by Matthew Klam
People were leaving. It was time to head to class. A guy called out to him as he walked by, then someone else said his name. I held up a hand, like, Hang on, we’re talking. “I know what they want,” he said. “They want to congratulate me, but that’s not what I want. They want to touch it, share in it, get close, but that turns me into something, and I don’t want to be that.”
“Congratulate you for what?”
He rubbed one eye and then the other. “I haven’t figured out what all this attention is about. I have to go somewhere quiet and think about it.”
“Good idea,” I said. He looked relieved, then worried, then went back to making notes.
I tried to steady myself, eating toast, and felt something saintly come over me, felt myself to be a steadying force for him too, in that parental way, surrendering myself for his sake as I peeled my egg. Every night I ripped out the murky parts of myself and submitted, until I was filled with only light, a nurturing object for my son to hold, for my daughter to close herself into, and lay there pretending to sleep until whichever one was beside me would sleep, and in the process I always passed out too, and woke up hours later, fully alert, afraid to wake them as I crawled out and wandered around the house, wincing at every creak in the floor, wondering what happened to my life.
Solito could look forward to a bright and boundless future, unless he’d already shot his wad, at twenty-eight, in which case he’d be better off blowing his brains out right now or preparing for decades of self-imitation, honing his “talk,” hating himself for phoning it in, cursed by early fame, like Fat Elvis dying on his gold-plated toilet. He scribbled away at his lecture, talking some, less guarded, delineating his Aristotelian three-act structure. I happened to be free of all that, of cartooning passion and real ambition, and wanted to feel above him, safe from his artistic pain—but I couldn’t, because he had what I wanted, whatever that was: public approval, sycophantic praise, suffering, audience, sympathy.
He’d walked from Guatemala, following mule trails through northern Mexico among candelilla men in rags. They tried to buy him from his trafficker in exchange for drugs, but he never forgot their burnished faces, crucifixes hanging from their throats. The wind in Sonora, roughnecks and cowboys. He’d gone missing in the Arizona desert, hallucinated from dehydration, passed through Tucson like a ghost. He’d lived to tell the story, and found his voice, his own drawing style, and a thorny political issue, a rallying cry, and turned that whole miserable thing into art, so readers could pity him, or at least read the thing once, and slap him on the back and forget.
George, the oldest member of the class, had a portfolio of notes and sketches that went back forty years. He was tall and angular, with a narrow, ravaged face, a quaking voice, white stubble on his chin, and gnarled, trembling hands. He’d grown up on a military base, enlisted in the marines at eighteen, and was assigned to carry a thing that shoulder-launched rockets. There were capable drawings of old French forts, Russian and North Vietnamese artillery, and pages of old letters, photos, and official citations. It was a kind of bliss to inundate myself with the muck of other peoples’ lives and to address technical problems with simple, obvious fixes.
“I never killed any women or children, but a guy in my unit did. I saw him throw a grenade in a doorway for fun.” He stared at me. His eyes were blue and clear and ageless. Was he trying to absolve himself? Maybe. “My little brother went over after I came back and was killed in action.” He touched his eyeglasses. His hand shook. It was clear that the war had undermined his life. Maybe he’d come here to resurrect the brother. I knelt between desks to help him get some solid forms beneath the timid lines of his soldiers. We went back and forth, from his thumbnails to his notes. Someone sat on the floor of the helicopter. Blood dripped. Wind shot through the open cab. We inserted key details, excised others.
Mel, the elementary school art teacher, had a good start on a travelogue to the wilds of Borneo. The town witch doctor drove a convertible. The inn where she’d stayed employed a cook who slept in a tree like a gorilla and covered himself in leaves. She made cartooning seem painless and fun. There were movie-like action breakdowns. She used sophisticated camera angles. She knew her anatomy, she’d had training, and she’d produced two roughed-out pages of a working outline.
“Looking good there.”
“Thanks.”
Carol’s stalky red hair stood up and shined as though it had been waxed. She’d begun a feverish and disturbing scene featuring beer and snow and a carload of teenage boys. The scene took place in 1989. The interior of the car was nicely delineated, well drafted, although the sketches were dark, with spectral light coming out of the dashboard, the boys grimly drinking. I had the feeling something bad was going to happen.
