Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

“What good is wicker armor on an island?!?!”

“I’m just trying to get you prepared for a new life, lover.”

“!@&$%#! I don’t want a new life! I want my old life!”

“You’ll eventually have to lead this island, Theo. Nobody else is going to do it. Peter Rabbit isn’t going to do it. The black-and-white characters aren’t suited for it. Poacher Junebug’s discredited himself. King Phnudge, well, he’s just not right. And Murkly is a villain.”

“That’s another thing, I don’t want to go around there anymore, I don’t like the way he looks at you!”

“He can’t help himself, Theo. I just wanted to bring him a sun hat.”

“Did he let you into his little hiding place?”

“Yes, we sat and had a very nice talk.”

“I don’t want you to have a very nice talk!!!!”

“Yes, dear. I won’t in the future.”

“How can I lead the island when I can’t even keep tabs on the Dingbats?!?!?!”

*

Spark Dingbat ascended the volcano easily. It had steps. Near the top he passed a small pyramid of skulls in various shapes and sizes — a skull duck with giant ovoid eyes, a skull robot with antenna ears, a skull pig with a tiny bone beret incorporated into its cranium.

C’Krrrarn perched at the rim of the volcano, seeming bigger than he had in the plane, looming like an outcropping of the rock itself. As the tiny beret was to the pig’s skull, so C’Krrrarn was to the volcano. Beyond C’Krrrarn, Spark saw trickles of steam seeping from between burnt-umber rocks, the undersides of which glowed orangely, like enormous briquettes. Seagulls massed on C’Krrrarn’s brow and shoulders, their dried liquid droppings striping him in the manner of a jailbird character, perhaps some crow or weasel standing before a parole board of bulldogs.

“I hope I’m not bothering you.”

C’Krrrarn did not speak.

“You didn’t look like you were doing anything.”

C’Krrrarn did not speak.

“Are you waiting for something?”

C’Krrrarn did not speak.

“My mom says you could just probably swim off this island any time you wanted, or else maybe walk along the ocean floor, but then where would you go, because it’s not like you have a home somewhere, and maybe in a way this island is as much like a home as you’ve ever known, and maybe we even crashed here because you were sort of attracted to the island from the airplane, like you felt some kind of geomagnetic tropism or maybe you glanced down and it reminded you of your mom and dad, do you think that might be right?”

C’Krrrarn did not speak.

“Are you going to kill us all? Just kidding.”

C.D.N.S.

“How can you sit like that in the same position for so long? Don’t your legs or your butt fall asleep?”

C.D.N.S.

“My mom is weaving you a tatami mat out of all this crud from the beach. Do you know what a tatami mat is? She said you would.”

C.D.N.S.

“Do you mind if I sit here for a minute?”

*

Note to artist: Everywhere along the bottom gutters of the pages now, muddy footprints, rabbit droppings, and Dingbat spoor ( ed.: What does that look like? ), forming an abject trail of smeary pictograms spelling out an unknown future.

*

Page forty-two, panel one, King Phnudge, alone in the woods. The island’s sole monkey has approached him from underneath a fern. The monkey carries a hand-cranked music organ and wears a top hat. King Phnudge raises his eyebrows in delighted surprise.

Page forty-two, panel two, a campfire in a clearing. Large Silly and Poacher Junebug and King Phnudge and C. Phelps Northrup devour shreds of the monkey, whose scorched remains still hang from a spit over the fire. The monkey’s carcass still clutches the organ. Northrup wears the top hat.

Page forty-two, panel three, in the brush at one side of the clearing, Peter Rabbit and Lisa Dingbat stared wide-eyed at clown, hunter, king, and critic as they eat the monkey. The rabbit and the girl are unseen by the others.

Page forty-two, panel four, moving on all fours, the rabbit and the girl silently slip into the woods, where they resume nibbling on ferns.

Page forty-two, panel five, night, the campfire, now abandoned by the others. Theophobe Dingbat tiptoes up to the extinguished fire, where he locates a charred monkey rib. He sucks at it thoughtfully.

Page forty-two, panel six, Murkly Finger. He crouches in his cavernous shard of airplane hull, reading a comic book, which is opened to a splash page showing C’Krrrarn towering over an alpine village.

*

From where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat could see into the island whole, as if he sat within a camera obscura. He saw his mother, now outfitting Poacher Junebug and King Phnudge and C. Phelps Northrup in thatched armor, adjusting the palm-frond breastplates over their torsos while they stood at awkward attention, trying not to disappoint.

He saw Large Silly covered in baked mud, with dried grasses stuck to his arms and legs, sitting beside the creek masturbating.

He saw his sister and the rabbit hiding in the grass watching Large Silly.

He saw his father standing on the beach angrily punching his agent’s number into a wicker cell phone and listening for a signal.

As though with X-ray vision he saw, too, into Murkly Finger’s lair. Murkly Finger sat surrounded by suitcases from the wrecked plane. Alongside the clothing Murkly Finger had laid out as a pallet on the ground was a neat row of reading materials. Among them was Spark’s own collection of Dingbat Family Cavalcade and Dingbat Collectibles Catalog . Murkly Finger also had a set of limited-edition clothbound Tennyson Trolley Sunday Pages , taken from C. Phelps Northrup’s luggage, a Dover paperback of The Seventh Voyage of the Phnudges , a copy of The Oxford Treasury of Comic Strips , and a stack of HORRENDOUS TALES OF C’KRRRARN! , issues number one through thirteen, sealed in plastic sleeves.

He saw the grave his sister and the rabbit had dug for the blackened skeleton of the monkey.

He saw the island’s birds and bugs.

He saw himself, too, seated beside C’Krrrarn on the rim of the volcano.

Spark Dingbat saw the island whole.

*

Poem

Say, Keener Dingbat, I wrote you a poem

On a funny old island where much has gone wrong

Sit right back and you’ll hear of my love

For your coiled scribbled hair and your spidery legs

Not so spidery though as the giant spider I killed

To protect you my love but should I have let it eat

Your husband and kids and that wretched vile clown?

Oh, Keener Dingbat, you’re haunting my days

I seek you in the pale lagoon and at the hidden spring

I seek you like a sheriff hunting a walnut oh shit

I stole that line, I can’t help myself, I steal everything, I am

Your Villain,

Murkly

*

From The Journal of C. Phelps Northrup

August 12

Rustling in our armor like a flock of pigeons we stormed Murkly Finger’s lair at dawn. We all partookipated — I mean, all able-bodied adultish manlike characters, even the dissolute clown, with the sole exception of Theophobe Dingbat, who declined command of our sally, leaving that to his spouse. The scoundrel Finger proffered no resistance — rather, welcomed us inside, so it was we at last unearthed his secret: not the yearned-for stockpile of nourishing provisions but the histories of our earlier selves, the panels and pages of our lives precursive to banishment on this island. Each of us retreated initially to various corners of the island, to mull on that from which we’d been distranded. Before he secreted it from my meanderish eyes, I glimpsed a sample of the earliest appearances of Poacher Junebug, in Frontier Follies —once a much less squat and feral figure, Poacher at his first flush had the stature and equipoise of a young Dan’l Boone. And how King Phnudge must miss his Queen and Phnudglings! I myself mourned an earlier self, the dapper gadabout wit who’d mercilessly shuttered theatrical kerfuffles with his encaustic pen.