The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  Some of my confidence evaporated on the subway, as if I really were going to a private audience with the pope and the pope knew what I was up to. I was thinking that if Simon were with me, or Hildi or even Olive, I’d be able to explain myself better, at least not make a fool of myself. I seemed to see them out of the corner of my eye. But the young woman getting off at Seventy-Second Street wasn’t Hildi. Later, the Seeing Eye dog on the platform at Columbus Circle wasn’t Olive. The man in a dark blue suit, rep tie, and crisp white shirt, as if he were heading for a funeral, wasn’t Simon.

  I held my MetroCard in my fist, afraid I’d lose it if I put it in my large briefcase, which was very full: a tin of homemade shortbread for Mankoff; a small collapsible umbrella; a copy of Marginalia; a draft of an article about the Egerton MS 1894, from the British Library, which was—I was planning to argue—the very first comic strip, though it wasn’t something we’d be able to borrow for the exhibit; Mankoff’s How About Never—Is Never Good for You?, which was very large and heavier than The Naked Cartoonist, which I’d shoved into the side pocket of the briefcase.

  Sally’s New Yorker was on my lap. I looked again at the offending cartoon. It didn’t make sense even if the woman was wearing Google Glasses, whatever they were. I showed it to the man on my right, and then to the woman on my left. They both shook their heads. I could always ask Bob Mankoff to explain it. Would that be a good icebreaker or would it just reveal my ignorance?

  In the station at Forty-Second Street my cell phone started to vibrate. Subway stations, Jack had warned me, now had Wi-Fi, but my phone was a cheap flip-top and I couldn’t hear anything. All I could do was shout into the phone and hope that Jack or Sally or whoever had called could hear me. “I’m in the subway station,” I shouted. “I’m in the subway station. I can’t hear you.” Jack had offered to buy me an iPhone, but I wasn’t sure I wanted one.

  I don’t know what happened, but suddenly I was very disoriented. I suppose, in retrospect, that I’d taken a wrong exit and was heading north on Seventh Avenue instead of east on Forty-Second Street. Everything had turned around.

  I asked several people where the New Yorker was. No one had heard of the New Yorker. “How about the Condé Nast Building?” No one had any idea, and I wondered again if I’d gotten off at the wrong stop. I couldn’t tell east from west by looking at the gray sky.

  Finally I asked a Bible salesman—a large African-American man standing in front of a little booth set up on the sidewalk. There were several people at the booth selling Bibles and handing out pamphlets and tracts. The man I spoke to had no idea either, but he pulled out his iPhone and tapped it several times. “It’s right there,” he said. “You see that Walgreens? It’s just before Walgreens.”

  I turned around and saw the Walgreens, and all of a sudden the world did a 180-degree turn and I was facing the right direction. I knew where I was. I pulled the tin of shortbread out of my briefcase, struggled to get it open, and gave each of the Bible people a piece.

  “God bless you and keep you,” the leader said, “and may His face shine upon you,” and all of a sudden I had a vision of myself as a New Yorker. I was tempted to explore this fantasy, but my briefcase was very heavy and I was a little bit dizzy, and I thought I’d better sit down first.

  There was no place to sit down in the lobby of the Condé Nast Building. Not a chair, not a bench, not a ledge, so I plunked myself down on a long step that ran across the entire lobby in front of the desk, which was staffed by a dozen men in uniforms. I guess I didn’t look like I belonged—in jeans and flats and a man’s white shirt—because after about sixty seconds one of these uniforms came over and told me I couldn’t sit on the step. Maybe I should have worn the outfit I’d worn at the Morgan: a two-piece dark suit, patterned blouse, and closedtoe pumps. I stood up and walked over to the desk.

  I got out my tin of shortbread and offered him a piece.

  “Look, lady,” he said.

  “Try it,” I said. “It’s really good.”

  “You got business here?” he asked.

  “I’m here to see Bob Mankoff,” I said. “I’m a little early.”

  “Nobody’s supposed to sit on the step,” he said. “Look,” he said again. “I got a little stool you can sit on for a few minutes, okay?” He brought a little three-legged stool for me, and I offered him another piece of shortbread.

