A few old rowboats and peeling oars lay outside the boat shed. Franklin pushed a boat into the water and began rowing upstream. Moonlight shone on the back steps of the drugstore, on iron-hooped barrels and piles of lumber; in a backyard garden a scarecrow wearing an old straw hat threw a long shadow across a stand of corn. Franklin was soon past the abandoned knitting mill that marked the end of the village. The water near the river’s edge was thick with grass and rushes, and he had to swing away from the bank. The woods on both sides were broken by an occasional dark house; here and there he saw a clearing with a bulldozer, and after a time he came to a well-lit house. It was set halfway up the hill, on the other shore. The house was obscured by the thick woods; from the rowboat he could hear the sound of voices, laughter. A party appeared to be in progress; Franklin could hear the chink of glasses. “Oh, absolutely!” a voice said, very sharply and clearly, before dropping back into the murmur. Through the dark Crosshatch of woods he could see patches of lamplit leaves and pieces of people moving in light on the front porch. A burst of high laughter seized his attention, aroused his deepest interest, but in fact he didn’t know, he couldn’t be certain. Something plopped lightly into the water — a frog? — and sent out ripples that began in shadow and, slowly widening, suddenly trembled in the brightness of the moon. After a while Franklin took up his oars and rowed home.
He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer’s trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible — indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible — therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise — well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon. In the long nights the thoughts came to him, streamed in on him, though mostly he merely watched them, a little distrustfully, out of the corner of one eye.
He was moving ahead: by midwinter he had completed more than 20,000 drawings. It took him another month to complete the difficult episode of the vanishing palace, the last adventure before the eruption onto the dark side of the moon. The palace, located on an island in the river that separated the white side of the moon from the dark side, had the property of fading away as you advanced through it. It was necessary not simply to invent a detailed dream-palace, a palace with long corridors and arched doorways, soaring halls and mirrored chambers, but also to make drawings that were lighter and lighter until the passageway or chamber seemed to fade away — and turning his head the boy saw, in perfect perspective, another detailed and alluring corridor, which began to fade as he passed along. At the end of the episode the entire palace faded away, like the Cheshire cat, leaving the boy and the monkey alone in blank whiteness. The monkey, removing a piece of charcoal from his pocket, quickly drew a spit of land, a rowboat, some waves; and as the monkey rowed them across the river toward the dark side of the moon, the boy looked over his shoulder and saw, clearly in the distance, the palace on the island, sharp and clear, growing smaller and smaller.
But it was the dark side of the moon that drew on Franklin’s deepest energies, for here he rigorously released himself into a realm of absolute cartoon freedom. Although he continued to draw in India ink on rice paper, he imagined the images in reverse, for he planned to instruct the cameraman to make a negative print, in order to create the effect of white drawings on a black background. In this black world the hero was to undergo a series of phantasmagoric metamorphoses, of dream dissolutions and hallucinatory recombinations. A radical shift in drawing style indicated the change: gone was the intricate perspective background with its preference for the unusual angle, and in its place was a flat picture plane with deliberately simplified figures. The instant the boy set foot on the dark side of the moon he began to unravel, until he was a single wavering line that gradually assumed the form of a spinning top. The top became a clown’s yawning face; inside the yawn was a fantastic garden, where the boy reappeared and was at once transformed into a tree hung with many apples, each of which gradually assumed the shape of his head. The faces grew bodies, and a crowd of boys ran off in many directions as each turned into a different animal ridden by a monkey; the animals collided and became a boy surrounded by tall, wavering, menacing figures, who pursued him into a black rock that contained a cobwebbed parlor. Slowly the parlor became an amusement park where the carousel horses grew larger and larger and began to eat the roller coaster, the fun house, the Ferris wheel until there was nothing left — at which point the fat horses melted together and became an open umbrella, beneath which the boy and his monkey floated down, down, down — and as the episodes of metamorphosis multiplied, becoming more dangerous, more sinister, incorporating apparently random images like toasters, icebergs, and blast furnaces whose shapes were cunningly drawn from earlier parts of the cartoon, beyond the edges of the paper Franklin noticed an occasional hard image that swiftly melted away: an edge of window, the hand of Mrs. Henneman holding out a glass, the yellowing slats of the partially open Venetian blinds, but already he had sunk back into the dark side of the moon. In a narrow valley he was surrounded by mountains with mouths, somewhere a phone was ringing, his temples were about to burst. A moon bird melted into a river of demon birds. “You have to decide,” someone was saying, “whether to build or buy,” and when he looked up he saw his own face reflected in a dark train window, through which he saw a passing landscape. Slowly the landscape became a sewing machine that stitched the silently screaming boy onto the sleeve of a shirt. The last snow melted under the spirea bushes by the steps of the front porch, green leaves hung from the maples, and one rainy hot day Franklin saw that he was done. Somewhere the notes of a piano sounded: Stella practicing. A drop of sweat trickled along his cheek. Several sequences needed to be reworked, the voyage was riddled with minor flaws, but he could fix things in a month or two. He wanted to hand it over to the cameraman, he wanted to throw it on a white screen in the dark of his study; and a day came when Franklin began carrying boxes up to Vivograph, which still operated in its old offices in the arcade building, but with an entirely new set of faces.
That evening he felt heavy-limbed and light-headed and went to bed early. When he lay down his heart began to beat very quickly, as if he were running; and he lay alert and exhausted as moon drawings streamed in his mind, with their two peg holes at the top, their numbers in the lower right-hand corner, their hundreds of thousands of carefully drawn little black lines.