The Animators(35)

The first day I get up to pee on my own is an event. Passing a bowel movement, and then passing a movement without requiring help wiping, is a double event. I watch reruns of The Simpsons while using my hand clench, squeezing, breathing. I try to stretch. Grit my teeth through muscle spasms. Food still spilling from my mouth. Bad back, precarious pelvic floor. I have never been more aware of my body than in this period of weakness. I look out the window onto the parking lot, the salt air seeping in.

The nurses station me in a chair, blanket thrown around my legs. One of the orderlies, Carl, takes the screws off the bedside table and props it against the wall to form a makeshift drafting board. In thanks, I draw, at his request, a naked Homer and Marge performing a sweaty, strenuous doggy-style. “Make that ass tight, you know what I’m saying?” Carl says. “I mean, get them titties to swaying.”

I try to zero in on the lines, the sense of flow. The end product is not great, would be discouraging were it not for the clean, sweet feeling of completion. My fingers are weak, my wrists tremble, but after a week or so I know where the line is going when I start to trace. Some part of me is relearning how to anticipate.

Soon I’m sketching for all the nurses and orderlies. Most bring in school photos of their kids. I start to read a little: newspapers from the waiting room, back issues of Time and Rolling Stone. Speaking is slow, frustrating. Some words return faster than others, old friends. Others wait for me just over the edge of the cliff, never to materialize.

Mel takes my sitting upright as a sign that work can commence.

The next visit, she plunks her dirty pink JanSport at her feet and looks to me for a moment, biting her lip. “Brainstorm?”

I try to look purposeful. I’ve put a sweater on over my hospital gown, in an effort to feel more like a person, less like a patient.

Mel is our fire-starter, the flint against the stone, sparking with ideas. She’s started a hundred projects she’s never finished. Puppet Parliament. An all-lesbian version of Oklahoma! Each idea better than the last.

But I am our finisher. I make us Finish Shit. I stake faith in the outline, designing the checklist needed to complete the day. I can carry my weight of design tasks, sure, but I am the only one who makes us beat the path to the storyboard and back to sketching, and that’s always what counted, at the early stages. Checking our notes, posting details for later addition around the Mac. I mind the story, knowing that the story will serve as the supporting beams upon which our little men will dance; all that which, under Mel’s fingers, will come alive.

But what can I mind now? With only half my words on a good day, my drawing hand like a latex glove filled with sand. We look at each other apprehensively. We wonder how this is going to go.

“Okay, man. Let’s hit it.”

Mel flips open her work journal and starts jogging out the also-rans, trying to see if something will stick. Lesbian Oklahoma! redux. Pass. A stop-motion version of the 1994 Stanley Cup finals, with the New York Rangers playing the Vancouver Canucks, in which the players are giraffes. No reason other than it would be fun to put together. Maybe. A fake nature documentary about strange animal sex practices (mosquitoes—but fucking! manatees—but fucking!) called A Metric Butt-Ton of Love. A saga of a time-traveling chimp titled Time Monkey! A short about a drug dealer operating out of a defunct porta-potty in a park on Staten Island. Some horseshit we came up with about what it would be like if cats learned to drive cars (a lot of accidents and fires and yowling). On and on. No, no, no.

Mel is squinting at me now, chewing her bottom lip. Her hair is sticking up in the back. She’s been patient. She’s getting tired. I’m getting tired. Thinking is hard work. Talking is harder.

And then she snaps: “Okay. I’m fuckin dying here, man. What about your journal? What about some of the ideas in there? What was that, anyway? Why haven’t I seen it before? Who’s Teddy Caudill? Can we talk about this? There were a shit-ton of ideas in there. The thing is bleeding ideas. I mean, it’s raw, man. What the fuck is it?”

Despite myself, I marvel at Mel, at the way the world she and I inhabit together works: When I am physically unable to disclose something, she remedies my lack, goes out and finds what I’m thinking anyway.

I stare at her, dumbstruck. She lifts her hands, shakes them. Yelps “Come on!”

I take a deep breath. Then another. I can practically feel my face going green. Just the thought of talking about the List, telling the whole story, feeling the words as they form and leave my mouth, robs my entire body of oxygen. I burp deeply.

Mel rises from her chair. She knows the look on my face. “Oh no,” she says. She goes for the trash can, hauls it over to me just in time for me to empty my lunch into it.

When I’m done, I say very slowly, teeth clenched, “Stop for today.”

She nods. Reaches out and taps my head. “You know,” she says thoughtfully, “when you’re angry, your intonation levels out. Broom-Hilda should totally use this as a therapy tactic.”

—

Mel comes back for visiting hours the next night. Instead of asking about the List again, she says, “It’s nice out. I bet they’d let you take a walk.”

I’ve just been issued an aluminum cane, a big one that descends into spider legs for reinforcement. Mel keeps pace with me, matching heel for toe as I hobble to the elevator and out the sliding door.

It’s dusk. The sky fades from pink to purple to blue overhead. Visible stars. There’s a flower garden at the side of the hospital. A small brick path leads from the ambulance drive to a couple of stone benches. When we arrive, I turn, position myself, and grasp Mel’s arm to lower my seat down, knees cracking loudly. “Fuck,” I whisper, wincing.