The Funnies (40 page)

There was more to it than just the walls, of course. We walked around the room like baffled souls thrown into purgatory, sifting through the rest, amazed that it could all have existed and been brought here, to become a part of this. At the foot of each painted character was a brand-new red metal wagon filled with junk: things my father had collected over the years that had been ours or had something to do with us. In my own wagon I found every report card I'd ever gotten, including the ones from college, which I couldn't remember ever sending home; all my medical records up to the age of eighteen; drawings I had made, presents I had gotten my parents for Christmas, clothes I had worn as a baby. And my penciled blueprint, blurred by the years and fuzzy at the folds, my drug-induced blueprint of our cartoon house, with all the superimposed rooms and imaginary spaces. I unfolded it gently, going easy on the creases, as if it were a map to buried treasure: the fading lines were palpable under my fingers, drawn with such vehemence they tore through in places. I could not recall the passionate anger that made them.

I went through Mal's wagon too. My father had filled it with things of my mother's—a tarnished silver barrette; a shot glass; a summer blouse, the fabric worn thin. There was a manila envelope containing black and white photographs of my mother and Mal, twenty, thirty years ago, walking through a park I couldn't identify, holding hands. The pictures were grainy and out-of-focus, and had the candid tawdriness of paid reconnaissance. There were other photos too, washed-out color snapshots my father had certainly taken, of my mother with Pierce: at the shore, holding him by his toddler hands above the roiling surf; in front of our high school, a mortarboard for him, a corsage for her. And dozens more, none that I had ever seen, none that had ever made it into the family albums. The spy pictures upset me, but these were truly shocking. How long had he hoarded them, intending someday to symbolically cede my mother to Mal? For all the misogynist presumption of the gesture, what truly amazed me was the endurance of his self-loathing: he had known for so long that he was no good, and never left the very people who reminded him of it.

It was Pierce's wagon that was strangest, though; he had the expected childhood relics, but his pile was comprised mostly of unfamiliar, unexplained objects. A corncob pipe, for instance, and a linen napkin stained with blood. The four of us gathered silently around him, picking through these things and spreading them out on the floor. A flashlight. A shoehorn. A deck of handmade playing cards, drawn hastily in pencil and cut out of yellow lined paper. Ice tongs.

“I sort of remember these,” Pierce said, picking up the tongs. It was the first thing any of us had said. “I found these in somebody's garbage. He took them away from me.”

“What about the napkin?” Gilly asked him.

Pierce stared at it for a long time. Something was happening to his face, but he kept it in check. “I don't know about that,” he said finally, and we didn't ask him about anything more.

Eventually, the three of us moved away and looked over the rest of it. There was a cartoon of our house executed in masking tape on the storeroom floor, and a lot of old bicycles—I recognized them from years before—hanging from the ceiling on ropes. The wall space between the characters was papered with fan mail to my father, adoring letters from children requesting drawings and signatures. I read a few, but mostly they were drearily similar, like kindergarten art projects. Pierce didn't get up, only worked his quiet way through his wagon, greeting each object with long, earnest concentration, like an anthropologist trying to decode the messages of the past. Which was what Pierce was doing, except the past was his own, of course, and not any of our business. We met up outside and waited for him, shivering a little in the cold, watching cars pass on Girard Avenue.

It seemed like hours. When he finally came out, he got into the back of the car without saying a thing, and Gilly got in next to him.

“Drive?” I said to Susan. She took the keys. All the silent way home, we held hands, listening to the sound the wheels made on the road and the even, exhausted breathing of Gilly and Pierce in the back.

My comic strip is called “The Family Facts.” Susan, who despite her bad experiences with the Burn Syndicate remains my editor, is trying to get actual newspapers to run it. She is more optimistic about its prospects than I am. It's not that it's bad: it's just true, or at least true to my memory, which of course doesn't make it all that much truer than the Family Funnies itself. There
is
something funny about a family that falls apart, or almost does; I'm certain of it. But there is a family out there named Mix that doesn't fall apart, and Ken Dorn is its patriarch, and I wonder, Susan's enthusiasm notwithstanding, if people might prefer Ken's version of events.

The backyard studio is now a studio and office, home to Susan's upstart comics syndicate, which is called Cal-Mix Enterprises (her title; I think it sounds like a cat food). So far its cartoonists' stable echoes with the snorting of a single stud: Tyro proved easy to draw away from Fake Comix, and he is overhauling “The Emerald Forest” for its new run in an expanded number of urban free weeklies. Sometimes I visit galleries with him in New York, or he comes down to Mixville for dinner, which Pierce makes for everybody when he's in the right mood, which is not very often but more often than before.

We have not met Bobby and Nancy's new daughter, and it seems increasingly unlikely that Mike will be around for the birth of his son (I went to the doctor's with Bitty and saw him on the video monitor—pinioning his monochrome arms, his little heart winking like a firefly). Also Rose hasn't spoken to us since we told her about the warehouse, and I doubt she'll go down to see it. But that's to be expected. If there's anything I've learned from my new involvement with my family, it's that voluntary change in anyone is exceptional indeed, myself included. I am loath to imagine what I'd be doing now if none of this had happened to me; then again, I feel awful viewing my parents' demise as a great opportunity, even if that's what it turned out, in part, to be.

And I remembered a weird experience. I don't know why I didn't think of it on the trip to the warehouse, and in retrospect I can't understand why I ever forgot it at all, so singular is it in my life: it makes me wonder what else I've forgotten.