  “Okay,” I said, holding up five fingers. “I’m a little early. Just give me five minutes.”

  “Who’d you say?”

  “Bob Mankoff.”

  “He work here?”

  “I hope so.”

  “This is good,” he said, biting off a piece of shortbread. “Five, ten minutes.” He looked at his watch. “Then you got to check in at the desk. They’ll page this Mankoff guy and tell you where to find him and check if it’s okay to go on up. I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be a New Yorker. Maybe I could move to New York. Jack and Sally wanted me to move to the city. They’d even picked out a condo for me to look at on Eighty-First Street. I could sell the funeral home. From Eighty-First Street, I could walk to the Met and the Guggenheim and the Frick. It would be an easy commute to the Morgan, where I’d be spending a lot of time during the next four years. I could see my grandchildren every day. Become a new person. Start a new life.

  I opened the tin again and ate one of the pieces of shortbread. It was raining outside. I was glad I had a small umbrella in my briefcase.

  I’d seen pictures of Mankoff and was prepared for the unruly hair, the beard, the heavy black glasses, and the big smile. He looked from a distance almost like a cartoon drawing of himself, one of his own drawings. I was looking across a warren of cubicles. He was standing in an open office doorway, just as he was in the photo on the jacket of How About Never—Is Never Good for You? In that photo there’s a banana peel on the welcome mat. A warning?

  At first I thought there was something wrong with his eye, and then I realized he had something stuck to his glasses like the woman in the cartoon. He was wearing Google Glasses. The cartoon still didn’t make sense to me. I held it in my hand as if it were a ticket or a bus pass or a passport that would admit me to Mankoff’s world.

  “Do I know you?” he asked, studying my face.

  “Hey,” I blurted out without thinking, holding out the magazine, “you’re the one who wanted a three-way.”

  He looked at the cartoon and laughed.

  “You didn’t used to be able to get away with that,” I said, recovering.

  “That was before Tina Brown. All edge. You disapprove?”

  “Not exactly. Just never appealed to me. I suppose that corresponds to some defect in my character. Reluctance to take risks, for example.”

  He laughed. “You came to see me,” he said.

  “She’s wearing Google Glasses, isn’t she? Just like you. That’s the little white thing on her glasses, isn’t it? But I still don’t get it. Where’s the ‘three-way’?”

  “She’s been streaming everything to a third party, and it’s singular, by the way: ‘Google Glass.’ ”

  “That’s what Google Glass does? Takes pictures of what you’re doing in bed and sends them to someone else?”

  “Well, that’s only one thing. What it does is take pictures of what you’re looking at and streams them to your followers on the web.”

  “I see.”

  “Come in,” he said backing into an office that was the opposite of Cyrus Walker’s office in the Morgan. No Persian rugs made you want to take off your shoes. No chandeliers sparkled like stars in the vault of heaven. No inlaid walnut bookcases displayed precious volumes. No inlaid walnut library table held a vase of fresh flowers. No Renaissance paintings graced the walls. The walls, like Mankoff’s desk, were covered with cartoons.

  And Mankoff himself was the opposite of Cyrus Walker. Cyrus could have passed for an undertaker, like the man I saw in the subway—dark blue linen
suit, probably Italian, with a crisp white shirt and rep tie. Mankoff was wearing khakis and a loose short-sleeved turquoise-and-yellow shirt that wasn’t exactly Hawaiian, but that made you think “Hawaiian.”

  I suppose we were both dressing too young. “You know what I think?” he said, reading my thoughts. “Don’t pay any attention to what other people think about you, because it doesn’t matter.”

  “Am I in the right place?” I said.

  “If you’re looking for Bob Mankoff,” he said.

  “I meant New York,” I said. “Everyone’s so nice—one of the uniforms in the lobby even brought me a stool to sit on. I thought I must be somewhere else.”

  “That’s because everyone here is from the Midwest.”

  “On the subway,” I said, “I suddenly had a vision of myself as a New Yorker. My son and daughter-in-law want me to move to New York. They even want me to look at a condo.”

  “You’re from the Midwest,” he said again. “You’d fit right in.”

