J. Lennon - The Funnies

I sat down slowly, setting my jacket on the floor. I picked up the Perrier and took a sip. “I think you’re right, sir.”

“Ray,” he said, “call me Ray.”

“You got it, Ray.”

He set the drawings down, and tilted his head up, toward a corner of the ceiling. I resisted the impulse to look there too. “What was it like?” he said, then looked down at me. “Living with the Maestro?”

“You mean Dad?”

“Yeah, yeah! Did the fans flock to the old home place? Was it a barrel of monkeys? I’ll bet it was a barrel of monkeys.”

“Oh, sure,” I told him. “We had some prime yuks.”

And this is what we discussed for the rest of the meeting: a highly selective, often imaginary version of my childhood, complete with adoring throngs, madcap domestic adventures, familial harmony and mountains of fan mail. To my amazement, Burn was utterly riveted. We laughed like old friends. It was fun, in a peculiar way, inventing this zany childhood for myself, and I began to realize that this was what the Family Funnies was all about: fulfilling the wishes of the American family with a delicate, photo-album detachment, letting the reader fill in the blanks with more goofy good will instead of the usual tedium and heartbreak most people’s blanks were filled with. I realized that Ray Burn was a completely fabricated person, that he had made, at some point in his life, a conscious decision to let the world fill him up according to his wishes, which he had been letting it do for so long that he no longer had an ounce of objectivity to his name, nor wanted to. Susan was right: tabula rasa. I was impressed with her judge of character.

My departure consisted of a lot of handshaking and back-slapping. My clothes were dry now, and I looked like a third grader’s math test, blurry with inept emendations. We thanked each other profusely. I half-hoped Ken Dorn would make one of his mysterious appearances, so that I could gloat.

“Say, Ray,” I said at the threshold of his office. “Do you know where Susan is?”

“Susan who?”

“Susan Caletti? Who works here?”

“Oh, sure!” he said. “Little Susie! Yeah, she’s down in that last office.” He pointed down a long, narrow hallway, where light shined from an open door. “You two know each other?”

“Uh…She’s my editor here, I think.”

He slapped his forehead. “Right, duh! I dunno where my head gets to.”

I headed down the hallway, leaving Burn with a little wave. I wondered how long he would remember our meeting.

* * *

“What happened to you?” Susan asked me, her eyes wide.

I gave her the short version. “But the main thing is that Burn liked me! We got on like old pals. He thought the cartoons were hilarious.”

“He’s a disturbing little person, isn’t he?”

“Most assuredly.”

She gathered her things and we left via a back hallway that emptied out near the receptionist’s desk. Susan was wearing some shimmery blue dress thing and a pair of running shoes. I wanted to grope her, and did, in the elevator. She kissed me.

“Tim,” she said.

“Oh God. What now?”

“Am I that transparent? I intercepted another memo.”

“Where do you find these things?” I asked her. “Do they just cc you every time they print out a secret communiqué?”

“Recycling bin,” she said. “The intern leaves copies of everything in there. I think she secretly has it in for everybody.” She detached herself from me. “Tim, the lawyers figured out a way around your contract. It’s just a matter of choice now: you or Dorn.”

“Well, I wowed the chief,” I said, feeling my heart sink.

“That does count for a lot. For everything, in fact.”

“Except money.”

She shrugged. “Except money. But Ray’s an old softie. His heart and his head. It’s a toss-up, as far as I can see.”

“Well, no use worrying.”

“No.”

I pulled her back toward me. “So the plan?”

“Ah! The plan! You’re a Friday visitor, so you’ve never known the pleasures of the Delicious Duck Wednesday specials.”

“And I will now?” I said.

“You certainly shall,” she answered, and that did make things a lot better.

That Saturday I woke to find Pierce sitting on the couch, playing solitaire with a deck of naked-girl playing cards. He had a look of controlled boredom on his face, as if forcing himself to act like a normal person while he weathered a particularly trying inner squall. I got myself some cereal and sat on the easy chair, facing him.

“You’re home,” I said.

He carefully did not look up from his card game. “Gilly’s coming.”

“Here? Really?”

“She’s picking me up. We’re going to go to Philly.”

“Philly!”

He nodded, then pulled from his pocket the worn-out warehouse key. I hadn’t seen it since I found it in the safety deposit box. “We’re going to find what it’s to.”

I tried to conceal my excitement. I hadn’t forgotten the key, but I’d filed away semipermanently the curiosity connected with it, sure that Pierce would never get around to finding the warehouse. I asked him how they were going to look for it.

“Gilly has a plan,” he said. It seemed that the two of them had spent much of the previous weekend poring square-eyed over the Yellow Pages and a street map of Philadelphia, marking with colored sticky dots the locations of every self-storage warehouse in the city. They were going to go and look for the right place in her car.

“But there have to be dozens of warehouses,” I said.

“Two hundred fourteen.”

“You’re going to go to two hundred fourteen warehouses in one day?”

He shook his head. “That’s where Gilly’s plan comes in,” he said, his eyes gleaming. Apparently Pierce had some sort of aura that Gillian could detect surrounding his person, as did everyone. People related to a person were said to share elements of that person’s aura, and it was possible to sense a person’s presence from his possessions or from items that were once his. It seemed that Gillian planned to go to each warehouse, ascertain if any Pierce-related aura was hovering about, and decide to inquire about the key based on that determination. As Pierce described the plan to me, in the same pained, earnest voice he might have used to tell me about a ball game or a television program, I began to feel like the world had vanished around me while I slept and been replaced with another one which, though similar, differed in certain subtle, disturbing ways.

“Aura?” I said. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah. You’ve got one, Mom, Mal, everybody.” He said that two hundred fourteen was too many warehouses even to drive by, but that Gillian would be able to sense the correct general area by a method of “emotional triangulation” she had devised herself. It involved a hand mirror and a candle, among other less palpable elements. “It’s some sort of witchy thing,” Pierce said. “I don’t totally understand it.”

My cereal had gone a bit soggy listening to this, so I took a few contemplative bites and considered the plan.

“Not to take the wind out of your sails,” I said. “But it sounds a little wonky to me.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, well…”

“Do you believe in that stuff?”

He pursed his lips, thinking. “I believe in her,” he said finally.

“Well, okay, good.”

“She thinks I need to go find the place. She says it’s like there’s a little part of Dad that isn’t fully dead, but wants to be, and I have to go put it to rest.”

“Can she talk to the dead?” I asked.

He looked shocked. “Of course not!” he said, turning back to his game. “Don’t be ridiculous.”