The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  He tiptoed into the room and leaned over his daughter’s bed. Kath’s mouth was open, a small dark oval edged in vermilion, and her turned-up nose was bent against her pillow. Her precious round face beamed with high summer color, and the love Scott felt for her at that moment was almost painful in its intensity. He placed a gentle, almost shy kiss on the swell of her cheek, then backed quietly away.

  Pulling the door shut behind him, he was startled again by a nearly uncontainable rush of emotion. He had been unable to pass Kath’s room without checking...to make sure she was really there, he admitted to himself. It was weird—he was still caught up in the subtle dislocation of the dream.

  Downstairs, Scott fixed himself a light toast-and-coffee breakfast, then thumped back upstairs to shower and shave, accomplishing all of this with considerably more noise than was necessary. He felt a small pang of disappointment when the ruckus of these ablutions failed to waken his wife or his daughter. For a delicious, delinquent moment he considered calling in sick, taking a French leave, crawling back into bed and waking Krista with Mister Happy. After all, it was his birthday.

  But the voice of his conscience interjected with its usual stubborn intolerance. Today was a heavy clinic day until two, then he had a group of medical students to babysit. On this latter account he knew he deserved no sympathy. Every year he promised himself he would drop his university affiliation, and every year he smilingly accepted reappointment.

  So he decided to buck up, meet his responsibilities. After all, there was tonight’s ‘surprise’ party to look forward to, and he took strength from that. Krista always arranged some sort of birthday bash for him, and he saw no reason for his thirty-seventh (middle age, an inner voice heckled) to be any different. It was a comfortable certainty, and Scott found himself grinning at the thought of it. This was not to suggest that Krista Bowman was predictable. In some ways she was—loving, caring, mothering, sexy—but for the most part there was just no second-guessing Mrs. Draper’s youngest gal, Krista Marie.

  At the door before setting out on the twenty-minute drive to the Health Sciences Centre in Ottawa, Scott had the barely containable urge to shout and waken the entire household, maybe the whole damned lake. But he didn’t. He went out to the garage, climbed into the car and nudged a tape into the deck, trying as he motored up the unpaved hill to think about tonight’s party and the fun they would all have together.

  But that dream-born feeling, dark and strangely prescient, refused to leave him. It remained like a low-grade fever throughout most of that day.

  2

  BY FOUR-THIRTY THAT AFTERNOON Scott had pretty much forgotten his early-morning dream and the funk it had kindled inside of him. In fact, as he stood in the hallway on Two Link and addressed his students, a growing part of his mind was already home, lounging on the deck, sipping a beer almost too cold to hold. It was hot, tacky, and the smell of the chronic ward was none-too-sweet. The students, six of them, each done up in a bleached-and-pressed intern’s jacket, stood attentively around him in a tight horseshoe. They had already seen and briefly reviewed five patients, and Scott felt that was more than enough. Mrs. Stopa would be the last. He loosened his tie and set about this final task.

  “Mrs. Stopa is ninety-three,” Scott said, taking the hand of the stuporous old Pole seated on the commode in front of him. “She has garden-variety senility, or simple deterioration, as the textbooks call it.” The object of the afternoon’s exercise was to introduce the students to the wonders of aging, specifically, senescence. “As you can see, she’s totally vegged-out. Complete mental destitution.”

  In truth, Mrs. Stopa was a study in apathy. She stared vacantly into her lap. She drooled. Her jaws worked continuously, but only rude chomping noises came out. There was really little else Scott could say about the old gal, and when she suddenly broke wind, the group edged discreetly away.

  “Well, gang,” Scott said. “It’s Friday. Shall we call it a day—”

  “Hey, everyone, come look at this.”

