The Road Narrows As You Go (10 page)

What message, from who?

From a bristlecone tree, Jonjay said, staring off into the distance of the white page in front of him as he started to draw, hand moving spontaneously over the paper, a tree, no, a crocodile with a clock in his mouth. I sat in front of this one bristlecone pine and I saw litter trapped in its lower branches, and when I reached over to grab it I saw what it was, the face of Hick's Peter Pan from the cardboard package to a toy. Something about this little fragment off one of his pictures told me he was in trouble. I came back as soon as I could.

You're not too late for this. His last wish was that you be here and you are, so there's that. Wendy dried her eyes and then cried again.

We can't let his body go to waste, it's wrong.

He asked for gags and pranks, said Wendy. Don't take his wishes too far.

Jonjay sat back and examined his crocodile, a veritable dragon. Look, that's Hick's sweat on our brains, Jonjay told her, he's improved my markmaking, and my vision, my whole perspective. This doodle is as
good as any I ever drew. I can see through the illusion of the white page to the perfect drawing inside. Imagine what you could draw, said Jonjay, and what we could all draw and what we could endure if we ate his eyes and ears and arms and hands.

You're grossing me out to the max, Wendy said.

Look, if we don't eat him something else will, Jonjay said. I know better than a worm how to eat this man. If we love him shouldn't we at least eat
some
of him? His mouth. His eyes. His fingers. His ears? I'll go around like a waiter and take everyone's order.

Don't be sick, please, she said. Where's your manners? My life just got
smooked
, pancaked. A grand piano of misery just fell on my heart.

But aren't you afraid you aren't inoculated from whatever it is killed him so suddenly? said Jonjay.

That's a lousy punchline, Jonjay. You do need liquids.

Who is he?
we whispered to Wendy as soon as we got the chance.

Who indeed! Boo-hoo! She collapsed her face into the palms of her hands and said, He's back! The boy came back. Now I'm sunk. I thought I'd never see him again.
He
convinced me to move here. And he's been the irreplaceable absence in my life ever since I did. I expected to reunite a year ago. And it was only to replace him why I chased surfers up and down Marin County. Gee whiz, when I first got to SF I was like plucking married mycologists out of Golden Gate Park for some of that green thumb action, and flirting with arcade game grandmasters to get close to the feeling I yearned for. I fooled around with homeless chalk artists on Haight trying to find a little bit of the lowly artist in Jonjay. There was a small piece in each of these guys that reminded me of a part of Jonjay. Pheromones in common. The same walk. That carnally innocent smile. Different flakes of what I needed to make a muddled version of Jonjay in my heart.

Well, what's the matter, then? we wondered. If you're hot for him, here he is.

I guess so, she said glumly. After all that daydreaming for the man, I'm not ready for the real again. And what if he's with that
girl
now? Ugh, I can't stand the thought of him with some tart not me. I don't know how to be his platonic friend. That would be the worst. My problem is I don't like to share and my hot crush was safe from real competition when he only existed in the loins of my memory.

It was after midnight when Ronald Reagan appeared on television. Most sets were on mute, as the evening news repeated his words,
Our government is too big and it spends too much … The answer to a government that's too big is to stop feeding its growth. Well, it's time to change the diet and to change it in the right way.

It's strange when the man you've been told your whole life is your father becomes president, Wendy told us. He was only the host of
General Electric Theater
when Mom pointed to him on the TV and said,
Look, there's your dad
. When he almost got assassinated last month, I cried.

My dad is a rodeo clown, said Rachael. Never see him. Not a part of my life.

My dad is in for life without parole, said Patrick with a tone of acid indifference. Killed his brother.

Dad is a libertarian, Mom is a librarian, said Twyla. First time I ran away I was fifteen.

Merchant marine, said Mark Bread of his own paterfamilias.

Orphanages called me their son, said Jonjay. First met Hick in such circumstances, two foster kids neglected under the same roof.

