A Hundred Thousand Worlds (18 page)

T
he hotel restaurant’s menu attempts to serve all comers. It is a culinary United Nations. Along with hot dogs and steaks, there is an extensive offering of pastas and curries. An entire page details stir-fry options; another, falafel, kibbeh, and tabbouleh. Val and Alex sit there for an hour, and Alex doesn’t eat. Not
won’t
but
doesn’t
.

It’s a savvy trick on Alex’s part that in these situations he doesn’t present resistance or declare his intentions not to do something. He simply
doesn’t
.

Won’t
she could break down.
Doesn’t
is a reed that bends with wind. When the waitress comes around and Val insists that he order something, he chooses a hamburger, plain, which goes cold on the plate while Val works her way through a massive Cobb salad.

She asks if anything is wrong, and he makes a noise that resembles the letter
M.

Missed, skipped, and refused meals have always been crises for Val. Alex is an engine, burning through calories at an alarming rate. The caloric intake required for sustenance, let alone growth, is daunting to her, and most meals barely end before she’s contemplating the next one. On the occasions Alex will not eat, she finds herself less interested in the cause than obsessed with the idea that without food he will grind to a halt, or collapse like a puppet with cut strings. In the past, she’s tried to force the issue, over stomachaches and queasiness, over the rare claim that he doesn’t like this food or that. But the amount consumed ends up outweighed by the effort expended in its consumption. Her current defeatist
strategy is to let it go and leave the food around, trusting he will find his way to it when he needs it, but part of her wants to reach across the table and stuff the hamburger into him like stolen goods into a burglar’s sack.

The waitress asks him if everything is okay, and he nods. She boxes it up for them to cram into the tiny hotel fridge, hopefully to be eaten cold later.

Upstairs, Alex gets into his pajamas and brushes his teeth wordlessly, without being asked. It’s a bad sign, because he is fastidious about not eating after he’s brushed his teeth. Once he’s out of the bathroom, Val goes in, shuts the door, and sits on the edge of the tub, sweatpants gripped in her right hand. It’s a testament to what an agreeable child Alex is that she has so few coping strategies for when he’s not. Negative emotions usually float through Alex like ducks down a stream. She’s thought that his basic mood has something melancholic about it, but real sadness and pronounced anger come upon him rarely. When they do, they strike quickly and dissipate just as fast. She tries to think of times he’s been this recalcitrant and can only think of the car ride from California to New York when he was three. She’d left her lawyer’s office that day, the manila envelope gripped in her hand, and walked to a copy shop a few blocks over. Scanning to make sure she wasn’t being watched, she took the picture out and copied it once, in black and white. The result was grainier than the original, and it was harder to make out Alex in the doorway. She thought for a second that she could copy this one, then the result, spiraling down into lower and lower resolutions until Alex was no longer in the picture at all, and that somehow that would fix everything; it would keep Alex safe and erase or at least obscure Andrew’s sin. But she slipped the copy and the original back into the envelope and went home, sending the babysitter on her way with a generous tip. Andrew wouldn’t be home until the following day. He was on a shoot up in Vancouver, the shift from L.A. to a cheaper location being a sure sign that the movie was running over budget. She found boxes in the back of a closet from when they’d moved in and packed as much as she could. Then, with the last of the packing tape, she affixed the copy of the photo to the door, layering
strip upon strip of tape over it so he’d have to claw and scrape the last little bits of it off the door with his fingernails.

She made so many mistakes those first few days. In deciding to run and not walk away, she’d left too much behind. Too many of Alex’s things, jobs left unfinished, friendships severed. Tim.

Alex refused to eat and wouldn’t leave the car. Although he’d been potty-trained for over a year, he regressed, forcing Val to stop at a Walmart in the southern tip of Nevada to buy diapers. He screamed bloody murder in the parking lot as she forced them on, convinced someone was going to call the cops, who would arrest her for kidnapping. When she had to haul him out of the car to go into the motel they ended up at the first night, he’d kicked and flailed at her, making inchoate noises so loud the desk clerk gave Val the key card to the room without payment, suggesting Val come back “when the little guy’s calmed down.” That night, he slept in the bathtub with the door closed, refusing to come out, refusing to talk to her. Thankfully the lock was too high and too elaborate for him to work it, but Val let him stay in there alone and, exhausted, fell asleep sitting outside the door, listening to him cry.

