She studied the page as though she might shred it. “Me,” she said, and shook her head. She had a big, loud, unmodulated voice, and let her voice go as deep and loud as she wanted. “Back there again.”
Brandon was dim and lazy, and ready to ink. He thought his gay pride sketches were perfect. He worked entirely in stick figures, like a three-year-old. I knelt beside him and we brainstormed for ways to improve his drawings. Working with dumb people was a depressing waste of time that made a joke of our struggle. Sarah was also stuck. She worked in a bookstore in Cambridge, and had Crohn’s disease, and had suffered a flare-up two days ago, so she didn’t know how much she could get done on her bookstore confidential/Crohn’s confession before Tuesday’s open studio. Then she started to cry.
When I finally stood up, I could barely walk. I’d been on my knees for an hour. I went down to the basement, where it was quieter, and sat at a computer. Once they’d put the finishing touches on their comic, they’d come down here to scan it and clean it up before printing. I wrote an instructional guide to the software, carefully explaining how to align their panels on the page, crop and make them level, and fix the white-out and eraser smudges. If you didn’t get down to the pixel level, you’d have grays in your whites that reproduced badly and made the final product look amateurish. Behind me, under the staircase, students from another class squeegeed paint across silk screens. Out the window I could hear people blabbing in the courtyard. I hadn’t checked my email since I’d left home on Friday. I logged on to the campus system and found a note from Robin from early this morning.
She thanked me for my voicemail. Somehow, everyone had slept more or less through the night. Before bed, she’d changed Kaya’s bandages, but it had taken an hour because she’d freaked out and cried hysterically. Robin had had to call our neighbor Elizabeth to come over to persuade Kaya to sit in the bath to soak them off. There were heat warnings, and Robin worried that with all the tape and gauze, the camp nurse would not let Kaya in the pool on Monday, even though a swim was maybe the only thing preventing a kid from bursting into flames. And Beanie had gotten ahold of one of my harmonicas but was afraid to put it to his lips because of what happened with the whistle, so he held it at arm’s length and had been screaming at it, more or less, since six A.M. Robin had a pitch meeting first thing Monday morning, with none other than Danny Katavolos, her old pal from the Latin American bureau who she’d complained about for years. Danny was a tiresome, artificial person who gave her lingering full-frontal hugs that she claimed to find revolting. At the Nature Channel, he’d moved up from channel subhead to network boss. His idea of great nature television was twenty-two minutes on the oldest living turtle in North America. She hadn’t had time to prepare, because I’d been away, so she didn’t have any ideas to pitch him, but in order to deliver eighteen episodes ahead of schedule and make the network a fortune, the show would have to be heavily scripted and produced, nothing educational, no environmental lessons, like a married couple beating the crap out of each other on a herring boat off the coast of Norway. Which, come to think of it, she thought he just might like.
Somehow she hadn’t seen the message from our bank, triggered by a negative balance. I’d gotten away with things I couldn’t bear to keep inside. I’d been operating like Beanie, testing gravity by dropping crockery off the table. I wanted to be discovered, punished, brutalized, and forgiven. She didn’t know enough to accuse me. I opened the attached photo of Kaya’s scraped and bruised body and studied it, as well as the equally troubling photo of her splotchy face and still-wet hair, after her bath last night, while she was eating ice cream. In the end, I felt better seeing those photos, more secure, knowing they’d survived.
There were several emails from Adam. The newest one had come in just this morning. I scanned my inbox and scrolled down to the oldest, from late Friday night, and worked my way forward.
There’d been a time, a few years back, when my finances had been in even worse shape, when I’d fretted constantly and stared at the calendar and wondered whether Adam had submitted the invoice for whichever jobs had run, terrified that a drawing had been killed or rescheduled, and he’d patiently calm my fears. But then Jerry the tech weenie had taken over, flush with cash, authorizing contracts for regular contributors, and for the last year and a half a check had gone straight into my account at the end of the month, no matter what I did. I felt appreciated and protected.
I figured Adam was writing with some last changes for the Romney drawing or to talk through the Chinese factory piece. But in the email he didn’t mention either, and instead explained that Jerry had hired someone named Dave McNeedle, in a role yet to be named, under himself as publisher but over Laura, the heart and soul of the magazine, who’d been running the place for the past eighteen years. I think the email was supposed to sound reassuring, catty, and cynical, but as it went on, Adam seemed less able to hide his alarm. Dave had worked in venture capital in Silicon Valley and had done some huge deals, and was married to Jerry’s little sister, Margaret. Jerry’s other attempts to optimize life at the magazine over the last two years—a swanky office redesign, free vegan coconut pudding, empowerment lectures by the likes of tennis legend John Newcombe—had also been worth a chortle or two but had never interfered with operations.