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Blue spent a couple of days looking for page sixteen and in the process waded through twenty-plus years of documents, photos and artwork ranging from brilliant to barely recognizable as coming from his own hand. Most disturbing to Blue was finding an image which was quite brilliantly drawn and coming to the conclusion that he wasn't actually the person who drew it. He decided that it would have to make its way to the new "Leer" pages whether he drew it or not. After all, it was to his credit that he managed to hold onto someone else's drawing for that long anyway, right?

So page sixteen of version "whatever" of Leer was lost and if it looked anything like page 24, no great loss. A bigger problem was staring Blue in the face. He had some really nicely laid out pages with half-decent drawings going, but the supporting text was lost. Blue prided himself on keeping the most useless piles of trash with an unshakable commitment to the notion that he would one day spin them into gold. John's words were not trash, yet apparently, Blue had disposed of them somewhere between the East and West coasts of the USA, and he was in no position to panhandle the entire country. Pages seventeen through thirty shared similar characteristics to one another, they were drawn, to varying levels of completion but were essentially text free.

They remained that way for days...

Chapter5 What to Keep Send in the Clown

Blue remembered this page well and fondly the moment he found it in the stack. He remembered working at the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco as well as at the Meridian in both Boston and SF, and the incredible haughtiness of the staff, especially the concierge. The thing that constantly amused Blue about working with these people is that they all had a certain shell of superiority about them. They were the finest in the hospitality industry. Nobody could compare with their impeccable presentation and sophistication, their refined sense of service. In short, nobody ran and got shit for you quite as nicely as they did. But just try to break in there. Try to become one of the elite if you were just a fine art grad from the Midwest capable of pronouncing about fifty words in any language other than English solely because you watched enough cartoons to pick up the exaggerated accent of a great French lover or a macho Spanish bullfighter from Mel Blanc. So when it came time for a message to be delivered to our friend Leer, Blue had no trouble at all coming up with a suitable delivery scene. The concierge at Leer's hotel would be visited by three spirits. They all just happened to be in one body. The body of a clown. This clown was obnoxious, silly and a little spooky. He was a bit of a showboat, perhaps a trifle too rude toward the concierge, but he got the job done. He delivered a letter, special delivery for Leer.

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"Travelling blind, just like Leer," Blue thought to himself. "Can't tell if I'm remembering or inventing at this point but I guess it doesn't matter much. After all, Leer is just a fictional character. John didn't really give me enought ot go on except I know that Leer's arrival in New York is something of a homecoming. Guess we'll see what happens as we stumble through the dark together."

Blue decides to keep searching his studio for lost pages of text even while he realizes that twenty years can bury even the best of things pretty deep. "The suitcase, if only I could find that old, brown, buckled suitcase. I kept everything in there, that and the travel bag. Never should have switched to boxes. Oh well, Welcome Home, Leer, let's see if we can figure out why you're here!"

Chapter 5 What to KeepVan

 

Blue was finding it increasingly difficult to piece the threads of "Leer" back together but as he did he remembered that there were several drafts of the beginning of the story. So Blue decided once again to air it all out. He gathered all of the notes he could find, the early typewritten pages from John and the artwork he had produced, even the rough sketches. There were a few gaps in the sequence but one thing was becoming very clear. Arnold loved to party, was wild about Bea and absolutely adored Edgar Van. Leer had something special going on, a sort of sixth sense and in Arnold's estimations was a little too serious, and Mona knew Leer. Blue was still trying to sort out how Catherine Kent fit in, but for the moment, he assumed she died seventeen years before the death of Arnold's father which meant that Arnold had now lost both his sister and his father and all he cared about was seeing the most preshas Edgar Van!

Blue decided that the best way to find the truth was to lay out everything, only then could the story rise up from the pages, only then could the secret of "Leer" be revealed.

 

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"You have to learn to stop rushing through everything," Edgar Van told the boy patiently. "Oh, alright, just take a break, a short one, and don't try to cram a whole day's worth of running into five minutes, Rachmaninov demands proper breathing."

The boy ran off as fast as his legs could carry him which was surprisingly fast considering his girth.

"The world continues to become smaller," Van ponders as he turns the globe with the hands of an artist, playing the topographical braille with his fingers as if stroking the strings of a harp. "My holdings become larger exponentially each day but what good does it do me when those who hear are not truly listening and those who do listen become that which I loathe most of all, the devoted."