  “You’re not from the Midwest,” I said.

  “That’s why I don’t fit in,” he said.

  We sat down with the desk between us. I had a good view of the city through the window behind Mankoff, but I didn’t recognize anything and wasn’t even sure what direction I was facing.

  I put a copy of Marginalia down on his desk on top of a pile of cartoons, and we leafed through it.

  “These images,” I said, “function like New Yorker cartoons. There they are around the edges. Nothing to do with the main story, but they affect the way you read the main story. Like the ‘three-way’ cartoon right in the middle of a long article on the Federal Reserve or nuns and the penis tree in the Roman de la Rose.” I had the page marked and opened the book to it. In one image a black-robed nun is plucking penises from a tree and putting them in a basket. In a second image two nuns are gathering penises and sticking them in their robes. “Or this snakeman playing the bagpipes through his anus.” I had this page marked too. A crowned head is attached to a long snakelike neck. At the other end of the neck the man is farting into the chanter of a bagpipe. “These would be good for the caption contest,” I said.

  He laughed. “Never get away with it.”

  “All these images are in the Morgan,” I said. “They’re images of dissent, transgression. They liven things up. They remind us of our bodily reality. Most scholars dismiss them as graffiti, scribes bored out of their minds, but I think they belong at the center like the cartoons in the New Yorker. I can’t remember a single article or story from the New Yorker, but I can remember hundreds of cartoons.”

  He laughed. “Got a theory?”

  “Not exactly, but let me tell you about my husband. He worked in Graves Registration in Vietnam before he became an undertaker. He faced death every day, but he never got over our daughter’s death. I never got over it either, but I’ve tried not to let it poison my life. And then after he had a heart attack, he was even more depressed. Refused a stent; refused bypass surgery. Wouldn’t do anything his doctors wanted him to do. And then about two months before he died, we started looking at New Yorker cartoons. We had hundreds of old New Yorkers in the attic. It gave him a new lease on life. He even started talking about bypass surgery, which is what his doctors had wanted from the beginning. When we ran out of cartoons he wanted me to draw more—our own cartoons. He was full of ideas. I couldn’t keep up with him. I had to stop working on my book—this copy’s for you, by the way.”

  “Well,” he said. “Death can be pretty funny. Like sex.”

  “If you’d ever been to the National Funeral Directors conference in Atlanta and heard the jokes, you wouldn’t say that.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “A man says to an undertaker, ‘Your wife has really nice tits. Mind if I cop a feel?’ ‘Go right ahead,’ the undertaker says. So the man fondles the wife’s breasts. ‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘They’re really nice.’ ‘Before you go,’ the undertaker says, ‘would you help me close the coffin lid?’ ”

  “You’re right,” he said. “That’s not funny. That’s disgusting.” But he laughed.

  “ ‘We made good time,’ ” I said. “ ‘We’re already in the valley of the shadow of death.’ Now that’s funny.”

  “Sam Gross,” he said. “A woman talking to her husband as they drive past a road sign reading FEAR NO EVIL.’ ”

  I started tossing out captions, and he caught every one.

  ME: “ ‘Death takes a personal day.’ ”

  MANKOFF: “Arnie Levin. Death lying in bed watching TV and drinking tea.”

  ME: “ ‘The Founding Fathers were clear. You must win by two.’ ”

  MANKOFF: “Two people playing Ping-Pong in front of the Supreme Court. That was a caption contest—last April. I don’t remember who did it.”

  ME: “ ‘Oh darn, and just as I was starting to take charge of my life.’ ”

  MANKOFF: “That’s one of mine. A man opens his apartment door and Death is standing there.”

  “I’ll stop there,” I said.

  “So,” he said. “What’s to laugh about?”

  “ ‘Sudden glory’?” I said, shaking my head. “No. ‘The presence of inflexibility and rigidness in life’?” I shook my head again. “No.”

  “That takes care of Hobbes and Bergson,” he said.

  “I mention them only to show them the door. How about ‘Release of tension’?”

  “Getting warm, warmer,” he said.

  “ ‘Incongruity,’ ” I said. “That’s where you come down.”

