The Funnies Read online

  Then, one night, they were playing the game, criticizing a movie they’d seen in which a woman leaves a man. Susan argued she had every right to leave; Lyle thought she had a responsibility to him.

  “But she didn’t see it that way,” Susan said.

  “But that’s the way it was,” Lyle said.

  “Not for her,” Susan said.

  “Everybody doesn’t get their own personal view of things that they can act on,” Lyle said. “There have to be rules. Or I could go committing heinous acts whenever I wanted.”

  “But you wouldn’t. Most people don’t want to.”

  “Because the rules have told them they shouldn’t.”

  “What if there were no rules? What would you do if there weren’t rules?”

  Lyle considered a moment. “Leave you.”

  That hung in the air for a moment. Then Susan said, “What rule is keeping you?”

  “I owe it to you to stay.”

  “You owe me nothing,” she said. So he left.

  * * *

  “I thought we were still playing the game,” Susan told me. She licked her lips. There was something terrifying about her face in its pure and open expressiveness; the whole of her could be seen there by anyone who wanted to look. It was as if she’d left her car unlocked in a bad part of town. “There was no change in tone,” she said, “no escalation of emotion, nothing. He just walked out, then came back for his camera equipment in a few days.”

  I had been plucking grass from the ground between my legs as she talked, and now when I looked down I noticed a small bare circle, which I had cleared. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be.” She shook her head. “I hated him. I’m not just saying that, either. I hated him all that time and didn’t even notice. That’s how clueless I am. I let myself be in love with a guy I totally hated, and when he left me I cried like a little friggin’ girl.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I don’t even much like me.”

  * * *

  We went on some rides. Susan headed straight for the tilt-a-whirl and insisted on riding it over and over, with the unhinged scowl of a mad Civil War lieutenant driving again and again, with tragic hopelessness, into enemy lines. Afterward we tried the Ferris wheel. It turned out to be pretty slow after all. Several times it stopped turning entirely, due to some ominous mechanical trouble, and as we swung in silence at the top of the world, I looked down at the crowd and picked out the Family Funnies characters in their plush, outsized costumes, frolicking maniacally in the dust below. “Is that you?” Susan asked, pointing.

  “I think that’s my brother.”

  We watched in silence as the surrogate Bobby made his way through the throng of revelers, throwing his arms in the air, doing little dances. It was disconcerting, like watching Mickey Mouse get drunk. Then I noticed Mal. He was sitting on a bench, holding an ice cream cone and gazing into the sky, perhaps at the Ferris wheel, perhaps at me. His glasses, reflecting sun, were twin glinting blobs that made my eyes pucker. I held up my hand against them.

  What was he doing here alone? I couldn’t recall ever seeing him at FunnyFest before. Once, he even told me that he didn’t like what my father turned into during the ‘Fest, when Riverbank took him into its greedy arms.

  Or was I making that up? Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember it actually happening. With the afterimage of Mal’s glasses still burning in my eyes, everything seemed to have an equal chance at truth or falsehood. Even my childhood memories were open to interpretation. When my sight came back, Mal was gone, and the Ferris wheel jerked into action.

  After the ride, I wanted to find the characters, to see how the costumes looked close up, but they had all disappeared, as if evading me. I forgot about them for a while, but when Susan and I were waiting in line for foot-long hot dogs I saw my mother ducking behind some shrubs that ran along the fence about forty feet away.

  “Can I leave you here a second?” I said. “I want to check something out.”

  “Sure.”

  I walked along the bushes, trying to find the gap the false Dot had passed through. For some time, I could see nothing. Then, feet: giant orange cartoon feet, milling around barely visible behind the hedgerow. I ducked down as far as I could, closed my eyes, and plunged through the branches, emerging in a peculiar cul-de-sac, a gumdrop-shaped space between the shrubs and the weathered wooden fence that demarcated the fairgrounds’ border. It seemed to have once been the site of a ticket booth or power station, now removed. In it stood six teenagers, smoking marijuana, each dressed up as a member of my family. I identified the Tim costume immediately by the striped T-shirt I was always made to wear in the strip. Its inhabitant, a thin-faced girl with a squint, held my head under her right arm.

