Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821)

by Lethem, Jonathan

  *

  Page forty-two, panel one, King Phnudge, alone in the woods. The island’s sole monkey has approached him from underneath a fern. The monkey carries a hand-cranked music organ and wears a top hat. King Phnudge raises his eyebrows in delighted surprise.

  Page forty-two, panel two, a campfire in a clearing. Large Silly and Poacher Junebug and King Phnudge and C. Phelps Northrup devour shreds of the monkey, whose scorched remains still hang from a spit over the fire. The monkey’s carcass still clutches the organ. Northrup wears the top hat.

  Page forty-two, panel three, in the brush at one side of the clearing, Peter Rabbit and Lisa Dingbat stared wide-eyed at clown, hunter, king, and critic as they eat the monkey. The rabbit and the girl are unseen by the others.

  Page forty-two, panel four, moving on all fours, the rabbit and the girl silently slip into the woods, where they resume nibbling on ferns.

  Page forty-two, panel five, night, the campfire, now abandoned by the others. Theophobe Dingbat tiptoes up to the extinguished fire, where he locates a charred monkey rib. He sucks at it thoughtfully.

  Page forty-two, panel six, Murkly Finger. He crouches in his cavernous shard of airplane hull, reading a comic book, which is opened to a splash page showing C’Krrrarn towering over an alpine village.

  *

  From where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat could see into the island whole, as if he sat within a camera obscura. He saw his mother, now outfitting Poacher Junebug and King Phnudge and C. Phelps Northrup in thatched armor, adjusting the palm-frond breastplates over their torsos while they stood at awkward attention, trying not to disappoint.

  He saw Large Silly covered in baked mud, with dried grasses stuck to his arms and legs, sitting beside the creek masturbating.

  He saw his sister and the rabbit hiding in the grass watching Large Silly.

  He saw his father standing on the beach angrily punching his agent’s number into a wicker cell phone and listening for a signal.

  As though with X-ray vision he saw, too, into Murkly Finger’s lair. Murkly Finger sat surrounded by suitcases from the wrecked plane. Alongside the clothing Murkly Finger had laid out as a pallet on the ground was a neat row of reading materials. Among them was Spark’s own collection of Dingbat Family Cavalcade and Dingbat Collectibles Catalog. Murkly Finger also had a set of limited-edition clothbound Tennyson Trolley Sunday Pages, taken from C. Phelps Northrup’s luggage, a Dover paperback of The Seventh Voyage of the Phnudges, a copy of The Oxford Treasury of Comic Strips, and a stack of HORRENDOUS TALES OF C’KRRRARN!, issues number one through thirteen, sealed in plastic sleeves.

  He saw the grave his sister and the rabbit had dug for the blackened skeleton of the monkey.

  He saw the island’s birds and bugs.

  He saw himself, too, seated beside C’Krrrarn on the rim of the volcano.

  Spark Dingbat saw the island whole.

  *

  Poem

  Say, Keener Dingbat, I wrote you a poem

  On a funny old island where much has gone wrong

  Sit right back and you’ll hear of my love

  For your coiled scribbled hair and your spidery legs

  Not so spidery though as the giant spider I killed

  To protect you my love but should I have let it eat

  Your husband and kids and that wretched vile clown?

  Oh, Keener Dingbat, you’re haunting my days

  I seek you in the pale lagoon and at the hidden spring

  I seek you like a sheriff hunting a walnut oh shit

  I stole that line, I can’t help myself, I steal everything, I am

  Your Villain,

  Murkly

  *

  From The Journal of C. Phelps Northrup

  August 12

  Rustling in our armor like a flock of pigeons we stormed Murkly Finger’s lair at dawn. We all partookipated—I mean, all able-bodied adultish manlike characters, even the dissolute clown, with the sole exception of Theophobe Dingbat, who declined command of our sally, leaving that to his spouse. The scoundrel Finger proffered no resistance—rather, welcomed us inside, so it was we at last unearthed his secret: not the yearned-for stockpile of nourishing provisions but the histories of our earlier selves, the panels and pages of our lives precursive to banishment on this island. Each of us retreated initially to various corners of the island, to mull on that from which we’d been distranded. Before he secreted it from my meanderish eyes, I glimpsed a sample of the earliest appearances of Poacher Junebug, in Frontier Follies—once a much less squat and feral figure, Poacher at his first flush had the stature and equipoise of a young Dan’l Boone. And how King Phnudge must miss his Queen and Phnudglings! I myself mourned an earlier self, the dapper gadabout wit who’d mercilessly shuttered theatrical kerfuffles with his encaustic pen.

