Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons

“Black Bolt,” said the Dire Utopianist.

The Dystopianist was confused. Black Bolt wasn't a villain or a hero. Black Bolt was part of an outcast band of mutant characters known as the Inhumans, the noblest among them. He was their leader, but he never spoke. His only demonstrated power was flight, but the whole point of Black Bolt was the power he restrained himself from using: speech. The sound of his voice was cataclysmic, an unusable weapon, like an atomic bomb. If Black Bolt ever uttered a syllable the world would crack in two. Black Bolt was leader in absentia much of the time — he had a tendency to exile himself from the scene, to wander distant mountaintops contemplating. . What? His curse? The things he would say if he could safely speak?

It was an unsettling choice there, amidst the feral shrieks of the schoolyard. The Dystopianist changed the subject, and never raised the question of Marvel Comics with the Dire Utopianist again. Alone behind the locked door of his bedroom the Dystopianist studied Black Bolt's behavior, seeking hints of the character's appeal to his schoolmate. Perhaps the answer lay in a story line elsewhere in the Marvel universe, one where Black Bolt shucked off his pensiveness to function as an unrestrained hero or villain. If so, the Dystopianist never found the comic book in question.

Suicide , the Dystopianist concluded now. The geneticist should be studying suicide, seeking to isolate it as a factor in the human genome. “The Sylvia Plath Code,” that might be the title of the story. The geneticist could be trying to reproduce it in a nonhuman species . Right, good. To breed for suicide in animals, to produce a creature with the impulse to take its own life. That had the relevance the Dystopianist was looking for. What animals? Something poignant and pathetic, something pure. Sheep. The Sylvia Plath Sheep , that was it.

A variant of sheep had been bred for the study of suicide . The Sylvia Plath Sheep had to be kept on close watch, like a prisoner stripped of sharp implements, shoelaces, and belt. And the Plath Sheep escapes, right, of course, a Frankenstein creature always escapes , but the twist is that the Plath Sheep is dangerous only to itself. So what? What harm if a single sheep quietly, discreetly offs itself? But the Plath Sheep , scribbling fingers racing now, the Dystopianist was on fire, the Plath Sheep turns out to have the gift of communicating its despair . Like the monkeys on that island, who learned from one another to wash clams, or break them open with coconuts, whatever it was the monkeys had learned, look into it later, the Plath Sheep evoked suicide in other creatures , all up and down the food chain. Not humans, but anything else that crossed its path. Cats, dogs, cows, beetles, clams. Each creature would spread suicide to another, to five or six others, before searching out a promontory from which to plunge to its death . The human species would be powerless to reverse the craze, the epidemic of suicide among the nonhuman species of the planet.

Okay! Right! Let goddamn Black Bolt open his mouth and sing an aria — he couldn't halt the Plath Sheep in its deadly spiral of despair!

The Dystopianist suddenly had a vision of the Plath Sheep wandering its way into the background of one of the Dire One's tales. It would go unremarked at first, a bucolic detail. Unwrapping its bleak gift of global animal suicide only after it had been taken entirely for granted, just as the Dire One's own little nuggets of despair were smuggled innocuously into his utopias. The Plath Sheep was a bullet of pure dystopian intention. The Dystopianist wanted to fire it in the Dire Utopianist's direction. Maybe he'd send this story to Encouraging .

Even better, he'd like it if he could send the Plath Sheep itself to the door of the Dire One's writing room. Here's your tragic mute Black Bolt, you bastard! Touch its somber muzzle, dry its moist obsidian eyes, runny with sleep goo. Try to talk it down from the parapet, if you have the courage of your ostensibly rosy convictions. Explain to the Sylvia Plath Sheep why life is worth living. Or, failing that, let the sheep convince you to follow it up to the brink, and go. You and the sheep, pal, take a fall.

There was a knock on the door.

The Dystopianist went to the door and opened it. Standing in the corridor was a sheep. The Dystopianist checked his watch — nine forty-five. He wasn't sure why it mattered to him what time it was, but it did. He found it reassuring. The day still stretched before him; he'd have plenty of time to resume work after this interruption. He still heard the children's voices leaking in through the front window from the street below. The children arriving now were late for school. There were always hundreds who were late. He wondered if the sheep had waited with the children for the crossing guard to wave it on. He wondered if the sheep had crossed at the green, or recklessly dared the traffic to kill it.

He'd persuaded himself that the sheep was voiceless. So it was a shock when it spoke. “May I come in?” said the sheep.

“Yeah, sure,” said the Dystopianist, fumbling his words. Should he offer the sheep the couch, or a drink of something? The sheep stepped into the apartment, just far enough to allow the door to be closed behind it, then stood quietly working its nifty little jaw back and forth, and blinking. Its eyes were not watery at all.

“So,” said the sheep, nodding its head at the Dystopianist's desk, the mass of yellow legal pads, the sharpened pencils bunched in their holder, the typewriter. “This is where the magic happens.” The sheep's tone was wearily sarcastic.

“It isn't usually magic ,” said the Dystopianist, then immediately regretted the remark.

“Oh, I wouldn't say that,” said the sheep, apparently unruffled. “You've got a few things to answer for.”

“Is that what this is?” said the Dystopianist. “Some kind of reckoning?”

“Reckoning?” The sheep blinked as though confused. “Who said anything about a reckoning?”

“Never mind,” said the Dystopianist. He didn't want to put words into the sheep's mouth. Not now. He'd let it represent itself, and try to be patient.

But the sheep didn't speak, only moved in tiny, faltering steps on the carpet, advancing very slightly into the room. The Dystopianist wondered if the sheep might be scouting for sharp corners on the furniture, for chances to do itself harm by butting with great force against his fixtures.

“Are you — very depressed?” asked the Dystopianist.

The sheep considered the question for a moment. “I've had better days, let's put it that way.”

Finishing the thought, it stared up at him, eyes still dry. The Dystopianist met its gaze, then broke away. A terrible thought occurred to him: the sheep might be expecting him to relieve it of its life.

The silence was ponderous. The Dystopianist considered another possibility. Might his rival have come to him in disguised form?

He cleared his throat before speaking. “You're not, ah, the Dire One, by any chance?” The Dystopianist was going to be awfully embarrassed if the sheep didn't know what he was talking about.

The sheep made a solemn, wheezing sound, like Hurrrrhh . Then it said, “I'm dire all right. But I'm hardly the only one.”

“Who?” blurted the Dystopianist.

“Take a look in the mirror, friend.”

“What's your point?” The Dystopianist was sore now. If the sheep thought he was going to be manipulated into suicide it had another think coming .

“Just this: How many sheep have to die to assuage your childish resentments?” Now the sheep assumed an odd false tone, bluff like that of a commercial pitchman: “They laughed when I sat down at the Dystopiano! But when I began to play—”