  “Hey, man,” she said. “I know you.”

  But I didn’t know her. I didn’t know any of them. There was something familiar about each, though: a bend of the nose or an expanse of forehead that might have been hallmarks of Riverbank’s stagnant genetic pool. But the girl I didn’t recognize at all.

  “You’re me,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah.” She had a slightly ironic well-I’ll-be tone that I didn’t much like.

  The others giggled. They were all boys. Somebody said, “Small fucking world.”

  I realized I was terribly out of place here, that the costumes had not been worth looking for, and that in finding them I had stumbled upon a hostile and unfathomable miniculture. I didn’t understand teenagers at all anymore. Where my generation had embraced irony with a taste for its novelty and its shock value with adults, these kids breathed it like pure oxygen, taking more power from it than I had ever thought possible, and crushed earnestness like it was so many soft drink cans. When they seemed sincere, they were really taking irony a step further, mocking the very concept of speaking one’s mind. What adults thought of them one way or another was of no significance. I feared them terribly. “Uh, sorry,” I said. “Wrong turn.” I ducked back under the bushes, leaving my ass exposed to any number of punting feet. Somebody snorted, and then they all did.

  “Where did you go?” Susan asked when I got back to the doggie stand. When I told her, she frowned. “If this was Disneyland, they’d get fired just for taking the heads off. Did you know that? At Disneyland, that’s just cause for instant expulsion.”

  “I had no idea.”

  We walked around, eating. Most of the attractions were, in fact, food-related; vendors sold everything from falafel to pork rinds to chicken lo mein. One enterprising man had named his menu items—standard American stuff, burgers and fries—after characters in the strip. So far, nobody had stopped him. I thought of ordering a Coca-Cola à la Carl.

  “Oh, look!” Susan said. “There’s a Timburger!”

  Sure enough, there was. My burger had gouda cheese and bacon on it and cost six dollars and fifty cents.

  I was beginning to feel a bit creeped out. Besides the prevailing depersonalization of myself and everyone I was related to, the place was swarming with children. Children made me uncomfortable. They had a smell, a confectionary pissiness to them, and all the self-possession of an escaped pack of zoo animals. For a moment, I had a gruesome epiphany, much like the stoned realization that a muscle, your tongue, was filling your mouth: that all around the fairgrounds, purchased food was being transformed into Kinderfleisch. It was happening now, right now, as I thought about it! I felt woozy and reached out automatically to Susan to steady myself. Her shoulder was hot and round and fit in my palm like a peach.

  That’s when I saw Ken Dorn. He was standing alone just outside the fairground gate, eating what looked to be a Timburger. When he saw us he grinned with devilish self-satisfaction, as if he had engineered our nascent acquaintance for some as-yet-concealed personal gain. In retrospect it seems like he must have walked toward us, but if memory serves, we were drawn toward him, as if toward the darkened entrance to a funhouse.

  “Hello, Ken,” I said, trying to preempt
him. He was still grinning.

  “Timmy,” he said, “Susan.”

  “What are you doing here?” Susan asked him flatly.

  “Oh, just surrounding myself with the trappings, you know.”

  She looked at me. “You two know each other?”

  “We met at the wake.”

  “Oh, right.” She bit her lip.

  “How’s the drawing going, Tim?” Dorn asked me. In his tone was something of the teens I had earlier encountered.

  “Better, better. Harder than I thought.”

  “Yes, it’s actual work, isn’t it.”

  We stared at one another, me attempting to figure him out, to exhume his motives, whatever they might be; him seeming to know everything about me there was to know. I finally looked away, back at the fairgrounds.

  “You’re getting along with your new artist, I trust?” I heard him ask Susan.