We learned a little more about his new friend Manila and her family woes, too. She was the Mexican-Québécois heiress-in-exile to the Convençion family fortune in iceberg lettuce. The iceberg lettuce grew on megafarms in the boot of southern Mexico. Her side of the Convençions lived on massive reindeer ranches in rural Quebec, and all their taxes went through a black box LLC in Nevada. A year ago after a European tryst
with a married cousin, she bought a VW van from a palm reader and left the Quebec reindeers behind and went driving south to visit the iceberg lettuce megafarms. Her plan: reclaim her fortune. Frozen out of her family's bank account, Manila told us she stayed in pocket by making the best of a bad reputation, rooming at five-star hotels with ineligible men who paid her for sex and to help end arranged marriages by getting caught in the suburban society pages in the lounge with whatever local twit scion, and then she would drive to another city's rich enclave and do the same thing all over again, and in between she slept in the back of her all-white VW van, stealing away tens of thousands of dollars in the process. We were astounded by these stories and the money she described. She said she often needed to wash away the minor irritation that was her celebrity. Park somewhere up the 101 like Coos Bay or Crescent Beach and suntan on the VW's rooftop and surf all afternoon and at night by campfire read Huysmans in the original French. Manila thought of herself more as a sorceress than a runaway exiled rich girl. She spoke five languages and wanted to write, perhaps poetry.

Art is an orphanage, said Biz Aziz. When you make art, you leave your parents' hopes for you at the door to the studio. My parents came on a boatload of refugees from the coast of Africa during the Second World War. When my mother was murdered in Hagerstown city, my dad moved west. Cancer ate him. I raised myself since I was ten years old right here in San Franpsycho.

It took Biz Aziz another three years to complete her depiction of this wake. The cartoonist's death would appear in local comic shops late in eighty-four. Biz Aziz narrates the story of Jonjay's arrival and how he contrived to get us all to eat of the body of the deceased. She draws the guests in her inimitable style, unrecognizable silhouettes, trembling shadow portraits of cartoonists supposedly lining up to eat the flesh of a dead man. Captions with some panels spell out the situation and name a few names. She
supplies no distinction between the real and the fictitious, the magical thinking and the actual doing. Biz didn't show any hints on the page that Jonjay's ceremony was a game or a trick he played, except surely it had to be. Wendy was convinced it was a gag. Biz might have believed the flesh was real at the time, or she was blurring the truth now in her uncensored comic. Part of being uncensored was the right to shock.

We remember green light before dawn floating between a black sky and black horizon. This lingering green anomaly, it was Hick's spirit's farewell. It was an unusual chlorophyll-green glow, the same colour as the candleflames surrounding his basket, and lasted unusually long. Gave us the shivers, the ghostliness of this aurora. As some guests, entirely exhausted, found their coats and shoes, dawn dragged out its rise up over a green-drenched Oakland that Monday morning. And when a single spear of bright yellow sunlight launched over the horizon and signalled the end, the manor began to empty—single file, heads bowed, out on to Stoneman Street and down the hill into San Francisco. The sunrise left green globules of its presentiment inside the manor. Zen celadon-green orbs hovered in meditative circles and formed prayerful clusters throughout the rooms in an eerie attempt to communicate, it would seem. You could see these orbs only out of the corner of your third eye, so to speak, but they must have meant Hick was still here with us in some fashion. When finally around eight in the morning these vapours left us completely, so did warmth. Though sunlight flooded the rooms, our fingers got so cold so fast they felt numb. We could see our breath in front of our faces. Wendy cranked the heat. We put on blankets.

Some trick. Eating Jonjay's offerings horrified us. To go along with the prank even as a piece of theatre made us gag. He made us go first, the strangers in the room—he gave us the loins, of all things, that he placed on paper plates. Closer inspection revealed our own doodles from earlier in the evening under the slivers of Hick's body. Laughing at him to cover for our fear, we said, No way.

He said, Go ahead.

When it came their turn, the other guests balked and blanched, too. We heard Art Spiegelman belching with nausea near a potted fern. But no one turned him down when he presented another morbid slice off the corpse. With the table manners of an upscale waiter, he named the cut and served it to you on a plate made of paper, the drawing on it your own. It was Hick's best friend who told the cartoonists, The dead
want
to give, it's the living who are afraid to take. Jonjay was acting like a seer or warlock or fool as he foretold the occult properties of this great man's flesh and warned us to prepare for what would hit us after the digestion of this numinous portion.

