by Joe Hill
I memorized their bodies. I cast them in my comics, the ones I drew for myself, the panels I thought no one would read. Different pieces got mixed up in the stew of my imagination: Epp’s arms on Yash’s body, Lol’s chin on Vince’s face, Crackerjack’s beak replacing Cora’s nose.
I scanned the want ads, read my hypnosis book. At night, the domain of Nyx, I cast some spells, I guess you could call them. No one heard my ritual, except that crazy bird, who I could swear was muttering along with me. It was all for a laugh, really, but when sleep finally came I was soaring high above the city, my head touching the clouds. As desperate as I was for money, I had left the cave, the submarine, the library far behind. I bathed in the light of the moon.
5.
Rodney filled the high score board of Crawlspace. Unlike most of us, he didn’t spin the trackball incessantly, instead applying quick, nearly imperceptible touches, as though dusting off the bald head of a curate. When he got an extra player at 10,000 points, he would exult, “Une autre vie!”
Another life.
6.
The TV only got one channel, reruns of forgotten shows. Yash watched to improve her English. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she was picking up speech patterns from thirty years ago, long-lost idioms like “my giddy aunt.”
We liked those old anthology shows, each one ending with a twist, the characters disposable. Our favorite was an Australian shocker called Tales From the Other Side of Sleep. The episode that stuck with me was the one we never finished, about a famous writer who lives by himself in a clean apartment with green walls. Every day he sits at the kitchen table, staring at his typewriter, the first three buttons of his shirt open. The smallest noises bug him: the rumble of a delivery truck, a neighbor’s heavy footfall on the stairs. At last he pecks out a sentence, only to crumple the page in disgust.
“Thinking hard,” Yash said, nodding grimly. “Many ideas, genius, think.”
After a minute the writer goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. The sink is spick-and-span, save for a small spider in the corner. A blast from the tap washes it down the drain. He goes back to his typewriter, touches the keys with long fingers. But where are the words? He chugs his water, returns the glass to the sink. His eyes widen: There’s another spider, notably bigger than the first. He turns on the tap until the spider disappears down the hole.
Hours pass. One-thirty. Crumpled paper fills the wastebin. Three forty-five. The light has changed. The green walls look almost yellow. The writer stands by the sink and stares out the window. His face, handsome in the morning, is hollowed out by despair. A drop of water falls from the tap—when he looks down, there’s a tarantula. The music lashes out. He screams and turns on the water full blast. The spider clings to the edges of the drain. He bangs away at the terrible legs with a long wooden spoon. Finally it returns to the darkness.
“I don’t like!” Yash said, eyes wide with panic. “I don’t like at all.”
“I don’t like it at all,” I corrected. Yash turned off the set and went to the roof for a smoke.
“The things I’d do to that ass,” Crackerjack said mournfully.
I never saw the end of that episode. Later that night and for years afterward, I imagined a series of progressively larger arachnids climbing out of the depths, the sink some kind of portal to hell. But what happened at the end? A sort of locked room mystery, maybe: we would find him stiff at the table, wrapped head to toe in silk.
7.
My life in that loft by the river only lasted eight months. I wore out my shoes going to interviews, wore out my hands washing dishes. I got a job as a bike messenger, careening down packed streets on Vince’s silver Schwinn. I memorized Hypnos Wakens, which had some very practical tips. I looked for illustration work, submitting to all the big places, all the medium places, then to the free rags, published almost solely for fishwrapping purposes. One of them said yes. I did all their spot art and a weekly political cartoon. The fact that I didn’t really know what the mayor looked like proved no hindrance: I drew him as a rat, a tangled python, a decaying gourd covered with flies. (Years later, when I met him at a function, I was surprised at how clean he was.)
Like I said, no one read that particular agglomeration of newsprint. No one, it seemed, but Prudence Caliper, a publisher of slick superhero comics: Dartman, Mini-Mega, The Femur. She invited me to “casual coffee” at the top of a skyscraper near the Princeling Comics HQ. We gazed at the clouds, the massive buildings that stretched like a mountain range. A plane crossed the sky with a banner that asked MORTGAGE QUESTIONS?
