A Hundred Thousand Worlds (13 page)

T
he room is a small right triangle, and once it was his mom’s. The bed is tucked into one of the vertices, a sixty-degree angle. This means the wall meets the other wall at a thirty-degree angle, and that wall meets the floor at ninety degrees. This year, they’ve been doing geometry on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Although it’s his mother’s least favorite subject to teach, Alex loves the language of it, every hypotenuse, arc, and sector.

Eliel is wedged between Alex and his mother, asleep. He has the stink of an older dog, meaty, not unpleasant, and coming from somewhere no bath or hose can reach. Alex leans on him slightly, careful not to apply too much weight.

“Why doesn’t Babu want you in her kitchen?” Alex asks. There are so many things to understand about the room, beginning with its shape. In Alex’s mind, the only rooms that are not cubic are found in museums, and they aren’t simply rooms, they’re
about
rooms. They say something about what it means to be a room, instead of just being rooms themselves. Then there’s the idea that his mother did not grow up in this room but “summered” here. Alex knows the transitional seasons can be used as verbs—he’s been known to spring and fall himself—but he’s never summered or wintered. Home is supposed to be a singular thing, something that exists in one place and persists in time. It doesn’t sound like a luxury to Alex to have a summer home and a winter home; it sounds confusing. He imagines he would always miss whichever home he wasn’t in and worry if it was okay without him.

“She doesn’t want me in there because she knows I’ll check the labels,” Val says.

“Check them for what?”

“For things that are bad for you.”

“Babu wouldn’t feed me anything that’s bad for me.”

“Sometimes Babu doesn’t know any better,” she says. He likes it here, he likes coming to stay here, but sometimes he feels as though his mother and grandmother are fighting over him, tugging at both his arms. This wouldn’t be so bad except that he thinks the fighting is not about him so much as it’s about something that came before, or something that was always there and still is.

“You didn’t tell me a story last night,” he says.

“I was upset,” she says. This is not an apology, only an explanation.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” says Alex. This too only explains.

“I know, Rabbit,” she says. “I’m not used to you being so big you can run off by yourself.”

“I wasn’t by myself. I was with Brett.” Alex regrets this after he’s said it.

“He’s nice, huh?” she asks. There is something resigned in her voice that calms Alex’s fears. Brett is no longer the enemy; he’s paid for his mistakes.

“He’s my friend,” Alex says.

She rolls over to face him, half her face visible over the sleeping border collie. “Tell me about what you guys are working on.”

Alex shakes his head vigorously. “You owe
me
a story,” he says. “An extra one. Two episodes.” His mother rolls back over and looks back up at the ceiling.

“Storyline again?” He nods, and he’s not sure if she sees it out of the corner of her eye or knows from the way the bed shakes, but she nods, too. “Which season?”

“I want to hear how Frazer and Campbell fell in love,” he says.

“Huh,” says his mother. “There’s not an episode for that.” She always stares off into space when she’s telling about storyline episodes. Freak-of-the-week
episodes, she pays extra attention to his face to make sure she’s not scaring him, but when she tells storyline episodes, it’s like the words are written very faintly somewhere and she’s straining to read them.

Alex pulls himself closer to her, displacing Eliel, who moves somewhat grudgingly around Alex’s legs and situates himself behind Alex. Alex wants to tell her he’s not so big he can run off by himself, but the words get caught and he puzzles over them. He tries to decide if they’re true, and whether or not he wants them to be.

Undecided, he curls into the angle described by the wall and the bed, tangential to curves described by mother and dog.

“I
t started in season three,” she says. “There’s something in TV called the
Moonlighting
effect. It’s where there’s a couple that doesn’t get along, but the audience wants them to fall in love. Or they think they do. So the writers make it happen, and then the audience decides it’s not what they wanted and then the show gets canceled.”

“This happens because of the moon?” Alex says.

“No, that’s just what it’s called.” She remembers the insistent matchmaking of the fans. On the Internet, people wrote shockingly explicit pieces of erotica featuring Frazer and Campbell. There is a weird disconnect reading someone else’s writing about what you’re like in bed, but she and Andrew used to recite some of the racier ones for the amusement of the guys in the writing room. Not acting them out, of course. Sometimes she’d even read them to herself and think it wouldn’t be like that at all. The fantasies tended to be either violent or tender, the former all lust with no love, the latter all love with no lust. It wouldn’t be like that, Val would think. It would be both at once.

“All season, there have been clues that everything they’ve dealt with, all the problems in time, have been caused by someone called the Leader,” she explains. “But no one knows anything about him. Until Frazer and Campbell catch some bad guys trying to tamper with the NIST-F1, which is our master clock.”

“What’s a master clock?” asks Alex.

“It’s the clock every other clock is set to,” she says. “Like if your watch
said nine thirty, and mine said nine thirty-two, and we wanted to know which was right, we could check them against the NIST-F1.”

“Oh.”

“So these bad guys tell Frazer and Campbell that the Leader is planning on altering the FOCS-1, which is the master clock of all master clocks, so that all of the clocks fall out of sync.”

“Why would the Leader do that?” asks Alex.

