Free The Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin

Bale. Those other kids. Some of them are sicker than I am, but I don’t think it’s hit them yet. What’s what. How they’ve been kissed off by God and medical science both. The nits are actually excited.”
    “Listen, Benny, don’t get the idea you’re here to set anyone straight. There’s no timetable. It ain’t British Rail. Leave them alone with your inside information.”
    And filling in the nanny, Nedra Carp, about Benny: “Use the spurs on that one, Miss Carp. He wants to tell ghost stories.”
    “Call me Nanny,” Nedra Carp said. “Prince Philip called me Nanny. Her Highness did.”
    And Mr. Moorhead, who advised him that Ben was very likely in a manic phase just now and that they could expect a reactive depression to follow. Telling Eddy that while there wasn’t much he could do medically for the child at this point, if his symptoms became more focused they could take certain steps. “Jesus,” Bale said. “He’s manic depressive too?”
    “We can handle it. If he gets really low,” said the physician, “I’ve some reds I can give him.”
    “Reds,” Eddy said.
    “Sure,” the good doctor said, “and if he climbs too high we can put him on blues.”
    “Reds and blues,” Eddy Bale said, staring at the medical man.
    “Uppers and downers, Eddy,” the doctor explained scientifically. “This could all have been avoided if we’d had extensive psychological profiles on these kids. Though it just might help if we kept him off sweets.”
    Eddy Bale thought of Benny Maxine’s hi-cal fingernails.
    Because the last-minute hitches were something more than the odd mislaid passport or their friends crowding round to see them off, their relatives’ helpful hints, special-pleading the kids’ tics and habits that they chose only at this last minute to disclose to Eddy, Eddy’s staff, Eddy taking notes and going into a furious, extemporized version of a shorthand he would not later be entirely able to decipher, offering the benefit of their close, habituate knowledge, their eight- to fifteen-year-old front-line observation of their offspring, filling them in—even the hostesses, even the stewards, the pilot, the crew of the 747 who had come out to look at their special passengers—on everything they could think of, as if the children were temperamental doors that only they knew how to open, cars difficult to start unless you knew just how to turn the ignition—Eddy furiously writing, writing—or houses leased for a season to strangers, pressing on them, too, medications that would have to be chilled, chipped toys, broken dolls, scraps of blanket, swatches of garment: all the emergency rations of a crisis comfort. (Exactly as if they were mechanical, their disorders trying as someone else’s machinery.) Or even the crush of the press. Not hitches, not even helpful hints, so much as a series of charms and spells. And Eddy trying to keep up, to get it all down. The real hitches his queer staff. Only Colin Bible quietly coping. Only Mary Cottle serene. The kids themselves in palace revolt, bloodless coup. Not noisy—they wouldn’t be noisy children, giving loudness only to their pain, the klaxon fortissimos of alarm—but moving along vaguely forbidden routes, doing the water fountains excessively, the lever- operated ashtrays, the now dismantled television equipment, the mikes and lights, watching the planes land, pointing, their eyes peeled for catastrophe. The real hitch his staff, his caper- dreamed crew. (Bale taking notes furiously, abbreviating, jotting, underscoring, placing exclamation points like unsheathed daggers beside main points he would later puzzle over, wondering what they could possibly mean.)
    Out of the side of Bale’s mouth: “Get on them, please, Nanny.”
    “At once, sir,” Nedra agreed, and Bale, even out of just the corner of his eye and even with only half an ear cocked and only a fraction of his already divided attentions, could tell at once the enormity of his