“Behold, the city,” she pronounced.
“I knew you were going to say that.”
Prudence smiled. She was about sixty, trying to look twenty-eight. She landed somewhere around fifty-seven. Crackerjack’s refrain poked into my head. I felt my horizons broaden. Her uncle had won the company thirty years earlier in a boxing bet, and she’d taken over after his stroke that spring. A bloodless coup, she called it. Her wiry hair was like a massive paintbrush, red with a streak of white. Her eyeglass frames were like goggles from the future. Her skin was good.
“You look like a superhero,” I said.
“I knew you were going to say that.”
We came to terms. She hired me as a B-line retouch specialist, a role she made up. I filled in texture for interiors, partial shadows, anything the old salts—Max, D.P., the legendary Simon Satin—didn’t want to bother with or simply forgot. Mostly they would make me get them provisions from the cart on the street. They liked their coffee black with four sugars. Their favorite thing was to make me wait in the sandwich line in ninety-degree heat, then send back orders that had, say, one pickle slice too many.
These were grizzled men. They had worked in the same room for so long that they had started looking alike, bodies like potato sacks. They finished each other’s sentences, or more commonly practiced a form of telepathy, finishing them in their heads. Despite it all, they taught me the ropes, little tricks of the trade.
They called me Sally. They were journeymen except for Simon Satin, a legend in the field. Simon Satin liked to slap my ass when I walked by. I protested when he started squeezing. I said, “I have to draw a line.”
“Cartoonists generally do,” Max wheezed. We all laughed and the touching stopped and I earned their respect in the end.
8.
Eventually I saved enough of the green stuff to leave Chez Sal. It was about time. Rodney was perpetually broke, panhandling by our own front door. Yash had found my sketchbook and was spreading wild rumors about me.
My new digs were cramped and the radiators were demonic but I didn’t mind. I offered oaths to Nyx and Nemesis and Hypnos, drank coffee at night, full of ambition. I covered the walls with scenes of battle and lust, strings of words in my fevered chickenscratch.
Five years later I stopped by a bar for a nightcap on my way home from work. The tavern turned out to be a comedy club. The first act went on before I could leave. His jokes had no discernible punchlines. They were more like rambling stories of his impossible roommates. Hecklers brought him to the verge of tears. He mentioned being at war with a parrot, and that’s when it clicked: It was Vince, roommate from salad days. His thick head of hair had been reduced to a few oily strands, and his face had gone to fat.
As I left, I caught him outside, smoking and pacing.
“That was great, Vinnie.”
He looked up. Then he decked me.
“What was that for?” It hurt to smile. I extended a hand. He slapped it away.
“You stole my bike.” Vince shoved me back down with a finger. “You left without paying your share.”
“Easy,” I said, rubbing my jaw. “So, how’s everyone? Lol still making those crazy-ass videos? Epp still juggling up a storm?”
“Ah, hell.” He was suddenly subdued. “It’s been a rough time. Unreal. Remember Cora?”
“Sure.”
“Hit and run, or so they say.” He snapped his fingers.
“I have my doubts.”
“Shit.”
“And Lol got some weird infection. No feeling in his elbows. He’s under quarantine.”
“Poor Lol.”
“Epp’s arm has been fucked up since that accident at the hatchet rane.”
“Oh no.” I felt a pang of survivor’s guilt.
“Worst of all is Yash. She’s lost her mind.”
“Maybe it’s the language barrier.”
“Fuck you, Sal.”
“I just mean she wasn’t always easy to understand.”
He flicked his ash. “She looks like hell. Picks at her skin, pulls out her hair. I can barely walk to the bathroom without her shouting at me to look out. She calls out your name, Sal.” He looked me in the eye. “She says they keep coming back.”
“Whose they?”
“The spiders. They’re everywhere now.”
Vince had to go back inside for his second set. He wrote down the hospital where Yash had just been taken, earlier that week.
“How’s that old bird?” I asked, folding the paper. “How’s old Crackerjack doing? I heard you tell that joke.”
