He closed the book and dropped it on the floor. He brought his legs up and stretched out on the couch and tried to watch Danny’s favorite cartoon through a haze of snow. He’d been making an effort for the past six months to comprehend the program, but the number of characters and the complexity of their interweaving and always-changing relationships continued to elude him. The more confused he became, the harder he studied. And this morning, studying Limbo was all he wanted to do. He’d use the show to block the growing possibility that moving Danny and himself to Quinsigamond was the biggest mistake of his life. He’d use the epic cartoon to keep himself from thinking about the pervasive gloom of the Clinic. Or the nurse and her Tabasco bottle. Or the floating card games that the patients endured, unaware, every night.
Instead, he stared at the grotesque little figures on the TV screen and tried to remember all their names.
To Sweeney, everything about Limbo was complex and unsettling. The concept was created, written, and drawn by a mysterious recluse known only as Menlo. The artwork was antithetical to the classic American style of Disney or even Hanna-Barbera. And because of this, he felt that something was a little decadent about the very look of the show. It didn’t help that the main characters were all freaks and outcasts. Classic circus numbers, disfigured and unwanted. The hermaphrodite. The fat lady. The skeleton. The Siamese twins. And the protagonist, Danny’s favorite, the chicken boy.
Sweeney first became aware of Limbo on the day Danny came home from kindergarten with a chicken boy trading card in his lunch box.
“I got it from Timmy Roache,” Danny said. “He had two of them.”
And that night, instead of reading another page of Mike Mulligan before bed, Danny had asked that Sweeney read the back of the chicken boy card.
The obsession grew out of that single dog-eared bubblegum card. And in the year that followed, Sweeney had cursed Timmy Roache more than once. It became a kind of tagline around the house. Every time Danny discovered a new Limbo card deck or comic book or videotape or board game, Sweeney would say to Kerry, “Thank you, Timmy Roache,” in a kind of mock-exasperated whisper.
In fact, he didn’t mind his son’s new enthusiasm. He saw it as a positive development. That was the line he preached to Kerry anyway. At this age, he’d tell her, it’s good to see that kind of focus and concentration. And he’s picking up a lot of new words and concepts.
Sweeney actually felt the cartoon had brought him closer to Danny. Up until the discovery of the chicken boy and his world, Kerry had been their son’s favorite. But all of those Saturday mornings, driving to the comic book store for a pack of trading cards and, if it were the first Saturday of the month, the latest issue of the Limbo comic, had bonded father and son.
Before the accident, Sweeney had never made much effort to understand the dimensions of the Limbo story line. Danny’s enjoyment of the show was all that mattered. But since the onset of his son’s coma, Sweeney had begun trying to figure out who was who and what was what inside the world of the concept.
That this was not an easy task shocked him at first. It was a cartoon, for Christ sake. Designed for and marketed to little boys. And yet, the scope and complexity of the concept was daunting. Its evolution over time was ridiculously detailed. And the intricacy of the minutiae built into the story was overwhelming.
The marketing sages who disseminated Limbo into the kid culture appeared to work in tandem with Menlo — maybe even dictated to the creator — so that the overall myth expanded with each new Limbo-inspired product to hit the street. The backstory and the various side stories all grew richer and denser and more detailed with the release of the latest card game, cereal box, action figure booklet, or text message. How, Sweeney wondered, with each exposure to each permutation of Limbo, did a six-year-old master it? And with such ease and grace?
The stories of Limbo took place in a realm called Gehenna, which seemed to Sweeney a series of enormous and decaying and desperately crowded cities separated by massive tracts of desert and swamp and forest. There was a core group of characters, a traveling band of circus freaks. Sweeney thought of them as repertory players, who surged to the forefront or faded to the background, depending upon the needs of any given story.
The freaks were led by Bruno, the bald strongman with the walrus mustache and the tattoos, the unofficial patriarch. But the heart of the clan — and the point of view for most of the stories — was Chick, the boy with the grotesque mouth and the body covered by a coat of feathers.
They traveled from city to city, often pursued by a cabal of scientists and soldiers in the employ of the heroes’ nemesis, the mad Dr. Fliess. They had, of course, all manner of adventure, traversed perils, found and lost allies, dispensed assistance and experienced betrayal. Whatever the medium — comic book, TV cartoon, or the touring ice show that had cost Sweeney a bundle — the freaks of Gehenna remained true to the integrity of their world. History mattered in this open-ended narrative. Past events had consequences and repercussions that played out in future episodes. The characters endured loss and change. The nature of the relationships within the group shifted and matured. Occasionally, someone would suffer and die.
The overall principle that gave a framework and a purpose to the freaks’ ceaseless wanderings was the quest to reunite Chick with his long-lost father. The gimmick that steered their travels was the trance into which Chick fell at unexpected and, usually, inopportune moments. This dream state was called “the Limbo” and, once in it, the chicken boy would experience visions and receive messages. These messages were delivered by a disembodied voice, which Chick believed to be that of his missing dad. The voice was erratically guiding Chick — and, so, the rest of the troupe — on a chaotic pursuit of sanctuary and, perhaps, healing. But unlike his compatriots, what Chick desired more than refuge or normalcy was simply to encounter and embrace the papa he had never known. It was a peril-ridden process and Chick had no control over any of it. And more than once, he’d endangered the whole troupe by trancing out at a crucial instant.
The whole trance shtick was the thing that confused Sweeney the most. Just when he’d begin to think he had a handle on the dimensions of the story, the chicken boy’s eyes would roll back and Bruno would look to Kitty, Chick’s love interest, and shake his head as if to say not again. Sweeney felt the same way. Because when Chick went into the Limbo, all the rules and logic of Gehenna were thrown out and replaced by a realm that was even more surreal and difficult to follow.
Danny had tried to explain it now and then, but grew frustrated with his father’s inability to remember key facts, to grasp what, to Danny, was an instinctive language of self-evident truths.
Now Sweeney had an opportunity to pay attention. To listen and look, closely and carefully. But the story made little sense to Sweeney and he was glad when the knock on the door gave him an excuse to get up and shut off the TV.
It was a disheveled young woman who looked as tired as Sweeney felt. She was dressed in a short denim skirt and a leather jacket and her hair was pulled into a ponytail.