Comic Book Artist Raphael McHumphries Enters the Void Through His Haunted Nintendo Entertainment System and Comes to an Epiphany About the Nature of Loss and Death

Raphael’s beloved cocker spaniel Osama Bin Doggen was murdered by a ballistic missile in a San Francisco dog park. He was sipping a latte on a nearby bench when it happened. He’d allowed Osama Bin Doggen to run free, and watched with a peculiar detachment as the missile fell from the sky and exploded against the dog’s hind legs. A patch of scorched earth the circumference of a Burger King. Black dirt. The occasional flame. A still-standing pooch skeleton in the heart of the damage. Raphael blinked at the wreckage of dog park before falling to his knees and screaming at the high heavens.

“Osama Bin Doggen, my most trusted ally, that lovable pooch who won my heart!” He shook his fists most vigorously. “Why did a Militia missile have to hit you?”

No one answered, so Raphael McHumphries stayed crouched in the dirt where he learned that burning soil did in fact make a noise. The sizzle of bacon fat in a pan. The spray of water in a cheapo car wash.

After the incineration of Osama Bin Doggen, Raphael McHumphries left San Francisco and returned to his childhood home in Monongalia County, West Virginia where his pup had been born. Raphael fondly remembered a taxidermist from his youth. A wheat stalk of a man with a perennial cough, always sucking on a lozenge. He had the most delicate hands, and Raphael thought it fitting that this man from the town of Doggen’s birth would get first dibs at memorialization even though there was no actual body. Raphael flew cross country with six suitcases stuffed with pictures. He hoped the taxidermist could use them to build a golden statue in the likeness of Osama Bin Doggen. He left the suitcases on the thin man’s doorstep, sighed, then headed for home.

It looked how he remembered. Two stories. A hundred yards off Cheat Lake. Chipped white paint. Creaky screen door. A track of dirt beneath the porch where foxes lived and loved. Raphael found his parents asleep in the attic in separate beds, their shriveled bodies connected to machines that resembled church organs. The sensors beeped and blooped as oxygen funneled into their ragged lungs.

“Your son has returned,” he announced.

They did not respond. Raphael McHumphries had not spoken to his family since the end of high school. His father had landed him a cushy gig as a travelling rubber band salesman, but Raphael turned it down to hitch cross country, a bag packed with pencils and pads, dreams of becoming the next great comic book artist, the type of man who made flesh the fantasies of children and strange men alike. And he had succeeded, had drawn haunted, racist tanks and giant heads that flew around wreaking havoc. He’d tried sending his parents some of these funny books, but they never replied. The closest he’d come to seeing them in the twenty-year interim was catching their confused faces on an episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Regis smiled that great big grin of his and asked them to name the leader of the Militia that had taken over by force an entire quarter of America. His parents stood at a podium clutching each other, looking wild-eyed at the audience then the cameras.

“We’re not supposed to be here.” His father trembled. His mother adjusted her babushka and sobbed. “We’re not supposed to be here! Please, somebody, help us!”

Raphael left his parents to their solitude and demise and explored the rest of the house. Everything looked untouched. His room. Posters of superheroes. A framed picture of the boy whom he had loved. Even the basement with its faux wooden walls and foosball table now layered in cobwebs. He opened up the basement closet and found his parents’ winter coats. He pressed his face between the sleeves and tried to get a hint of their scent but only smelled moth balls and old age. He pushed further and discovered that the closet extended back and back and back into a kind of tunnel with stone walls. Try as he might, he could not remember this.

Raphael crept forward until he came to a tiny room. There was an old couch sealed by plastic, a dusty television with rabbit ears, and three wooden shelves filled with old Nintendo Entertainment System games. Those lovable gray cartridges! He hadn’t played them in so long, didn’t remember owning this many. But he picked one up called Comic Book Artist Raphael McHumphries Enters the Void Through His Haunted Nintendo Entertainment System and Comes to an Epiphany About the Nature of Loss and Death and blew into its underside, his spittle tickling the exposed microchip, a strangely sexual gesture.

Afterwards, he could not explain why, what precisely motivated him to hook up the Nintendo and plug Comic Book Artist Raphael McHumphries Enters the Void Through His Haunted Nintendo Entertainment System and Comes to an Epiphany About the Nature of Loss and Death inside, but he would later tell those that would listen in coffee shops or at comic conventions that perhaps it was a result of too many losses suffered simultaneously. Raphael blew into the cartridge once more for luck and pressed the power button. The television flashed blue, then black, then blue, then black. A pixilated image appeared, cartoony, just barely daring to represent the human form. Red hat. Red overalls. Blue shirt. Beige skin. A mustache the same color as his dark hair. An Italian Stereotype. He stepped out of the television, his body flat and gruesome. One-dimensional. He held out a digital hand, his body glowing with video game light.

What choice did he have? What else could Raphael do?

He took the Italian Stereotype’s pixilated hand, and together they passed through the screen. Together they burrowed into the underbelly of the modern world.

It’s a field. It’s a cave. It’s a castle.

It’s all of these things. And they’re all here. All the ones you remember. The boy robot who fights other boy robots. The yellow orb who eats other orbs. The cute pink creature who eats other cute creatures. But they are old now. Flashing red, then their normal colors, then red again. Long white beards. Wrinkles. Liver spots. Decay. This is where they come to die.

Raphael McHumphries walks among them — among their flashing bodies — and comes to the realization that this is where they come to die, all those digital apparitions of his youth, all those colorful sprites that made him feel less alone during terrible days suffered during his West Virginia childhood, those friendless Friday nights of high school, waiting by the phone with a liter of Coca Cola firing up another round of Nintendo, a three dollar rental from Joe’s down by the pizza shop where the former high school wrestling star sold dime bags. This is where they come to die.

This is where they come to die!

Raphael finds the Italian Stereotype prone on the ground, his legs splayed, his digital chest rising and falling, rising and falling. Raphael takes his digital hand into his own. This world shudders with an electronic pulse, with noises made to imitate music, beeps and bloops combined to form the melody of childhood and remembrance.

“You never gave up,” the Italian Stereotype rasps. “We would die and die and die and die again, and you just kept on going. Pushing us forward like chess pieces. So brutal. Why? Why?”

“I don’t know.” Raphael rubs his forehead. “I’m sorry.”

The dying heroes of his youth moan in pain all around him. The characters disappear, their flashing bodies becoming points, numbers that rise into the sky then vanish. And suddenly Raphael McHumphries is left alone with only his memories for comfort. For some reason, what he remembers is this: a blank sky from childhood, the summer day the robot came to town, a traveling performer, a lark, how large it appeared then, so tall, a hundred feet, a hundred stories. Raphael and all the other children of Monongalia County rushed Main Street to get a glimpse of it, tin legs, tin chest, tin head like a bucket. And it chose him, it reached down to the sidewalk toward all those beautiful bellowing children and cupped Raphael in the safety and surprising warmth of its tin hands and brought him up, up, up like a sacrament, set his flimsy child body on the machine’s shoulder. Then it marched. Straight down Main Street. Straight across the county where everyone could marvel. Raphael standing proud on its shoulder waving to the stunned onlookers below. And up there so far above the humans felt both like living in the cocoon of their collective love and being held a million miles away from it. It felt like what hovers between life and death, the silky spaces that shimmer in between.