  It was one of the students, an attractive young lady, calling to the group from across the hallway. She was staring excitedly over the shoulder of an elderly gentleman whose chest had been crisscrossed in canvas restraints to prevent him from toppling out of his wheelchair. At first glance, the old man appeared to have little more going for him than his ward-mate, Mrs. Stopa. His scrawny frame was clad in the accustomed attire of the senile—sleeveless undershirt, hospital-blue pajama bottoms, fuzzy brown slippers—and there was the familiar reek of ammonia about him. His face was sharp and heavily lined, and drool trailed from his chin to his food-spotted bib. His eyes, small and so deeply brown they appeared black, punctuated his barren expression like the button eyes of a rag doll.

  But as Scott drew closer, a light flickered in those eyes that hinted at something deeper. It was fleeting, gone so quickly it might not have even been there. But in the space of that single breath, Scott felt certain he’d seen something...lurking in those wrinkle-webbed eyes. What the old man was doing with his hands added to the feel of mystery. With his left he steadied a clipboard against his knees, and with the pencil in his right, he drew.

  Scott had heard about this old boy, but had not yet seen him in person. His attending physician, Vince Bateman, who was also chief of psychiatry, had presented the old man at Wednesday morning rounds as a ‘diagnostic dilemma.’ Clinically, the patient satisfied most of the criteria needed for a diagnosis of senility; and yet, according to Bateman, his artistic ability approached the incredible. He had arrived by ambulance, unconscious and with no ID, and Bateman had christened him ‘The Cartoonist.’

  “C’mere, you guys,” the student said. “Check this out. It’s amazing.

  The rest of the group gathered round, gawking curiously at the pad and the brisk, apparently haphazard path of the pencil. With an impatient glance at the time, Scott joined them.

  Unmindful of the intrusion, the old man continued his pencil scratching. As he drew, he rocked to the music coming from the radio on the wheelchair beside him. It was one of those old-fashioned transistor models that had been so popular some twenty years back, prior to the advent of the Walkman and the ghetto-blaster. Its cracked and battered casing was held together with strips of masking tape, grubby with age.

  Scott glanced at the old man’s pad...and when he did, his impatience vanished. As a kid Scott had been an avid comic book fan, all of them, everything from Sergeant Rock to Richie Rich. But he had never seen anything like this.

  The artist had created a series of action drawings, squared-off in classic comic book style, which depicted two men boxing. In the last of these, one man lay face-down on the mat. The other stood with his legs spread and his arms triumphantly upthrust. Lead-black blood trickled from the loser’s ear; the old man was just in the process of detailing his vanquished body. The pencil moved with remarkable accuracy and speed, and the drawings were of a professional quality. No, Scott thought, it was more than that. They seemed almost alive.

  “Who is he, Dr. Bowman?” one of the students said.

  “Well, no one knows for sure,” Scott said, switching back in his memory to Bateman’s presentation. “A nameless vagrant, found unconscious in the park bordering the QE Parkway. He’s not my patient, but if memory serves he’s shown none of the classic signs of alcoholism, which is the usual case with these unidentified derelicts.”

  Scott glanced at the man in the wheelchair and, for just a second or two, found the scratching of his pencil unnerving.

  “He’s amazing,” the girl who’d discovered him said. “Look at how fast he goes. And he hardly even seems to be looking at the page.”

  “He is not really senile,” said another student, a soft-spoken East Indian. “Is he?”

  Scott opened his mouth to reply when a high, effeminate voice cut in behind him.

  “Well, he pretty much fits the bill, Doctors.”

  Scott and his entourage turned to face Vince Bateman, who’d been passing by in the h
all and overheard the question.

  Scott felt a familiar stab of dislike for the man. As a clinical psychiatrist Bateman had few peers. The trouble was that he knew it, and his ego, as huge and ungainly as a grizzly, made him nigh on insufferable to work with. He took over the discussion without so much as a confirming glance at Scott.

  “When this gentleman came to us two weeks ago,” he said, “all he had were his tattered clothes and a knapsack containing that clipboard, a bunch of old drawings, and a bundle of lead pencils.” He adjusted his Gucci tie, then flicked an annoying bit of lint from the sleeve of his herringbone jacket. “Before the medical people could come up with a diagnosis, the old fellow regained consciousness and started producing these drawings. One of my residents saw him in consultation, quite properly tagged him as senile, and had him transferred up here. He’ll remain on the chronic ward until he can be placed in a more appropriate center—Saint Vincent’s or someplace like that.”

