A Hundred Thousand Worlds (22 page)

“Places,” says Miller. They file out, careful not to touch one another. Each is storing up a charge all his or her own, and any contact now will cause it to disperse. From outside the door of the dressing room, they can already hear the crowd murmuring. They are here to be entertained, or edified, or even changed. And Val is here for something, too: she’s here to stay the same somehow, to keep a line of communication open between who she is now and some other version of herself.

When it’s over, they all seem lost. The performance is a thing they’ve expended that will now need to regenerate.

“Run time was three and ten,” Miller tells them, reading it off his watch.

“Slack,” says Roy Cohn.

“Act two,” says Miller, shaking his head. When it goes slack, it’s always in act two. “Call tomorrow’s at seven thirty, same as it ever was.” He hands back wallets, phones, and keys. Val checks her phone immediately: no calls, no messages. Nothing has gone wrong, nothing has ever gone wrong. She exhausts herself some days inventing dangers and hazards so she can experience this relief that nothing has happened. She tucks her phone back into her purse.

“You have to come to the club with me,” Louis is saying to the Angel. “Like that. I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before. People will lose their shit.”

“I’m afraid ‘people,’” says the Angel, putting air quotes around the word, “will have to hold on to their shit for one more night.”

“It’d be a thrill,” says Prior. “Like the moment the clown shows up at the birthday party.” He pats Louis on the shoulder. “Adult beverages in the men’s for those who are so inclined.” He grins acidly at the Angel. “You can wear your wings.”

“Oh, Christ, no,” says the Angel. She turns to Val. “You coming?”

“In a minute,” says Val.

She heads for the women’s dressing room to call Debra and check in. Through the open door she can see feet, legs.

Andrew sits in the chair in front of her mirror, elbows on his knees, holding a bouquet of flowers big enough to obscure his face.

“What the fuck—” says Val, and immediately he is standing, holding the flowers out like an offering or shield. He smiles the lopsided grin he uses for his real smile.

“The stage manager let me back here,” he says. He shrugs. “He was a fan, apparently.”

“He’s never mentioned it,” says Val. She stands in the doorway, not wanting to enter the room.

“These are for you,” says Andrew, thrusting the flowers at her.

“I don’t want them,” she says.

He sets them down on the dressing room table. “I’ll leave them.”

“You should take them,” says Val, “and go.”

“You were great,” says Andrew. It’s driving her crazy that he can maintain eye contact when she’s trying to stare daggers at him. Her face is a stone and he’s looking right at it. “I’d never seen it,” he goes on. “Even when they did it on HBO with Pacino and everything. I should have, I know.” It’s such a weird thing to apologize for, given all the apologies he owes her. “I was aware of it, of course. But it’s a little over my head.”

“What are you doing here?” she asks, to stop him from babbling.

“We were doing some shooting, for the show,” he says. “Ted comes to New York to maybe do some theater. It’s just the one episode.”

“I mean what are you doing
here
?”

His smile drops. The scene he’d hoped they’d do together is over. Another begins.

“I thought we should talk,” he says.

“I said everything I need to say to you six years ago,” says Val. It sounds like a line from a hack play, and she oversells it.

“You didn’t say anything six years ago,” says Andrew. “You disappeared.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s what this is about,” he says. What’s coming next is obvious, it’s been obvious for so long she only wonders how they’ve avoided this moment until right now. But she tries to put it off a little longer.

“You can’t see him,” she says.

“You don’t get to say that.” He’s not getting angry, because he’s prepared. She’s been furious from the moment she walked in, because she was ambushed.

“You don’t get to show up after six years and demand to see him,” she says.

“I don’t want this to be a confrontation.”

“You’re shit out of luck there,” says Valerie. She begins to busy herself with things around the room. She straightens some script pages on the Angel’s dressing room table. She picks up her hat.

“I’ve been discussing this with my lawyer,” says Andrew, then immediately stops himself. “Okay, see, that’s not the direction I want this conversation to take,” he says. “But you need to know that’s a possible road this can go down.”

“Are you threatening me?” asks Val without turning to look at him.

“No, I’m not,” he says. He’s not lying. She didn’t think he meant it as a threat, but it’s there, a knife in his voice, a blade in everything he says. “But it’s an option I need you to keep in mind. That I have rights, and that you are in a delicate position here, legally speaking.”

“I’m his mother,” she says.

“No one is arguing that,” says Andrew. “But there is also a viewpoint from which it could potentially be argued that you are a kidnapper.”

