A Hundred Thousand Worlds (25 page)

G
reedily, Alex devours crab Rangoons, pork dumplings, and shrimp egg rolls. He has ordered a meal of appetizers, all of them gloriously fried. His whole dinner is things that should come before dinner; he is the present dining on the past. Brett made the uninspired choice of chicken lo mein, but Alex generously shares one of everything with him. They sit on the floor of the hotel room, the Chinese food containers laid out between them as if they are planning a great battle.

“So you’re thinking,” says Brett, with lo mein dangling from the corner of his mouth, “they leave the city of industry and get swallowed by a giant metal worm.”

“It’s boring if they have to walk again,” Alex says. He flinches as the word
boring
gets away from him. It’s one his mother strongly discourages, being of the opinion that only people who aren’t particularly bright get bored.

“And eaten by a giant metal worm is more exciting,” says Brett.

“Not eaten. Swallowed.”

“Difference?”

“Digestion. The worm doesn’t digest them; he holds them in his stomach. Like he’s carrying them.”

“All right,” says Brett after a pause, “I buy it. So what happens once they get swallowed?”

Alex is happy that Brett has liked everything he’s added to the story so far. He was worried Brett would be upset that the shape-shifting girl decided to go home, but he seems okay with it. This next part is riskier, though.

“I thought they could live there for a while,” says Alex. “Inside the metal worm. There’s light in there, because the worm runs on electricity, and there’s food, because of all the other stuff the worm has swallowed.” Alex has thought this part out extensively; he has calculated that the boy and the robot could live happily and comfortably there for a year, at least. “They could live there and be friends,” he says.

“Doesn’t make for a very exciting story,” says Brett. It is exactly what Alex knew he was going to say, but it still makes him angry. He wants to throw his chopsticks on the ground, but he doesn’t. He holds them tightly, so tightly they’re about to break.

“Why does the story have to be exciting?” he says, a little louder and higher-pitched than he wanted to. “Why do things have to happen? Why can’t this story be ‘They were friends and they had some sandwiches and nothing else happened?’”

By the end he is yelling, which he was trying not to do. His breath is coming in quick, hitching gasps, and his eyes are burning, which is not cool. Which sucks.

“Then it wouldn’t be a story,” says Brett.

“Maybe I don’t want it to be a story anymore,” Alex says. “Maybe I want it to stop right here.” He crosses his arms with a huff.

Brett puts his hand on Alex’s knee, then scoots around to sit next to him on the floor. Alex thinks that this is the first time they’ve touched in any way other than shaking hands. Alex leans into him and puts his head on Brett’s chest, and now the thing he can’t stop is that he’s crying. It starts out as tears, and he thinks maybe it’s okay and Brett won’t see it, even if he can feel that now his shirt is all wet, but once Alex is aware there are tears, he starts sobbing, he can’t stop. He doesn’t want Brett to see him like this, because he doesn’t want Brett to think he’s a baby—no one wants to be on a co-mission with a baby. He wants to be brave and adult, but he lets Brett hold him as he cries and he thinks,
I made it this far,
which is a brave thought, even if it feels very small.

“It doesn’t work like that,” says Brett. “Everything changes, all the time. Even if you tried not to change, things would change around you till you’d have to. It’s like you’re a story, not a picture.”

Alex knows this, and he knows about sharks and how they have to keep swimming or they’ll die, and how you can’t stop moving ever because the earth is moving you through space at ridiculous speeds, speeds that, when you think about the fact you’re moving that fast, you feel like a superhero. He knows you can’t stop, you never get to stop.

“Every time things change, they get worse,” he says.

He can feel that Brett is nodding. “Seems like that sometimes,” says Brett. “But I think that’s only when you let changes happen and you don’t change anything yourself. When you make the changes yourself, maybe things get better.”

“Is that what you do?” asks Alex.

“Me?” says Brett, laughing a little. “No, but maybe I should start.”

Alex sniffs, a big sniff that pulls the crying part of himself back inside the rest of him and puts it aside. He thinks about scooting away, but he feels good right here, resting on Brett. “Do you ever miss your mom?” he asks.

“She’s going to be back in a little bit,” says Brett, who must have thought Alex was asking about his own mom and not about Brett’s.

“No,
you,
” says Alex. “Do you miss your mom?”

“Sometimes, sure.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Huh,” says Brett. “I usually see her at Christmas. But we came out here to see Debra’s parents last year. It’s weird when you get older. A lot of times you’re supposed to be in two places at once. That was the first year since my dad left that I didn’t go home for Christmas.”

“Your dad left?”

Brett nods. “When I was a little older than you.”

“How come?”

Brett takes a second to think about this. “I don’t know,” he says. “All
he ever told me was ‘It’s not about you,’ which as a kid isn’t enough of an answer. Isn’t now, really.” He stabs a dumpling with the end of his chopstick and eats it.

“Do you ever see him?”

“Yeah,” says Brett. “He lives in New York now. Sometimes he calls me up to go have a beer. Sometimes I go.”

“Are you like friends?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” says Brett. “I mean, he’s my dad. That doesn’t change. Even if you want it to.” He looks down at Alex. “My dad’s the one that got me into comics. He used to come home from work with them and we’d read them together.”

“I have a friend in New York who sometimes reads comics with me,” says Alex.

“When I got a little older, he’d take me to the comic book store with him. Every Wednesday when the new comics came out. Even though he had to drive past it on the way back from work, he’d come home, pick me up, and we’d go together.”

“What did you do after he left?”

“My mom offered to start taking me, but it didn’t feel right. So I would ride down there on my bike after school. It was as far as I was allowed to ride by myself. I think my mom only let me do it so I could keep some kind of routine. It was a way to know time was passing.”

