Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Nobody has any idea how hard it was for me coming up. It’s taken for

  granted now, kids like you come around, they grew up loving the crab and

  they figure everybody always loved the crab, the crab must have been some

  kind of overnight success. Sure, right, but that overnight lasted ten years,

  no more, no less. Ten years slugging it out on the circuit, little clubs,

  appearances at lodge dinners and state fairs, riding in the undercarriage of

  tour buses. I paid my dues a dozen times over and I still feel it right here.”

  The crab reared up, propping on his huge, closed claws, and tapped two

  legs assertively on his lower shell, as if miming a gut check. “Then you guys

  come around here talking about Buster Fucking Keaton. Like it was some

  kind of party for me, this fershlugginer career. ‘Hmmm, why, I think I’ll

  just allude to Buster Keaton, that ought to make the eggheads cream their

  panties.’ Tell you the truth, I never saw Buster Keaton when I was coming

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  INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB

  up because I was too busy busting my chops trying to entertain you people.

  Never saw Buster Keaton until a couple of years ago and then when I did

  I didn’t see anything I thought was all that great.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest that your work was in any way derivative—”

  “Keaton ever do a show about a crab living in a human family?”

  I was silent.

  “I’m asking you because I want to know. You seem familiar with Keaton’s work,

  so I’m putting the question to you in great sincerity. Anything with a crab?”

  “No.”

  “Right, that’s what I figured. My material is entirely my own. I came to it

  the same way maybe your precious Keaton or Vigoda came by their own—

  pure suffering, forged into something of value to others, like crushing a coal

  into a diamond, at great cost of effort and personal sacrifice, a process you

  wouldn’t know too much about since everything to you is just a big pile of

  slippery postmodern allusions and references with no soul to speak of, not

  even any notion that it might be missing one, that there might be something

  to mourn the loss of—a soul, I mean.”

  I knew it was not my place to defend myself, here—to point out that it

  was precisely that essence of existential suffering, or soul, if he preferred that term, which had drawn me to his work, made me seek for a description

  for how such an uncanny and timeless thing had broken out in the vacuous,

  tinselly environs of network situation comedy. Even as he berated me he

  was inviting me inside, it appeared to me. My task was to selflessly accept

  that invitation.

  “You say your material is entirely your own. That suffering and sacrifice you

  speak of lies so close to the surface of your humor. How close were the

  Foorcums to a portrait of your own family?”

  “What are you, like the one guy in the United States with no Google?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’ve said a thousand times if I’ve said it once: I haven’t spoken about—or

  to—my family in over forty years. What makes you think I’m about to sing for

  you? What was your name, Lehman?”

  “Lethem.”

  “Mr. Lethem, with all respect, go fart on a Wheat Thin. What makes you

  think today’s the day some kid sashays in here and I’m just suddenly in the

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  JONATHAN LETHEM

  mood to break my silence for you on a whim, when I wouldn’t even sing for

  that fucker Larry King? Even if I wanted to, my lawyers wouldn’t let me.

  Every single person who ever knew me in that shitheel town has tried to

  sue me at some point, let alone the members of my beloved goddamn

  family. Rule one: We speak of the Foorcums as the Foorcums alone, or this

  is O-V-E-R.”

  “The Foorcums, then. Are you in touch with Richard Drimpet and Joan

  Cranewood-Freehan, who played your on-screen parents?”

  “These are your questions?” The crab scratched with a single leg against

  the tile in one direction repeatedly, away from his body, as if trying to strike a match or dislodge something stuck to a foot. His claws, though, lay totally

  inert, draped before him. “Drimpet and I were off speaking terms by season

  three, another item you could’ve peeled off a fan site. Joan used to call me

  from time to time. She tried to get me to do a guest appearance on that

  Snowbirds show, kept pestering me to come on. But what am I going to say to a bunch of old ladies in a mobile home, you know? ‘Follow the sun, chickadees!

  You haven’t got that long to live!’”

  “Was it difficult between you and Reg Loud? His embodiment of Feary

  Foorcum was so memorable, but the two of you were pitted against one

  another continuously throughout the show. And his behavior after the

  cancellation was rather bitter.” I hoped the crab could follow my leads

  without having to take offense. Reg Loud had, of course, been jailed for

  narcotics possession several times after his difficult child-stardom found its

  nadir in the years following Crab House Days. For the crab, I could only assume the ferocity of the character’s portrayal of his brother, combined with

  the young actor’s very public woes, resonated deeply with ancient, real-life

  traumas. I was still circling what seemed to me the main, and perhaps

  tenderest subject, of Delia Watertree, who’d played Pansy Foorcum.

  “Difficult? The opposite. Sometimes in this crazy fucked-up world of

  show business you meet someone with a real beating heart, someone who

  matters to you, who knows what it’s all worth. Rarer than you might think,

  unfortunately. Reg is the only thing that kept me going on that show as

  long as I did.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that. Because his character was usually seen

  as the crab’s tormentor.”

