Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  Robin had a beautiful soul and was sensitive and guarded and jaded and tough, and like any young soulful sensitive person who’d suffered unimaginable pain at the loss of her brother, who’d withstood the family breakup and her own temporary brain trauma, she wanted someone who understood her pain. But she was so fucking pretty, and had a lovely healthy body, and I was so pleased with the fact that she gave herself to me that it pained me. So instead of the soul mate she’d been promised, she got some clod scheming for ways to shove it in her.

  The tension dissipated at breakfast, and crept back in at night. She put so much energy toward holding me off, trying to keep herself together, keep to her side of the bed, to keep me from climbing her like a tree frog. I had a beautiful fiancée and I should’ve been happy, I should’ve been skipping through rain puddles, celebrating our uncommon love. But love like that doesn’t exist on this planet, which somebody forgot to tell me, and then she poked me in the eye in her sleep, and in her nightmares sometimes yelped or moaned, and gouged me with her toenails, and stole all the blankets, and scratched around for pills every morning, and lied to me about finishing the milk, which I thought was nuts, so I wrote it down, and used it in the comic that I happened to be drawing, which only made things worse. To get even with me, she shut me out. And so, to get back at her, I kept writing her into my stories, twisting things she’d said and done, diminishing her, taking our private moments out of context, to frame and punish her.

  I’d been conducting these kinds of experiments for years, leaning on details of my personal life, trying to represent the truth, to give form to this confusion, wondering how close I could cut it, worrying how the people involved might react. I didn’t enjoy hurting their feelings. If I could’ve figured out another way to do it, I would’ve. Certain friends spooked easily and felt threatened by my borrowed or poorly disguised representations, or harbored some innate persecution complex, and became chiding, distant, or hostile, although the ones I’d intentionally set out to unnerve or unmask either failed to get the hint, or tolerated it well, or felt proud to have inspired me. Such are the pitfalls of autobio cartooning.

  My roommate Nedd eventually stopped speaking to me, because of injurious depictions of him in cartoon form. My friend Annie unwittingly contributed to the making of the character Anna Boringstein, a bulimic communications flack who just happened to work for the mayor. My good friend Rishi was a tolerant and forgiving guy, but I made too many jokes at his expense, and although our friendship might’ve fallen apart anyway, it ended forever when he took a job in New York. We’d lived together for years, and worked at the same agency. I resented him for leaving. I miss him even now. In the end, I couldn’t face these people out of shame.

  During our first year together, I didn’t write about Robin at all. But in order to meet the demands of the longer, more burdensome periodical, I put the weekly strip on terminal hiatus, and turned away from themes of twentysomething agitation and incipient adult ennui and toward a world I could reach out and touch, that of a young couple on the marriage track. From sheer fatigue I quit massaging the truth and began dumping in wholesale identifiable scenes and verbatim conversations, which is partly how my comic evolved into something less fractured and more novelistic, but maybe also why I eventually ran out of material. Is it any wonder that after a short while of living with me, she hopped a flight to Managua?

  Robin would be gone for weeks at a time, covering a massive piece of the planet, natural disasters and geopolitical events. At first, anyway, she was trying to figure out the rules of journalism. She wanted to get up close, to get ratings, to push advertisers until they flinched. If some butcher went around Lima decapitating children, putting their heads on pikes, she had to shoot it, she had to give her work that feeling of proximity to danger. As a kid, she’d liked it loud, liked to rock, went right up to the band onstage, stood beside the speaker and got blown around.

  She met Danny Katavolos at Telemundo, and together they traveled across most of the Western Hemisphere, before they both quit news and happened to end up at the Nature Channel, first Danny, then Robin, a year later.

  She’d come home in the middle of the night, her hair smelling like cigarettes, banging her suitcase through the door, waking me, complaining that her pants were too tight, pacing around the bedroom, stripping, yanking her suitcase open, talking loud and ignoring me, turning on lights, trying on clothes for work the next day.

