Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons

“Now you're the liar.”

“Let's just see.”

I jumped up. “If you spray me I'll spray you,” I shouted. The spray hit me as I moved across the room. The wet mist fell behind me, like a parachute collapsing in the spot where I'd been, but enough got on me. An image of Lucinda formed, glowing and salmon-colored.

Lucinda was naked. Her hair was short, like when we were together. Her head lay on my shoulder, her arms were around my neck, and her body was across my front. My shirt and jacket. Her breasts were mashed against me, but I couldn't feel them. Her knee was across my legs. I jumped backward but she came with me, radiant and insubstantial. I turned my head to see her face. Her expression was peaceful, but her little salmon-colored eyelids were half open.

“Ha!” said Addie. “I told you it would work.”

“GIVE ME THAT!” I lunged for the spray. Addie ducked. I grabbed her arm and pulled her with me onto the couch. Me and Addie and Lucinda were all there together, Lucinda placidly naked. As Addie and I wrestled for the spray we plunged through Lucinda's glowing body, her luminous arms and legs.

I got my hands on the spray canister. We both had our hands on it. Four hands covering the one can. Then it went off. One of us pressed the nozzle, I don't know who. It wasn't Lucinda, anyway.

As the spray settled over us Charles became visible, poised over Addie. He was naked, like Lucinda. His glowing shoulders and legs and ass were covered with glowing salmon hair, like the halo around a lightbulb. His mouth was open. His face was blurred, like he was a picture someone had taken while he was moving his face, saying something.

“There you go,” I said. “You got what you wanted.” “I didn't want anything,” said Addie.

We put the spray on the table.

“How long did the police say it would last?” I said. I tried not to look at Lucinda. She was right beside my head.

“About twenty-four hours. What time is it?”

“It's late. I'm tired. The police didn't say twenty-four hours. About a day, they said.”

“That's twenty-four hours.”

“Probably they meant it's gone the next day.”

“I don't think so.”

I looked at the television. I looked at the cuff links. I looked at Charles's ass. “Probably the sunlight makes it wear off,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“Probably you can't see it in the dark, in complete darkness. Let's go to bed.”

We went into the bedroom. All four of us. I took off my shoes and socks. “Probably it's just attached to our clothes. If I take off my clothes and leave them in the other room—”

“Try it.”

I took off my pants and jacket. Lucinda was attached to me, not the clothes. Her bare salmon knee was across my bare legs. I started to take off my shirt. Addie looked at me. Lucinda's face was on my bare shoulder.

“Put your clothes back on,” said Addie.

I put them back on. Addie left her clothes on. We lay on top of the covers in our clothes. Lucinda and Charles were on top of us. I didn't know where to put my hands. I wondered how Addie felt about Charles's blurred face, his open mouth. I was glad Lucinda wasn't blurred. “Turn off the light,” I said. “We won't be able to see them in the dark.”

Addie turned off the light. The room was dark. Charles and Lucinda glowed salmon above us. Glowing in the blackness with the vibrator on the side table and the luminous dial of my watch.

“Just close your eyes,” I said to Addie.

“You close yours first,” she said.

PAPER LANTERNS WITH CANDLES INSIDE, their flames capering in imperceptible breezes, marked the steps of the walkway. Shadow and laughter spilled from the house above, while music shorn of all but its pulse made its way like ground fog across the eucalyptus-strewn lawn. Doran and Top and Evie and Miranda drifted up the stairs, into throngs smoking and kissing cheeks and elbowing one another on the porch and around the open front door. Doran saw the familiar girl there, just inside.

He squinted and smiled, to offer evidence he wasn't gawking. To convey what he felt: he recognized her. She blinked at him, and parted her mouth slightly, then nipped her lower lip. Top and Evie and Miranda pushed inside the kitchen, fighting their way to the drinks surely waiting on a counter or in the refrigerator, but Doran hung back. He pointed a finger at the familiar girl, and moved nearer to her. She turned from her friends.

The foyer was lit with strings of red plastic chili peppers. They drooped in waves from the molding, their glow blushing cheeks, foreheads, ears, teeth.

“I know you from somewhere,” he said.

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

“You one of Jorn's friends?”

“Jorn who?”

“Never mind,” said Doran. “This is supposed to be Jorn's house, I thought. I don't know why I even mentioned it, since I don't know him. Or her.”

“My friends brought me,” said the girl. “I don't even know whose party this is. I don't know if they know.”

“My friends brought me too,” said Doran. “Wait, do you waitress at Elision, on Dunmarket?”

“I don't live here. I must know you from somewhere else.”

“Definitely, you look really familiar.”

They were yelling to be heard in the jostle of bodies inside the door. Doran gestured over their heads, outside. “Do you want to go where we can talk?”

They turned the corner, stopped in a glade just short of the deck, which was as full of revelers as the kitchen and foyer. They nestled in the darkness between pools of light and chatter. The girl had a drink, red wine in a plastic cup. Doran felt a little bare without anything.

“This'll drive me crazy until I figure it out,” he said. “Where'd you go to college?”

“Sundstrom,” she said.

“I went to Vagary.” Doran swallowed the syllables, knowing it was a confession: I'm one of those Vagary types . “But I used to know a guy who went to Sundstrom. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“I'm twenty-eight. You would have been there at the same time.” This was hardly a promising avenue. But he persisted. “Gilly Noman, that ring a bell?”

“Sounds like a girl's name.”

“I know, never mind. Where do you live?”

She mentioned a city, a place he'd never been.

“That's no help. How long have you lived there?”

“Since college. Five years, I guess.”

“Where'd you grow up?”

The city she mentioned was another cipher, a destination never remotely considered.

“Your whole life?” he asked. Doran racked his brain, but he didn't know anyone from the place.

“Yeah,” she said, a bit defensively. “What about you?”

“Right here, right around here. Wait, this is ridiculous. You look so familiar.”

“So do you.” She didn't sound too discouraged.

“Who are your friends here?”

“Ben and Malorie. You know them?”

“No, but do you maybe visit them often?”

“First time.”

“You didn't, uh, go to Camp Drewsmore, did you?” Doran watched how his feelings about the girl changed, like light through a turned prism, as he tried to fit his bodily certainty of her familiarity into each proposed context. Summer camp, for instance, forced him to consider whether she'd witnessed ball-field humiliations, or kissed one of the older boys who were his idol then, he, in his innocence, not having yet kissed anyone.

“No.”

“Drewsmore-in-the-Mist?”

“Didn't go to camp.”

“Okay, wait, forget camp, it must be something more recent. What do you do?”

“Until just now I worked on Congressman Goshen's campaign. We, uh, lost. So I'm sort of between things. What do you do?”