“No one would call me that.” She wonders if that’s what they said about her back then, in Los Angeles. If for six years, she’s been the crazy that ran off with her kid. None of her friends from back then have ever called or visited, and she’s written it off to the fact that few of her friends from back then were what you’d call close, especially after Alex was born. But maybe Andrew spent the months after her disappearance poisoning the well, protecting himself from other, potentially better-informed opinions on the situation.

“Fuck, fuck,” Andrew sputters. He scratches at the spot on his forehead that’s lately started to go bald. “That’s not what I’m calling you. Can I start over? How is he? Do you have a picture of him?”

She folds her arms over her chest and glares at him.

“I want this conversation to be about Alex, not about us,” says Andrew. “Every awful thing you think about who I was back then, as a husband, I’m admitting to. And as a father. I was an asshole, Valerie. But I’ve changed a lot.”

“You know who says things like that?” says Val. “People who haven’t changed a lot. People who are still assholes.”

Andrew looks at her, pleading, or doing a good impression of someone who’s pleading. “I want to be part of his life,” he says.

“His life is fine without you in it,” says Val. “Vastly improved.”

“He shouldn’t grow up without a dad,” Andrew says. “He’s getting into that age. It’s right around when I lost my dad.”

It’s a cheap card to play, the death-of-a-parent card, but it’s only been two years now since Val’s own dad passed away, and she finds her skin a little thicker on this issue. “I’m not saying this to trivialize your loss,” she says, “but there’s a difference between losing your dad and never having had one.”

“I know,” says Andrew. “And I can’t make up for the time that I wasn’t there. But I want to start now. I’m ready to be a father to him now.”

“That’s great, Andrew,” Val says. She reaches around him and grabs her coat. She wants to exit. If she can find the perfect line, she can walk off
stage. “It’s great that you’re ready. It’s great you’ve had time to figure stuff like that out about yourself. Did you want to tell me all about how you got here, to this point of enlightenment?”

“I didn’t cheat on him, Valerie,” he says. “I cheated on you and I fucked up our marriage, but it shouldn’t keep me from seeing him.”

She thinks of the photo, of the moment she knew Alex would never be safe with Andrew.

“He’s going to come live with me,” says Andrew.

She laughs, a forced, panicked thing. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“Two years,” he says, dead calm.

“There’s no fucking way.”

“It’s the custody agreement, Valerie,” he says. “We had a seventy-thirty custody split. You’ve had him for six years. I’m just sticking to the agreement.”

“That agreement is bullshit,” she says.

“That agreement is court ordered and you’ve been in violation of it for six years. If we go to court, they’ll give me full custody. They’ll take him away from you,” Andrew says. “I’m not saying you can’t see him. You can visit.”

“Visit?” she says, her voice breaking a little.

“You could even move to L.A.,” he says amicably. “It’s not like you couldn’t find work.”

“I hate L.A.,” she says.

“You didn’t use to.”

“I do now.”

“You don’t have much in the way of recourse here, Valerie,” says Andrew. “I’m offering to do this all without getting the courts involved.”

Her anger is spent. It will grow back, she knows, but she needs it now and it’s gone. Some practical part of her mind steps up. “When?” she says.

She can see his relief in not having to face her anger anymore. “I’d like to have him settled in before the school year starts,” he says. All of his gestures are softer now; he holds his palms up and open. “The place I live, there’s a good school nearby. I know a lot of people whose kids go there.”

“He’s homeschooled,” says Val.

“That’s great, that you’re doing that,” says Andrew. He almost reaches out and pats her on the shoulder. She would scream. He pulls his hand back. “But this school is excellent. A lot of resources. I’ll send you a link.” It’s becoming normal already. Links e-mailed, photos shown off. She remembers the little bit of time when the custody agreement was actually in place, the horrible courteousness and civility the court had ordered. It’s all creeping back now. “I know you want to look at this like a doomsday scenario, Valerie,” he says, “but it doesn’t have to be.”

“Should I call you or your lawyer?” she says. “With my decision.”

“We can make arrangements directly,” says Andrew. “It’s probably easiest. I worry a little about getting lawyers involved.”

“But you spoke to yours,” Val points out.

“I spoke to him hypothetically,” he says. “There are things about mandatory reporting that I didn’t want to run up against.”

She feels trapped, checkmated. She wants to have a strategy now, but her mind is a screaming thing.

“I’ll call,” she says.

“When?”

“Soon.”

“I’m in town until the end of next week,” says Andrew. “I could come by.”

“I’ll call when you get back to L.A.,” she says. “When you’re at a safe distance.”

He nods and shrugs. He can afford to look humble now; he’s won. He puts on his jacket, leaving it open because L.A. has made him stupid to the prospect of winter. As he goes to leave, she can see again that he wants to touch her or hug her or something. She shies away enough to defuse whatever half thought he’s having. In the doorway, he stops and turns back. “So how does it end?” he says. She looks at him, blank. “The play. The second half.”

