Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons

“Totally unrelated in every way. I'm an artist's assistant. Heard of London Jerkins?”

“No.”

“To describe it briefly there's this bright purple zigzag in all his paintings, kind of a signature shape. I paint it.” He mimed the movements, the flourish at the end. “By now I do it better than him. You travel a lot for the congressman thing?”

“Not ever. I basically designed his pamphlets and door hangers.”

“Ah, our jobs aren't so different after all.”

“But I don't have one now.” She aped his zigzag flourish, as punctuation.

“Hence you're crashing parties in distant cities which happen to be where I live.”

“Hey, you didn't even know if Jorn was a guy or a girl. I at least was introduced, though I didn't catch his name.”

He put up his hands: no slight intended. “But where do I know you from? I mean, no pressure, but this is mutual, right? You recognize me too.”

“I was sure when you walked in. Now I'm not so sure.”

“Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself.”

In the grade of woods over the girl's shoulder Doran sighted two pale copper orbs, flat as coins. Fox? Bunny? Raccoon? He motioned for the girl to turn and see, when at that moment Top approached them from around the corner of the house. Doran's hand fell, words died on his lips. Tiny hands or feet scrabbled urgently in the underbrush, as though they were repairing a watch. The noise vanished.

Top had his own cup of wine, half empty. Lipstick smudged his cheek. Doran moved to wipe it off, but Top bobbed, ducking Doran's reach. He glared. “Where'd you go?” he asked Doran, only nodding his chin at the familiar girl.

“We were trying to figure out where we knew each other from,” said Doran. “This is my friend Top. I'm sorry, what's your name?”

“Vivian.”

“Vivian, Top. And I'm Doran.”

“Hello, Vivian,” said Top, curtly, raising his cup. To Doran: “You coming inside?”

“Sure, in a minute.”

Top raised his eyebrows, said: “Sure. Anyway, we'll be there. Me and Evie and Miranda.” To Vivian: “Nice to meet you.” He slipped around the corner again.

“Friends waiting for you?” said Vivian.

“Sure, I guess. Yours?”

“It's not the same. They're a couple.”

“Letting you mingle, I guess that's what you mean.”

“Whereas yours are what — dates?”

“Good question. It's unclear, though. I'd have to admit they're maybe dates. But only maybe. Vivian what?”

“Relf.”

“Vivian Relf. Totally unfamiliar. I'm Doran Close. In case that triggers any recall.” Doran felt irritable, reluctant to let go of it, possibly humiliated, in need of a drink.

“It doesn't.”

“Have we pretty much eliminated everything?”

“I can't think of anything else.”

“We've never been in any of the same cities or schools or anything at the same time.” It gave him a queasy, earth-shifty sensation. As though he'd come through the door of the party wrong, on the wrong foot. Planted a foot or flag on the wrong planet: one small step from the foyer, one giant plunge into the abyss.

“Nope, I don't think so.”

“You're not on television?”

“Never.”

“So what's the basis of all this howling familiarity?”

“I don't know if there really is any basis, and anyway I'm not feeling such howling familiarity anymore.”

“Right, me neither.” This was now a matter of pure vertigo, cliff-side terror. He didn't hold it against Vivian Relf, though. She was his fellow sufferer. It was what they had in common, the sole thing.

“You want to go back to your friends?” she said.

“I guess so.”

“Don't feel bad.”

“I don't,” lied Doran.

“Maybe I'll see you around.”

“Very good then, Less-Than-Familiar-Girl. I'll look forward to that.” Doran offered his hand to shake, mock-pompously. He felt garbed in awkwardness.

Vivian Relf accepted his hand, and they shook. She'd grown a little sulky herself, at the last minute.

Doran found Top and Evie and Miranda beyond the kitchen, in a room darkened and lit only by a string of Christmas lights, and cleared of all but two enormous speakers, as though for dancing. No one danced, no one inhabited the room apart from the three of them. There was something petulant in choosing to shout over the music, as they were doing.

“Who's your new friend?” said Miranda.

“Nobody. I thought she was an old friend, actually.”

“Sure you weren't just attracted to her?”

“No, it was a shock of recognition, of seeing someone completely familiar. The weird thing is she had the same thing with me, I think.” The language available to Doran for describing his cataclysm was cloddish and dead, the words a sequence of corpses laid head to toe.

“Yeah, it's always mutual.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Look around this party,” said Doran. “How many people could you say you've never been in a room together with before? That they didn't actually attend a lower grade in your high school, that you couldn't trace a link to their lives? That's what she and I just did. We're perfect strangers.”

“Maybe you saw her on an airplane.”

Doran had no answer for this. He fell silent.

Later that night he saw her again, across two rooms, through a doorway. The party had grown. She was talking to someone new, a man, not her friends. He felt he still recognized her, but the sensation hung uselessly in a middle distance, suspended, as in amber, in doubt so thick it was a form of certainty. She irked him, that was all he knew.

IT WAS two years before he saw the familiar girl again, at another party, again in the hills. They recognized one another immediately.

“I know you,” she said, brightening.

“Yes, I know you too, but from where?” The moment he said it he recalled their conversation. “Of course, how could I forget? You're that girl I don't know .”

“Oh, yeah.” She seemed to grow immensely sad.

They stood together contemplating the privileges of their special relationship, its utter and proven vacancy.

“It's like when you start a book and then you realize you read it before,” he said. “You can't really remember anything ahead, only you know each line as it comes to you.”

“No surprises to be found, you mean?” She pointed at herself.

“Just a weird kind of pre—” He searched for the word he meant. Pre formatting ? Pre cognition ? Pre- exhaustion ?

“More like a stopped car on the highway slowing down traffic,” she said, seemingly uninterested in his ending the unfinished word. “Not a gaudy crash or anything. Just a cop waving you along, saying Nothing to see here .”

“Doran,” he said.

“Vivian.”

“I remember. You visiting your friends again?”

“Yup. And before you ask I have no idea whose party this is or what I'm doing here.”

“Probably you were looking for me.”

“I've got a boyfriend,” she said. The line that was always awkward, in anyone's language. Then, before he could respond, she added: “I'm only joking.”

“Oh.”

“Just didn't want you thinking of me as Ben and Malorie's, oh, sort of party accessory . The extra girl, the floater.”

“No, never the extra girl. The girl I don't know from anywhere, that's you.”

“Funny to meet the girl you don't know, twice,” she said. “When there are probably literally thousands of people you do know or anyway could establish a connection with who you never even meet once.”

“I'm tempted to say small world.”

“Either that or we're very large people.”

“But maybe we're evidence of the opposite, I'm thinking now. Large world .”