The Funnies (36 page)

I was early for the meeting, so I stopped in for old times' sake. On display was a series of “drawings” by a woman I'd not heard of. I had some trouble finding them. All I could see were the walls, each painted a metallic dark gray. Nothing hung on them. Then I realized that the walls
were
the drawings: she had apparently taken a pencil—lots of pencils, I supposed—and covered every inch of wall space with graphite and fixative. I took a postcard on the way out and put it in my jacket pocket. It was a white index card “drawn” on in the same way.

On the nineteenth floor, I peed, then waited on a long leather couch in a lushly carpeted room that could have comfortably housed a chamber orchestra and several parked cars. Some distance away, a receptionist sat behind a wide mahogany desk. She kept glancing at her watch, then looking up at me. At about ten minutes past ten, she picked up her phone and spoke to somebody, but I was too far away to hear. She hung up, came to the couch and said, “Mr. Burn will be with you shortly. Would you like a Perrier?” I told her I would and she vanished through a smoked glass door, and returned with a bottle of Perrier, a bottle opener, a cocktail napkin and a small wooden table. She opened the bottle for me, set it on the table and returned to her desk.

I didn't particularly like Perrier, but I stuck to protocol and drank some anyway. It was a testament to both the decadence and puissance of the beverage industry that water could be altered so that it made you belch. After a time, someone came out for me. “Mr. Mix?” he said.

“Yes.” It was a young man, some kind of intern or temp, with a round face and thin brown hair. He was wearing a golf shirt, untucked from a pair of jeans, and white tennis shoes.

“Follow me,” he said. I got up, grabbed my portfolio and raised the Perrier bottle to the receptionist as I passed, grinning. She wasn't watching.

The temp led me through a labyrinth of cubicles, past offices with their doors slightly ajar. I looked carefully for Susan, who I thought would surely find me before the meeting, but she failed to materialize.

Eventually the temp and I arrived at a corner office, a cavernous chamber with oaken paneling and purple carpet and windows twice as tall as I was. “Wow,” I said.

“Yep,” the temp said proudly, sitting down behind a huge desk.

I blinked at him. Suddenly it occurred to me that he wasn't young at all, was in his forties and just looked young owing to his childish face, his sneakers. I stood there like a fool, clutching my portfolio across my chest.

“You're…”

“Raymond Burn. Niceta meetcha. Have a seat!”

I lowered myself into a leather armchair, looking around for a place to put the Perrier. I opted for the floor. “Uh, well! Thanks! For seeing me!” I said, wondering if the windows opened and, if so, whether I should fling myself out one. Why hadn't he introduced himself already? Why didn't he shake my hand? Why didn't I shake his? I sprung back to my feet and leaned across the desk, my hand extended. The postcard I'd gotten downstairs slipped from my pocket and fell onto the desk, so I retracted my hand, grabbed it, stuck it back into my pocket, held the pocket shut with my portfolio and re-extended the hand to where Burn's was waiting impatiently. We shook.

“Love your dad's work,” he said. “Love it! You could say I'm a Fan.” He gave the shook hand a surreptitious glance, then wiped it with a handkerchief.

“Well,” I said. I sat down again. “Me too.”

“You better be, heh-heh. Tim, I was just talking to Ken Dorn the other day. You know Ken?”

“A little.”

“Ken was saying he didn't think you had the stuff to draw the Family Funnies. Now, don't get me wrong,” he said, holding up his empty palms. “We're committed to you, Tim. You've got the legacy, you see. But I just wanted to know if maybe you had any interest in responding to that statement of Ken's, whaddya think, Tim?”

I set down my portfolio and noticed two enormous dark handprints on my knees. Where had they come from? I looked down at my hands: black, as if I'd been delivering newspapers all morning.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I have a response to that. Uh, I just want to say that I can do it, sir. I mean, I want to do it, and I'm the right man, uh, for the job…and…” I picked up the portfolio again. “And I think my portfolio will speak for itself, sir.” I lifted the heavy thing over the edge of the desk and set it down, open end first, before Ray Burn. “I think perhaps you should take them out yourself, sir, owing to the fact that my hands…I don't know what happened…seem to be very dirty suddenly…”

He peered over the portfolio at my hands, which I was holding out to him. “Yeah, you got yourself a little mess there, heh-heh.”

It wasn't just my hands and pants, of course; it was my white shirt, too, the inside of my jacket. The postcard had fallen out of my pocket again and onto my lap, and I understood now that it was the culprit. I picked it up. The penciled side was half rubbed off: it hadn't been fixed on there after all. I could see the artist's name, scrawled in thick black magic marker, hazy beneath the worn parts. “Maybe…” I said. “Maybe you should go ahead and give those a look, sir. While I go clean myself up a little.”

He was already sliding the cartoons from the portfolio. “Sure, sure,” he said, distracted. I jumped to my feet and headed out of the office at a brisk jog. The maze confounded me. Which way around the desks? It took me several minutes to get back to the lobby. Once in the restroom, I dropped the postcard into the trash and looked at myself in the mirror. A disaster. Not just my clothes and hands but my face, my neck…how had I touched myself in so many places so quickly?

I washed my hands with liquid soap from the dispenser, then wet a crumpled ball of paper towels and used them to dab at the huge stains on my shirt and pants. The towels grew dark, but the stains didn't seem to diminish; on the contrary, they spread, losing definition, and my chest and thighs became soaked with dirty water. I took off my jacket before attempting to clean it, then decided to just leave it off, despite the inkstain on the arm. I checked myself in the mirror. I looked like I'd been splashed by a dozen cabs.

Back in the office, though, Ray Burn was laughing. The sound was so shocking, so unself-conscious, that I considered backing out into the hallway until he was finished. Laughing! This was something, I realized, that had been missing: an audience. I stood paralyzed in the doorway, listening to him.

“Mix!” he said. He pounded his desk. It made a sound like a bank vault door crashing open. “This is a gas!”

“It is?”

“‘Liberries!' That's it exactly! What a killer!” He moved another drawing to the top of the pile. “And how ‘bout this—‘If Puddles doesn't use a fork, how come we have to?' Tim, this is brilliant!”

“Thanks!” I said.

“It's like you're the reinfuckingcarnation of your old man, pardon the French. You got that same sense of humor. That's what a good strip really needs! A sense of humor!”

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.”