  He nodded. “Mashing two or three frames together.”

  “But the problem with incongruity,” I said, “is that it’s a necessary cause but not a sufficient cause. It always seemed to me that Simon’s laughter came welling up out of something deeper. The cartoons were just triggers, vehicles, like the little cars that bring up coal from the depths of a mine. He was an undertaker, but he loved to laugh. Until Hildi—that’s our daughter—was killed. But then at the end he started laughing again, as if he’d discovered something funny at the bottom of things.”

  “Here’s what I think,” Mankoff said. “Grim Reaper cartoons are a coping mechanism, but they’re something more than that. Laughter is holier than prayer. I’m not a guy who talks a lot about holiness. Or prayer. But I think a lot about laughter. When you laugh, your ego disappears. Like dancing. Your whole body becomes part of the dance, part of the laughter. Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, used to say that without laughter, there is no Tao. He used to ride a buffalo backward. I mean, he’d sit backward on the buffalo. A water buffalo, not a bison.”

  “So the buffalo’s going one way and Lao Tzu’s looking the other way. He must have gotten a lot of laughs.”

  “So life’s a comedy, not a tragedy.”

  “Do you think that’s what Simon was doing at the end? Riding backward on a buffalo.”

  “You could do worse.”

  “Do you think that’s what you’re doing?”

  “Maybe that’s it,” he said. “But I’m still waiting for my ego to disappear.” He looked at his watch. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got to go to a meeting. I’ve got to take these cartoons to David Remnick. I’ll take in fifty roughs—rough drawings. He’ll pick seventeen or eighteen.” He moved the copy of Marginalia to one side and scooped up a pile of cartoons from his desk.

  I was disappointed. I was afraid I wouldn’t get to show him my cartoons. But he said he’d be back in fifteen minutes. I conjured up a picture of Simon riding backward on a buffalo, looking back at me as the big animal plods along, swishing its tail back and forth, its great thick horns curving backward, white socks on its feet.

  When Mankoff came back I said, “Let me show you some of Simon’s cartoons before I go. They’re not all about death, but they all came to him while he was dying. He always wanted me to send them to you, so let’s pretend.” Of course, I wasn’t pretending. I was imagining how astonished everyone would be—Jack and Sally, my colleag
ues at Knox, Cyrus at the Morgan—when I told them I’d sold a batch of cartoons to the New Yorker.

  I laid out the seven cartoons I’d brought. They were on sheets of good quality eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper, smaller than the large sheets that Mankoff had taken to show David Remnick. Even so, I was expecting Mankoff to jump at the chance to publish them, but that’s not what happened.

  “This is my favorite,” I said—“ ‘The lost funeral home of the elephants’ ”—expecting Mankoff to chuckle at the mashed-up frames of reference.

  “The reader,” he said, “has to be familiar with the trope of the lost graveyard of the elephants.”

  “That’s a problem for New Yorker readers?”

  He shook his head. “The real problem is that the caption doesn’t complete the drawing. The drawing says it all. The clearing in the jungle. The white hunters. The reader can see that it’s a funeral home. There’s even a sign: JUMBO AND SONS, FUNERAL DIRECTORS. The caption is redundant.”

  I knew right away that my fantasy was just that. A fantasy. I forgot about death for a minute.

  “And these trees,” he said. “They look like giant rocks.”

  I knew better than to argue or to point out that this was the way a lot of cartoonists shaded their trees, to say that these drawings were just roughs.

  He looked over the rest of the cartoons.

  “There’s no consistent style,” he said. “No signature. They’re all different. As if you’re imitating different cartoonists. This one is totally different from the funeral home in the jungle. You’d never know it was by the same cartoonist—and by the way, why are they ice fishing?”

  “That’s Satan, you see. Hell has frozen over, and the other devil says, ‘It was bound to happen sooner or later.’ Hell freezing over.” I could feel the blood rising to my face.

  He put it at the back of the stack, which he held in his hand. He was looking right at me with the stupid Google Glass. What did he see?

  “Are you streaming this now?” I asked. “Right now?” I didn’t want him broadcasting my red face out to the World Wide Web.