“What’s it about?”
She studied the page as though she might shred it. “Me,” she said, and shook her head. She had a big, loud, unmodulated voice, and let her voice go as deep and loud as she wanted. “Back there again.”
Brandon was dim and lazy, and ready to ink. He thought his gay pride sketches were perfect. He worked entirely in stick figures, like a three-year-old. I knelt beside him and we brainstormed for ways to improve his drawings. Working with dumb people was a depressing waste of time that made a joke of our struggle. Sarah was also stuck. She worked in a bookstore in Cambridge, and had Crohn’s disease, and had suffered a flare-up two days ago, so she didn’t know how much she could get done on her bookstore confidential/Crohn’s confession before Tuesday’s open studio. Then she started to cry.
When I finally stood up, I could barely walk. I’d been on my knees for an hour. I went down to the basement, where it was quieter, and sat at a computer. Once they’d put the finishing touches on their comic, they’d come down here to scan it and clean it up before printing. I wrote an instructional guide to the software, carefully explaining how to align their panels on the page, crop and make them level, and fix the white-out and eraser smudges. If you didn’t get down to the pixel level, you’d have grays in your whites that reproduced badly and made the final product look amateurish. Behind me, under the staircase, students from another class squeegeed paint across silk screens. Out the window I could hear people blabbing in the courtyard. I hadn’t checked my email since I’d left home on Friday. I logged on to the campus system and found a note from Robin from early this morning.
She thanked me for my voicemail. Somehow, everyone had slept more or less through the night. Before bed, she’d changed Kaya’s bandages, but it had taken an hour because she’d freaked out and cried hysterically. Robin had had to call our neighbor Elizabeth to come over to persuade Kaya to sit in the bath to soak them off. There were heat warnings, and Robin worried that with all the tape and gauze, the camp nurse would not let Kaya in the pool on Monday, even though a swim was maybe the only thing preventing a kid from bursting into flames. And Beanie had gotten ahold of one of my harmonicas but was afraid to put it to his lips because of what happened with the whistle, so he held it at arm’s length and had been screaming at it, more or less, since six A.M. Robin had a pitch meeting first thing Monday morning, with none other than Danny Katavolos, her old pal from the Latin American bureau who she’d complained about for years. Danny was a tiresome, artificial person who gave her lingering full-frontal hugs that she claimed to find revolting. At the Nature Channel, he’d moved up from channel subhead to network boss. His idea of great nature television was twenty-two minutes on the oldest living turtle in North America. She hadn’t had time to prepare, because I’d been away, so she didn’t have any ideas to pitch him, but in order to deliver eighteen episodes ahead of schedule and make the network a fortune, the show would have to be heavily scripted and produced, nothing educational, no environmental lessons, like a married couple beating the crap out of each other on a herring boat off the coast of Norway. Which, come to think of it, she thought he just might like.
Somehow she hadn’t seen the message from our bank, triggered by a negative balanc
e. I’d gotten away with things I couldn’t bear to keep inside. I’d been operating like Beanie, testing gravity by dropping crockery off the table. I wanted to be discovered, punished, brutalized, and forgiven. She didn’t know enough to accuse me. I opened the attached photo of Kaya’s scraped and bruised body and studied it, as well as the equally troubling photo of her splotchy face and still-wet hair, after her bath last night, while she was eating ice cream. In the end, I felt better seeing those photos, more secure, knowing they’d survived.
There were several emails from Adam. The newest one had come in just this morning. I scanned my inbox and scrolled down to the oldest, from late Friday night, and worked my way forward.
There’d been a time, a few years back, when my finances had been in even worse shape, when I’d fretted constantly and stared at the calendar and wondered whether Adam had submitted the invoice for whichever jobs had run, terrified that a drawing had been killed or rescheduled, and he’d patiently calm my fears. But then Jerry the tech weenie had taken over, flush with cash, authorizing contracts for regular contributors, and for the last year and a half a check had gone straight into my account at the end of the month, no matter what I did. I felt appreciated and protected.
