Gary Braunbeck - Keepers

Carson had adopted a cat that he kept at my house. I had no arguments about his keeping it at the house, as long as he paid for the food and litter from the money he earned working at the AARC sheltered workshop. Besides, the cat proved to be agreeable company at night, was always very affectionate, and didn’t shed nearly as much as I’d feared at first.

The cat-which Carson named Butterball-ran away one night as I was taking out the trash and failed to close the back door behind me. I dreaded telling Carson about it as I drove to the group home to pick him up for our week together. I had the radio tuned to Cedar Hill’s National Public Radio station where two agricultural scientists were discussing the remote possibility that an outbreak of scrapie was starting to infect sheep in Montana.

By the time Carson and I got back to my house (after cheeseburgers at the Sparta and a matinee at the newly renovated Midland Theater, the pride of downtown Cedar Hill) I knew there was no avoiding it.

I pulled up in front, killed then engine, then turned to him and said, “Carson, I need to tell you something. I’m afraid it might be bad news.”

“I know,” he said, softly bouncing up and down in the seat.

I grinned for only a moment. “Oh, you do, do you?”

“Uh-huh. Butterball ran away and-hey, you know what? I got some new slippers. They’re real warm and-”

“Whoa, Carson, hang on. How… how did you know about Butterball?”

“‘Cause Long-Lost told me.”

“And who’s Long-Lost?”

He reached into his knapsack and pulled out a comic book, then rifled through the pages until he came to a dog-eared page. “ This is him.” He handed over the comic.

The whole thing-front and back covers included-was drawn in black and white. The paper stock was cheap (some of the ink rubbed off on my fingertips) and it was hand-bound with plastic spirals. A homemade comic if ever there was one.

It was open to a full-page drawing of a creature that was so incredible I was momentarily taken back in time to my first encounter with Bruce Banner’s alter ego, The Incredible Hulk. “Wow. That’s pretty cool.”

And it was. This creature named Long-Lost stood in the middle of a futuristic-looking city where it towered over every building around it. It had the head of rat with a unicorn’s spiraling horn rising from the center of its forehead; the snout of a pig, the body and wings of a bat; the legs of a spider; a horse’s tail; and two semi-human arms jutting from its chest, one hand gripping a pencil, the other a sketch pad. The more I looked at it, the more details registered; its body was composed of fish scales, its wings were a mosaic of hundreds of different varieties of feathers, its underbelly looked slick as a dolphin’s skin, and its spider’s legs ended in paws that were a combination of dog and cat.

It was both grotesque and remarkable, the work of an underground artist who was obviously gifted in a way only the truly and happily demented can be; despite all of its disparate parts, Long-Lost as a whole seemed at once organic and correct, as if it should look no other way than this.

“So this is who told you about Butterball?”

“Uh-huh. He’s the Monarch of Modoc.”

“What’s Modoc?”

Carson shook his head and made a tsk -ing noise. “Boy, you sure are goofy sometimes.” He took the comic from my hand and closed it, turning the cover toward me.

And there it was: Modoc: Land of the Abandoned Beast.

“Modoc is Long-Lost’s kingdom?” I asked.

“It ain’t a kingdom like with knights and stuff, y’know? It’s like in the future, only it’s not, really. It’s like a… a hidden world. There’s people and everything and they all love Long-Lost and he protects them.”

I nodded my head and asked him if I could see the comic again. He reluctantly handed it over. I flipped through the pages, stopping here and there to read the dialogue in the various balloons… except there wasn’t any. In each frame where a character was speaking, its speech-bubble was blank. It was only through the badly printed narration in the squares that I was able to discover that Long-Lost was preparing Modoc for something Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know. (That’s how the phrase was written every time it appeared: Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know.) I handed it back to Carson.

“How could Long-Lost tell you about Butterball when there are no words?”

“There’s words there. I can see ’em but you can’t, yet.”

“Yet?”

Carson nodded. “It’s a secret.”

“Okay.” But it still didn’t explain how he’d known about the cat. Or how he’d come up with the phrase hidden world. I wondered if he even knew what that meant.

“Carson?”

“We gonna go to the Sparta again tomorrow? They make good cheeseburgers.”

“The best known to mankind, yes-but I was about to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“Is this a joke you’re playing on me? Did you sneak out last night and get Butterball and take him back to the group home?”

“Nuh-uh. Butterball went to live at the Magic Zoo.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

“Yeah… but not about this. I lie about Christmas presents-like telling you I don’t got one for you. I lie like that. But not this. This Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know.”

I decided to let it rest for a while. If this was a joke of some kind, Carson would tell me eventually; if it wasn’t, at least he wasn’t upset. I only hoped that Butterball was all right. I really liked having that cat around.

Later, after dinner, Carson pulled out a whole stack of Modoc comics and sat next to me on the couch, showing me each page of every issue, in order, so I could follow what was going on.

Long-Lost ruled Modoc, a place where human beings and animals lived together in perfect accord. Long-Lost kept everyone in Modoc happy and entertained by drawing their wishes and then making those wishes come to life. It was a good-enough place. But there was an evil hexer, Tumeni Notes, who was trying to cast a spell so that the animals would revolt against Long-Lost and force him to show Tumeni where the Great Scrim was located. The Great Scrim separated Modoc’s world from our own… On and on it went, becoming dumbfoundingly complicated as it threw in everything from simultaneous-universe theories to Darwinism and a dash or two of modern DNA research. I found it difficult to believe that Carson-though categorized as a “high-functional” Down’s and capable of reading at a fifth-grade level-could understand all of this, let alone keep it straight.

He came to the most recent issue and opened it to the first page, then let out a little gasp and immediately closed it.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can’t read this one yet.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cause I’m not supposed to.”

“I don’t understand.”

Tsk -ing again. “You’re goofy. I can’t read it ’cause Long-Lost won’t let me see the words yet.”

“But there aren’t any words in the first place.”

“Are too.”

I grabbed up three issues at random and opened them to various pages. “Look at this-Carson, come on! Look! Nowhere, see? Nowhere in any of these comics does any of the characters say anything. See? Just empty space.” I was shocked at how angry I suddenly felt.

“I told you already, there’re words in them, you just can’t see ’em.”

“Yet,” I added, all at once too frustrated to care.

“Uh-huh. Long-Lost does it to me, too. When I get a new Modoc, the words aren’t always there ’cause he don’t feel like talking to me yet. I gotta wait.”

“Like I have to wait?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why do I have to wait? Why can’t Long-Lost just let me read the same words he says to you?”