  “Swimmingly, thanks.”

  Suddenly I was tired. Maybe it was the heat, but part of it must have been Dorn. I didn’t have it in me for a conversation with him; he begged a profusion of second guesses I didn’t feel like making. He droned at Susan and Susan droned back, and I stood with my hands in my pockets and my eyes half-shut until they stopped.

  * * *

  Susan pulled her car into our driveway. “Well,” she said.

  “Well.”

  “Nice day, huh?”

  “Very. Do you have a place to stay?”

  She shrugged. “I can find a motel.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “Stay at our place.” I quickly added, “I can sleep on the couch. You take my bed.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t.”

  “Or my father’s.”

  She grimaced, and it was decided.

  Inside, I knocked on Pierce’s door, while Susan shut herself in my bedroom. “Pierce,” I said. “Are you up?”

  “I am lying down,” came the measured reply.

  “My editor’s staying over. I’m taking the couch.”

  “Your who?”

  “Susan, from the syndicate?”

  A long pause. “Oh, okay.” He sounded better, in possession of some rudimentary grip. I hadn’t seen him all week, and from my own observations and evidence from the bathroom, deduced that he hadn’t bathed or showered during that time.

  “We were at FunnyFest all day,” I said. Silence. “It wasn’t too bad, you know. In fact it was silly. The mayor almost drowned.”

  Pierce said nothing, and I regretted saying anything. Then he said, “I don’t think any of that is silly.”

  “Whatever you say,” I said automatically.

  “That’s what I say,” said my brother.

  seventeen

  In the morning I woke determined to spend some time with my mother. I lay on the couch, still groggy, working out the logistics. Susan could go off to FunnyFest alone, I supposed, and I could take the Caddy to the nursing home; maybe I’d bring Mom down to Washington Crossing, if they’d let me. This seemed like a plausible scheme, and afforded me the momentum to get up and rummage through the fridge for picnic elements. What I found was less food than archived material, so I pulled on the dishwashing gloves and began deaccessioning, lobbing each fungal mass into the trash bag until there were only unopened condiments left, inertly maturing in their glass cloisters. I sponged down the shelves, put on some pants and headed for the South Side Market, five or so blocks up the street. Their prices were insane, geared toward shoppers who would rather pay four dollars a pound for butter than wait in a checkout line with poor people, but I was driven, and charged it all to a crusty old credit card. I came back to the sound of the shower—Susan, I supposed, was up—and bustled around the kitchen making sandwiches and fresh iced tea.

  The bathroom door opened, and footsteps came toward me down the hall. “Sleep well?” I called out.

  It was Pierce standing there, his cheeks scrubbed raw and sunken like ruined vegetables. His voice came out quiet and cracked. “Fine, I guess.” He eyed the sandwiches.

  “Do you want one?” I said.

  He nodded. I took a sandwich out of its plastic bag and handed it to him. He took a little bite off the corner, then began tearing off huge chunks with his front teeth, as if he had just chased and killed it on the savanna. I watched him while I made another sandwich.

  “Another?” I said. He swallowed the last bite, then shook his head no, so I bagged the fresh sandwich too. I gathered together my makeshift lunch and put it in a paper grocery sack, then slid it into the austere recesses of the fridge.

  “Have you been eating?” I asked him.

  “Mostly raisins.”

  “Just raisins?”

  He shrugged. “Other dried fruits, too.” He put one gently shaking hand on his stomach. Already his cheeks looked a little fuller, though that might have been my imagination. “Other things seemed poisoned, somehow. I’m a little worried about the sandwich.”

  “How’d it taste?”

  He nodded. “Good. Going on a picnic?”

  “I thought I’d go visit Mom, maybe take her out to Wash Crossing.”

  “Can I come?”

  “Yeah, sure. Should I make you another sandwich? For lunch?”

  He looked at the pile of ingredients, eating them with his eyes. “Would you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He stuck out his hand, to steady himself against the counter. “I think I might lie down for a bit.”

