Free Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem Page B

profound that he'd brought me a rock.
    If it was high school there would have been a punch line. He would have led me out to the curb to see the trunkload of identical rocks in his car.
    Ten years later, that kind of follow-through was gone. Matthew's gestures were shrouded and gnomic. Trees falling in forests.
    “Come in,” I said.
    “I saw the Piggly Wiggly when I parked,” he said. “I thought I'd get some beer.”
    It was two in the afternoon. “Okay,” I said.
    A few minutes later he was back in the doorway with a rustling paper bag. He unloaded a six-pack of Sierra Nevada into my fridge and opened a tall aluminum canister of Japanese beer to drink right away. We poured it into two glasses. I wrote off getting anything accomplished that afternoon.
    He leaned back and smiled at me, but his eyes were nervous. “Nice place,” he said.
    “It's a place where I can get work done,” I said, feeling weirdly defensive.
    “I see your stuff whenever I can,” he said earnestly. “My parents clip them for me.”
    I draw a one-page comic called
Planet Big Zero
, for a free music magazine produced by a record-store chain. Once a month my characters, Dr. Fahrenheit and Sniveling Toon (and their little dog, Louie Louie), have a stupid adventure and review a new CD by a major rock act.
    Somewhere in there you might detect the dying heartbeat of Toscanini's glasses. It's a living, anyway. Better than a living recently, since a cable video channel bought rights to develop
Planet
into a weekly animated feature, and hired me to do scripts and storyboards.
    “I didn't realize your folks were into rock journalism,” I said.
    “My parents are really proud of you,” Matthew said, working diligently on his beer. He wasn't being sarcastic. There was nothing challenging left in his persona, except what I projected.
    He told me his story. Since Santa Fe he'd been in Peru, taking pictures of plinths and other ancient structures. He talked a lot about “sites.” The term covered a sculpture in Texas made of upended Cadillacs half buried in the desert, stone rings in Tibet, a circular graveyard in Paris, and Wall Street skyscrapers. He'd shot hundreds of rolls of film. None of it was developed. He was trying to get funding to create a CD-ROM. In the tales he told there were ghosts, mostly women, scurrying out of the frame. An expatriate Englishwoman he'd lived with in Mexico City who'd thrown him out. A female journalist who'd been his collaborator, then disappeared with his only photos of an Inca burial site that had since been destroyed. And the bitch in the Florida Keys just now who'd stolen his camera after a shared three-day drunk.
    I live in Connecticut, an hour out of the city if there's no traffic. Matthew had driven up to see me in his parents' car. He was in New York trying to convince his parents to cash out ten thousand dollars in zero coupon bonds they were holding in his name, presumably for when he married and bought a house. He was willing to take a hit on early-withdrawal penalties, so that he could use what remained to fund his return to Peru.
    He'd become some combination of an artist with the temperament, but no art, and Thor Heyerdahl without a raft.
    The Japanese canister was empty. Matthew went into the kitchen for the first of the Sierras, unapologetically. He wasn't drinking like he was on a tear, or wanted to be. It was as though the beer was a practical necessity, like he needed it for ballast.
    “If you don't want to drive back down tonight you can stay in the garage,” I told him. “It's set up as a guest room. You can pee in the sink in there. I'll give you a key to the house so you can shower or whatever.”
    “That's great,” he said. His look was humble and piercing, both. “You know, it's really amazing to see you again.”
    I sort of flinched. “The same,” I said.
    “It's amazing how little has changed after all this time.”
    I wasn't aware of that being the case, in any sense at all. But