The next morning, all that rage had been spent. Silently, he ate a muffin from the continental breakfast and got into the car. He’d consented to being diapered, but mumbled “Gotta go” when he needed to for the rest of the drive, and on the third day he went without them. On the fourth, she threw them away at a rest stop in Pennsylvania, not wanting to bring them with her into whatever new life awaited her and Alex in New York.

This feels like an echo of that: he punished her for taking him away from Andrew, even though he couldn’t have known what was going on, and now he’s punishing her for taking him back to Andrew. Val stands up and pulls on her sweatpants, leaving her skirt on the bathroom floor. She ventures back into the room. Alex sits cross-legged on the unused bed, his book open on his lap.

“Hey, Rabbit,” she says, “how about a story?”

“No, thanks,” he says quietly, not looking up.

“You sure?” she says. “There was an episode I had in mind.” He doesn’t respond. Val isn’t sure Alex has ever refused a story before. A curious thing about being a mother is how little newness it involves. Routines may at times feel oppressive, but the entry of newness is disruptive, frightening.

“You want to cuddle?” she says, sounding to her own ear desperate and weak.

“I want to read my book,” he says. Rebuked, she goes to the other bed, pulls the sheets out of their tight tuck, and slips herself in like a letter into an envelope. She turns off her light and lies on her side watching him, but when he looks up and sees her, she rolls to the other side and stares at the blinds. They are lit buttery yellow from the lamp next to Alex’s bed, and although he doesn’t shut off the light, she never hears him turn a page.

T
he sun is coming in at a steep angle through the slats of the hotel window blinds. That means it’s late. Not the New York sun. Heartier, more robust, a midwestern sun. Surprised he didn’t notice it before now. The clock next to the bed reads 11:11. Seems like it should be significant.

“Let’s not get out of bed,” says Ferret Lass. Rolls and throws her arm over him. Not sure if she means today or ever. He is fine with either.

“Fred will be angry with me,” he says. The past week with Fred has been strained, and it’s not anyone’s fault. It’s been a team effort. Ferret Lass called Tuesday to get together. Brett tells himself he wouldn’t have gone if there’d been work to do. But Fred hadn’t given him more than three script pages to pencil, and that included one that read “Full-page spread: vast barren starscape.” Brett told him they didn’t have room for full-page establishing shots at this point, and Fred sulked for an hour. In the absence of work, spending time with Ferret Lass seemed permissible and preferable to watching Fred sit at the hotel room desk and affect the postures of the tortured writer, trying to mine bits of genius from his skull. But when Brett returned early the next morning to accusations that he’d broken the creative flow, he turned right around and called Ferret Lass to see about going out for breakfast.

Things had gotten better, and by Friday morning they were almost at the halfway point they’d promised to Russell at the beginning of the week, due in no small part to Brett’s advancing the plot on his own late Thursday night while Fred slept. He presented the pages, still in sketch rather than finished pencils, to Fred the next morning, before coffee had
been acquired. “We can work with it,” Fred muttered, and Brett resisted the urge to tell him to fuck off and draw it himself.

“Fred’s not your girlfriend,” she says. The first time this word has been used. By either of them. It makes him nervous.

“Are you my girlfriend?” he asks. Tentative. He’d be fine with either answer. She laughs. She is so pretty. He always thought of Debra as pretty. She is, but in an everyday, meet-you-at-a-bar way. Here is this impossible kind of pretty. If he drew her into the comic, Fred would tell him to draw someone more realistic. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?” he asks.

“I called Iota and told her I was sick,” she says. “The organizer can’t keep track of us. Every time he sees one of us up close, all the blood rushes from his brain to his dick. Besides, there’s so many cosplayers here, they barely need us.”

“What exactly is it you’re supposed to do?” Brett asks.

“I asked about this,” she says. Raises one finger. She is about to deliver a thorough answer. “It used to be the comic book companies would hire girls like me to come and work cheesecake. Hang around the booth attracting attention. But some of the female fans called bullshit, and rightly so. Because objectification. But at the same time, guys who show up at a con have certain expectations of what they’re going to see. So the people running the convention hire us to do the same thing the comic companies used to hire us to do. Because capitalism.”

“What difference does it make if you’re hired by the company or the con?”

“We never say we’re hired by the con,” she says. “We never say we’re hired at all. No one ever gets angry directly at us. But they don’t know who they should get angry at. So no one gets hurt.”

It’s the longest he’s ever heard her talk. Her voice is the only thing about her that is more attractive when she’s in the costume than out of it. Impressed by her assessment of things, he realizes she hasn’t answered his question about what they’re hired to do. It isn’t important.

