Robin had a beautiful soul and was sensitive and guarded and jaded and tough, and like any young soulful sensitive person who’d suffered unimaginable pain at the loss of her brother, who’d withstood the family breakup and her own temporary brain trauma, she wanted someone who understood her pain. But she was so fucking pretty, and had a lovely healthy body, and I was so pleased with the fact that she gave herself to me that it pained me. So instead of the soul mate she’d been promised, she got some clod scheming for ways to shove it in her.
The tension dissipated at breakfast, and crept back in at night. She put so much energy toward holding me off, trying to keep herself together, keep to her side of the bed, to keep me from climbing her like a tree frog. I had a beautiful fiancée and I should’ve been happy, I should’ve been skipping through rain puddles, celebrating our uncommon love. But love like that doesn’t exist on this planet, which somebody forgot to tell me, and then she poked me in the eye in her sleep, and in her nightmares sometimes yelped or moaned, and gouged me with her toenails, and stole all the blankets, and scratched around for pills every morning, and lied to me about finishing the milk, which I thought was nuts, so I wrote it down, and used it in the comic that I happened to be drawing, which only made things worse. To get even with me, she shut me out. And so, to get back at her, I kept writing her into my stories, twisting things she’d said and done, diminishing her, taking our private moments out of context, to frame and punish her.
I’d been conducting these kinds of experiments for years, leaning on details of my personal life, trying to represent the truth, to give form to this confusion, wondering how close I could cut it, worrying how the people involved might react. I didn’t enjoy hurting their feelings. If I could’ve figured out another way to do it, I would’ve. Certain friends spooked easily and felt threatened by my borrowed or poorly disguised representations, or harbored some innate persecution complex, and became chiding, distant, or hostile, although the ones I’d intentionally set out to unnerve or unmask either failed to get the hint, or tolerated it well, or felt proud to have inspired me. Such are the pitfalls of autobio cartooning.
My roommate Nedd eventually stopped speaking to me, because of injurious depictions of him in cartoon form. My friend Annie unwittingly contributed to the making of the character Anna Boringstein, a bulimic communications flack who just happened to work for the mayor. My good friend Rishi was a tolerant and forgiving guy, but I made too many jokes at his expense, and although our friendship might’ve fallen apart anyway, it ended forever when he took a job in New York. We’d lived together for years, and worked at the same agency. I resented him for leaving. I miss him even now. In the end, I couldn’t face these people out of shame.
During our first year together, I didn’t write about Robin at all. But in order to meet the demands of the longer, more burdensome periodical, I put the weekly strip on terminal hiatus, and turned away from themes of twentysomething agitation and incipient adult ennui and toward a world I could reach out and touch, that of a young couple on the marriage track. From sheer fatigue I quit massaging the truth and began dumping in wholesale identifiable scenes and verbatim conversations, which is partly how my comic evolved into something less fractured and more novelistic, but maybe also why I eventually ran out of material. Is it any wonder that after a short while of living with me, she hopped a flight to Managua?
Robin would be gone for weeks at a time, covering a massive piece of the planet, natural disasters and geopolitical events. At first, anyway, she was trying to figure out the rules of journalism. She wanted to get up close, to get ratings, to push advertisers until they flinched. If some butcher went around Lima decapitating children, putting their heads on pikes, she had to shoot it, she had to give her work that feeling of proximity to danger. As a kid, she’d liked it loud, liked to rock, went right up to the band onstage, stood beside the speaker and got blown around.
She met Danny Katavolos at Telemundo, and together they traveled across most of the Western Hemisphere, before they both quit news and happened to end up at the Nature Channel, first Danny, then Robin, a year later.
She’d come home in the middle of the night, her hair smelling like cigarettes, banging her suitcase through the door, waking me, complaining that her pants were too tight, pacing around the bedroom, stripping, yanking her suitcase open, talking loud and ignoring me, turning on lights, trying on clothes for work the next day.
They were driving from Medellín to Cartagena, a terrible idea even by crazy standards, and approached a roadblock manned by paramilitary troops. Danny was in the backseat, and their pothead cameraman panicked at the wheel, and the three of them started fighting about their equipment, which pieces to offer up first, which ones they might later exchange for ransom, and then they ran out of gas. Or got a flat tire, I forget. I liked her stories of drug lords, Sinaloa death squads, kidnapping, extortion. I was a good listener. She came home spooked but so intensely alive. There were close calls and bad things that weakened her resolve, until she started saying no to Haiti, not worth it, not going to that part of Mexico again, either. “I can’t be killed,” she’d say, “for a five-minute story about bird migration.”
She’d crawl into bed, too tired to eat the dinner I’d left out, had to get up early to cut bulk footage off the satellite feed and edit the package for seven A.M. Or she undressed at the foot of the bed, ignoring me as she pulled the blouse up over her head, sliding her skirt down her legs as I lay there; it was night, I’d been asleep. Absentmindedly she flipped through her closet, snipped a long string from the armpit of her blouse, elbows out, telling me about some cartel body count, how the killers went into a school and dragged students out and shot them, she got the footage, the bureau was pleased. Robin was brave, and I admired that. I assumed that, at the very least, she’d be killed. I think she hoped she would be.
An old friend of hers, a Venezuelan journalist, got shot in the face in Quito. Other friends had heart attacks, gained a hundred pounds, or took a job writing speeches for a hospital in Cincinnati and never went back to Latin America.