  “Maybe you ought to.”

  He walked halfway across the living room before he stopped, his hands out at his sides like a dancer’s. “Tim?”

  “Yeah?” His voice had the quality of a wax-cylinder recording, tremulous and faint.

  “There’s somebody else in the house, man.”

  “It’s my friend, Susan. My editor. Do you remember?”

  “No.”

  “She’s in town for the weekend. I told her to stay in my room. Is that okay?”

  He made it the rest of the way to the couch, supporting himself with delicate gropings of the chair, the end table. “That’s cool, sure,” he said.

  I sat down with him. We turned on the TV, but since it was Sunday there were only religious shows on. Pierce noticed the Family Funnies videotape lying out by the VCR. “Were you watching that?” he said.

  “Yeah. Brad Wurster did the animation, you know. He’s the guy teaching me cartooning.”

  He was silent for some time, touching his face lightly, like one might a lover’s. “I don’t think you ought to be doing this whole thing. You can stay here forever for all I care, in fact that would be really cool, but you should get some kind of job instead.”

  I took a minute to let that sink in. “Do you have any reason for telling me that?” I said. “Because it’s really hard to pass up. It’s a lot of money.”

  He snorted. “Money corrupts, bro,” he said, half-ironically. “And besides that, you won’t ever stop. And you’re too nice a guy to do it.”

  Nice. The innocent chime of it filled me with gratitude. I reached out and touched his shoulder, and he nearly jumped out of his seat.

  “Jesus!”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I backed off a few inches, trying to stifle the urge to touch him again.

  “It’s okay, but. Man alive.” He shuddered. I waited for him to get back on the subject of me and the strip, but he never did, only held himself against an ambient and imaginary chill. I heard movement in the hall.

  “Hi,” Susan said. “Pierce. Remember me, Susan?”

  He managed a smile. “I guess we never officially met.”

  She extended a hand to be shaken, and I cringed, but Pierce took it gently. “Forgive my, you know, inhospitality. I’m coming off a spell.”

  “Sorry.” She seemed not to be made uncomfortable by this, and I was relieved.

  “Well, you know,” Pierce said.

  There wasn’t much to talk about after that. I told Susan to help herself to breakfast—I had bought some cereal—and that Pie
rce and I were headed for the nursing home. “I can meet you back here at some point,” I said.

  She nodded. “Well, okay,” she said, and headed for the kitchen. I felt like I had let her down, and didn’t know what to say. What were the rules for accommodating one’s editor-friend? I had no idea. I was baffled enough to want to cry.

  In the Cadillac, Pierce said, “She’s cute.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. Are you, you know?”

  “No!” I paused to swerve around a dead animal. “I like her.”

  “She’s cool.”

  I half-turned to him. “What’s your girlfriend like?”

  “She’s a witch,” he said.

  “That’s not very kind of you.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “She’s a witch. Like, a wiccan. Herbs and spells and shit. She lives in the Pines.”

  I thought about the sand I’d seen on the floor of the Cadillac. It was still there now. “She’s a Piney? You’re dating a Piney witch?” A lot of people do not know that there is a giant forest in the middle of New Jersey, called the Pine Barrens. It’s all trees, sand and cranberry bogs, and is home to the cleanest natural water and most isolated people within five hundred miles.

  “I wouldn’t call it dating,” Pierce said, but I could see he already thought he had said too much. I didn’t say anything more about it.

  The first thing I noticed at the nursing home was Bobby’s car, parked at the far end of the lot, away from the other cars. I pointed it out to Pierce, and he nodded. “I forgot,” he said. “They come on Sundays. It’s like, their day.”

  “They don’t like it when other people come? Does Rose come weekends?”

  “Rose comes Tuesdays, I think. Mornings. Bitty during the week, but I don’t think lately.” He slumped in the seat. “I’m sure he’ll be pissed. Whatever.”