Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem

Author:Jonathan Lethem
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Contemporary
ISBN: 9781400076802
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I ONLY had an hour's warning. He got my number from information, he explained on the phone. I gave him the address. An hour later he knocked on my door.

He wobbled slightly. “I parked in the green zone,” he said.

“That's fine, it's two hours.” I stared. He was still tall and bony, but his face was fleshy and red. I immediately wondered if I looked as bad, if I'd lost as much.

“Here,” he said. “I brought you this.”

It was a rock, fist-sized, gray with veins of white. I took it.

“Thanks,” I said, checking the irony in my voice. I didn't know whether I was supposed to think it was mainly funny or mainly profound that he'd brought me a rock.

If it was high school there would have been a punch line. He would have led me out to the curb to see the trunkload of identical rocks in his car.

Ten years later, that kind of follow-through was gone. Matthew's gestures were shrouded and gnomic. Trees falling in forests.

“Come in,” I said.

“I saw the Piggly Wiggly when I parked,” he said. “I thought I'd get some beer.”

It was two in the afternoon. “Okay,” I said.

A few minutes later he was back in the doorway with a rustling paper bag. He unloaded a six-pack of Sierra Nevada into my fridge and opened a tall aluminum canister of Japanese beer to drink right away. We poured it into two glasses. I wrote off getting anything accomplished that afternoon.

He leaned back and smiled at me, but his eyes were nervous. “Nice place,” he said.

“It's a place where I can get work done,” I said, feeling weirdly defensive.

“I see your stuff whenever I can,” he said earnestly. “My parents clip them for me.”

I draw a one-page comic called Planet Big Zero, for a free music magazine produced by a record-store chain. Once a month my characters, Dr. Fahrenheit and Sniveling Toon (and their little dog, Louie Louie), have a stupid adventure and review a new CD by a major rock act.

Somewhere in there you might detect the dying heartbeat of Toscanini's glasses. It's a living, anyway. Better than a living recently, since a cable video channel bought rights to develop Planet into a weekly animated feature, and hired me to do scripts and storyboards.

“I didn't realize your folks were into rock journalism,” I said.

“My parents are really proud of you,” Matthew said, working diligently on his beer. He wasn't being sarcastic. There was nothing challenging left in his persona, except what I projected.

He told me his story. Since Santa Fe he'd been in Peru, taking pictures of plinths and other ancient structures. He talked a lot about “sites.” The term covered a sculpture in Texas made of upended Cadillacs half buried in the desert, stone rings in Tibet, a circular graveyard in Paris, and Wall Street skyscrapers. He'd shot hundreds of rolls of film. None of it was developed. He was trying to get funding to create a CD-ROM. In the tales he told there were ghosts, mostly women, scurrying out of the frame.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.