I figured Adam was writing with some last changes for the Romney drawing or to talk through the Chinese factory piece. But in the email he didn’t mention either, and instead explained that Jerry had hired someone named Dave McNeedle, in a role yet to be named, under himself as publisher but over Laura, the heart and soul of the magazine, who’d been running the place for the past eighteen years. I think the email was supposed to sound reassuring, catty, and cynical, but as it went on, Adam seemed less able to hide his alarm. Dave had worked in venture capital in Silicon Valley and had done some huge deals, and was married to Jerry’s little sister, Margaret. Jerry’s other attempts to optimize life at the magazine over the last two years—a swanky office redesign, free vegan coconut pudding, empowerment lectures by the likes of tennis legend John Newcombe—had also been worth a chortle or two but had never interfered with operations.
Dave had apparently been introduced at a lunch meeting on Friday, two days ago, and offered his thoughts on the future of digital media, lamenting the magazine’s economic prospects, using investor jargon and social network data. Then he began criticizing editing choices from the past few months, including a recent cover story on Bobby Jindal’s faith that he found “tough sledding.” He criticized other sections of the magazine, and praised publications that had successfully moved into the digital age with lists and videos and hot takes. According to Adam, Dave didn’t say anything positive about the deeply reported, long-format journalism that had made the magazine necessary reading for U.S. presidents since Millard Fillmore and instead mentioned how much money the publication was losing every year. This bit of hand-wringing from Adam, more than anything else, struck me as worrisome. Adam said he knew that rumors were flying and people were panicking, but he told me not to take too seriously anything I read. He did concede that there would be changes and closed the note by asking me to call him at home.
On Saturday afternoon he’d written again—while I’d been playing softball, getting whacked on narcotics, and licking Amy’s coochie—to say that the Chinese factory story had been killed. “You’ve probably already heard,” he wrote, but the number of print issues would likely be reduced from twelve to maybe eight. Or six. Or maybe none. Although there would be an increase in “Web content.” A few of the monthly contracts had been canceled, but not mine, not yet anyway, “And I won’t let them cancel yours,” he wrote. “That’s how important you are to the magazine.” I should call him at the office, or on his cell anytime.
His third email had been sent late Saturday night. He explained that Laura had quit, although she’d already been fired, but she didn’t know that until she read it later on an industry blog. Apparently, surveillance cameras around the office had been vandalized, and several other people at the magazine had quit or been fired, and maybe those firings had been for the best, but for now the bloodshed was over. There were more assurances, uncharacteristically ungrammatical ones that even on a good day Adam would never be in a position to make. “I’m not going anywhere, I’ll die at my desk, and so will you.”
A last email had come in around nine this morning. “I’ve been lucky to work at an institution that remained true to its heritage and principles,” he wrote, sounding tired, or like a kidnapping victim being forced to give his own eulogy. He said he didn’t know what the future would bring.
I combed the Web for stories about the magazine’s implosion and found rants, paeans, and deep outrage from an endless supply of stuck-up former staffers who’d gone on to important careers in journalism and publishing, as well as heartwarming recollections of the good old days. I wondered if I’d get my next check, if it would be my last, and figured I was fortunate to be away from home, where no one would notice my chattering teeth and hollow-eyed, thousand-yard stare. The whole thing felt absurd, unbearably contrived, and way too real.
I’d gotten lazy and cocky, ignored phone calls and emails from other art directors; I’d shunned friends at other magazines, ad agencies, and design houses. I had nothing on the horizon, hadn’t attended an industry party or award ceremony or bothered to respond to invitations to join a panel or judge a contest since Kaya’s premature arrival. It would take weeks or months of begging, with backbreaking charm and jolly banter, to get the attention of anyone in a position to hire me, and how long after that to scrape together an assignment—at the given rate, no leverage—and 90 or 120 days after that to get paid. We were about to be broke like I hadn’t been broke since I’d quit advertising. Any unforeseen expense would blitz my credit card and start a full-scale war at home. I started to hyperventilate, and began to see sparks in the air. I saw myself wearing the wool liner from an old army coat, wheeling a milk crate across a catering hall in a luggage caddy, setting up an easel to do caricatures at a bar mitzvah.