  By evening we’d received the first reports of the clown’s escape. It was the female Dingbat child who alerted us, the first we’d heard her speak aloud in weeks. We searched the isle from stem to stern but found no sign of him. With Poacher I even ascended the terrifying volcano, where C’Krrrarn and Spark Dingbat keep their enigmatical watch. They refused our questions with resounding silence, but it was plain enough there was no sign of clown there, unless he’d disintegrated in the bubbling melt. It was not until the following morn that he reappeared, on the pebble beach, contentedly munching a word balloon.

  Large Silly seemed happy enough to show us what he’d done: clambered backward into his own panels, using the gutters as rungs on a ladder into the past. A trick, the clown told us, that he’d learned from a duck. With practice, he implicated, we might learn it too.

  *

  Page eighty-eight, panel one, the cove. A large pile of antique black-and-white furniture from Tennyson Trolley is afire. Poacher Junebug and C. Phelps Northrup turn a spit on which five word balloons have been impaled. The edges of the balloons are gently browned. Junebug and Northrup both salivate greedily, their eyes like full moons.

  *

  def. flotsam: flot-sam noun

  1. wreckage, debris, or refuse from another character’s panels, found abandoned on the beach or floating in the water

  See also jetsam

  2. characters who live on the margins of cartoon lore, such as clowns, hunters, critics, monsters, children, or animals (considered offensive in some contexts)

  def. jetsam: jet-sam noun

  1. cargo or equipment that either sinks or is washed ashore after being thrown overboard to lighten the load of a cartoon in distress

  See also flotsam

  2. cartoons that have been discarded as useless or unwanted

  *

  “… and then, as shown on pages five through seven in issue forty-seven, Keener failed to make me a ham-and-egg breakfast in the manner to which I have become accustomed, on the morning before I was supposed to go onstage with the Rolling Stones, causing me to eat Pop-Tarts and therefore to completely fnargle the gig—hey, are you getting this down?!?!”

  “Sorry, yes, if you could just go a little slower, Mr. Dingbat.”

  “I’m paying you twenty-five clamshells a day to take dictation on my memoirs, critic, not to surreptitiously nibble on those crispy word balloons you’ve got ineptly hidden in your palm-frond satchel!!”

  “Most sorry, Mr. Dingbat, but you really should taste this one, Poacher acquired it in C’Krrrarn, issue number seven, The Caverns of Despond, it has something of the dank savor of a truffle mushroom—”

  “Give me that!!! Mmmm, crunch, slurp, crunch, slurp …”

  “Now, try this one, it was spoken by a fair lass from, ahem, my own adventures, and makes a perfect tonic, if I may be so bold, a counterpoint to the first … it has the bite and tangicity of a Vermont apple, perhaps a Pink Lady or a Red Delirious …”

  “Ahhh, crunch, munch, glug, glug … ah, this is hopeless, we’re never going to write my memoirs!!!”

  *

  From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark D
ingbat saw his sister running in the woods with the rabbit. His sister had grown fur and a small tail.

  From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his father swimming joyfully with the clown and the critic in the surf. Their three pudgy bodies resembled dolphins and it was hard to tell one from the other.

  From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his mother in a tower she’d painstakingly constructed out of plywood made from the woven-together heat and stink and motion lines salvaged from the panels of the other characters. She was in the upper room of the tower, humping Murkly Finger, who still wore his cape and hood.

  From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw King Phnudge commanding his army of slave Phnudges as they carried his castle forward, brick by brick (bricks balanced on their miserable heads because they had no arms) and reassembled it on the far side of the island.

  From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw Poacher Junebug with his bamboo spear and his wicker sack full of word balloons, returning from another successful expedition.

