkempt, unkind unendurable. The uncontrollably uncomfortable. All that unethical, unbridled, unconditional undoing. All the ungodly unhinged, all the unfriendly unnatural. The unpleasant, the unimaginable, the unprincipled. The unfit, the unsavory, the unforeseen. The unsurpassed, unsightly unruly. The untimely unsuitable, the unwelcome unutterable. The undertaker, I mean.”