Even Tim hadn’t had a good answer for that. The network wanted the show to have a big bad, so Tim complied with the biggest bad he could muster: a vague threat that tied every other plotline together. But the plotlines were so diverse and resistant to the idea of a single motive that when the Leader showed up, he had to remain part cipher, part trickster god. There had been hints dropped for eleven episodes before he finally made his appearance. Going into shooting, they had a fabricated mask and a vocoder, but no actor to play the villain. At the very last minute, Tim had grabbed one of the gaffers, put the mask on him, and told him to stand “in a menacing way.”

“They finally catch the Leader in Switzerland, where the FOCS-1 is kept. They have him at gunpoint, and he tells them he’s actually one of them from the future.”

“You said ‘he,’” Alex says. “So the Leader is Campbell.”

“I said ‘he,’” she explains, “because the Leader has a deep robot voice that sounds like a ‘he.’ But it could be either of them. Anyway, before they can figure it out,
the Leader
”—she says this with emphasis, avoiding any gendered pronouns—“zaps Campbell and he disappears to somewhere in time.”

“What does he zap him with?”

“By ‘he,’ do you mean
the Leader
?” she asks. Alex giggles. “A time ray, I guess?” she says. Tim was never big on the science behind things. “The Leader is from the future, so the Leader has all kinds of future technology.”

Andrew had actually been zapped by the movie gun. His agent convinced him he’d never make the jump from television to leading man, so,
with his contract coming up at the end of season three, he’d started taking roles in smaller films. “Big parts in little movies,” he’d told Val. What worried him was that, more than anything he’d done before, these parts called for legitimate acting, something closer to Val’s career experience than his own. “They’re going to realize I’m a mug,” he told her. He asked her about classes she’d taken. He borrowed her copy of
An Actor Prepares,
by Stanislavski, because he’d heard of it. She’d grinned and told him he didn’t have enough pathos to be a Method actor, and a week later, when he returned the book and admitted she was right, she introduced him to some Meisner exercises. The moment rather than the method, being present with another actor rather than being deep in your own character’s head. The two of them stood in her living room, sizing each other up, then finding one thing about the other to speak out loud.

“You look unhappy with me right now,” she said.

“
I
look unhappy with
you
?” he said. This was always the rookie response, to overstress the pronouns.

“You do; you look unhappy with me. Right now.”

“I look unhappy with you
right now,
” he said, moving the emphasis. Back and forth like that, feeling the words shift and morph through their repetition. Their attention so focused on one another that it was indistinguishable from attraction. In the classes she’d taken at the Acting Studio, in New York, a good exercise ended with you wanting—needing, almost—to either punch or fuck your partner. This tension usually escalated into laughter, breaking the scene, and the same held for Andrew and Val, aided no doubt by the fact that Andrew always brought a bottle of wine to the sessions. And then there was a Friday, late, when Val started the exercise with “You have big teeth,” a standard opening, but one that brought all of her attention to his mouth. She stared at it as the words bounced back and forth between them, and as he said, for the seventh time, “I have big—” she stopped him with a kiss, and he repeated it back at her, escalating. When she paused for a breath, she pulled back and examined his face, worried, frantic that this had only been part of the
exercise. Then he kissed her, something new. As she pulled him toward the couch, something her acting coach used to say at the beginning of each class popped into her head and she giggled into Andrew’s neck as his kisses moved down her shoulder.

“What is it?” he said.

“The moment,” she said, “is a tricky fucker.”

In the morning, she woke up to the sound of coffee grinding and Andrew whistling the overture to
Love for Three Oranges.
She found him in the kitchen, adorable in boxers and socks, pouring two cups.

“This is good,” he said, tentative, half asking.

“This is good,” she said.

The producers were determined to keep Andrew around, so the writers had to construct the second half of season three as “Campbell light,” with Andrew appearing in the minimum number of episodes his contract required. At first, Val had looked forward to carrying the show on her own. Frazer had become a sidekick, and this was her opportunity to retake the reins. Fans responded well, but Val had trouble finding Frazer’s character without Andrew to play off of. On her own, Bethany Frazer seemed not efficient and professional but cold and hard.

“Through season three,” Val says, “Frazer is at Anomaly all alone. She was working alone before Campbell showed up, but now she realizes she’s alone. And Campbell, he’s been zapped into the past. And he was used to being alone, too, because he’d used his time ray to zap himself around time before. But sometimes being alone is okay until you realize you’re alone, and sometimes it takes being not alone to figure that out. While Frazer’s trying to find all these clues to where in the timestream Campbell is, and Campbell’s trying to find time portals the Leader left behind so he can get back to the present, they’re both starting to figure out how much they need each other.”

Tim wrote two scripts for the finale: one that would serve as a series finale and one that would set up season four. Val signed on to do
Othello
with Shakespeare in the Park at the end of the summer, even though it might mean she’d be in New York when shooting was supposed to start for the new season. But then the advance reviews started to trickle in on two of Andrew’s movies. Not only had they been panned, but he had been singled out for abuse. Critics called him arrogant and flat. “Attractive cardboard,” said one. He showed up at her apartment, looking as if the air had gone out of him. She cooked him dinner, although she hadn’t had any appetite for days. She poured him wine, but none for herself. Earlier that day, she’d done the math and calculated that by the time
Othello
was in production, she’d be showing, and no one wanted a pregnant Desdemona. But that conversation could wait.

