Calvin, Hobbes, and the Pasts We Deny
Article by Sam Nystrom Costales Art by Alex Wollinka
You and I used to bike from the yellow duplex on Van Buren over to the library to look for Calvin and Hobbes anthologies. You’d sit cross-legged in the comics island section, I would plop on your lap, and we’d flip through Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons or Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat and read the strips out loud to one another. There was one strip where Calvin tells Hobbes how weird it is that scientists imagined the whole of the universe exploding from a dot and still only managed to come up with the name Big Bang. He concludes, “that's the whole problem with science. You’ve got a whole bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.”
I asked you what you thought existed before the Big Bang, and your closest approximation to an answer was that as a kid, bored in Sunday school, you’d try to picture what existed before God. You came up with the idea of a huge gnarled tree blossoming a single flower out of which He fell, free to create the rest of the universe. Grasping for a more secular answer, I settled on the comic book setting to explain the Big Bang, like a big pencil coming down from the sky and marking on a white piece of paper all the little panels and characters. In either case, you start to wonder where the tree came from, or the pencil.
You tell me on the phone some nights that you regret that things were always so unstable when I was a kid. You’re hoping we can talk about this when I get back; I tell you okay. I feel that I love you too much to hold the past over you in this way. The turbulence you remember was often out of your control. You sometimes bring up the places that could’ve been–New Mexico, Colorado, Chicago. In response I assert that where we are now is good enough. I find myself stringing together memories like the beads in a rosary hanging in your Sunday school class, washing each fragment of the past in a light of gentle passivity. We do the same thing when we try to picture the origin—as if that big pencil in the sky had started with the punchline and then went back to the Big Bang, sketching out the strips in between. The terrifying power of nothingness and the infinity of its possible outcomes starts to lose its power and beauty if we think of ourselves as fated to come into being. As Calvin says, “When you look into infinity, you realize there are more important things than what people do all day.”
It is so tempting to try and brush aside the past in this way, to render it harmless by accepting the given state of things as if destined to be sketched out by a comic book artist. I too readily efface myself from these memories; make myself a subject to the mysterious hand holding that pencil. At some point I realized that all the moments I think of, the times you could not afford rent, nights spent playing with Star Wars figurines in the back of your grad courses, our patterned flight across this city, are all haunted by a figure I find myself negating—pushing towards the backgrounds of these memories.
If we’re talking about past futures, I remember soft hands using a box cutter to scrape off the cactus needles that had stuck themselves to me during a hike. I was scared by the razor's edge but those hands worked so gently that the knife barely touched my skin. I remember watching Ice Age 3 on a bed in a garage, curtains hanging on all sides. Running my hands through thick black hair in that park in Irvine. Waiting with excitement for a man to arrive at our door after a 14-hour drive. Chamomile tea with lime and honey when I was sick, a flavor you could never quite replicate. Wandering through countless cities in Southern California while you were at conferences; filling those moments with trips to Knott’s Berry Farm or the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The night we spent in that KOA cabin on the coast watching Johnny English while rain pounded down outside. I remember the wet tranquility of the morning after the storm had passed, the calm air and the dripping pines as the three of us walked hand in hand.
There is a past in which I had deemed the figure of a stepfather worthy of love. I mistook a muddled attempt at affection, hindered so strongly by his own struggle to escape a sense of patriarchal stoicism, as the same apathy I sensed so often in my own relationship with my father. On the late nights when I find myself slipping and need to talk with somebody, I know to call the landline because your phone will be turned off. So many times has my stepfather picked up the phone only for me to ask for you. Each time I reject his voice at the end of the line I feel a stinging guilt, and yet the idea of opening myself up to his love feels impossible. You tell me he has worked hard to learn how to love; I reject that it has not been enough—never willing to accept that maybe I needed to work too. There is a possible past in which the two of us had grown together.
At one point, in that house on Augusta street, you found a couple of Calvin and Hobbes books in some old boxes. The covers were worn and tattered and some bent horribly at the spine. Scientific Progress Goes ‘Boink’, Revenge of the Baby Sat. They were my sister’s— she was rougher with her books, or maybe the past had been rougher to them. It was good to have a few of my own; we no longer lived so close to the library. The books felt displaced, fragments of a childhood that still remains so alien to me—you tell me bits and pieces of the past, enough to know she had it harder than me.
The scars and taped pages form a sort of temporal index upon which you could measure my childhood against hers. There are special moments in Calvin and Hobbes, certain strips where we are left without dialogue and become an accomplice to the two friends—when Calvin and Hobbes bear witness to the infinity of space, we too are left to contemplate the stars with them. These pages are not read passively, instead we elaborate and project our own meanings into the visual form. I wonder now what memories you had written into the old dog-ears and worn edges, which pasts had been set aside in the attic only for you to unfold with me on our plush red couch. Which memories could have been inscribed in those words had I been willing to sit on that red couch with my stepfather instead. The past cannot be rendered harmless, it works its way into attic boxes, waits to be opened up and deciphered. The books reveal a sort of truth about the Big Bang—not about the drawing of origins, the graphite filling of empty homogenous space by a comic book artist—instead as a testament to the inscription chaos leaves on the present, our inability to ever depart from origins.