“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.