He shrugged. “Long gone. Flew the coop, right after you did. That’s one good thing, I guess. We don’t have to hear it say ‘Life’s a bitch, then you marry one.’ I had to jam wax balls in my ears just to hear myself think.”
“That’s not . . . those weren’t the words.” I had wondered about that, during his act. “That’s not what Crackerjack said.”
“Sure it was.” Vince looked at me funny. “All day, every day. A broken record with feathers.”
He dropped his cigarette, fastidiously grinding it out with his heel. “Take care of yourself, Sal. And visit Yash if you can.”
“Of course,” I lied.
9.
Flash backward five years. At our monthly coffee, Prudence complained about Simon Satin’s shaky line, Max’s hygiene, D.P.’s B.O. Then she’d drink out of little bottles while I showed her my own drawings, done in a luscious, even decadent line. I had my own cast of characters: Dr. Flood, Angelbot, The Wipe. They weren’t based on my former roommates—“flatmates,” as Lol would say—but parts bore a resemblance: Rodney’s pout, Dave’s cornflower eyes.
Prudence smiled and sipped as she flipped through my art.
“There’s a way you handle light that I like,” she said.
“More like the dark,” I said.
“The rest, I don’t understand.”
“Dr. Flood can make it flood. Frogbot is part robot, part frog. The Wipe wipes people’s memories.”
“I get the powers,” she said. But are they heroes or villains?”
“Aren’t they one and the same?”
“Don’t get postmodern on me.”
I worked my way up the ladder. Soon I was writing scripts for the old guard. The characters were young, and their creators were out of touch.
Flash-forward eighteen months. Over skyscraper coffee one day, Prudence announced she was cleaning house.
“The place smells.”
“Literally?”
“Literally and figuratively.” She looked at her pocket planner. It was a Wednesday. “Go see a movie, Sal.”
I caught a doc about the history of dirt. It was the second part of a trilogy and Hypnos paid me a visit there in row eleven. When I came back, at half past four, the office was empty. It was like she had vacuumed up its history, every trace of cigars and graphite, sweat and erasers. A single bifocal lens wobbled on Simon Satin’s desk, as though she’d taken a mallet to the side of his snow-white head.
The following week, she hired a squad of young illustrators to work under my command. Then she went out on a bender for three months. It was fine. I was good at delegating. I oversaw the adventures of the New Hazard, the Lightning League, Eve the Reversible Woman, all your other favorites. Eventually I introduced my own creation, The Wipe, and in the third issue I put him up against Cloudman, in a duel that had them careening all over the city.
You all know The Wipe now, thanks to the movie. Maybe your kid has the action figure. The Wipe erases memories. The Wipe helps people forget about the terrible things they’d seen. The Wipe wears a spotless white outfit, just as you’d expect.
The Wipe is a hero, I think. He traps his enemies by digging up their past and presenting it in a way that gives them mental breakdowns. It’s very theatrical, like objects in a museum. The psychology’s a little black and white, but that just makes it more effective, according to Prudence, who eventually came around. The Wipe had Mommy Issues, Daddy Issues. I could draw from experience.
10.
One of my aborted projects at Princeling was a comic book version of Hypnos Wakens. I still had my old copy, a mottled paperback, with pages missing and scads of underlining, but I couldn’t quite part with it. Maybe I should have. I had read it cover to cover, several times over, but I dipped in all the time. I caught new angles, fresh wisdom. For example, it wasn’t until much later that I paid any attention to the index. It was bonkers. The bulk of the entries were under the letter H, more specifically branching off from the very practical word How. I reproduce most of one such page:
How to be popular, 3, 8, 16, 66-69
How to blend in, 210-218
How to distract, 188, 212
How to find inspiration: in art, 76, in life, 107. See also Creativity.
