What was he doing here alone? I couldn’t recall ever seeing him at FunnyFest before. Once, he even told me that he didn’t like what my father turned into during the ‘Fest, when Riverbank took him into its greedy arms.
Or was I making that up? Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember it actually happening. With the afterimage of Mal’s glasses still burning in my eyes, everything seemed to have an equal chance at truth or falsehood. Even my childhood memories were open to interpretation. When my sight came back, Mal was gone, and the Ferris wheel jerked into action.
After the ride, I wanted to find the characters, to see how the costumes looked close up, but they had all disappeared, as if evading me. I forgot about them for a while, but when Susan and I were waiting in line for foot-long hot dogs I saw my mother ducking behind some shrubs that ran along the fence about forty feet away.
“Can I leave you here a second?” I said. “I want to check something out.”
“Sure.”
I walked along the bushes, trying to find the gap the false Dot had passed through. For some time, I could see nothing. Then, feet: giant orange cartoon feet, milling around barely visible behind the hedgerow. I ducked down as far as I could, closed my eyes, and plunged through the branches, emerging in a peculiar cul-de-sac, a gumdrop-shaped space between the shrubs and the weathered wooden fence that demarcated the fairgrounds’ border. It seemed to have once been the site of a ticket booth or power station, now removed. In it stood six teenagers, smoking marijuana, each dressed up as a member of my family. I identified the Tim costume immediately by the striped T-shirt I was always made to wear in the strip. Its inhabitant, a thin-faced girl with a squint, held my head under her right arm.
“Hey, man,” she said. “I know you.”
But I didn’t know her. I didn’t know any of them. There was something familiar about each, though: a bend of the nose or an expanse of forehead that might have been hallmarks of Riverbank’s stagnant genetic pool. But the girl I didn’t recognize at all.
“You’re me,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah.” She had a slightly ironic well-I’ll-be tone that I didn’t much like.
The others giggled. They were all boys. Somebody said, “Small fucking world.”
I realized I was terribly out of place here, that the costumes had not been worth looking for, and that in finding them I had stumbled upon a hostile and unfathomable miniculture. I didn’t understand teenagers at all anymore. Where my generation had embraced irony with a taste for its novelty and its shock value with adults, these kids breathed it like pure oxygen, taking more power from it than I had ever thought possible, and crushed earnestness like it was so many soft drink cans. When they seemed sincere, they were really taking irony a step further, mocking the very concept of speaking one’s mind. What adults thought of them one way or another was of no significance. I feared them terribly. “Uh, sorry,” I said. “Wrong turn.” I ducked back under the bushes, leaving my ass exposed to any number of punting feet. Somebody snorted, and then they all did.
“Where did you go?” Susan asked when I got back to the doggie stand. When I told her, she frowned. “If this was Disneyland, they’d get fired just for taking the heads off. Did you know that? At Disneyland, that’s just cause for instant expulsion.”
“I had no idea.”
We walked around, eating. Most of the attractions were, in fact, food-related; vendors sold everything from falafel to pork rinds to chicken lo mein. One enterprising man had named his menu items — standard American stuff, burgers and fries — after characters in the strip. So far, nobody had stopped him. I thought of ordering a Coca-Cola à la Carl.
“Oh, look!” Susan said. “There’s a Timburger!”
Sure enough, there was. My burger had gouda cheese and bacon on it and cost six dollars and fifty cents.
I was beginning to feel a bit creeped out. Besides the prevailing depersonalization of myself and everyone I was related to, the place was swarming with children. Children made me uncomfortable. They had a smell, a confectionary pissiness to them, and all the self-possession of an escaped pack of zoo animals. For a moment, I had a gruesome epiphany, much like the stoned realization that a muscle, your tongue, was filling your mouth: that all around the fairgrounds, purchased food was being transformed into Kinderfleisch. It was happening now, right now, as I thought about it! I felt woozy and reached out automatically to Susan to steady myself. Her shoulder was hot and round and fit in my palm like a peach.
That’s when I saw Ken Dorn. He was standing alone just outside the fairground gate, eating what looked to be a Timburger. When he saw us he grinned with devilish self-satisfaction, as if he had engineered our nascent acquaintance for some as-yet-concealed personal gain. In retrospect it seems like he must have walked toward us, but if memory serves, we were drawn toward him, as if toward the darkened entrance to a funhouse.
“Hello, Ken,” I said, trying to preempt him. He was still grinning.
“Timmy,” he said, “Susan.”
“What are you doing here?” Susan asked him flatly.
“Oh, just surrounding myself with the trappings, you know.”
She looked at me. “You two know each other?”
“We met at the wake.”
“Oh, right.” She bit her lip.
“How’s the drawing going, Tim?” Dorn asked me. In his tone was something of the teens I had earlier encountered.
“Better, better. Harder than I thought.”
“Yes, it’s actual work, isn’t it.”
We stared at one another, me attempting to figure him out, to exhume his motives, whatever they might be; him seeming to know everything about me there was to know. I finally looked away, back at the fairgrounds.
“You’re getting along with your new artist, I trust?” I heard him ask Susan.
“Swimmingly, thanks.”
Suddenly I was tired. Maybe it was the heat, but part of it must have been Dorn. I didn’t have it in me for a conversation with him; he begged a profusion of second guesses I didn’t feel like making. He droned at Susan and Susan droned back, and I stood with my hands in my pockets and my eyes half-shut until they stopped.
* * *
Susan pulled her car into our driveway. “Well,” she said.
“Well.”
“Nice day, huh?”
“Very. Do you have a place to stay?”
She shrugged. “I can find a motel.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Stay at our place.” I quickly added, “I can sleep on the couch. You take my bed.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“Or my father’s.”
She grimaced, and it was decided.
Inside, I knocked on Pierce’s door, while Susan shut herself in my bedroom. “Pierce,” I said. “Are you up?”
“I am lying down,” came the measured reply.
“My editor’s staying over. I’m taking the couch.”
“Your who?”
“Susan, from the syndicate?”
A long pause. “Oh, okay.” He sounded better, in possession of some rudimentary grip. I hadn’t seen him all week, and from my own observations and evidence from the bathroom, deduced that he hadn’t bathed or showered during that time.
“We were at FunnyFest all day,” I said. Silence. “It wasn’t too bad, you know. In fact it was silly. The mayor almost drowned.”
Pierce said nothing, and I regretted saying anything. Then he said, “I don’t think any of that is silly.”
“Whatever you say,” I said automatically.
“That’s what I say,” said my brother.