Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821) by Jonathan Lethem

and the rabbit had dug for the blackened skeleton of the monkey.
    He saw the island’s birds and bugs.
    He saw himself, too, seated beside C’Krrrarn on the rim of the volcano.
    Spark Dingbat saw the island whole.
    *
    Poem
    Say, Keener Dingbat, I wrote you a poem
    On a funny old island where much has gone wrong
    Sit right back and you’ll hear of my love
    For your coiled scribbled hair and your spidery legs
    Not so spidery though as the giant spider I killed
    To protect you my love but should I have let it eat
    Your husband and kids and that wretched vile clown?
    Oh, Keener Dingbat, you’re haunting my days
    I seek you in the pale lagoon and at the hidden spring
    I seek you like a sheriff hunting a walnut oh shit
    I stole that line, I can’t help myself, I steal everything, I am
    Your Villain,
    Murkly
    *
    From
The Journal of C. Phelps Northrup
    August 12
    Rustling in our armor like a flock of pigeons we stormed Murkly Finger’s lair at dawn. We all partookipated—I mean, all able-bodied adultish manlike characters, even the dissolute clown, with the sole exception of Theophobe Dingbat, who declined command of our sally, leaving that to his spouse. The scoundrel Finger proffered no resistance—rather, welcomed us inside, so it was we at last unearthed his secret: not the yearned-for stockpile of nourishing provisions but the histories of our earlier selves, the panels and pages of our lives precursive to banishment on this island. Each of us retreated initially to various corners of the island, to mull on that from which we’d been distranded. Before he secreted it from my meanderish eyes, I glimpsed a sample of the earliest appearances of Poacher Junebug, in
Frontier Follies
—once a much less squat and feral figure, Poacher at his first flush had the stature and equipoise of a young Dan’l Boone. And how King Phnudge must miss his Queen and Phnudglings! I myself mourned an earlier self, the dapper gadabout wit who’d mercilessly shuttered theatrical kerfuffles with his encaustic pen.
    By evening we’d received the first reports of the clown’s escape. It was the female Dingbat child who alerted us, the first we’d heard her speak aloud in weeks. We searched the isle from stem to stern but found nosign of him. With Poacher I even ascended the terrifying volcano, where C’Krrrarn and Spark Dingbat keep their enigmatical watch. They refused our questions with resounding silence, but it was plain enough there was no sign of clown there, unless he’d disintegrated in the bubbling melt. It was not until the following morn that he reappeared, on the pebble beach, contentedly munching a word balloon.
    Large Silly seemed happy enough to show us what he’d done: clambered backward into his own panels, using the gutters as rungs on a ladder into the past. A trick, the clown told us, that he’d learned from a duck. With practice, he implicated, we might learn it too.
    *
    Page eighty-eight, panel one, the cove. A large pile of antique black-and-white furniture from
Tennyson Trolley
is afire. Poacher Junebug and C. Phelps Northrup turn a spit on which five word balloons have been impaled. The edges of the balloons are gently browned. Junebug and Northrup both salivate greedily, their eyes like full moons.
    *
    def.
flotsam
: flot-sam
noun
    1. wreckage, debris, or refuse from anothercharacter’s panels, found abandoned on the beach or floating in the water
See also
jetsam
    2. characters who live on the margins of cartoon lore, such as clowns, hunters, critics, monsters, children, or animals
(considered offensive in some contexts)
    def.
jetsam
: jet-sam
noun
    1. cargo or equipment that either sinks or is washed ashore after being thrown overboard to lighten the load of a cartoon in distress
See also
flotsam
    2. cartoons that have been discarded as useless or unwanted
    *
    “… and then, as shown on pages five through seven in issue forty-seven, Keener failed to make me a ham-and-egg breakfast in the manner to which I