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  INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB

  “I’ve taken my licks. That’s the business, that’s the character. Don’t confuse

  show business for real life, Lethem. Compared to some licks I’ve taken, that

  show was all cake and candy and ice cream.”

  “He flooded your room with sulfur oxide in an attempt to cause you to molt

  six months early,” I said.

  “Heh heh. Yeah, that was a good one. One hundred percent the kid’s idea,

  too. Good head on his shoulders. You know, a lot of the best bits came from

  him and me working together, batting stuff to the writers, free of charge.

  We’d improv in rehearsals—he was always cutting up, making me pee my

  pants. Talk about bitter, Loud never got credit for any of that stuff. Head

  writer walked off with two Emmys. Reg deserved better, much better.”

  “It’s an incredible story. Does he know how you feel about it?” I couldn’t

  recall the last turns in Reg Loud’s quite miserable tabloid spiral, except that five or six years earlier he’d resurfaced in a brief stint as a local morning

  talk show host, spewing right-wing survivalist bilge over the airwaves of

  some medium-sized Midwestern city, Indianapolis or Cedar Rapids.

  “Fuck you trying to imply? Of course he does.”

  “No offense. I’m glad to hear it.”

  “None taken.”

  “I wonder if I could get
a chance to talk with him for my story. Do you

  know how I could get in touch with him?”

  The crab fell momentarily silent, but cinched the glistening stump of his

  amputated leg deep under his lower shell, as if he’d now been involuntarily

  made to recall some particular hurt.

  “He wouldn’t care to talk about Crab House Days,” said the crab. “He’s moved on.”

  “What about Delia Watertree?”

  “That bitch.”

  Delia Watertree, launched to fame as the coarse but irresistible Pansy

  Foorcum, was the only member of the cast who’d ascended to greater heights

  since the show’s cancellation. The entirety of her subsequent career seemed

  a kind of long renunciation of the broad and overtly sexual appeal of the

  Pansy Foorcum character; in her stage and screen roles (she’d never glanced

  back at television work) she relentlessly played against her natural, peaches-

  and-cream beauty, favoring roles in glasses or bruise makeup or pants suits or

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  JONATHAN LETHEM

  buckskin, playing lawyers, frontier settlers, sexual-assault victims, suicidal

  writers, vanished aviators, and the like. Nevertheless, a measure of Pansy

  Foorcum’s innocent lustiness thrived almost subliminally within the shell of

  her prestigious career, confirmed by its apparent absence, as though she and

  her audience were together rising above prurient thoughts in rewarding her

  with Oscar and Tony nominations for her nobler roles. Too, her quiet,

  reflective mannerisms still recalled the poignancy she’d evoked in spells of

  gentleness toward her sitcom sibling, the housebound crab.

  “She was lovely to your character,” I said, speaking softly now. “A viewer

  would have thought you and Pansy were full of feeling for one another. You

  often seemed united against the others—Feary and your parents. As if you

  two alone shared a sense of dreamy possibility about what might lay outside

  the space of the house—beyond the circumscribed sensibility of the

  Foorcum family.”

  “You go on telling yourself what you want to hear,” said the crab. “Meanwhile

  I’ll bet you watched her like the rest of America’s teenage boys, with one

  hand in your pants and your tongue pressed to the screen.”

  I chose not to point out the impossibility of the physical arrangement he

  proposed. It occurred to me that it might, in fact, be possible to watch a

  television screen while lapping at it with one’s antennae. “I remember when

  you asked her not to go to the prom, since you couldn’t go—”

  “Listen. You want the skinny on Delia? That little floozy used to cavort

  around the set with no underwear on, just to drive me crazy, knowing

  nobody else could see, knowing I’d never say anything. Believe me, the

  carpet did not match the drapes. She’d put her foot up on a chair and start re-lacing her high-tops, right in my face, trying to get me to flub lines.”

  “That’s astonishing.”

  “Believe it. You know what else? At night, after the whole rest of the cast

  and crew had gone, she’d bring guys back and do them, sometimes two at a

  time, real marathon stuff, right in the next room, so I couldn’t get a minute

  of sleep. What a mouth on her, too, always crying out ‘make me your little

  whore’ and telling these guys it was the biggest thing she’d ever seen, how she was so frightened it would hurt her—”

  Now I was certain the crab was confused. “But, you didn’t really live in that room—” I began. I wondered whether in fact his memory had slipped back to

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  INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB

  an earlier time, to that other family of which he’d sworn he’d never speak.

  Perhaps Pansy Foorcum had merged in his mind with an unnamed sister in

  another house, long ago. The difficulty, of course, was that it was equally

  likely that in his confusion he’d conflated Crab House Days with Crab Sex Dorm. That short-lived reality show had been notoriously lavish in its use of crab-point-of-view camera placements.