She begins buttoning her coat, paying the buttons more attention than they need. “It ends with all of them talking in Central Park, in the winter,” she says. “Except Harper. She flies off to California.”

“Huh,” he says. “It was great, Valerie. You were really great.”

After he is gone, there’s no sound in the dressing room, and again she can hear laughter and clinking glass from the room next door. She thinks about having a drink with the rest of the cast, sitting silently in the corner and letting a bit of booze take the edge off. But there’s no edge; she feels blunted, like a pencil tip worn down.

I don’t really see a need to retire as long as I am having fun.

—STANLEY MARTIN LIEBER

Don’t do comics. Comics will break your heart.

—JACOB
KURTZBERG

A
hundred miles an hour, Alex runs across Iowa, Kansas, New Mexico. He begins, feet planted, hand on the back door of the rearmost sleeper, then takes off, through the sleeper where he and his mother share a berth, through the dining car, through the observation car, bursting with light, and through three coach cars where people too used to airline travel spend the entire trip buckled into their seats as if the
Southwest Chief
will soon undertake a turbulent descent. When he reaches the far end, he turns and does the whole thing in reverse, still managing to move forward at a staggering eighty miles an hour.

His mother granted him his superspeed by giving him an overview of general relativity while his babu drove them to the Chicago train station. As he understands it, while passengers on the train will see him running by at only ten miles per hour, someone watching outside the train would register his speed as a combination of his running speed and the train’s traveling speed. Taking a step further back, she explained, someone watching from above the earth would see him barreling along at his own measly ten miles an hour, plus the train’s ninety, plus the roughly eight hundred miles an hour at which the earth spins at this latitude. But even that pales when you think about someone observing from farther away, who might see Alex running at more than sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, throwing in the earth’s speed as it circles the sun. Which it does within a galaxy whirling along even faster than that.

As he passes windows, Alex slows slightly to see if he can catch anyone
watching him from outside, standing by the side of the tracks or floating in orbit. So far as he can tell, he hasn’t been spotted.

Time aboard the
Southwest Chief
becomes elastic, due in part to the removal of any enforced bedtime. This is done not by edict but by default. His mother’s sleep schedule, which normally dictates his own, has become erratic. She goes to sleep whenever the idea occurs to her: a three-hour nap after lunch, dozing through dinner, only to stay awake from four in the morning till breakfast. Their berth has a cramped feeling Alex associates with confinement, although as a New Yorker he is well adapted to living in small spaces. But his mother never leaves it, for the full duration of the trip. Alex decides early that he is on his own, and while he cuddles up to his already sleeping mother at nine thirty sharp on the first night, by ten he is up again, wandering through the coach cars, where the breathing of dozens of sleepers has settled into unison, and the observation car, where strangers—not just to Alex but to each other—play endless card games. Overhead, the stars sit stationary in a sky that cannot possibly be the same one that hangs over New York: it is so pinpricked with light that the darkness seems the lesser part of it.

Lying on a bench, watching the stars through the ceiling of curved glass, Alex wonders if these distortions in time, and the compression of his mother’s days into uneven cycles of eight hours rather than twenty-four, are related to the train’s motion across the surface of the earth, or through space. Maybe speed tugs and pushes at time the way a roller coaster stretches your stomach till it’s the length of your whole body or presses your face until it feels all smooshed together. Thinking on this, he falls asleep for a while, then wakes up and groggily makes his way back to their berth, where his mother is now awake, sitting in full lotus on the tiny bed, spine perfectly straight. He curls up next to her and sleeps, her knee resting over his hip, her hand stroking his thick hair.

When he wakes up, she is asleep again. Alex stays in the berth, reading
Adam Anti & Houses in Motion
for two chapters, then takes the notebook
from his backpack and some trail mix from one of her bags and goes back to the observation car. It is sunny, and the sun has a bigness to it where it seems like it’s coming from everywhere at once. The sun is fighting off the air-conditioning that keeps the other cars refrigerator cold. The passengers who have packed only for summer weather group here, away from the enforced chill, and the observation car is crowded. Alex is relieved to spot Gail, who is maybe a friend of his mother but at least is someone he knows from the previous two conventions, and is safe, and, more important, is sitting alone at a table for two. She is hunched over a piece of writing. She looks up at Alex and smiles, tired. He tries to remember if he saw her in here the night before, if maybe she’s been here all night.

“Are you done?” he asks.

“Just a break,” she tells him. He tries to remember if they’ve been introduced or he’s only seen her, then decides it doesn’t matter.