  They were driving from Medellín to Cartagena, a terrible idea even by crazy standards, and approached a roadblock manned by paramilitary troops. Danny was in the backseat, and their pothead cameraman panicked at the wheel, and the three of them started fighting about their equipment, which pieces to offer up first, which ones they might later exchange for ransom, and then they ran out of gas. Or got a flat tire, I forget. I liked her stories of drug lords, Sinaloa death squads, kidnapping, extortion. I was a good listener. She came home spooked but so intensely alive. There were close calls and bad things that weakened her resolve, until she started saying no to Haiti, not worth it, not going to that part of Mexico again, either. “I can’t be killed,” she’d say, “for a five-minute story about bird migration.”

  She’d crawl into bed, too tired to eat the dinner I’d left out, had to get up early to cut bulk footage off the satellite feed and edit the package for seven A.M. Or she undressed at the foot of the bed, ignoring me as she pulled the blouse up over her head, sliding her skirt down her legs as I lay there; it was night, I’d been asleep. Absentmindedly she flipped through her closet, snipped a long string from the armpit of her blouse, elbows out, telling me about some cartel body count, how the killers went into a school and dragged students out and shot them, she got the footage, the bureau was pleased. Robin was brave, and I admired that. I assumed that, at the very least, she’d be killed. I think she hoped she would be.

  An old friend of hers, a Venezuelan journalist, got shot in the face in Quito. Other friends had heart attacks, gained a hundred pounds, or took a job writing speeches for a hospital in Cincinnati and never went back to Latin America.

  It was a riot inside a women’s prison in Brazil that finally finished her off: murdered guards, the building in flames. Or maybe it was the town that was buried under a mudslide, or the time she rented a single-engine airplane to take her crew three hours across the dark ocean, to do a piece about an oil rig burning off the coast of Guayaquil. And stared out the window before takeoff as the man on the runway waved his arms at the pilot, pointed at the landing gear on their aircraft, and yelled, “You’re overloaded!” The pilot ignored him, waved goodbye, and gunned it. The man on the ground crew stepped back and made the sign of the cross, and then the pilot made the sign of the cross too as Robin sat there, silent, and the plane barely cleared the tops of trees and headed out to sea and couldn’t get any higher, buzzing a hundred feet over the ocean for the next three hours.

  I think she felt guilty that she lived and Eddie died. I suppose her work had something to do with it. I think she went looking for death and found enough to cure her, although it took years, and in the meantime there was guilt, like for the little boy who cried on camera in his mudslide tableau. She wondered, Who owns the story? Who gets to decide? Was it right to shoot this scene, to take this piece for herself? Would we know anything at all if we didn’t traffic in the lives of strangers? Are we interconnected, or is it hit-and-run? Are your stories also my stories, or are we intact and alone? She came home and dumped out her guilt to me like dirty laundry, and those stories piled up on our floor and what was I supposed to do with them?

  She took a Xanax and flipped off the lights and climbed into bed. Her body slim and hot and neatly packed, her ass so small and round you needed a magnifying glass to find it, so sweet and tight that gospel music should’ve been pouring out of it. We lay there and talked about Honduras, where she was headed next, or maybe the Kuwaitis wanted this refugee camp in the D.R., or the office in Bogotá that rented out equipment insisted on a polic
e escort, and she had to call her guy down there in the morning to figure it out.

  Was it her story or was it mine? Did I live only in support of her enrichment? Did my experiences matter? If she had only let me bop her, would I have passed out and forgotten the whole thing?

  “When do you get back?”

  “I have to check.” She got up and put another Xanax in the pill chopper and cursed when pieces bounced onto the floor, and got back in bed and placed the ice-cold bottoms of her feet against my shin.

  “Oh my God, your feet!”

  “Well, you’re like a stove.” A little more foot, almost ankle, rubbed against mine. The curves of her feet were stark and dramatic. I petted her hair gently. Her breathing changed. “I’m finally calming down.” She had problematically high arches that caused complicated injuries, exacerbated by running. “Thank you for loving me.” I would miss her and then forget her, and have to remember her all over again.