  From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw Spark Dingbat in his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn. They sat on two tatami mats, a large and a small, woven specially by Spark’s mom. Each subsisted, for the time being, on thought balloons, which they swallowed as soon as they arose, without opening their mouths. It was enough.

  The Porn Critic

  Kromer couldn’t operate hedonism but these days it operated him, in the way that a pinned cylinder operates a player piano. What he knew came mostly from books—Anaïs Nin, William S. Burroughs, The Hite Report, stuff gleaned as a teenager from his parents’ shelves. Yet in his current circle of Manhattan friends, who were mostly graduate students and legal proofreaders, Kromer played the role of satyr. The more he protested that it was only a single heroin-laced cigarette that had happened to be placed in his hand, or that his so-called threesome had consisted of scarcely more than heavy petting and a brush with sleep apnea, the more they looked to Kromer as their saint of degeneracy.

  Kromer’s reputation had its origin in the parties he was dragged to by a former schoolmate: a raven-haired, baggy-eyed heiress named Greta. Though these parties were invariably disappointing, Greta invariably closed them down. When a host was reduced to switching off lights and hinting that the sofa wasn’t available, Greta took Kromer on her finishing rounds, often in the rain. Kromer worked nights, so the hours didn’t bother him, and he had nothing else to do. Greta’s legacy, a large trust fund she wasn’t permitted to touch until her thirtieth birthday, drove her mad with the determination to die squalorously before she became wealthy. “Hell, I’ve been in three kinds of threesome,” she once told Kromer, her lips tremulous and her eyes fixed on some dreamy distance, in a way that made her look as if she were on the brink of tears or insane laughter, but in fact indicated that she hadn’t slept for two or three days. “With two boys, with two girls, and with a couple. The only kind I can’t ever be in is the kind I’d really like—three men.”

  Greta was, in her desultory way, the real thing. The difficulty was an uncooperative world, slouching through a new propriety under Clinton. Everyone else Greta knew had been molesting their trust funds since prep school. That was the problem—they were responsible to their money, while Greta waged war on hers. Her only privilege was the use of her father’s “man,” a do-anything emissary and delivery person, who always picked up the phone and, astonishingly, would deliver Corner Bistro hamburgers fresh and hot to any downtown dive bar, usually one occupied primarily by pre-op transsexuals, where Greta and Kromer might be hanging out. Greta sometimes needed to borrow the fifty cents to make the call. Kromer, once he’d learned the trick, urged Greta to use this service often, as it would generally put an evening out of its misery, bringing on the sleep Greta badly needed but resisted. Kromer assumed this deliveryman or fixer was really a butler, but the one time he referred to him as Jeeves, Greta seemed not to get it.

  From Greta’s many aspiring transsexual acquaintances Kromer remained terrified of accepting even a blow job. None of them could have guessed what aura they’d transferred to Kromer. The process was mysterious. A book nerd, a clerk, Kromer sat failing even to drink very much among young blacks in stuffed brassieres who the following day would be late for beauty school or, in some cases, Intro Soc or Psych at Queens College. Their special language—“shemale,” “pre-op”—made them a nerd species, too, Kromer understood. Yet, the next day, attending afternoon breakfasts with his wondering cohort of PhD candidates and proofreaders, Kromer played the part of Rasputin or Gurdjieff, expected to launch foul seductions or even abductions. Perhaps this was a matter of sheer phrenology—the suggestion of something sallow and ominous in Kromer’s jawline and eye sockets.

  Renee and Luna, in History at the Graduate Center—Kromer’s names for them were Beautiful Renee and Invisible Luna—practiced the buddy system, never letting themselves be caught alone with him. Kromer learned this fact from their bolder colleague Sarah, who was willing to meet Kromer unaccompanied in Union Square, at least by daylight. The afternoon was bright, pigeons combing mud baked by winter, a scarf keeping Sarah’s mouth hidden. Kromer had been speculating that Sarah might want him herself, when she mentioned Renee and Luna’s policy.

  “They shouldn’t be afraid of me.”