“You should come to Los Angeles,” she says. Out of the blue. “After the convention.”

“What’s in Los Angeles?” he asks.

“Me.” This is something he didn’t know. That she lives in Los Angeles. Two lists: Things He Knows on the left and Things He Doesn’t Know on the right. He finally has something in the left column.

“You mean to visit?” he asks.

“If you want to visit,” she says. Sounds a little disappointed. “Or you could come live with me.” He looks at her to see if she’s joking. He hasn’t known her long enough to know what she looks like when she’s joking. “I have a big apartment on La Cienega,” she says. “It gets good light in the morning. There’s a room you could draw in.”

“What would we do?” he asks. He has no idea what he wants the answer to be. What the question is. She shrugs.

“You could draw. I’d keep looking for modeling work. We’d fuck a lot. Same thing we’re doing right now. Or I could move to New York. New York’s the same as L.A., as far as I’m concerned.”

“You’d move to New York to be with me?”

“I’d move to New York to be in New York. If I was moving to New York, it’d be nice to have someone to stay with. And to sleep with. Or, if I stay in L.A., it’d be nice to have someone to share my rent and my bed.” She looks at him as if she’s explained something incredibly simple.

“Is this a West Coast thing?” he asks. “People don’t do this in New York.”

“I’m sure people do this in New York all the time,” she says. He wonders if this is something West Coast people assume. That people in New York are not uptight. But they are. “I’m not asking you to marry me. I’m not even asking you to sign a lease. I’m asking you to come to L.A. for a while, and if you get tired of it, leave. Or if I get tired of you, I’ll ask you to leave. Or maybe we both get tired of fucking each other and we end up roommates.” He gets the impression all of these endpoints are essentially the same to her in terms of desirability.

“It sounds weird.”

“It’s easy,” she says. Draws out both syllables. Makes the word a patch of smooth road. “That’s why it sounds weird. Because you’re used to things
being hard, and this is easy. You’re used to things being complicated, and this is not complicated.”

He can think of a hundred problems. Thousand ways for it to go wrong. Screaming scenarios play out in his head. Crying jags. Thrown plates. “It seems complicated.”

“Think about it,” she says. She is there in bed with him. She is this impossible kind of pretty. “Here,” she says. Moves toward him. “I’ll make a convincing argument.”

A
fter spending all morning in the recycled air and manufactured sunlight of the convention center, stepping out onto the street is overwhelming. The thick, damp heat of Chicago’s summer is weirdly refreshing, or maybe it’s the body’s natural need for sun. Gail holds her face up to the light for a few seconds before thoughts of skin cancer pop into her head and she shades her eyes with her hands.

From out here, you can see the convention’s effect on the outside world. Robots are waiting for cabs. The lines for the hot dog vendors include angels, aliens, mutants. But even among the general population, clothes are getting tighter and shinier. It occurs to Gail that she might be the only one here without an alter ego; most of the people who pass must have Twitter handles or DJ names or online personas that mask or reveal. Even Val is Bethany Frazer when she’s here. She’s often thought of the con as a throwback to adolescence. But what if it’s a prediction, or a pupal stage? Is it possible the culture of the outside world is becoming more paranormal, or that this subculture being celebrated inside is bubbling up, bleeding through?

“I’m buying,” says Gail as Val reaches for her wallet. The hot dog vendor hands them two, and Gail begins liberally applying mustard to hers. She gently grabs Val’s wrist when Val reaches for the ketchup.

“You want everyone to know you’re a tourist?” says Gail.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” says Val. “My father would have been mortified.”

“You were thinking it was a New York City cart dog and you’d have to smother it so it’d taste like something,” says Gail. “This is one complaint you can file against New York: our street food is for crap.” With glee she tears into her hot dog, wads the bite into the side of her mouth, and asks, “You grow up here?”

“Around here,” says Val. “In Bucktown for a while, then up to Evanston. We had a summer house in Normal; my mom still lives out there.” Gail has never met anyone who would admit to having had a summer house growing up. “You?”

Gail shakes her head, then nods and swallows. “Ames, Iowa. Home of the Iowa State Cyclones. You know what Gertrude Stein said about where she grew up?”

“I don’t, actually.”

