“The old man’s rib cage crackled like brittle twigs,” Rebecca wrote in a narrative box. “I worried his skin would tear.”
In the second panel, the old man flatlines. In the third, the other paramedic bags him, forcing oxygen into his lungs. In the fourth, she hits him with paddles, over and over, to bring him back to life. Since yesterday, her pencil sketches had grown in complexity: the faces looked disturbed, the old man radiated illness. It was tight, spare, intense. I wanted her to start inking. She said she thought she might toss it in the garbage. I asked why.
She tapped her pencil against the side of her glasses, wincing. “Because I killed him.” I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Not on purpose.”
“Okay.”
“He’s not the only one.”
“You killed other people?”
“I saved other people.” She made a serious face. “I killed mice.”
“You what?”
She showed me how she’d done it, in a lab in college: yanked the animal by the ends, snap, pop. You could also gas it or chop off its head. She thought her story demanded an exploration of her role in each of these deaths. I knelt beside her and told her there wasn’t enough time.
Carol’s comic had structure, like Rebecca’s, but almost no dialogue, and just a few captions. She’d knocked in the background of the snowy, beer-drenched drawings I’d seen yesterday. The first three panels were almost identical, as if this scene of boys grimly drinking inside a car in a snowstorm went on, in a loop, forever. In the fourth panel, a girl sat on the front seat, in her underwear, lit by the radio dial, kissing one boy, the hand of another on her breast, and two more in the backseat laughing and talking about her body. Even though I pretty much knew what was coming, reading this scene broke my heart.
The second page showed four nearly identical panels of the cassette deck radio dial. The drawings were dark. The repetition slowed time down, building tension. In each panel, she’d written a caption in a box. In the first one, “You try to hold it in, but eventually the pain will express itself.” In the next she wrote, “It’s better to face it directly than have it come out through illness or failed relationships.” In the third one she wrote, “Recovery takes place.” In the last one, “Healing takes place.”
Maybe it worked on me because I knew the victim. Maybe it’s easier to push this stuff aside when the cartoonist isn’t sitting right there. She had one arm laid on the table, pencil smudges on her nose, and ashy graphite all over her hands. She put her hand over the drawing of the girl.
“I wish I had a better story to tell about that day, but I don’t.” She’d enrolled in my class as part of her recovery. “It hurts to think about, but I’m the one telling the story now. I’m the one who gets to decide.” She lived in town and had an appointment with her shrink this afternoon. She took out a red bandanna and blew her nose. At the next desk over, Rebecca glanced up at her, then went back to her own work.
I made some practical suggestions for both of them, and threatened them with tomorrow’s deadline, and walked to the far corner and stared at the floor. If someone looked up, I tried to hypnotize them with my mind. Tell the story. The story is in you. It has to come out. I could hear pencils on paper. I remembered standing here last year, and the year before that, trying to will them through.
“Went to a party last night,” my new friend, Angel Solito, explained during the coffee break, his shiny black hair pushed into a rooster comb, wearing his hoodie and a checkered ska belt. The rain had forced both classes to congregate by the woodstoves. He’d begun by warmly and politely thanking me for facilitating last night’s discussion, then complained that journalists had been hounding him all morning by phone and email. The party had taken place at some donor’s swanky beach digs. “I met a man from Tennessee,” he said. The man owned the largest private collection of Greek statuary on earth, he explained, and had invited him to come visit.
I swept the floor, scrubbed the stains off my sheets, and put the ladder back where I’d found it. Threw away her broken eyeglasses and her playing cards, and cleaned off the table so I could work. Rain splattered onto my mattress. I tried and failed to close the skylight, went back to my notes and sketchbook and started to hyperventilate. Like Rebecca, I’d have to omit key pieces of information, conflate others. These omissions would absolve me of certain sins. Like Carol, I had only one story to tell, didn’t want to tell it, but knew I had nothing else to say.
In The Crossing, Solito attempts to go north on foot and on buses. Later he clings to the tops of freight trains. In those scenes, there’s nothing in front of the train, no horizon, no destination. We don’t know where this boy will end up, and that’s really the story of children trying to reach the United States from Latin America. I still had Carl’s copy, and noticed the fine brushwork of tree branches that ducked down to knock sleeping children off the train. I reread the scene of him getting robbed and beaten in Jalisco, before crossing the border, a child walking into the Arizona desert with some men who later died of dehydration.
I’d been trying to lower my anxiety level, to make Solito’s accomplishments seem accessible, to inspire myself. I wanted to be great, too, wanted prizes and love from strangers. Instead, his stuff superimposed itself over mine. The reviews I’d read last night, the apoplectic praise and hysteria over his talent, youth, and ethnicity all went to work on me. His experiences were historic, monumental.