  “There, there.” Sometimes, from stress, she’d get the hiccups.

  “I can’t do it with you tonight.”

  I made a soothing humming sound you might use on a baby. I’m sure I stroked her arm or touched her face. “Hey, what’s a few Xanax,” she’d say, sounding drunk, “compared to a heart attack?” I had to agree. I had to get used to having her around. Welcoming Robin back into my life was like rejoining a cult: special rules, rituals, foods, a certain way of speaking, figuring out what was permitted, how to avoid those actions now deemed wrong.

  “Stop.”

  I did. “Go to sleep.”

  She turned and cranked the blankets around her and rolled away. “I call you from wherever I go, desperate to connect, and you have nothing to say, then I come home exhausted and you expect me to fuck you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t get you. You avoid me when I’m here, you sigh and stew, you’re nicer to the mailman than you are to me, and then when I have to leave you act sad.”

  I liked the mailman and he liked me. Nice guy, dependable.

  “Or, you get on the phone and start to cry, and say what’s the point, and try to dump me.”

  “I thought you said you needed to sleep.”

  “I’m working hard, I’m doing everything. I don’t know why we’re still together. Why are we trying to have a baby?” After a few minutes, in a clear, detached voice she’d say, “I’ve been holding on to the hope that if we have a child, this will have been worth it.” And then, interrupting the silence: “I have to let go of the hope that things will improve.”

  She flung an arm over her head. I lay there, staring at her armpit, realizing that you could miss a thing but never want to see it again. You could hate something but still want to eat it.

  She started making teeth-gnashing, sighing, snorting sounds of sleep. And while she slept, I began seeing the panels of an already finished comic, my own work, that didn’t actually exist yet. And over here a box with narration. And down below, in a wordless three-panel sequence, the guy on the tarmac making the sign of the cross, and then the pilot making the cross, and finally, the airplane’s cross-shaped shadow hovering just over the water, in a long rectangular panel, to indicate an extended period of time.

  I could lie there pretending to sleep or go into the bathroom and jerk off into the sink. I stepped over her suitcase and went downstairs and took some notes about the story I’d just heard, making up any details I couldn’t remember, feeling like a scheming two-faced calculating fraud. I suppose now that it was some reaction to envy and disappointment, since her return didn’t include me in the bodily sense and her storytelling made me feel like her toilet. But it wasn’t just something to flush away, wasn’t just someone banging a suitcase around and then lights out. She saw a mudslide, a prison fire. I saw her watching, being moved by what she saw. Then I took those pieces and laid them out under a bright light and messed around with them, for weeks, months, and when I was done, I’d done it without anyone asking for it, ever vigilant, in my note taking, of the things that went on around me, a kind of misfit with delusions of grandeur and an overactive fantasy life, although in that case my vigilance led to a story about a young couple in the early years of marriage trying to have a baby, told from two points of view, one off the coast of Ecuador, one closer to home, with an unborn child, and God in the middle. I felt like some kind of predator.

  That comic appeared in Suspicious Package, Issue No. 5, and sold for $3.95, and went through several printings, and won a nice award at a convention, and later became a key chapter in my book. Marital failings, artistic desolation, the inability to meet expectations, grown-up male alienation. She saw me churn through the material of my friendships and housemates and saw how it tore me up to use that stuff and also how excited and relieved I was to be making headway in the cartooning world. She saw how the irresistible substance of our relationship presented itself and became central to my work and how much richer and more complex my comics became as I struggled under the weight of the material. She wanted me to succeed. I wanted to tell my story, wanted to peel back the onion, uncover the mess, surprise my eyes with what my hand could do, alone at my desk at strange hours, heart pounding, pits sweating, cackling silently to myself and hoping I could shock the world. I connected to a second self, a deeper sense, a subaudible language of colors, shapes, of gnawing contradictions.