“There is no there there,” says Gail, complete with poetic pauses. “True of Gert’s hometown, true of mine. I left when I was seventeen, came to school at U of C. First lesson I learned: mustard only. Chicagoans take their condiments very seriously.” She chomps on the hot dog again and continues with her mouth full. “It ended up being a big advantage, having lived here. Most New York comics writers don’t know the first thing about Chicago. But Center City is the National analog of Chicago, so when I started writing
The Speck & Iota,
I was able to give it some local color.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Val, smiling genuinely for the first time all day. It’s the perfect opposite of how she smiles at the convention: the forced smile draws the memory of happiness out of the body and pushes it into the face; a real smile feeds happiness back into the body, radiating it out from a point.

“National Comics set their books in fictional cities,” says Gail. “Metro City is clearly New York, but they don’t call it New York. Pearl City is San Francisco, complete with the Pearl Gate Bridge, which, for some reason, is bright blue. And Center City, which is where the Speck and Iota are headquartered, is completely and obviously Chicago.”

“Why not use real cities?” Val asks.

“In the beginning I think it was because they wanted OuterMan to have a futuristic city to have adventures in. Metro City is New York, but it’s more like New York in Corbusier’s wet dreams. Highways spiraling through the air, tram cars on a web of invisible wires. Once your main city is fictional, it’s easier to stick with fictional cities, for the sake of consistency. There’s also the fact that comic book cities get blown up a lot. The past couple years, it’s nice not to have to be blowing up New York or Boston or Chicago. I mean, who wants to knock down the Empire State Building now?”

“But you live in New York?” she says.

“Where else is a person going to live?” says Gail. “I miss Chicago, but a girl can’t live on hot dogs alone.” The zeal with which she’s eating gives the lie to her statement.

“You couldn’t live here and write?” asks Val.

“I could,” she says. “I probably should. There’s maybe a half-dozen writers I see regularly in New York. And my company’s editorial office is there, but they never want to see me.” There was probably a time when everyone who worked in comics lived in New York, but now National is the only major publisher whose offices are in Manhattan. If there’s a city where the comics industry lives, it’s this traveling city, the cons, that moves westward every summer like a tent revival show. “What about you?” she asks Val. “You couldn’t live here and act?”

“New York convinces you it’s the place you have to be,” Val says.

“Must be a weird place to raise a kid, though.”

“He adapts,” Val says. “He’s thrived. He’s more of a New Yorker than I’ll ever be.”

“Subway maps in the brain, and lungs that can process exhaust fumes,” says Gail. “Superpowers.” She and Geoff sometimes make lists of the gifts that would make living in New York easier. The power to make yourself visible. Able to leap from Flatbush to the Lower East Side in a single bound.

“You have kids?” Val asks.

“Oh, no,” says Gail. “No, no. I’m a few rungs lower on the ladder of stability than the having-kids one. I have cats. Multiple cats. I am a single New York lesbian with cats. Living the dream.” Val looks a little surprised. “Don’t worry,” Gail says, “this isn’t a come-hither hot dog.”

“You seeing anyone?” says Val.

Gail chuckles. “I spend my days thinking about a woman who can fly faster than the speed of sound and can hear heartbeats a planet away. Dating prospects pale in comparison.”

“Standards too high,” Val says. “I’m familiar.”

“Being married to Ian Campbell was that great?”

“No,” she says, laughing. “It was awful.”

“People are, it turns out, largely awful,” says Gail. “One more thing that makes dating a challenge.”

“Plus I’ve already got the perfect man in my life.”

“Sometimes I leave my desk after writing all afternoon and I can’t bring myself to talk to anybody,” Gail says. “No one seems as real as the people in my head. It’s isolating. It keeps you apart from people.”

“It keeps you from getting hurt,” says Val.

“Getting hurt’s not so bad,” says Gail. “Builds character or something.”

“Character can fuck itself,” says Val, dabbing mustard from her chin. Gail can tell from the way she says it that she’s not used to swearing. Having a kid, you must get out of practice.

“Yeah, fuck character,” says Gail, trying to encourage her.

“I worry about going back to it full-time,” Val says. “I’m not sure I can start being other people again.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“It feels so selfish,” she says. “All that energy put into making things up.”

“
Selfish
gets a bad rap,” says Gail. “You could also see it as you’re giving up all that other stuff and all those other people to create something,
and that something you create is as much for everybody else as it is for you. It’s kind of self-
less
when you look at it like that.”

“Is that how you look at it?” says Val.

“No,” says Gail. “I like writing about flying girls in spandex. That and a job I can do in my pajamas.”