How to fool practically everyone: doctors, 173, experts, 173-174, friends, 166-168, the police, 170-171, yourself, 110, 177
How to gain weight, 75-76
How to get ahead in your career, 55-58, 95, 128-134
How to get things for free, 12, 30-31
How to lose weight, 77-78
How to make a favorable impression: on bosses, 18, 61, on colleagues, 61-62, on strangers, 65
How to make people believe you’re someone else, 88-90, 180
How to make someone fall in love with you, 15-19, 25, 33-35, 156-158
How to pass: as another gender, 215, as another race, 216, as someone younger, 218-219, as someone older, 220
How to play dead, 236-239
How to save money, 40-41
How to tame animals: cats, 13, dogs, 15, frogs and toads, 19, serpents, 122, winged creatures, 131-132 See also Familiars.
How to wipe out the past: 53, 148-149
How to write persuasively, 6, 76, 156-161
On the bottom of one page someone has scrawled: “How to disappear.”
In the end, I couldn’t figure out how to adapt the book. I asked one of my assistants to have a go: Goodfellow, someone with real talent. She quit soon after. Graduate school, she said vaguely. I tried to find out where she went, but she must have left the city.
11.
Flash to now.
I left Princeling nine years ago this August, after a fight with Lee over money. All fights over money are actually over sex, and all fights over sex are actually about power. All fights over sex are probably about whose turn it is to wash the dishes.
Lee was Prudence’s cousin, and after Prudence died, she took the reins at Princeling. I’m not saying it should have been me—it just should have been anyone else but her. We were married for approximately forty-five minutes, just enough for her to get the summer house, the cat, the BMW, some Simon Satin originals. I got the movie money and the brownstone and the glassware, plus a nice little case of writer’s block.
12.
What I mean to say is, I don’t draw comics anymore. I have nothing to prove. I have the movie money and the action figures. Crackerjack sometimes comes calling, its voice crooning obscenities, but mostly I sleep fine.
Une autre vie. How many is it possible to get? I’d ask Rodney, but he lost his last one around seven years ago.
I live on the second floor of the townhouse. The third floor is basically storage, stuff I can’t get rid of. I rent out the first. My lodger, a polite researcher from Kazakhstan or Kansas, has asked me to water her plants while she was visiting a cousin in Boston or Au
stin.
Being on the first floor, my boarder resorts to half a dozen locks, and it takes me a while to find the right keys. I haven’t been inside in ages. The room faces an airshaft, but somehow light pours in. I draw the shades. It’s a jungle in here, the plants generating their own humidity.
The green is intense. Cascades of aspidistra. Vines like veins. I half-expect Crackerjack to swoop in for a chat.
Trapped in small webs in the herb garden are specimens of drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, each no bigger than a speck of dirt.
13.
The TV drones as I spray. It’s a show where they use modern methods to solve cold cases. The end is always the same: they track down the killer, now living in Nowheresville, a pillar of the community. At the very least she’s someone who waves hello, bakes pies, checks your mail when you’re out of town.
Everything’s too loud and too bright. I kill the volume and tend to the vigorous plant life. I have the opposite of a green thumb, so chances are everything will be dead soon. The closed captioning mangles whatever it is they’re saying. TWISTED HOMEY SIDES, read the stark white letters. Even the simplest phrases turn into word salad. DIET FOLLICLE CRIMES.
My heart goes out to the hearing impaired.
I lock the six locks. I slide the two chains, large and small. There are other pieces of door armor, remnants of this neighborhood’s grittier past: A heavy beam I slide through two slats, about six inches north of the knob. A rod that shoots through a series of iron rings, straight down into a three-inch divot drilled into the threshold. In a fit of interior decorating, I push a table against the door and put some planters on top of it.
The silver-haired host describes how, after murdering her parents twenty-five years ago, the killer of the week fled her small town to hide in the big city. A MAIN YAK WALKS AMONG US. Unsolved deaths on the fringes of the city appear unconnected—until now. There’s some stupid music. There’s a stupid graphic showing a web of connections—a green feather, a page torn from a book, Simon Satin’s dismembered hand. Poor old Rodney’s left foot. They spell everything out for morons, but what do you expect? (Lee was always on my case because I wouldn’t dumb things down at Princeling.)