The Animators(108)

Donnie sends me to a doctor. He prescribes Zoloft and Xanax. I gain back the weight I lost from the stroke, turning round and soft again. I sleep. Real, deep, gauzy sleep, nearly comatose. Stroke sleep. Sleep begetting sleep. I can’t get enough. When I’m not sleeping, I crave sleep. Most days, it is enough to get up, change sweatpants, and transfer myself to the couch, where I turn on the TV and nap it all off.

It is strange and ultimately insulting how, when someone you love dies, just expires without warning, time does not stop. For weeks after the funeral, everything is in limbo. Obligations disappear, routines crumble. It is enough to shuffle along the edge of one’s life. When the call back to normality comes, I ignore it.

I don’t answer the phone. I don’t check email. I avoid going online at all until, one night, I make the mistake of Googling my name and am greeted with a shitstorm. Mel is being talked about, we are being discussed, in public and in private. Articles have been written, comment sections have become sinkholes of gossip, hearsay. There’s the NPR interview gone to hell, the photos, the off-reels. I never knew just how many pictures there were of Mel licking people’s faces, or using random objects to pantomime a wang, or, in our early years, flashing the shocker. That one half of the partnership is dead, of an overdose, overdose overdose, has doubled, tripled our search engine tally.

Mel is being made over large and transparent in legend, even while her smell still hangs in the studio, her cigarette butts still crushed in sundry coffee cups around the Cintiq, a pair of crumpled green Asics by the door. In death, she is changing. Disappearing.

—

I get a stack of mail from Donnie’s office. A lot of sympathy cards I toss out. One from Florida in a soft pink envelope, a nice papyrus job. I know who has sent it before it’s open. It is indeed a Lisa Greaph production. Her cursive is soft and gray and swooped. I’ve never seen the name Sharon written so beautifully. It almost makes me glad it is mine.

Dear Sharon,

I read about Melody and was so sorry to hear this sad news. I know in my heart the love of Christ will find you and lift you up. “We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” II Corinthians 5:6–8.



—

There is a Mel that now exists only in my head. A faux Mel, a hazy stand-in Mel, a Mel more cartoony than the actual cartoons we made of her. This Mel in my head listens, pats me on the back, never pukes, never gets into fights. I forget the bad breath and sour moods, the drunkenness, the stupid dancing. It is idealized Mel, cheap, ill-made. And that cuts most of all. In my heart of hearts, I know how much she would have hated that.

The line between being fucked up and being straight enough to leave the house is becoming harder and harder to figure. I get my groceries delivered. Mail from the studio is forwarded. I don’t even like to go out on the stoop. Each slant of sunlight is a visual warning against my new habits, my perpetual nighttime mind—the weed I now buy at the pound level from Fart’s roommate, the Xanax I’ve started taking every day, sparingly at first, then ramping it, sensing a nearby boundary, getting just close enough to reach that zenith of fuzz, the mind’s cable-cut snow. I want to wade through my apartment in a pool of yellow light. Decide I kind of know, now, what Mel was chasing after.

One night I run out of smokes. I decide to chance it, go out for some. I set off in my bathrobe and flip-flops. It’s cold, but it feels good, bracing, to walk. I pass the bodega on the corner and keep going. I head west toward the water at Sunset Park.

When I hit Fourth Avenue, I cross without looking into a four-lane intersection. A sedan comes barreling toward me out of the dark. I’m so taken aback by the headlights, can barely believe they’re coming at me like they are, that I have to stand and stare to make sure. The car honks. I hold out one hand. I know that will make it stop. It’s just logic.

And for the first time in months, it happens: I am lifted out of my skin and into the space above so I am looking down at myself underneath, staring wide-eyed into the headlights. I see a few stray hairs blow in the breeze. I see the way my shoulders slump forward, like I’m lifting something heavy the wrong way. Who would it hurt, if it happened? Who would they call? What would I leave behind? A stockpile of stank weed. Two rancid apartments. Cartoons they’ll have to censor pretty heavily, should they ever air them on cable again. A man in Louisville, Kentucky, whom I royally, inevitably fucked over. And family I don’t talk to.

I sink back down into my body. The wind flaps my robe. Cool air rushes into my crotch. I forgot to put on underwear before I left the house.

The sedan screeches to a stop. The NYPD cruiser behind it is passing incidentally, slams on the brakes at the sight of my bush. I’m too dazed to protest or explain myself when I’m ushered into the backseat.

Except to tell the cops: “My hand stopped it. Did you see?”

Donnie comes down to bail me out. She greets me with a slip of paper: the number of an attorney. “You need to take care of this one yourself,” she says.

We’re outside the police precinct at Twenty-eighth Street. It’s midnight. Brecky sits at the wheel of Donnie’s BMW. She waves to me, fiddles with the radio. She doesn’t climb out.

I struggle to pull the jeans Donnie brought over my thighs.

Donnie scrubs her face with both hands. Says, “I was looking in the mirror this morning. I just bought this under-eye cream, this fancy hundred-dollar Dior shit. It’s supposed to tighten up the skin around there. Make the circles and lines go away. It’s not working. I look like hell a pretty big portion of the time now.”