“You’re a writer?” he asks. She nods like she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t have. “Me, too,” he says.

“It’s no way to make a living,” Gail says, which is something his mom says about acting sometimes. He wonders if that’s something you say about things that are important to you. His fingers tap his own notebook as he tries to decide where to start today. He didn’t realize this about telling a story, that you needed to figure out where to start again and again. It was easier with Brett, and he even thinks about getting his mother’s phone and calling him. Before they left Chicago, Brett gave his mother the number and told her Alex could call him anytime. The Idea Man had said the same thing before they left New York. It’s funny, thinks Alex, that his father never gave him a phone number and said “Call me anytime.” He wonders how often he would have called his father if he had a number to call him at. But he decides not to call Brett, because Brett is probably working or driving, and anyway, Alex can catch him up on the story when they see each other in Los Angeles.

“Can I ask you a question because you’re a girl?” Alex asks Gail.

She takes off her glasses and folds them, placing them on the paper in front of her. “You understand I can’t answer for all girls, or for girlkind or anything.”

“That’s okay,” says Alex. He opens his notebook to the last page with writing on it. The boy, the robot, and the shape-shifting girl have left the factory and are at the far edge of the city, where he left them. His concern right now is for the girl. Maybe this is because it was Brett who added her in, but now that she’s helped them get into the city, he’s not sure what is supposed to happen to her. He’s not even sure what she wants to happen. “If you were kicked out of your home,” he says, “because you were different or something. And then later you could go back. Would you want to go back?”

Gail leans back in her seat. “That’s not an easy question,” she says.

“I know,” Alex says, rapping his pencil point onto the page, leaving little checkmarks. “I’m stuck on it.” He watches her think about it and decides he likes her. He likes that she’s taking time to think about his question.

“You think the answer’s different for boys than it is for girls?” she asks him. That’s not an easy question, either. Though his mother insists girls and boys are the same, he’s not so sure. Differences are louder than samenesses.

“I guess it’s probably not,” he says. “But it’s a girl in the story, and I thought since I had a girl here . . .”

Gail laughs at this, and Alex is not sure what he’s said that’s funny. “You’re a real charmer,” she says, but not the way people usually say it. It’s more like when sometimes he’s being stubborn his mom will say, “You’re a real pill.”

“When I was a kid,” Gail says, “I left home because I felt like I didn’t have a choice. Because of who I was inside, I didn’t think I could stay. But I always wanted to go home. I imagined what it would be like. How they’d welcome me back. They’d kill the fatted calf and all that. Everything would be fixed, and all the things I’d run away from would be gone.”

“What’s a fatty calf?” says Alex.

“You know, I have no idea,” she says. “In the Bible, they’re a big deal.”

Behind her, weird desert landscapes pass. Outcroppings and gullies and dunes that look as if someone went to the moon and covered it in rust. “You didn’t go back?” Alex asks.

“I did,” she says, shaking her head. “It took me years. How old are you?”

“Nine.”

“I stayed away as long as you’ve been alive,” she says, as if she is daring him to believe it. “And then I went back. It felt strong, going back. I’d made a life of my own. I’d become even more myself than I had been when I left.” When she was talking about leaving home, she stared off into the desert, but now she looks at him and registers his confusion. “It sounds hokey,” she says, “but it’s like there’s a person you’re supposed to be, and something inside you is always trying to make you into that person, or get you as close as you can get. Hopefully it’s a good thing. Anyway, I went home thinking,
Now I’m this complete person and they’ll all see that who I was, the person they didn’t want back then, was a step toward this person who, really, is quite amazing.
” She shakes her head again and puts her glasses back on. “I sound like a yoga instructor,” she says.

“My mom and I used to go to yoga,” Alex says. “It’s very calming.”

“More of a spinning-class girl myself,” says Gail.

“So did they see that?” Alex says.

“They tried, I guess. I didn’t stay too long. Maybe they would have, maybe not. They still couldn’t give me whatever it was I needed from them when I left.”

“That sounds sad,” says Alex.

“It made me sad for them,” Gail says. “That they hadn’t changed. I didn’t need what they could have given me anymore. I might still want it—I might always want it—but they didn’t have anything I needed.”

Alex nods and thinks about how sometimes answers are more complicated than questions. He wants to thank Gail, but he doesn’t know how, so he looks down at his notepad and writes.

The shape-changing girl looked around the city, but she was thinking about the desert and how it was quiet and how she had time to practice her magic there. She thought about how they’d taken her name away, and she realized they’d only taken their name for her, and they couldn’t stop her from choosing a name of her own. So she wished the boy and the robot luck in their journey, and she put on a face she liked and went home.