  You trade security and comfort built up over months or years for a moment of self-expression, followed by more years of confusion, resentment, guilt, all the trust undone, finally earning it back. She felt ridiculed. I had hurt her. It took years for her to forget and move on. Why did I do it? Because I’d been dying for a story and it walked through the door.

  Kill your thoughts. Kill your mind. I gave up on dramatic and artful self-destruction, the deeply personal, soul-baring exercise, the creative public spectacle of my demise. The slow grinding degradation. The self-immolation. I gave up on sending tricky smoke signals through semiautobiography.

  Why did I tell that story of her on the plane and me back home? To embroil Robin, to mythologize her, to upset her, break her open. I’d convinced myself that everyone wants to be immortalized in a work of art. I told that story because it confused me. Because it felt good to scratch the itch of that confusion. Because the work of telling it became a consolation. Because when I worked on it, I took hold of dark matter. I felt an ecstatic thrill seeing my work on the page. I wanted to leave my mark. I thought I could transform it into something else. Because if I didn’t somehow address these ideas, I was literally thinking myself out of existence. Which, I guess, was what I’d done, which was why I didn’t want to be alive anymore, and why I went to my suitcase to find a belt and hang myself.

  Someone had thrown my suitcase on the floor and was lying in the nearest bed, staring at me. A woman with bare shoulders lay in my sheets in the dark.

  “Hi, funny bunny.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you.”

  I sat down beside her on the bed to steady the visual. Her eyes were dark. She’d tried and failed to make some kind of knot on top of her head, and part of a ponytail fell across her massive forehead. She looked like a stunned gymnast trying to get up off the floor.

  “You’re all wet,” she said, and leaned into me. Her skin against mine for the second time in one day wiped out the hours in between. “Your face is wet.”

  “It’s raining.” It was fated and epic. It had meaning and destiny. It was too much to take in. We kissed and she touched my face and I leaned back and squeezed alongside her. Maybe I could’ve laid down on the other bed, but if I did, in this state, we’d be like invalids in some ward.

  “You smell like booze.”

  “I’m so drunk.”

  She explained that after I’d left her dormitory she’d heard the voices of her returning suitemates. They sat with her for a few minutes, and were nice, then let her sleep, and when she woke up it was dark and she packed up and turned in her conference pass
to campus security. But then in the parking lot she couldn’t locate her car key, and came here looking for me, and found my door open.

  On the night table I noticed a bag of cherries I’d brought from home, a can of club soda, and the bottle of OxyContin, now empty. Between the painkillers and the Valium she’d had enough drugs to level a hippopotamus. They’d also given her an anesthetic to put her in some twilight state of amnesia. Despite my own inebriation, I figured that if she’d driven home with all that in her, four hours in weekend summer highway traffic, she’d be dead by now.

  “How is it?” I touched the splint.

  “Hot,” she said. “This thing holds steady at about a hundred and forty degrees.” I remembered the ice melting out there on the grass where I’d dumped it. “I was awake anyway,” she said, “thinking about all this.” She seemed on the verge of apologizing for what happened in her dorm this afternoon. “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “I know it’s wrong, but it doesn’t feel wrong.” She reached over to me. “My hands fit your face. I love you here next to me.” She touched my cheek.

  She was being nice. She put her head on my chest and said she loved listening to my heart. Uncontrollable brain-stem functioning and preorgasmic jizzing scattered into doubt and muddled sensations and further reversals of mood. I shoved my face into her hair, sniffing, wondering how long she’d been lying here, wondering whether we had a future, how we might survive. She loved me. She looked forward to seeing me, but then Mike figured it out and got horny and jumped my girlfriend. One day she hoped to have something better, maybe not with me but then who? I thought of high-ranking church officials begging for her support, scientists and art collectors, meeting her for coffee, kissing her on both sides of the mouth. Museum directors, social entrepreneurs, animal activists, education reformers, emailing, phoning, pleading for money, staring at her breasts. I tried to get ahold of myself.