The Animators(94)

“Fuck,” she says. “See? Your body doesn’t want to do it.”

“It means we’re dumber than our own bodies.”

“Let’s do it just once,” she says. “Once will be enough. Okay? On three.”

We both take a deep breath.

“One. Two. Three.”

Our elbows unlock at the same time and we fall. It feels like a mistake, like we really have jumped off a bridge together, and when I begin to move, I feel a split-second stab of regret. This is ridiculous. What have I done? I would give anything—anything—to go back, to have kept myself upright.

And then, there’s a rush, so brief it’s a blink. I’m falling. I have weight, and yet I am weightless, at the mercy of something larger than myself. It is reverse flight.

I have finally discorporated.

We hit the floor at the same time with a smack. We groan. Mel rolls over onto her back. Her lip is bleeding.

“Did you become one with the motion?” I ask her.

She punches me in the shoulder. Groans, “Motherfuck.”

—

Mel takes over an entire side of the studio and claims it as her Sharon Wall, blowing up each frame of the flipbook and posting them in chronological order. She keeps a sheet draped over it until she’s done, then unveils it to me one evening with the warning, “Please don’t puke.”

When it is revealed, I freeze: Sharons from age zero to thirty-two, all present and accounted for. A progression of mes, each slightly different from her predecessor, a thousand tiny factors of difference comprising the new person awaiting fifty frames down. Each face has an expression, tight or loose, watchful or wan, that seems to barely conceal a complex system of inner workings: valves and pistons, desire and sad appetite.

I look at all those versions of myself looking back at me with a sort of expectancy. I feel something with long roots stir inside my chest. I would not be able to stand looking at this wall if I couldn’t finish this thing. I would be too ashamed. Too angry at myself.

“Looks like a serial killer lives here,” Mel says.

“A serial killer with one victim.”

She pinches my cheek. Sings, “You’re a special girl!”

—

Missing Teddy has become a physical need. The heat of it moves through my bloodstream with nowhere to go but back around the track, tapering, returning. It feels like my body is digesting itself. I call. Hope he will have forgiven me. Grit my teeth against my mother’s voice in my head. The ring always cuts off at the second or third beat, directs to voicemail: “You have reached Ted Caudill at Weirdo Video. For product and shipping information, please dial the store landline at 502…”

I’m getting the old jitters, the adrenaline that was once with me all the time, nearly unbearable as my brain pumped away with the fantasy. But the fever is different now. It knows its only end is itself.

Nevertheless, it is this longing that finally lights the fuse for work. All that want, it opens me up, heats my insides so that it is impossible to sit still. I need to fashion a way out for myself, and this need clicks something crucial into place, bringing me back to my drafting board.

The fire catches. It’s on. Someone hits the crazy switch and we go into hypermode, skull-first. Unstoppable. We are making this cartoon.

—

I’m usually up first, around six. I shower, pull on jeans, and stumble downstairs to the studio. I make coffee in the French press, knocking yesterday’s grounds into the garbage. Not clean? Don’t care. More juice for the ride. Precious fuel. Jitters with purpose.

I take over the storyboarding corner, sequencing, filling in gaps. It’s the final building process: seeing the whole, seeing the holes. Knowing when we’re not done. Around noon, Mel steps in, half-awake, slurping the cold dregs of the French press, and looks to the board to check out the progress. She may know how to get us started, but I know how to keep her in her seat.

We start inbetweening in earnest, two mad cogs in a wheel, a perpetual-motion machine of the most badass proportions. We shift out drafting boards to face one another and each take a scene: flip, scratch, done, flip, scratch, done. Coffee cedes to Red Bull. Ashtrays fill with butts. We bust out the work-trance playlist: Wu-Tang, Nas, Funkadelic. We dance slightly as we work, whispering lyrics under our breath: flip, scratch, done. Flip, scratch, done. The dark comes and we segue to postpunk off-rhythms, an uneasy beat, Romeo Void, Joy Division. Sometimes, my hands tremor without my noticing and I’ll go through a whole run of a hundred tracings before I realize they’re shit. I do them over. When Mel starts to flex her hands, I know she’s getting tired. I tell her to break while I keep going, slower, bending close to the table to ensure it’s right.

At the ten P.M. point, our stomachs are cramping and our hands are begging for mercy. We break. Mel pours the rum and cokes. I order tacos, Thai, sushi. I change into a long, threadbare maxi, what Mel calls my “eatin dress.” “You putting on your eatin dress, Mamaw?” she yells.

“It’s not a fucking eating dress. It’s a tunic.”

“Listen to her,” Mel says to the empty room, flopping down on the couch. “It ain’t a fuckin eatin dress. That thing’s a eatin dress if I’ve ever seen one. Not an eatin dress. A eatin dress. Who cares if you slop gravy down the front? It’s a eatin dress.”

We’ve let our calluses soften. By the end of the first month, we both have to tape our fingers to catch the bleeding. Once, when she stays up late, Mel pounds a bloody smiley face on a piece of scrap paper and leaves it on my table. “Dude, this is gross,” I tell her.