  The creature appeared not to hear me. He carried on muttering about

  Pansy’s sexual theatrics, reproducing what he’d supposedly overheard

  through the wall, playing both voices aloud as if performing a Punch and Judy show—a private litany aired, it seemed to me, for reasons having nothing to

  do with our interview. At last he reached a pitch and then quit abruptly, his

  words replaced with the high whining sound he’d treated me to earlier, and

  then with the distinct yawn. “Keep that in mind next time you see her begging

  for money for African famine relief,” he concluded. “She’s probably got

  nothing on under her Florence Nightingale costume, either. That dame gets

  her jollies from pity.”

  I opted to chalk the crab’s freewheeling animus up to show-business envy,

  at the prestige accorded to the sole performer who’d shaken the career curse

  of the franchise. “What’s in the cards for you?” I asked, not wishing to hear

  more. “Is this a firm retirement? Do you long to reconnect with your

  audience?”

  “I get calls every day, believe you me.” The crab stirred a claw, his minor

  rather than major, which still lay un-moving. He ratcheted the smaller pincers

  wide and turned them toward his face, as if miming a telephone receiver.

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “I’m telling you, some of the pitches I’ve heard. Crazy stuff. Hoo-wee. I had

  some rappers out here the other day. Everything nowadays is gangsta, gangsta,

  gangsta. Those guys are revitalizing show business, if you ask me. But I don’t

  really see a place for myself in the mix.”

  “So, you’ll rest on your laurels,” I suggested.

  “What fucking laurels? You see one goddamn laurel around here? If you do, it

  probably blew over from the next yard. Hah. Sorry, I just hate that word— laurels.”

  “I only wondered if you’re content not to practice your art.”

  “Listen, I’m keeping busy.” The crab withdrew and shuttered his claw now,

  seeming to grow reflective.

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  JONATHAN LETHEM

  “I didn’t mean anything—”

  “I know you didn’t, kid.”

  “You’ve got nothing to prove to anyone,” I said softly.

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  I fell to silence. The crab shifted, sighed, rattled. The day had turned, too,

  clouds deflecting the high bleaching sun, and announcing themselves as gray

  mountains in the oscillating mirror of the pool.

  “Look, Lehman. You want a scoop? I’m hatching a major comeback. You

  can be the first. I’m saying major major. You understand? When this thing

  blows, there’ll be no keeping a lid on it, I promise you.”

  “A premise for a show?”

  “Big show, of sorts.”

  “Please.”

  “Follow me. I’d tell you to walk this way, only you’ve heard that one before.”

  Startlingly, the crab was on the go. He moved awfully fast for a being that

  had seemed wrought in rusted ironwork a moment before. Clicking his way

  off the tile-work, he slid across the grass, past me, and toward the left side of the house. The lawn dipped to a basement door there, portal to a half-submerged, windowless lower level with the appearance of a garage or

  workshop, perhaps. I stood, stuffed my
pad and ballpoint into my pants

  pocket, and hurried to join him.

  “Go ahead, open the door,” he said.

  I tried the handle, which turned easily, and pushed the door inside. The

  darkness was enough that from the brightness of the day I couldn’t make

  anything out, within. I stepped back, uncertain.

  Crab House Days had, of course, made much of the conceit that its title character was trapped in his bedroom, yet I recalled from some footage from

  Crab Sex Dorm how he could transverse human doorways by tipping himself dexterously on one side. The crab did this now, gripping the doorframe

  neatly with his claws and virtually rolling himself through the doorway.

  Inside, he dropped back to the unpainted cement floor. I followed, leaving

  the door open behind me. The basement was cool and conveyed an intense

  marine smell, like that of an aquarium. Low fluorescent fixtures shone a dim

  green light, from what appeared to be special bulbs, perhaps like those for

  illuminating plants or animals in a zoo display of creatures unused to direct

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  INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB

  sunlight. As my eyes accustomed themselves to the dark I saw that we were

  surrounded by dozens of immense water tanks, the murk and silt within

  them glowing in the greenish light.

  Another figure stepped from the rear, startling me. It was Feary

  Foorcum—or rather, Reg Loud. Loud was cloaked in a white lab coat, and

  still wore his hair in his signature ragged punk cut. He was also still of a

  childish stature, though he’d grown stocky, and his once brattish features

  were withered and creased with deep lines of cynicism and age—he seemed

  still too young to be an adult, and far too old to be in his early forties, as a quick calculation suggested he ought to be. But then perhaps he had been

  playing younger than his real age on Crab House Days, like so many child stars have done.

  “Reg, this is Mr. Lehman. He’s come to have a look at my quote-unquote

  comeback.”

  Reg Loud stuck out a horny, trollish hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said

  in the terribly familiar voice, a sort of parroty squawk, with which he’d

  hectored both his parents and crab for all five seasons, filling their ears with his crank Libertarian views. “You’re one of the first to see the babies.”

  “Babies?”