Throughout, the Sharon Wall remains intact. It’s a hundred mes, watching me sleep, jerk off, eat bowls of oatmeal, sketch, do PT exercises. Watching the hair grow back down to my shoulders, get cut back up into a crew. Waiting.
I spend days lost in our world, sketching, editing. When I am inside our project, I am fluid, my identity negotiable. I don’t want to go outside. I don’t want to see anyone except Mel. I let a back molar rot completely. The pain is so intense, it finally forces me to leave the studio. I visit a Puerto Rican dentist to have it yanked for half price. I sweat in the examining chair, tears rolling down the sides of my face and into my ears, and still cannot wait to get back to the studio, back to the drafting board.
We’re getting closer.
—
A couple of days later, Mel pulls up in a Ford F-150 hauling a near-new, thirty-six-inch Cintiq, purchased from a Manhattan designer who sold it to pay off gambling debts. A top-of-the-line digital tablet in full HD, glimmering and sleek. Wide-screen, full and flowering pixel density. Full rotational possibilities. Zero lag time in line formation. She was probably drooling as she drove it down Knickerbocker.
Unilluminated, it resembles a very large, adjustable monitor. But lit from within, glowing and slightly blue, it becomes perfection, the ideal blank space waiting to be filled. It will make inbetweening faster; editing, a breeze. It will supplant stacks and stacks of onionskin with mere strokes on a screen. No more pencil tests, no more endless, endless drafts. No more recycling bins filled with castoffs, one out of every three drawings wasted. No more bullshit hours spent scanning drawings, impatient, one hand holding a cigarette, the other feeding sheets into the maw of the machine. We will sketch directly onto the screen from now on. A glowing, digital miracle.
We carry it into the studio and stare at it all afternoon, gawping, two monkeys with their first mirror. Wordlessly, Mel fishes two new digital pro pens from her pocket. Hands one to me. Tosses a case of detachable nibs onto the table.
“It’s gorgeous.”
“I know,” she says.
“Should we be doing this?” I whisper.
Mel laughs at me. “We’ll still keep some paper around,” she says. “I won’t torch the lightboard. Don’t worry.”
You can draw on paper and feel like a god, but it takes technology to make you truly divine.
It seems like cheating, the first time. But only the first time. I am shocked at the lack of guilt I feel. We start keeping the room dark at all hours to see the screen clearly, wipe it down to prevent a yellow nicotine film from building up.
The first part of our cartoon, we decide, will be old-method—sketching, scanning, and editing from there. But the ending will be a new kind of baby, one born of the Cintiq. Our first paperless production. We’ve never used this much software before; we’ve never felt so wedded to a machine. But here we are. The Cintiq makes this the fastest project we’ve ever completed. Neither of us will argue with the results, which are not radically different. This story, we reason, is a journey. Movie Sharon will emerge into a crisper, more vibrant world. And so will we.
Stroking the screen, Mel says dreamily, “I’ve named her Carlene.”
Days turn into weeks. I fall asleep on top of sketches and wake up with charcoal smeared on my arms and cheeks. Non-photo blue pencils roll next to spoons in our kitchen. There’s a glare in my vision now, from the Cintiq, when I walk to the bodega for pop and cigarettes.
Mel starts cracking a fifth earlier and earlier, spiking her Pepsi as soon as night falls. She’s doing it again. Getting drunk at the board, like she did toward the end of Nashville Combat. It worries me more than the coke: Drinking, for Mel, is not just a habit. It is the country in which she lives as a native, a part of her always there, even when abroad. It’s subtler, sneakier. It’s something that can take her away.
I don’t like it, but she works quietly, the bend in her back growing more and more pronounced as she proceeds, outlined in the light of the Cintiq’s screen. I go to bed at midnight. She’s up until six. We overlap in ten-hour increments.
—
We struggle to name our baby. Discarded titles: The List. Unlocked. Sharon’s Stroke. Super Stroke! Everything’s stupid. Nothing works. “Why can’t we just call it what it is and be done with it,” I say.
Mel says, “I agree. Let’s call it what it is. You drew what you wanted, right? So why not call it what you want most?”
We end up calling it Irrefutable Love.
—
That summer, six months after leaving Kentucky, we finish the draft. Our cartoon—as it will come to exist—takes its first breaths.
It started with the men, but it ends with me. Mediums change. While the men of the List do surface in Sharon’s legendary freak-out montage—that dark, heady universe-hump Mel had envisioned that would eventually precede the stroke scene—that is the only place for them, in this thing we’ve made. Real story told, I finally cut the dudes loose.
The festival blurb we will eventually use is this: