But now I could see that we were all Mal had. “Yeah,” I told him lamely. “Yeah, that would have been something,” but my face must have told a different story, because Mal only flashed a flaccid grin and walked out, making this the third — and I hoped final — conversation of the day that had ended badly.
twenty-two
Late that night I remembered Pierce had the car on weekends. I tried to talk him out of it, so that I could attend the conference. “Gillian could always come out here,” I told him. “I won’t be around until Sunday night.”
He was lying on his bed, reading a paperback novel, but put it down now and gave this some thought. “She’s never been here before.”
“Well then, I’m sure she’s dying to visit.”
He looked at me as if I were insane. “No way,” he said finally.
Instead, he agreed to drop me off at the hotel. It was far from being on the way to Chatsworth, the Pine Barrens town Gillian lived on the outskirts of, and I couldn’t complain. The next morning, I packed a bag with the usual items, plus a few others I thought might be useful — a sketchbook, a few things to read — and met Pierce by the car, where he was standing with shower-slick hair, staring into the distance. He brought nothing, it seemed, but the clothes on his back.
We listened to the radio, an AM station that exclusively played country classics: Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams. The DJ wisely remained near-invisible, as when he did speak it was with a quavering, spooked voice as grave as a crow’s. The station fuzzed out halfway to Bridgewater. Pierce reached out and clicked the radio off, leaving us together in the soporific muffled hum of the Caddy’s interior.
“So,” I said to my brother.
“So,” he said.
“What did you and Mal talk about?”
He shifted his hands on the wheel, weighing his answer. “He came out and talked to you, huh?”
“Not about you.”
“Uh-huh. Well, nothing, really. Mom. Life. Et cetera.”
I said nothing for a few miles, watching the trees drift by along Route 202. “He told me Mom’s even worse,” I finally said.
“She didn’t know him.”
“No.”
He turned to me. “Let’s bring her home, man. I’m serious. Like, right away.”
I knew this was right: visits once a week were not enough. She hadn’t even her memories to keep her company anymore, save for the stray, out-of-context recollection that floated every once in a while past her mind’s eye. Or at least it so seemed; what did I know? I was beginning to get an inkling, through the clumsy lens of my own meager loneliness, of the vast, clinical emptiness of my mother’s. “Yeah,” I said, feeling my heart shrink to a tiny, callused knob. “Yeah, we have to do that. Do you know the first thing about it?”
He shrugged. “No. Give her medicine? Clean her up, talk to her? What is there to know, Tim? We just give her what she needs.”
“It has to be more complicated than that,” I said, but he met this with only a silence that persisted for the rest of the trip.
* * *
I had no idea if Susan, in her advanced state of indifference to me, had bothered to book me a room in the hotel. I checked in at the desk to discover that she hadn’t, though I decided to chalk this up to unavailability, rather than malice. It was quarter to ten in the morning. I asked the desk clerk which way the conference was, and she pointed me toward a double doorway on the left, which opened into a long hallway.
The first thing I saw entering was an enormous woman, stout and dense like a cannonball, wearing a studded leather bikini and scabbard. The latter contained an ornate medieval sword. The former contained, barely, the woman. She was standing at a chipped folding buffet table where two men sat wearing Star Trek Federation uniforms and Spock ears. The three looked up at me at once, goggling as if I was the one in the weird getup.
“Uh, is this the conference?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” said one of the men. “Are you a visitor or a participant, or what are you?”
“Mostly a visitor. I’m supposed to be on a panel.”
The other man, who was smaller, began rifling through a clipboardful of papers. “What’s your name?” this one said.
“Tim Mix.”
A lot of shuffling and frowning. The big lady sidled off, resting a palm on the hilt of her sword. I looked down the hall in the direction she’d gone and saw a diverse and clumsy menagerie of people, bizzarely costumed: a space suit, some kind of animal with a lot of tentacles, a wizard and a witch ducking hand in hand into a brightly lit doorway. “I don’t see you here,” said the small Spock. “M — I–X, right?”
“Yes,” I said, still watching the crowd. Then something occurred to me. “This is the cartoonists’ conference, isn’t it?”
“Oh, no!” said the tall Spock, and they both laughed. “This is JerCon! We’re a science fiction conference! Your con is down the hall.”
“Ah,” I said. “Thanks.”
Sure enough, there was another table at the other end of the hallway. From a distance it appeared to be staffed by contemporary earthlings in conventional clothes. I made my way past the sci-fi people, peeking into ballrooms and meeting rooms. Racks of paperbacks and comic books, loud laughs from panel discussions, where characters in and out of costume spoke from behind microphones set up on table stands. I had no trouble getting registered for the cartoonists’ conference, was given a schedule and a hello-my-name-is pin with TIM MIX laser-printed onto it. Next to my name, seemingly questioning the legitimacy of my attendance, was a winking Dogberry, the wily and irreverent canine hero of “Art’s Kids.” I looked at my schedule. Art Kearns himself was the grand master of the conference, and would deliver a closing speech at tomorrow night’s awards dinner. He would be on hand afterward to give drawings and autographs to his fans.
I scanned the list of participants, and came across some of the most famous names in cartooning: Leslie Parr, Kelsey Hoon, dozens of others I knew from my daily perusal of the funnies.
Which, I suddenly realized, I hadn’t read all summer. Pierce didn’t subscribe to a newspaper, and apparently neither had my dad. Oddly enough, I hadn’t even missed them. I made a mental note to pick up a paper and read it sometime over the weekend, if for no other reason than to see what strips of my father’s the syndicate was running, now that he was dead.
Meanwhile, the convention people had apparently gotten the news of his death too late to remove him from the list of participants. There he was, drawing and signing in the Red Room, speaking at a panel in the Blue Room, debating Tyro, author of the minimalist strip “The Emerald Forest,” in the Brown Room. I wondered who they had gotten to replace him: hopefully not me. I looked at the schedule for Sunday and found:
9am-11 am: Continental Breakfast Buffet in Ballroom B