J. Lennon - The Funnies

“Can I come visit you and Uncle Pierce?” she said. She unfolded the washcloth and put it on her head, not in a silly way but reverentially, like an old lady in church. “Maybe over school vacation. Maybe for Christmas.”

This jolted me. Christmas! With my brother, at home! Not to mention Thanksgiving, Labor Day. Holidays with Pierce and Mom, opening her gifts, holding them up to her inscrutable eyes. “Sure,” I said. “Any time.”

“How about soon, before school?”

“Well, I have to draw cartoons. And you’d have to ask your mom and dad…”

She took off the washcloth and dropped it on the pile. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, and slid off the bed. I felt jilted, as if by a lover.

“Goodnight,” I said weakly.

She turned, ran back, stretched out to me and gave me a kiss. “Sleepy dreams,” she said, and hurried out the door.

* * *

In the morning everybody ate cold cereal. The options were dumbfounding: every sugar-rich concoction under the sun, each represented by a jolly mascot. I ate the cereal formerly known as Super Sugar Crisp, which in this enlightened age had become Super Golden Crisp, its public image transformed from cheesy harbinger of tooth decay to precious Incan artifact. My mouth ached, but I scooped out every last drop of cloying milk. Looking around the table, I could see the same expression of awe on everyone’s face; it was the only moment of unqualified joy I had witnessed under this roof.

My letter was finished, sealed and stamped, thanks to a booklet of self-adhesive American flags I’d found in the kitchen drawer; I left some change for the postage, feeling I’d taken enough already. Now the letter was in the pocket of my jeans, awaiting a mailbox.

After breakfast, I thanked Nancy. She nodded gravely, her eyes still luminous from the sugar high. I kissed Sam on the cheek and she accepted with grace. “Tell Uncle Pierce hi,” she said.

“You bet.”

“Tell him I love him!” This was irony, something I’d never before heard from Sam, but which seemed to fit. Nancy and Bobby didn’t recognize it as such. Expressions of unease overpowered their faces.

“I will,” I said.

Bobby drove me back to the hotel. He was strangely chatty. I wondered if he was always like this mornings, before the day defeated him. “Too bad you can’t come to the plant. I ought to show you around sometime.”

In fact, there was no reason I couldn’t go, except that I hadn’t been asked. “That would be great.”

“Show you the sterile radiating units, they’re something else. Had to order them special from Switzerland. And the shredder, which actually is called the homogenizing refuse deintegrator, but we call it the shredder.”

“Yikes.”

“Oh, it’s all perfectly airtight, perfectly clean. Smells like a doctor’s office in there, no kidding.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Like a trip to the doctor’s,” he said, apparently to himself. We were silent for a while.

“Sorry I came in late,” I said.

He waved this off. “Barely noticed.”

“Good.”

“So, Tim. Think about what I said yesterday. About Mom.”

“You bet.”

“I know you think it’s the right thing. But you’re only doing it for yourself, to feel good about yourself. That’s no reason to take an old lady away from the place where she‘ll be safe.”

I wondered if Bobby had really looked at the nursing home. The degeneration of people’s bodies, the madness, the unrelenting smell of urine. I said, “Well, that’s food for thought.”

We had come to the hotel. A woman with antennae walked into the revolving door with a man in a robot suit. Bobby didn’t appear to notice.

“So keep in touch,” he said.

“I will.”

We shook. “That was a great visit.”

“Sure was.”

He nodded. “Okay, right. See you, bro.”

I got out of the car, straining to come up with a response. “Right on,” I told him, and shut the door. The sound it made was quiet as a breath.

* * *

I was among the first to arrive for my panel. To my surprise, there was a name placard already in place for me, along with three others: Bennett Koch, Lynn Bismarck and Ken Dorn.

I actually did an authentic double-take. Ken Dorn? I didn’t think he’d ever had his own strip before. The other people I knew of only vaguely: Koch’s strip, “Pangaea,” had a lot of cute dinosaurs in it, and Bismarck’s was one of those serial soap-opera things, the kind that now invariably looked like Roy Lichtenstein paintings, I forgot the name.

But Ken Dorn! I began to get a creepy feeling, like he’d been planted. I entertained the notion that he had somehow replaced me without my knowing: had I been betrayed by the Burn Syndicate’s corporate honchos? Or by the woman I possibly sort of loved? I took the sealed letter from my pocket and turned it over in my hands. I felt like a fool, and thought about tearing it to pieces.

“Timmy Mix. Fancy meeting you.”

He was beginning to grow a tiny mustache and goatee, and had gotten his hair shaved closer to his head. “I’d imagine you’re brimming over with insights from your training, mmm?”

“Hello, Ken,” I said, stowing the letter. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Don’t know? You haven’t taken any notes?” He reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a small stack of 3x5 note cards, fastened with a rubber band. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this. The issues are compelling indeed.”

“Well…I’ve never done anything like it before.”

“I would suppose not.”

“So what strip have you taken over?” I said, trying to sting him. He looked off into the air, though, and crossed his arms in a pose of mock contemplation.

“Oh, I’ve taken over the inking for a few. But I’m most interested in taking over full creative control.” He raised his eyebrows and turned to me, grinning. “Someday, that is.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, crossing my own arms. I was almost a full foot taller than Ken Dorn. Push him over , I thought.

“I was talking to Ray the other day, and he seemed quite impressed with my drawings. I didn’t have anything prepared, of course, but it was no trouble dashing off a few sketches…”

“Ray? Ray Burn?”

“Yes, Ray Burn. A good man, wouldn’t you say, Timmy? What did you talk about the last time you saw him?”

I cleared my throat. Dorn leaned back and plucked from a chair a glazed donut and a cup of orange juice. “Well,” I said, “he told me I’m the sentimental favorite.”

Dorn took a large bite of donut, laughing from behind his closed lips. “So you are,” he said, chewing. “So you are.”

“Where did you get those?”

“These?” he said, holding out the donut and juice. “There was a table in the hall. Participants only!”

“Then you’ll excuse me,” I said.

“Of course! See you behind the mike!”

* * *

Everyone seemed to have donuts and juice but me, and if there had been a table in the hall, it was gone now. I stood helpless among the conventioneers, squinting into various rooms. Finally I gave up and was turning to take my place in the Green Room when I saw him at last: Art Kearns.

Kearns was being escorted by a jowly middle-aged woman wearing an “Art’s Kids” T-shirt. He clenched her arm with one hand and a scuffed wooden cane with the other. Both hands, along with the rest of Art Kearns, were shaking. He was a large man, even in this sad, crumpled state, still bearing the profile of the Wyoming cowboy he was said to have been before he became famous. He wore a white shirt and bolo tie, and a pair of dirty black jeans; his head was nearly bare, with a little red knoll of blotchy skin poking up through his hair. He was blinking, blinking, blinking his eyes, as if something tiny and painful was lodged under both lids.