I sat there flipping mindlessly around different news sites, keeping my brain in neutral, trying to process what had just happened, maybe hoping to find a funny animal video to distract me, when a headline caught my eye. For only the second time in its history, a major book prize had named a cartoonist as a finalist for its highest award. For a moment, I wondered whether it was me. But the accompanying photo of Angel Solito, who I’d eaten breakfast with, cleared up any confusion about why people had been congratulating him. In the photo he stood in a gray T-shirt, arms crossed, with a defiant look. I logged off the computer and pushed back the chair, chuckling to myself, although the sound began lower, deeper, shivering, rattling. I had to get back to class.
Climbing the stairs two at a time, I felt a wild energy, and strode into the room, infused with a saintly desperation to enlighten and instruct. I knelt beside Vishnu and did the pen-nib demo he’d requested after our first class, pointing out the parts of the pen, the barrel of the nib, where the ink was held, demonstrating to him how to grasp and hold the nib, moving quickly, showing off, controlling the line, pulling it toward me, turning my arm, rotating the paper.
“As a general rule of thumb,” I said, in a loud, sharp, patronizing tone, “the pen can only move in so many directions.” As I raised the pen, he gave me a worried look. I thought of driving it through his eyeball, into his brain. “And now it is time for me to re-dip.” On his desk sat a cup of ink, a murky cup of ink wash, a stack of empty coffee cups, and a pile of inky blotting tissues from his hours of failed experimentation. I went on, possibly screaming, about the viscosity of various inks. There was also a bag from the bagel place, crumbs in his lap and all over his shirt. “Now you do it,” I said. A strange chill came over me. My vision became blurry, clouded with auras. Maybe this was a dream and we were all already dead.
I went around the room, offering harried technical instruction and hollow, condescending compliments and encouragement, moving on when I felt my aggression spiking. “Nice try.
” “Staircases are tricky.” “That looks wrong. Start over.”
On the kitchen table in my apartment I found a note. “My arm is killing me,” Amy wrote. “I’m going into town for more drugs.” Her handwriting looked like the goofy scrawl of a child, since her good hand was purple and immobilized. “P.S. Where is my car key? I have to go.” Good. I wanted her to go, get as far away from here as possible. We’d had our fun, although it was nothing really, and fucking her was killing me. “I’m going to New Hampshire to get Lily, then I’m heading home to deal with Mike.” The paper was creased from her effort and her letters had smudged in the struggle to keep pace with her thoughts. “I’ve had it with his attacks and blame and projections.” Maybe she was using her broken hand. I couldn’t tell. “I am working on myself. I’m trying to be better. If I dropped dead tomorrow he’d trip over my carcass and not notice, although he is generous to others.” Then the note broke up into random upper- and lowercase block print. “He is rude to me on a daily basis.” A grapefruit I’d brought from home had been demolished, and she’d left its pits and guts on the kitchen counter.
I went to the bed and sat, holding the note. She’d never confront him. Nothing would come of it. I bowed and smelled the clothes on the bed, her T-shirt, bra, and underpants, taking my time with each, moved and overcome, engaged in the sensory knowledge, holding poignantly to the memories of her parts.
I had some raging, sicko crush on an emotionally stunted zillionaire, and she had a weakness for losers. It was silly and hopeless, and we’d never make it to Minorca. I found my shorts on the floor where I’d tossed them the night before, soaked from the late-night bike ride in the rain, with her key and earrings still in the pockets. I put the key on the kitchen table and placed the earrings in a teacup beside them.
There were some shopping bags from a store in town, and I picked up one and gave it a squeeze. I’d figured she might try to bribe me before she left, as a way to make light of last night’s suggestion that I prostitute myself to her wealthy friends. A gift, or cash or a check, a couple thousand, maybe more. And I’d laugh it off, so she’d pretend to shove it in my pants or something, more laughter, but then she’d get serious and plead, but I’d hold firm. No thanks, I’d say, I don’t need your pity, and shake my head with disdain. So she’d break down, she’d beg, and I’d cave.