  “But what about his drawings?” the East Indian said. “An artist like this cannot be senile...can he?”

  Perplexity crossed Bateman’s face like a swift-moving cloud. He stroked pensively at his mustache before speaking, and when the words came, they seemed to cause him physical pain. It was that hard for Vince Bateman to be indefinite.

  “I have to admit being at a loss to explain the artwork,” he said. “It could be an unconscious carry-over from his past, something he was previously capable of doing with little or no thought. Another possibility, since senility is a cyclical condition, is that he draws only when more or less lucid. The fact that he doesn’t communicate during these periods could be due to some separate form of pathology, such as aphasia secondary to stroke...or he might simply be choosing to ignore his external environment.”

  The perplexity had left Bateman’s face and now it clouded the faces of the students. Typical of Bateman, he was talking way over their novice heads.

  Scott, irked and anxious to leave, decided to elucidate.

  “What Dr. Bateman is saying, group, is that we haven’t got a clue what makes this old boy tick. In some ways he fits neatly into a diagnostic slot, and in other, very fundamental ways, he does not.”

  Bateman flushed. The only thing he hated more avidly than disorder was being paraphrased. Scott had to turn his head to conceal a self-satisfied smirk.

  “There’s a batch of his artwork right here,” Bateman said. “In this satchel.” He indicated a heavy woolen handbag, slung by its strap from the back of the wheelchair. “You might be interested in going through some of it. The majority are quite macabre, with a gruesome sort of horror-comic bent. More than a few appear to relate to events recent in the news. Disasters mostly. More evidence to support the theory of lucid intervals. Presumably he hears about these things on his radio, then creates his own comic book versions.” Bateman edged away. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said.

  Then he was gone, gliding down the hall with an animated flourish that made Scott wonder—not for the first time—where the man’s true sexual preference lay.

  Still smirking, Scott moved closer to the wheelchair.

  “We’ll go through some of these,” he said, “then pack it in, agreed?” Noting the eager nods, he reached into the satchel.

  “Ow,” Scott cried, jerking his hand back. Blood welled from the pulp of his index finger, droplets of it spattering the armrest of the wheelchair. A few drops landed on the artist’s bare arm, and the old man flinched as if slapped. Other drops speckled the floor at Scott’s feet. No one noticed. All eyes were on his finger.

  “Sonofa —” Scott said, catching a string of profanities in early stride. His gaze settled accusingly on the dark interior of the satchel. “What the...?”

  One of the students, an overweight girl with a runaway case of acne, produced a half-used packet of Kleenex and handed it over to Scott. Then, as if expecting something to spring out at her, she peered into the old man’s satchel. Once satisfied, she poked in a chubby hand. It came back holding a crisp sheet of paper, one edge streaked with fresh blood.

  “Paper cut,” she said. Then she withdrew a sheaf of drawings.

  Unmindful of the commotion, the Cartoonist flipped to a fresh page and resumed his penciling.

  Scott examined his cut finger. The wound was small but surprisingly deep. A few minutes’ pressure and a bandage would control it—but it stung like hell. Looking down at the grubby old artist, Scott wondered when last he’d had a tetanus shot.

  “Are you all right, Doctor?” the East Indian said.

  “Not fatal,” Scott said. “Just painful.” He shifted next to the overweight student, who had already begun leafing through the drawings. Despite himself, Scott’s interest had been rekindled by Bateman’s last suggestion: that some of the drawings related to events current in the news. He watched as the girl filed slowly through the sheaf.

  Bateman had been right. Many of the sketches were quite macabre. Boneyard scenes with half-rotted ghouls clawing themselves free of the grave. Bloated sea creatures reaching up from weedy depths for the legs of unsuspecting bathers. Some dark, formless thing lurking beneath a sleeping child’s bed.

