The Resurrectionist

LIMBO COMICS 2.0: “Rising and Shining”

. . They came from the city of Quinsigamond, in the heart of the industrial rust belt, a land of bad dreams and rubble. They crossed the American continent in a southwestern arc, traveling in a convoy that fragmented and regrouped over a run of days and states. And they became a family in the way that only renegades can, by embracing their difference and taking the hard-line against consensus reality.

Make no mistake, however: traveling with the comatose is a complex undertaking. But Nadia had planned well and thoroughly and on those rare occasions when her plans failed to consider an eventuality, she was a genius at improvisation.

Fueled on amphetamine and fast food, the Abominations kept pace with their leader, gunning their bikes through the night, some of them blocking for the hearse, some of them covering its rear. Sleeping rough, out in the fields and forests, they huddled in their leathers. They torched the Honda and abandoned it in Newark. They lost the Fluke to a state cop somewhere in Delaware. They lost the Piglet to a county sheriff someplace in South Carolina. But Nadia had no worries. The boys would either catch up or disappear, she said, and there wasn’t much anyone could do either way.

As for the hearse, it was left undisturbed, as if, in this land, death was always the final authority. The nurse and the pharmacist took turns driving, Danny and Buzz stretched out in the back. Nadia monitored her patients, tended their lines and sponged them down each night. She drew fluid from Buzz’s makeshift shunt. Beneath the beer cans in a Styrofoam cooler at his feet, she stored the vials — the Sheep’s new source of meat for the soup they’d consume while in transit. Danny’s fluid she dumped out the window.

Behind the wheel, Sweeney was pleasantly surprised to find a radio in the dash. He fiddled with the dial until he found the Chi-Lites or the Stylistics, then he would let himself daydream. And when he rode shotgun, he transcribed the daydreams on the back of his son’s medical reports, using Dr. Peck’s surgical marker.

From his perch on the dashboard, Rene, the salamander, acted as compass, herald, and mascot. Once or twice, when passing through a rural stretch, Sweeney pulled over and collected some beetles and aphids for the newt. But Rene didn’t seem interested in the grub and he began to eat less and less as the journey progressed. As if he were moving beyond food. As if he were preparing for a new kind of sustenance.

After a time, Sweeney started to follow Rene’s lead, foregoing the greasy burgers and fries and reducing his intake to the speed and the beer. In this way, the trip became more and more like a story as they pushed southward and began to zero in on the border, made themselves ready to cross out of their homeland forever. And at some unnoticed point on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere, Sweeney succumbed to a profound repose. And he understood that this was what it felt like to believe.

Unlike Sweeney, Nadia remained insatiable. The hearse became littered with her refuse, crumpled and stained paper bags piling up amid crushed aluminum cans and Danny’s issues of Limbo, which were now in a condition somewhat less than pristine.

Late in the night, as Nadia speeded along, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping a can or a bunful of meat, chattering about what they would find at the end of their journey, Sweeney would page through one of the comics, reading by the glove box light, searching out a needed name or nugget of history. Then he’d close the box and scribble in the dark on the back of a med sheet, sometimes right on an x-ray.

By Augusta, he came to feel, at last, that he understood the story of the freaks. By Tuscaloosa, he understood that the story was deficient. And by the time they crossed the border at Brownsville, he found that he was reading solely for reference.

To many, it might seem crazy to travel west in order to move east. But the only freighter bound for Old Bohemia that would consent to carry this troupe of misfits was the Wyznanie, an ancient Polish tramp with a crew of convicts and a captain who napped through much of the passage.

The ship departed from the Port of Tampico and steamed out of the gulf, headed for the old world. Nadia paid a fortune for transport, but they were able to drive the hearse right into the hold, where the Abominations set up camp.

The bikers stayed below deck throughout the journey, eating and sleeping among the freight — barrels full of colored inks and embalming fluid, crates full of barbiturates and the pulpiest of paper. They spent the nights curled together in blankets, rolling with the waves and dreaming of the castle on a hill outside of Maisel. Nadia had described it as the last clinic they would ever need. But Nadia never came down to the hold.