This happened during my sophomore year in college. The art supply section of the college bookstore was open late because it was finals time, and I was buying a bunch of pencils and newsprint for a drawing project I was working on. It was almost dark outside, and there was nobody else in the store save for the clerks. I was thinking about ringing up my purchases and leaving when I looked up at the counter, which stood about fifty feet from where I was standing, and saw somebody waiting in line who looked exactly like me.

Now, what was odd was that I knew everybody in the art department, and in fact had been keeping my eyes open for friends of mine, so if somebody had come in—especially somebody who was dressed in the same T-shirt and jeans I was, and from behind, anyway, had my precise haircut, posture, etc.—I figure I would have noticed. But I hadn't noticed anyone. And this guy seemed to have a newsprint pad and pencils, too, which he had to have gotten from the very section of the store I was shopping in.

As I watched, this person walked out the door, onto the sidewalk, and—I swear I saw this clearly through the bookstore window—climbed into my car and drove off.

I remember feeling agitated and more than a little embarrassed, because my car had been stolen before my eyes and I had done nothing to prevent it. At the same time, it didn't register as a terribly big deal to me: watching a doppelganger steal my car was weirdly like lending it to my own brother. I walked to the counter and paid for my supplies. Outside, the car really was gone and I walked home.

The police found the car abandoned and, miraculously, unharmed on the shoulder of Route 90, and it was returned to me the following day. But the more I thought about them, the more the circumstances of the theft seemed incredible at best, and at worst invented. That, at least, was what the police appeared to think. I began to wonder if I had done this myself, in some sort of stress-induced daze, and if in fact I did similar things all the time, then obscured them in my mind. I wondered if I was beginning to get sick the way Pierce had. In the end I gave up thinking about it entirely, and my life went on as planned, which plan actually turned out to be no plan at all.

But now I wonder if that person really was me, and if he spent ten years wandering around, gathering the raw materials that a real life could be made from, in order to return them to the original me at some later date and make me whole. I wonder what that later date might be, or if perhaps it already passed without my notice, meaning that what I was for all those years was never very far from what I was supposed to be.

At any rate, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for him to show up. Anna Praegel, who is recovered, divorced, and full of pithy advice, is fond of telling us what a great life she would have had if she hadn't sat around waiting for things to happen to her, because when they did they were invariably the wrong things. Nevertheless, it does make a good story, and I'm working on a way to fit it into the strip, which any day now should be reaching a college rag near you.

* * *

Not long ago I was cleaning out the cabinets under the sink when I came across a cardboard box addressed to my father. It was postmarked a few weeks after he died and had a Riverbank P.O. Box for a return address. It hadn't been opened.

I turned it over a few times and gave it a good shake. Something was loose in there, making a muffled, metallic sort of rattle. The box looked familiar, and I closed my eyes, remembering: it had sat on the kitchen counter, pushed back next to the broken radio, for several months, then was moved to the living room floor, just inside the sliding doors, when Pierce and Susan made pancakes together. A few weeks later it vanished, and now here it was again. I called out to Pierce, who was smoking cigarettes in his bedroom.

He walked out looking stricken, as if he'd been watching television for days on end. I held up the box to him and he frowned.

“Whassat?”

“You tell me.”

He took the box and gave it a cursory look. “It came for Dad. I don't know what it is.”

I opened a drawer and pulled out a dull paring knife with a green plastic handle. “Give it here,” I said. He did, and I set it on the counter and sliced through the packing tape. Pierce came up beside me and watched. I folded back the flaps and picked up a piece of cream-colored linen paper with a letterhead printed on it. The letterhead read
RIVERBANK
FUNERAL
SERVICES,
INC
.

“Uh-oh,” said Pierce.

“Why was it addressed to
him?”
Pierce was saying.

“Got me,” I said, and then, unnecessarily, “
That's
him in
there.”
We stared at the open package for a few minutes, lost in our private worlds of horror. Beside me, Pierce breathed his labored cigarettey breaths.

“So what do we do with it?” I said.

“We can't keep it in the house. We have to scatter it or something.” The remains of our father had become “it,” which made things easier.

“But then we have to take it out of the bag.”

We could easily have stood there all day. I took the urn out of the box. It was ornate and artificially aged, with foreign writing and pictograms all over it, and a small curved handle. The lid had a rubber lining, to ensure a tight fit. The bag of ashes was inside the urn, so I stuck my hand in there and worked it through the opening. The ashes were barely visible through the ultraviolet-proof coating, coarse and multicolored, with large black hunks of what pretty much had to be bone.

“Oh my God,” said Pierce.

I dropped the knife back into the drawer and clattered around until I found a scissors, then followed the instructions in the letter. A fine gray dust rose as our father cascaded into the urn.

“Oh, yuck, yuck!” Pierce was saying. We backed away, terrified of inhaling him. From across the kitchen we watched the dust settle. After a safe interval, I clamped the lid on, threw the box into the trash and wiped up the counter with a rag.

“How about the river?” I said to Pierce in the car. He drove while I kept the urn on the floor, clamped between my ankles.

“What if it floats? It'll float, and then it'll just get tangled up in some old branches and mud on the bank.”

“We could go down the shore.”

“No way,” he said. We were tooling around on some narrow county road. “We'll throw it in and it'll come crashing right back on us. And then it'll be all over our clothes.” He bit his lip. “I was thinking of renting a plane or a helicopter or something and dropping it out.”

“What if it blows back in?”