Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

By evening we’d received the first reports of the clown’s escape. It was the female Dingbat child who alerted us, the first we’d heard her speak aloud in weeks. We searched the isle from stem to stern but found no sign of him. With Poacher I even ascended the terrifying volcano, where C’Krrrarn and Spark Dingbat keep their enigmatical watch. They refused our questions with resounding silence, but it was plain enough there was no sign of clown there, unless he’d disintegrated in the bubbling melt. It was not until the following morn that he reappeared, on the pebble beach, contentedly munching a word balloon.

Large Silly seemed happy enough to show us what he’d done: clambered backward into his own panels, using the gutters as rungs on a ladder into the past. A trick, the clown told us, that he’d learned from a duck. With practice, he implicated, we might learn it too.

*

Page eighty-eight, panel one, the cove. A large pile of antique black-and-white furniture from Tennyson Trolley is afire. Poacher Junebug and C. Phelps Northrup turn a spit on which five word balloons have been impaled. The edges of the balloons are gently browned. Junebug and Northrup both salivate greedily, their eyes like full moons.

*

def. flotsam : flot-sam noun

1. wreckage, debris, or refuse from another character’s panels, found abandoned on the beach or floating in the water

See also jetsam

2. characters who live on the margins of cartoon lore, such as clowns, hunters, critics, monsters, children, or animals (considered offensive in some contexts)

def. jetsam : jet-sam noun

1. cargo or equipment that either sinks or is washed ashore after being thrown overboard to lighten the load of a cartoon in distress

See also flotsam

2. cartoons that have been discarded as useless or unwanted

*

“… and then, as shown on pages five through seven in issue forty-seven, Keener failed to make me a ham-and-egg breakfast in the manner to which I have become accustomed, on the morning before I was supposed to go onstage with the Rolling Stones, causing me to eat Pop-Tarts and therefore to completely fnargle the gig — hey, are you getting this down?!?!”

“Sorry, yes, if you could just go a little slower, Mr. Dingbat.”

“I’m paying you twenty-five clamshells a day to take dictation on my memoirs, critic, not to surreptitiously nibble on those crispy word balloons you’ve got ineptly hidden in your palm-frond satchel!!”

“Most sorry, Mr. Dingbat, but you really should taste this one, Poacher acquired it in C’Krrrarn, issue number seven, The Caverns of Despond , it has something of the dank savor of a truffle mushroom—”

“Give me that!!! Mmmm, crunch, slurp, crunch, slurp …”

“Now, try this one, it was spoken by a fair lass from, ahem, my own adventures, and makes a perfect tonic, if I may be so bold, a counterpoint to the first … it has the bite and tangicity of a Vermont apple, perhaps a Pink Lady or a Red Delirious …”

“Ahhh, crunch, munch, glug, glug … ah, this is hopeless, we’re never going to write my memoirs!!!”

*

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his sister running in the woods with the rabbit. His sister had grown fur and a small tail.

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his father swimming joyfully with the clown and the critic in the surf. Their three pudgy bodies resembled dolphins and it was hard to tell one from the other.

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his mother in a tower she’d painstakingly constructed out of plywood made from the woven-together heat and stink and motion lines salvaged from the panels of the other characters. She was in the upper room of the tower, humping Murkly Finger, who still wore his cape and hood.

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw King Phnudge commanding his army of slave Phnudges as they carried his castle forward, brick by brick (bricks balanced on their miserable heads because they had no arms) and reassembled it on the far side of the island.

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw Poacher Junebug with his bamboo spear and his wicker sack full of word balloons, returning from another successful expedition.

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw Spark Dingbat in his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn. They sat on two tatami mats, a large and a small, woven specially by Spark’s mom. Each subsisted, for the time being, on thought balloons, which they swallowed as soon as they arose, without opening their mouths. It was enough.

Kromer couldn’t operate hedonism but these days it operated him, in the way that a pinned cylinder operates a player piano. What he knew came mostly from books — Anaïs Nin, William S. Burroughs, The Hite Report , stuff gleaned as a teenager from his parents’ shelves. Yet in his current circle of Manhattan friends, who were mostly graduate students and legal proofreaders, Kromer played the role of satyr. The more he protested that it was only a single heroin-laced cigarette that had happened to be placed in his hand, or that his so-called threesome had consisted of scarcely more than heavy petting and a brush with sleep apnea, the more they looked to Kromer as their saint of degeneracy.

Kromer’s reputation had its origin in the parties he was dragged to by a former schoolmate: a raven-haired, baggy-eyed heiress named Greta. Though these parties were invariably disappointing, Greta invariably closed them down. When a host was reduced to switching off lights and hinting that the sofa wasn’t available, Greta took Kromer on her finishing rounds, often in the rain. Kromer worked nights, so the hours didn’t bother him, and he had nothing else to do. Greta’s legacy, a large trust fund she wasn’t permitted to touch until her thirtieth birthday, drove her mad with the determination to die squalorously before she became wealthy. “Hell, I’ve been in three kinds of threesome,” she once told Kromer, her lips tremulous and her eyes fixed on some dreamy distance, in a way that made her look as if she were on the brink of tears or insane laughter, but in fact indicated that she hadn’t slept for two or three days. “With two boys, with two girls, and with a couple. The only kind I can’t ever be in is the kind I’d really like — three men.”

Greta was, in her desultory way, the real thing. The difficulty was an uncooperative world, slouching through a new propriety under Clinton. Everyone else Greta knew had been molesting their trust funds since prep school. That was the problem — they were responsible to their money, while Greta waged war on hers. Her only privilege was the use of her father’s “man,” a do-anything emissary and delivery person, who always picked up the phone and, astonishingly, would deliver Corner Bistro hamburgers fresh and hot to any downtown dive bar, usually one occupied primarily by pre-op transsexuals, where Greta and Kromer might be hanging out. Greta sometimes needed to borrow the fifty cents to make the call. Kromer, once he’d learned the trick, urged Greta to use this service often, as it would generally put an evening out of its misery, bringing on the sleep Greta badly needed but resisted. Kromer assumed this deliveryman or fixer was really a butler, but the one time he referred to him as Jeeves, Greta seemed not to get it.

From Greta’s many aspiring transsexual acquaintances Kromer remained terrified of accepting even a blow job. None of them could have guessed what aura they’d transferred to Kromer. The process was mysterious. A book nerd, a clerk, Kromer sat failing even to drink very much among young blacks in stuffed brassieres who the following day would be late for beauty school or, in some cases, Intro Soc or Psych at Queens College. Their special language—“shemale,” “pre-op”—made them a nerd species, too, Kromer understood. Yet, the next day, attending afternoon breakfasts with his wondering cohort of PhD candidates and proofreaders, Kromer played the part of Rasputin or Gurdjieff, expected to launch foul seductions or even abductions. Perhaps this was a matter of sheer phrenology — the suggestion of something sallow and ominous in Kromer’s jawline and eye sockets.