“Let’s sign,” she said, as if it was what she wanted. He offered hollow protests, but he was obviously relieved. It was important she never let him think that she’d given something up for him. It was important that he hadn’t had to ask.

That night, they invented lists of demands to submit to the network, to justify having held out as long as they had. The network gave them everything they wanted. The show was saved.

“So they fall in love while they’re not around one another?” Alex says. He’s curled up next to the dog now, the two of them like a pair of parentheses.

“Something like that,” Val says. She wonders if children can ever understand the way their parents are in love, or that their love could possibly exist outside of the children themselves. It would require the child to look at her parents as people completely separate from herself. And if Val is unable to think of her mother that way, she wonders if it is even possible for her to understand herself as separate from Alex, now that he is here, now that he is the inexorable thing in her life.

She continues a summary of that season, a plot so convoluted that when they were shooting the episodes, she’d sometimes have to have Tim explain to her what was going on, but Alex either understands it all
on his own or is losing interest, because his questions and interruptions taper off, and by the time Frazer and Campbell are reunited in the season finale, his breathing is tinged with a soft, gentle snore.

Val quietly climbs out of the bed and makes her way downstairs. Brett and Fred have already retired, and her mother is sitting on the couch with an afghan covering her legs and Eero covering her bare feet. The living room smells of spices Val could not name and is the temperature particular to rural summer evenings. In New York right now, the day’s heat would be struggling and failing to dissipate, trapped like a bug under a jar, but here, where there is nothing but space, the heat leaves behind it a cool that feels like an absence rather than an imposition.

“Is he asleep?” her mother asks.

“More or less,” says Val. Her mother curls her legs under her, displacing the dog and making room for Val on the couch. Val sits, and for a second Eero looks up at her beseechingly. But when Val doesn’t pat the couch or her lap to invite him up, he retreats to his own bed.

“It’s nice having a house full of boys again,” her mother says. “It makes the place feel heavier. Less likely to blow away.” What Val remembers a house full of boys feeling like is loud: her father preferring to bellow from the next room rather than come find the person he was talking to, and her brothers racing around outside yelling in the voices of whatever breed of mortal enemies they happened to be that day: cowboys and Indians, Martians and astronauts, commies and G-men.

“You should sell the house, Mom,” she says, not for the first time. “Come live in New York.”

“New York is no place for dogs,” her mother says. She has a list of complaints about New York, reasons for not moving. For years, Val’s asked her mother to come live in New York because it would make Alex happy and because it would be better for her mother than living in the woods and because Val wouldn’t have to worry about her anymore. But this time, it’s that Val wants her mother with her, who doesn’t want to be alone. Her mother seems to know this, although it doesn’t change her answer. “I like
my house,” her mother says, “especially when my family’s in it.” She puts her hand on Val’s knee. “Honey,” she says, “what are you doing here?”

“There are things I need to do here,” Val says. “We’re booked at the convention in Chicago this weekend. It’s one of the bigger ones.” She can see now all of the tasks she’s put in front of her, how she’s made a line, a mechanism to move her forward, a conveyor belt that will gnash her up at its end. “We have to be in Los Angeles in two weeks. Not even. A week and a half.”

“No, you don’t,” her mother says, angry with her,
for
her. “It’s as simple as you don’t go. You stay here. With me. Or you go somewhere else.”

“I can’t, Mom. I should have known when I took Alex this was going to happen. Sooner or later, Andrew would decide he’d look good as a father.”

“So let him go knock someone else’s daughter up and leave mine out of it.” Val smiles at this. Her mother never liked Andrew, as much as he poured on the charm. It had driven him nuts, which made him act even more charming, which made her like him even less. Even during the time she loved Andrew, she got a kick out of seeing him struggle to rope in those few people who didn’t succumb. It was an obsession with him, being universally liked, something he’d been able to talk about but never get over. Andrew told her once that when his mother had remarried, when Andrew was ten, his new stepfather sat him down and told him that while he’d never love Andrew like a father loved a son, he wanted them to be friends. But despite Andrew’s constant efforts, his stepfather never treated him as much more than a roommate and was palpably relieved when, at seventeen, Andrew announced his intention to move out. During the run of
Anomaly,
Andrew had been a regular checker of discussion boards, and still kept boxes of letters from his time on
Sands in the Hourglass,
often handwritten, both fan and hate mail, soap opera watchers being apparently more traditional than sci-fi fans in the way they relayed their opinions to actors.

“I don’t think he wants the whole mother/child package at this point.” What Valerie suspects is that Andrew has reached a point where he
needs a gimmick to continue going after younger girls, and Alex is cute enough to induce womb-ache in Andrew’s target demographic. Maybe if he were an ugly child, she wouldn’t be in danger of losing him. It’s not a charitable thought, but charity is for people with things to give away.