  This last one made Scott think of the night fears Kath had suffered until just recently. Almost every night she would awaken at some ungodly hour, thrashing and screaming, insisting there was something under her bed, something with scaly wet skin that slithered and touched her toes.

  “Here’s one,” Scott said, interrupting his own thoughts. He took up a sheet with his uninjured hand and displayed it. “I’m sure you recall the endless news coverage of the recent 747 disaster at Uplands Airport.” Shown was a sleek, mammoth aircraft skidding out of control at the end of the runway, then nosing in jagged, flaming halves into a bordering cornfield. “Looks as if Dr. Bateman was right.”

  The students pored over the drawings with interest.

  “You folks can scout through the rest of these if you like,” Scott said after a moment. “I have to run.” His mind had turned again to home.

  Also anxious to leave, the students thanked Scott for his time, replaced the drawings in the satchel, then marched off down the hallway, chatting cheerily about the strange old man and the August weekend ahead.

  Scott started away—but out of the corner of his eye he noticed a flutter of movement and he paused, turning back in time to see a single sheet of drawings glide to the floor from the artist’s withered hand. He bent and retrieved it, curiosity compelling him to study its contents.

  There were four frames, again with a horror theme, depicting a lone figure in a decrepit, cobwebbed room. The figure was standing before an elaborate lion’s-head fireplace, and using an ax to rip up the floorboards. In the last frame the figure discovered a mummified corpse underneath. The corpse had a knife in its heart, and something rectangular clutched to its chest.

  Great stuff, Scott thought in amazement. What a talent.

  Replacing the drawings in the satchel, he glanced again at the old man’s work, intrigued by the almost mechanical persistence of his scribbling, by the uncanny ability that seemed to simply flow through him. He found it difficult to accept that the mind responsible for this talent could be entirely empty. From the first moment Scott had seen the old man, he’d been tempted to believe he could be reached, a channel of communication somehow established. His interest in this patient was only partly professional. It was mostly just plain old curiosity. It would be fascinating to learn more about the old man. Some of his comic book styles rang faint bells in Scott’s memory, taking him back across the years to that childhood fascination with comics. Maybe this old guy had been an illustrator for one of the classics: Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, or something like that. It was an interesting possibility—a senile celebrity.

  A nurse appeared next to Scott and said,“Dr. Bowman?”

  Scott didn’t answer, hadn’t even heard the woman’s voice. He was staring at the drawing the artist was just then creating, a tingly sense of déjà vu
coursing through him. He’d had a similar experience on one other occasion, several years back in a village in Bavaria, a place he knew he’d never visited before. At the time he’d been examining some primitive instrument of torture in a dusty medieval museum. Krista had jibed him about that, suggesting that in another life he’d probably suffered public humiliation in a similar device for the unspeakable things he’d done to a clergyman’s daughter.

  But what was this? The drawing hadn’t even taken shape yet, just some ribbed, rounded objects, but geometrically arranged—

  “Dr. Bowman?” the nurse repeated.

  The old artist began sketching more rapidly now, adding texture and dimension, his pencil a hoarse whisper against the page. The rounded objects became cylinders...barrels. Four barrels. But that closely ribbed pattern—as if hoops had been wrapped around them at regular intervals—that was the familiar bit.

  “Dr. Bowman.”

  Scott did a half-turn toward the nurse, then looked back compulsively at the drawing. With speed that was conjurer slick, the Cartoonist imprinted one of the barrels with a flower that looked like a rose. Then, equally quickly, he etched in a series of parallel slats—like boards but with abnormally wavy edges—joining the barrels from side to side.

  Where have I seen this before? Scott wondered. Had it been recently? Yes, there was a sense of newness to the recognition.

  He felt a hand on his forearm and looked around at the nurse, whose face was flushed with exasperation. “Yes, sorry,” he said, “but I...” Then he gazed again at the drawing, trying to place those shapes, their geometric relationship to one another, that big white rose.