“Hey, thanks,” I said.
We shook hands. It was like grabbing a branch. “No problem,” he told me. “Whatever you got yourself into with that girl, this oughta straighten it out.”
* * *
Out in the hall, I studied the marks on my letter, trying to decode them. A continuous line, a blobby, smeared amorphism, a hieroglyph at the bottom that might have been a signature. I wondered who, exactly, was drawing “Art’s Kids.” Had the inkers taken over? Did Kearns even write the gags? The drawing might have been of Dogberry, or of Greta or Funny Hans or Derrie-Do or any other “Art’s Kids” characters. Or it might have been the Empire State Building or Richard Nixon.
I surprised myself with my enormous and inexplicable affection for Art Kearns, which was springing up inside me like a kiddie pool filling with water from a hose. I stood very still and let my mood improve. When I felt like a human again, I unpinned my name tag and threw it in the trash, then brought the letter to the front desk to be mailed.
twenty-seven
Pierce had something on his mind. The Caddy’s windows were closed and the air conditioning on, and no music played on the radio. When I shut the door he said nothing, so I said “Hey,” and Pierce said “Hey.”
He pulled away from the hotel parking lot. “How’s Gillian?” I said.
“Oh, you know.”
“Not really.”
He didn’t seem to hear, only grunted and nodded at the sound of my voice.
To fill the time, I played back every disappointing and humiliating event of the past week in my mind, with special attention to the precarious blown moments on the sidewalk outside the movie theater with Susan, and my ignominious retreat from the conference. I thought about the way Susan wobbled from side to side, waiting for me, possibly, to stop her with an arm curled around her waist or an offered hand; the fat man’s bushy eyebrows, their blurry meeting place over his knurly red nose. I got myself pretty worked up. I stared at the door, wondering what it would be like to open it and fling myself out onto the pavement, if I would tumble under the Caddy and be pulverized by its wheels, or if I’d spend the rest of the day at the hospital having road gravel pulled out from under my skin by a knock-kneed intern with a pair of sterilized tweezers. I was beginning to shift myself toward the center of the car when Pierce said, “What if it’s some sort of trap?”
“What?” For a second I thought he was talking about the car door.
“What if he’s laid a trap for me?”
“Who?”
He was frowning the panicked, spasmodic frown of a child about to cry. “Dad.”
“Dad?” I said. “Why would Dad lay a trap for you?”
“The key,” he said. “It’s in a warehouse, right? In Philadelphia. What if it’s some kind of trap? It could be a bomb, or like you know those corporate guys who set up a kind of pulley system so that when they intercom their secretary and tell her to come in, she opens the door and it trips a wire that’s attached to a shotgun and boom, suicide. Something like that.”
For the briefest of moments, this scenario seemed perfectly plausible, and I lost myself long enough in it to delay speaking. Then I said, “Um, Pierce, that’s ridiculous.”
“Oh, is it?”
“Why would Dad want you dead?”
“He hates my guts.”
“Hated,” I said. “And he didn’t, really.” Though there was precious little evidence for that. Pierce extended his arms against the wheel and pushed his head into the seat, as if buffeted by massive g-forces.
I said, “If he hated you so much, he wouldn’t have left you the house, or any money to live on.”
He seemed to consider this. I thought he was going to speak, but he didn’t, not for a long time. He stared at the road, driving with enormous concentration, his lips pressed together and his chin creased. Finally he said, “You know what I was just thinking?”
“No,” I said, with a certitude intended to reassure.
“I was thinking how weird my life is. Compared to other people’s.”
“How so?”
“Well, you know what people are always after. Like, success, I guess. Jobs and love and getting famous and getting elected. And I was just thinking how much I’d like to have those things as goals. I mean, I don’t care so much about actually getting them, you know. I just want them to be goals.”
I had missed something. “So why aren’t they?” I asked him.
He sighed, and I knew that I’d let him down. “Never fucking mind.”
“No! No, I’m sorry, I just don’t understand.”
He spoke with bitter intensity, straining to mask his emotions. “I don’t get to have those kinds of goals. I get to try to get out of bed in the morning, and half the time I don’t. I try to have a conversation. If I get up, I think, okay, I’m not going to smoke so many cigarettes today, and I’m going to have a conversation, and it’s going to last something like ten minutes. I try to open the door to my bedroom. Mostly I can do that, if I’ve gotten out of bed, and that’s pretty great, a thing I can be successful at almost every time I try it.” He wiped off his face, which had begun to shine. “Yesterday I dropped you off and today I picked you up, and in between I went to my girlfriend’s. I mean, do you know what that’s like, being able to do that?” His hands were shaking now, and he held the wheel more tightly, and then his arms were shaking.
“Maybe I should drive,” I said.
Pierce took a minute to think it over. “Yeah, okay.”
He pulled over and we switched places. For a long time he kept shaking. It wasn’t until we had reached the North Side of Riverbank — MIXVILLE read the new green sign — that he asked me, “So how was the conference?”
“It was really great,” I said.
* * *
I got to work quickly, forcing myself to draw. It had only been two days, but it felt like weeks, and the lines came out wrong every time, veering off cockeyed or going on a little too long before stopping. The characters were weirdly foreshortened or stretched in odd directions, and their faces gaped blankly out from the page like stickmen’s. It was obvious that whatever zeal I’d built up had dissolved over the weekend, and I was only going inexpertly through the motions. All night I tried to get it back, whatever “it” had been, and by two a.m. I had, if nothing else, burned the neural networks more or less back into place. I could draw the Family Funnies again.
Back in my room, this seemed a dubious achievement. I reasoned with myself for several more hours. Did anyone like their jobs? People got dressed every day, went to the office, earned money, but they didn’t like it, did they? They simply did it, because they had to. At least I didn’t have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, or opening the bedroom door.
The next morning Wurster could tell that something had changed. He drilled me mercilessly, making me draw the same strip over and over while he walked around the house, tending to his cats, yelling weirdly perceptive instructions and corrections at me from other rooms. But all I could think about was the fact that my letter was being picked up, brought to the post office and sorted by state, bundled with the other New York mail and loaded onto trucks, driven up the turnpike and into Manhattan. I drew my sisters, my brother, my parents, myself. I drew dogs and cats and trees and houses, popsicles and hamburgers and bicycles. I reinvented the language, the props, for a fake drama, enacted by a false family. And I was still doing it the next day when my letter was sorted into a tray and given to a carrier, tucked into a bag and dumped at the front desk of her building, carried to the Burn Features mail room and pushed into her box, then delivered on a cart to her desk, facedown. She sees the bleeding, smeared drawings first, the unintelligible signature, then turns it over. She reads the return address. She opens it, reads it.