"You were different, more capable, truly gifted and absolutely independent, but now you're gone."

"He's not going to let you leave here, y'know," the perfect little pretty in pink sister taunts the pudgy little superhero as he attempts his getaway.

"He can't catch me when I'm flying!" the boy responds as he rushes up to the balcony. Now he is free. He dashes up the stairs and leaps onto the railing, a risky move but when you possess his powers, it's easy. Faster and faster he runs along the rail until...

Falling is only a little different from flying really, one just bears a little more intent.

The boy falls helplessly toward the marble floor too quickly for fear to overtake surprise.

"Joshua!", Van yells as he deftly grabs the large golden candlestick and hurls it in a single motion, like a javelin toward the falling boy, and just as quickly as he fell, he is saved. The candlestick neatly pierced the fabric of his cape in precisely the right spot for Joshua to land with his sorry ass sitting directly in a rather large and surprisingly comfortable chair roughly two hundred years older than anyone he had ever known.

"So much for not being able to catch you", Joshua's sister Shannon remarked dryly as the boy sat dumbfounded, staring up at the candlestick which saved his life, embedded deep in the masterfully stained woodwork of the church.

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"What's that kid doing running around in a superhero costume, in a church. in the first place," Blue wondered to himself as he sorted through the colored pages, drawn on maps. "And what's up with Edgar Van, for crying out loud. Is he some sort of superhero himself," Blue moans to himself, his mind grasping pointlessly at the threadbare undergarments of his own memory. "I created this scene", he recalls. "John wrote most of that other stuff, but I put these kids in here, but why?" He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers so tightly against his own eyeballs that he could feel the backs of them bumping into something that Blue hoped was the part of his brain that controlled memory. He was pretty sure it wasn't and was busy telling himself that he knew better than that when he remembered...

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Blue spent a few days trying to assemble the pieces of "Leer" together. After the initial rejection letters, he had scrapped the idea of photographic reproductions with text bubbles overlayed by hand and Xeroxed on a color copier. Now, twenty-plus years later, with scanner technology being what it is, Blue is entertaining the idea once again. He reasons that the print industry has developed step by step with other industries, utilizing the latest hardware and software innovations, making it possible to use much of what was rejected so many years ago. the biggest drawback Blue was running into was that there was simply no way he could meld the first version with the second. Finally, Blue decides not to try.

"I'm going to use it all. I'm going to just lay it out there, mix it all together and let everybody figure it out for themselves. People are smart. If Leer is dreaming about Mona in color on one page and black and white on another, so what. Hell, I thought he was dreaming about Catherine Kent! And maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Too bad, there's just way too much good shit in here to waste it by trimming the fat. This is like good fat. This is Porterhouse fat, charbroiled and sizzlin'." Blue concluded.

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Chapter 5 What to Keep

"What to keep and what to kill, that really is the question, isn't it?", Blue thought to himself as he looked through the stack of notes, sketches and rewrites from the early days of "Leer". The more he looked at everything, the less he wanted to kill any of it. Blue found himself marvelling at the sheer amount of time that he and John had put into "Leer" to no avail, bolstering his ambition to see the project through. He decided to include it all. His studio was already littered with every kind of art supply, collage element and "another man's treasure" one could imagine but Blue had become adept at finding everything just the way he had scattered it, out of necessity. It wasn't that Blue was messy so much as he was chaotically productive. When he spread the stack out on the floor, Blue began a sort of dance, leaping from notes to sketches, over to a large ink and colored pencil rendering on an over-sized topographical map and back again.

"I'm going to confuse the hell out of everyone who tries to read this", Blue said to himself as he landed with his legs splayed wide across a large drawing and a row of a half-dozen inked pages in succession. "Anybody who can't figure out the story can go back to reading "Archie"," Blue heard John snickering into his ear. He turned so suddenly that he nearly fell on the ice that Leer broke through over twenty years earlier. John was nowhere in sight, but Blue felt him there. If he found out that John was dead, it would have made sense to him. The paranormal evangelists would identify the chilling feeling as his dear friend's presence, possibly attempting to contact him from the great beyond. It wasn't that kind of chill. It was more like exhilaration, a palpable feeling of shared purpose, as if John were actually there, helping Blue to make the right decisions, nothing buried, nothing burned.

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