She remained, day and night, at the bow of the ship, Buzz in the deck chair behind her, wrapped in quilts, his eyes covered by sunglasses. Studying the Atlantic, Nadia searched for other ships that might be carrying other dreamers striving toward the same castle, that final clinic, the healing church of all sleeping freaks.

And like a mirror at the ship’s stern, Sweeney watched everything recede. Behind him, Danny lounged and dreamed, wrapped in alpaca.

Near the end of the voyage, on a particularly foggy night, Sweeney took the complete Limbo story and began to throw it overboard, one issue at a time, like some kind of ritual. In the moonlight, he glanced at one garish cover after another and then let it drop into the ship’s wake, watching it float for a moment or two before it sank into the blackness of the sea.

He spied Bruno swimming for the coast of Gehenna, Kitty on his back, the unconscious chicken boy cradled in one bulging arm as the strongman kicked the trio to safety. Sweeney focused in on the swimmer’s face, looking, perhaps, for a sign of realization regarding the moment’s meaning. And then he tossed the issue over the ship’s rail.

Next he perused a tawdry death scene, showers of scarlet blood frozen midspurt as Lazarus Cole was pummeled to death by the enraged dozen. Sweeney saw the rocks and bricks, pipes and plates crashing down on the magician’s body, tearing flesh, breaking bone, thrashing the skull until the brain began to turn itself off. This time, Sweeney closed his eyes for a moment as he sailed the comic into the dark and salty air.

When he opened them, he saw that the wind had selected a particular image in the last issue of Limbo and he looked down on a full page depiction of Chick, prone atop his own coffin lid, floating out into the watery expanse as the sun rose and his family folded itself, member by member, into unique shrouds of grief along the shore.

And as he studied this picture, Sweeney thought about all the places where the story’s creator had gone wrong, fallen down on the job. It was as if the artist had come to hate his characters and his audience. And for Sweeney, this was a helpful exercise in learning how to craft his own tales.

Some stories, the Limbo author had written, do not have a happy ending.

And some stories, Sweeney would counter, have no ending at all. Were he to meet and confront this Menlo, the creator of Limbo, Sweeney would insist that some stories sail on and on, moving, perhaps, beyond their maker’s vision, but floating, nonetheless, into worlds unknown. Carried by currents of need, whose source we may never discover.

If it is true that Danny was shattered by a story, then maybe it follows that he can be remade by a story. In this regard, Sweeney has ideas. Notions of wandering and adventure, of transgression and sorrow, penance and reconciliation. Beyond this, Sweeney has hundreds of sheets of medical reports and a surgical marker. And it is possible that this is all he needs for a communion of minds and shared memories. For a true dream in which human freaks engage an abominable world. And sometimes redeem it.

THE FATHER DROPS the last issue of Limbo into the sea and takes a seat next to his boy. Rene sits unmoving on Danny’s shoulder, like some tiny, scaly parrot, studying the horizon. Sweeney pulls the cap off the marker, lifts the papers into his lap, turns his head and glances at his sleeping son.

Then he looks out at the black, unending ocean. And over time and miles, he begins to see the chicken boy, resting, unmoving on a slab of wood, on the splintered altar of a coffin door. Chick is bobbing on the ocean’s waves, free from the flock of gulls that had circled and swooped for days, maybe weeks. Neither hungry nor thirsty anymore, he lives on story now, as he rides in perfect rhythm with the sea.

Dreaming that he is cruising on a tramp freighter to the old world, where his patriarch awaits. Dreaming of sanctuary and serenity. Of reunion and communion and the last and best redemption.

Dreaming of that moment on the horizon when he will open his bill, separate the maxilla from the mandible. When, by thought alone, he will release those keratin hinges that smell of cherry and coconut.

Dreaming of that instant when he will come fully awake, and open his beak and deliver the words that advance the story and make the future possible.

“I forgive you.”