  “They’re not afraid. They’re dizzy and repulsed. They want to be able to compare notes.”

  Notes? Kromer was a hinge between worlds, a glimpser. All he had to offer them was his own notes, not the world itself. This situation he couldn’t make understood.

  Nor could Kromer confess that it was Renee, all-but-dissertation on contemporaneous Western representations of the Boxer Rebellion, whom he loved. Renee Liu, who wore turtlenecks and resembled a whippet, her nose a beacon of melancholy, who furrowed her brow and laughed in suspicion of anything Kromer said that was halfway sincere, whose older sister had been at college with Kromer and Greta, and whose tiny Chinese parents Kromer had once therefore seen picking up Renee’s sister and her belongings at her dorm.

  Kromer had no idea whether Renee knew this, or whether her sister had told her terrible stories about Kromer’s college years. But he couldn’t interrogate Sarah on the subject, for fear that she might be injured by being overlooked in favor of Renee. What Kromer wanted to injure was the image of himself as debauchery’s emissary. He said nothing. They fled the frozen park for a coffee shop, where Kromer suggested hot chocolate, adding, he hoped, a brushstroke of harmlessness.

  *

  Was it Greta and her pre-ops, or the depth of Kromer’s eye sockets? Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second Avenue, a hedgehog-like, grubby genius of street-level commerce. The possessor of a block of storefronts, his specialty lay in preempting hipster entrepreneurship with his own fake-indigenous coffee shops, video-rental emporiums, and, finally, the erotic boutique.

  Sex Machines’ interior and stock had been painstakingly derived from that of a famous San Francisco shop, founded by a sex-positive lesbian collective. In lieu of such a collective, the owner had installed Kromer, transferred from the video-rental outlet, as both manager and night man. Night hours were what counted in this instance. A wizard salesman, Kromer switched on and demonstrated the range of speeds on any number of devices with a shame-dissolving forthrightness. At those moments, he thought of himself as a Conceptual Lesbian, a term he’d invented and never spoken aloud, nor advanced into any coherent definition. Kromer was fairly certain he’d never experienced an erection within the bounds of the shop.

  Four things. Pre-ops, eye sockets, Sex Machines, and the state of Kromer’s apartment. Few had been inside, but word evidently got around. Kromer’s boss, whose video store feat
ured “staff picks” shelves with extensive written remarks, had insisted that Sex Machines produce their own version of the San Francisco collective’s newsletter, a hallmark of that store’s unfurtive friendliness. In the newsletter, pornographic movies were extensively categorized according to predilections and interests, and rated on several indices: number of key scenes, story or its desirable absence, diversity of performer types, et cetera. It seemed that this was the way to sell porn to bored marrieds, a market Kromer’s employer characterized as “Moby Dick.”

  Kromer, outed once in conversation as a novice writer, was deputized as the editor of the Sex Machines newsletter, as well as its sole contributor and reviewer of new materials. His apartment was a maze of stacked porn. The volume was staggering. The disarranged piles melded into a wallpaper of ludicrous fonts and slashes of pink, brown, and yellow flesh; though the job was chiefly a matter of inventorying characteristics, tabulating spurts and lashings, Kromer couldn’t get through the tapes fast enough. As invisible to him as familiar bookshelves would be to another, the accumulation tended to make a powerful impression on visitors. This Kromer ought to keep in mind, but hadn’t.

  *

  It should have been foremost, especially on that in-like-a-lamb evening in March, a month or so after his stroll with Sarah, when Kromer improbably pried Renee and Luna loose from a dull celebration held at a pub just a few blocks from his building (some underdog had passed his orals, on second attempt). Kromer had brought Greta along, and it was she who actually accomplished the trick, keening for Kromer to lead her back to his apartment, where she knew he had a fresh bag of good pot. “Do you want to get high?” Greta, inserting herself beside Kromer, posed this question flatly to Renee and Luna, whom she’d only just met. Greta’s dress, mascara, and mannerisms in this company made her appear a woman garbed as a bat or a cat at a party where no one else was costumed. She was an instinctive corrupter and seducer, guilty of everything ever imputed to Kromer. Yet he’d never have carried off the extraction himself.