Swallowing the gross slippery flesh, what was going down our throats, was it takeout sushi? Was that the thing, raw fish used to trick us? Where did he get his props at such a moment's notice? In Biz's version of events in issue nine of her comic book, Jonjay is seen taking a fresh X-Acto blade from the longtable and going alone into the ink shadows of the master bedroom—; no witnesses as he performs the rite. When he returns to the others, it is with his hands cupped around a paper plate for a small filet. Isn't your art tempted if not your gut? he tempted you. He pitched the flesh to us: Your hands want to draw the way Hick's hands could. What cartoonist wants to live without a taste of that effortlessness? The worms don't deserve him. Let's share some of the secrets that made up his greatness and inoculate ourselves from what killed him.

Okay. Okay okay okay. Wendy accepted hers. He claimed Wendy's piece was foreskin and came with a spell of forgetting—the instant she swallowed she forgot the names of who stayed and who left, if Johnny Hart stayed on or was it Dik Browne? Chester Gould and his oxygen tank? And even as she accepted her piece she denied any of the scene was real.

We remember somewhat differently. We remember the nervous, agreeable laughter from the guests that invariably followed his very morbid offering. What did we eat that night? Props, like the corpse pieces
in a Halloween haunted house. That was always Wendy's belief. No one took Jonjay seriously except for in his meaning. How could you accept anything but the soul of the gag, which was so dark it seemed appropriate, given who Hick was, and why Hick had considered Jonjay his best friend—because Jonjay was the kind of friend who would think of this. Jonjay was a savage but not a maniac. So we took bites. Biz Aziz chewed a heartvalve. She ate and ate without progress, marvelling at the tenacity of the muscle. Wendy choked back a second mouthful.

Once upon a time we shared in this common misconception of there being a divide between fact and fiction, but after that night our sense of the reality of events and the certainty of objects was forever deranged. How life seemed to be made up of the kind of person who controlled perception while most other kinds of people yielded to it. Even though we snuck in and inspected the body later, after everyone had had a piece, just to see if bits were missing—and there weren't,
there were not
—in all parts of our lives thereafter, both mentally and physically, Jonjay's prank would haunt us.

9

We wanted Jonjay to tell us one way or another, was the meal real or wasn't it? Twyla was the first to put the question to him, and he would ask us in return: Why do you want to know? Would that put you at ease? What do you recall?

We remember green light, green minutes, when, after hours of threatening to do so, Jonjay appeared carrying those pieces for us to eat. This sense of humour, so closely imitating ritual and evidently an appropriate honour to the deceased, was another reason we couldn't tell if what we'd eaten was in truth a fiction, or if that limpid white flesh we thought might be raw calamari between our teeth was off his body. Then there's a blank space, an absence or gap not in the narrative but in our conviction. We remember the body was removed by gentlemen mortuarists who would cremate and bury Hick in a cemetery plot in Daly City. One day we would go visit, but not soon.

Stop thinking about it, Jonjay warned us. Move on.

And for the moment, we did. Our attention couldn't cling forever to the sides of that big wicker basket. We took care of Wendy as she spent the
rest of the week bedridden with a chest cold that wouldn't quit her. She slept twenty hours at a stretch. When she didn't sleep she lay on pillows on the living room floor and read sporadically from the bestselling
Michelle Remembers
. For two reasons Wendy made herself read the entire book: because Hick never finished reading it before the hospital, and because it took place in Victoria.
Michelle Remembers
contributed to her sickness's creeps for the satanic story was
all true
. Every word. She knew this island town described in these pages, it was her hometown. She and her mom used to go on bicycle rides along the seawall and frequently passed the Ross Bay cemetery where Michelle was abused by Satanists. When Wendy was asleep we all took turns reading from it too—the unlocked memories of unimaginable satanic ritual abuse Michelle had been the victim of in her early childhood, including an intentional car crash on a highway, being buried alive in a grave, and numerous other sacrificial rites in forests and caves, culminating in visitations from none other than Jesus and Azazel, aka Satan himself. All of it Michelle repressed for two decades, until in her college years Dr. Pazder's unique style of Catholicized psychiatric hypnosis uncovered the truth in therapy sessions. Later the doctor would divorce his wife in order to marry his patient.