The Animators(48)

—

But as I’m getting ready for bed, I keep thinking about it: She said it was my best work. She said it interrupted her sleep.

Then I think of one of the sketches I saw from my book, of a long, horny hand emerging from the frame. No shit you couldn’t sleep, I think. I couldn’t sleep for an entire school year after that.

—

(There is new guilt now. What good I could have done, to have told someone. This should have happened to someone who had people. Parents to whom she could have made confession. Teachers. Friends. Other than Teddy, I had no one. The guilt is a sleeping giant, something that sets my entire self to trembling when it wakes up.)

—

She corners me in the living room while I’m watching Cowboy Bebop on my new laptop. “I got something to show you,” she says.

I take a deep breath. “Do you.”

She reaches behind her, produces a poster board. Unfolds it. She has made a List mural.

“What do you think?” she says.

It is the sensation an animal might have upon encountering a fast-approaching car. My mind freezes, shrivels into itself. I have just enough time to heft myself up, run to the kitchen, and croak my dinner into the trash.

“Aw Jesus.” She folds the poster board. “How many times am I gonna make you do that?” She follows me, grabs some paper towels. I roll my eyes and take them. A runner of spit hangs from my lower lip.

“You’ve got a wino’s stomach these days,” she says.

I give her the finger.

“There’s some ginger ale out in the car,” she says. “Want me to go get you one?”

I nod. Anything to get her out of the room.

When she’s gone, I spit once more into the trash can, then take a closer look at the poster, breathing hard. It’s two stapled together, about four feet by four feet, covered from edge to edge. Had it been any other project, I would have liked what she’s done here: She borrowed the style from the Cheap Thrills album cover R. Crumb did for Big Brother and the Holding Company. That same comic quilt wheel, full and chaotic. She’s split the whole into cells. Each man to a box, details inserted in tiny cursive, stretching out and out like insane tentacles. She took photo bases for her sketches from the Internet, probably Facebook. The figures are not caricatures but her more realistic work, faces lined and wizened. In one panel, Jay Hasbey, number 19, cradles a kid, his or someone else’s, I don’t know. He is surrounded by crows. One sings, “ACT score 35.” Another trills, “NO FAT CHICKS.” In another, cartoonist Pete Said, number 28, is shuttled back a decade and a half by a strident lack of Internet presence, taking a wide-eyed, puffed-cheek hit from a massive 1999 bong, long and sinister, a screeching face carved into its end. Up the bong stem, in calligraphy: Night terrors. For Brent, the bellicose probate lawyer, a professional head shot from his firm. Written down his tie: He said you freaked him out. And there are more: candids from GalleyCat and ReAnimator. It gets worse in the New York years. These are people we know, people in our professional circles who document themselves on Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram, and there’s a surfeit of material for them, more than anyone would ever want to know.

Beardsley is last, the photo recent, from a party. He’s laughing, chin doubled above an opened shirt collar, arm at a northward angle, thrown around an unseen someone. A goblin with one raised eyebrow peeks out from his armpit. Thought bubble: “broke up via text message.k.”

Seeing the List split into pages was bad enough. But seeing the List in its entirety as one sprawling landscape, going from year to year, spreading out and out, is so much worse. I am rocked by its vastness—so much want, so much deprivation, everything I hungered for from age thirteen on. The sheer numbers and the wealth of detail make me queasy. There are so many. So many.

Did I see any of these people for who they were, when I wanted them? When you need something so huge that you lack a clear objective, you will make do with whatever is there. It’s a story of consumption. Forever a vessel, filled with one man, then another. Why couldn’t I have wanted something nobler than someone to fuck me?

Mel busts back in, ginger ale in hand. “I’ve been thinking about it,” she says, “what it might look like. What we could do with it.”

“No.”

She holds up her hands. “Wait a sec, just hear me out. What if we don’t do, you know, the List as is? How about we play around with the idea of all these dudes and do, like, a compendium piece, a sort of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Or a story where this List, I don’t know, sort of forms an alternate universe where like an ur-version of all these guys have to live in a house together and form their own weird Jonestown cult. The Cult of Sharon! Or, wait, no. They have to marry each other. A hundred-dude marriage. And they form a secret society that lasts for centuries. Kind of like the Masons, but. You know. Kinkier.”

Dead silence.

“Or something else. Something that makes it yours. You know? Mess with it. Turn it around. Get weird with it.” She sighs, runs her hands through her hair. “Make it so it doesn’t sting as much. It could be great, Sharon. It could be really good.”

I feel the anger bloom, red and pleasurable. It takes something like this to remind me: Mel is an exhibitionist at heart, a pusher of tensions in unnatural, explosive directions. She has ambushed me, when my defenses are at their lowest. I can practically feel the synapses in my head firing and missing.