Alex thinks about the ways he measures time. He thinks about his watch, which just goes around and around. How do you know time’s moving forward? There are pencil marks on the doorjamb in their apartment to keep track of his height, and that’s a way to know. But what happens when you stop growing?

“Do you ever call your dad up to go have a beer?” he asks.

“Never have,” says Brett. He sounds kind of proud about it.

“So do you see him more than your mom?”

“No,” says Brett. “By ‘Sometimes he calls me up’ I mean like once a year.”

“And how long since you saw your mom?”

“I guess it’s been a year and a half.”

Alex thinks about how long a year and a half is. It would contain two of at least one thing that happens once a year. A year and a half could include two birthdays, or two summers, or two Christmases. “That’s a long time with no mom,” he says.

“I guess it is,” says Brett.

Alex struggles with this state of momlessness, how someone can have a mom who is not there. The primary and undeniable fact of his mother has always been her nearness, her presence. Will she still be his mom if she isn’t there to cuddle him, or even to sit next to him on the couch?

“Does your mom know where you are?” he asks. “That you’re in California?”

“No,” says Brett. “I didn’t tell her about this trip.”

Alex sits with this thought a minute, that not only would he and his own mother not be together, but they might not even know where the other one was. Any time they spent apart was always defined by place and duration.
I’m going to the store, I’ll be back in twenty minutes. I’m going downstairs for a drink, I’ll be back in an hour.
It seems impossible to think that soon he will not know where she is all the time, and she won’t know where he is, either. His position in space has always been in relation to hers and now, without that, he wonders if he’ll be like a boat on the whole ocean, where you can’t see land in any direction, and the sun cycles over you day after day.

T
he drinks have made everything bright and disconnected. She drives the rental back to the hotel, and L.A.’s legendary traffic is hundreds of pairs of suns burning out of the darkness at her, leaving trails on her retinas. In the lobby, the elevator, the hallway, she is still watching headlights come at her again and again.

She offers to pay Brett, but he declines. He’s a good kid. She lets herself hope that he will stay here, that it is love between him and the girl—which one was it? Maybe he will stay here and Alex will have at least one friend, one known quantity in a strange city.

Val thinks about how badly she has squandered her last couple of days with Alex. From the moment they left her mother’s, depression has been on her like a thick black cloud. All she can think of is the ending, and it’s causing her to lose this time with him, making her unable to pull herself from the deep well that has opened in her chest.

She is sad and relieved that he doesn’t ask for a story, because what story could she tell him now? What’s the story that comes after the end? In the only way she could, she’s told him everything. But now she thinks there must have been episodes she missed, plotlines she left out. All through this trip, she’s been listening to the complaints of
Anomaly
fans that in the end it didn’t hold together. It went on and on, wandered sometimes for a full season in a direction that didn’t make sense. It contradicted itself at times; it changed its past to fit with its present, and when it was finished, there was no resolution. No closure. But why should they expect something of
television that life wasn’t going to provide? What entitled anyone to resolution, and who ever promised closure?

Once in an interview, a fan asked Tim to tell him the answers, and Tim looked at him and said, “You don’t want the answers. The answers are ‘All of time is a mess, and we plod through our little section of it.’ Answers are like orgasms and picnics: they’re never as fulfilling as you hope they’ll be.” She wants more questions between her and Alex, more mysteries for them to solve together, instead of answers that don’t amount to anything, or make sense in light of what’s come before.

He gets into his pajamas without being asked, performing that incredible reversion to a younger self by putting on things that are fuzzy, soft, and overlarge. She asks him if he’s ready for sleep and he nods, so they curl up together under the blankets of one of the hotel beds. She hopes he doesn’t notice she is holding him too tight, her arms locked around his little body like it might repel itself from her, like a magnet whose poles switch.

In the dark, they are not sleeping. Alex shifts against her and, thinking he might be wriggling free, she pulls him in tighter, closer.

“Mom?” he says. A sound of upward-swooping birds, a sound headed skyward.

“Yes, Rabbit?”

“You don’t have to be upset,” he says. “You don’t have to be sad.”

As he says this, Valerie knows it was never Alex she was protecting from this moment. He is so much stronger than she is. She can remember every fall he ever took and how each time her heart leaped into her throat, and how each time he popped back up and continued on his way as if nothing had happened. She wasn’t protecting him; she was protecting herself.

“Rabbit,” she says, “I have something I need to tell you.”

“It’s okay,” says Alex. “I already know. I figured it out a while ago. I wanted to tell you before, but I didn’t know how.”

These are the exact words she was going to use. Because the moment
to tell him has always been
before
. The right moment is always already past; it is happening right now somewhere else in the geometrical supersolid of timespace. She can point to it from where she is. She can see it flying by her like the headlights of passing cars.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” he says.

“It is,” she says, not believing it. “It’s not forever.”

“How long for?” he says.

“Two years,” she says. “You’re going to live with your dad for two years.”

“Where will you be?”

She realizes here is her biggest mistake in all this. She’s had time; she could have made plans. She spent so much time and energy flailing against what was happening, she never made any proper preparations for when it happened. She wanted so badly to stop it, she never formed a backup plan for if she failed. Which she has.

“I’m not sure yet,” she says. “I have to go back to New York, at least for a while.”

“Then you’ll come back?”

“I’ll try,” she says. His breath is rapid, as if he might start to cry. If he does, she will take him and run again. They will disappear forever, better this time. They will change their names and not hide in the open like idiot rabbits waiting to be snatched up by something predatory. She’ll do it right this time.

“I don’t think I like it here,” he says. “I want to go back to New York.”

“You can’t,” she says.

“Why not?”

“Because I made a mistake, a long time ago,” she says. “I did the wrong thing, and now we have to make it right.” She doesn’t believe this, even as she says it. The blame is on her, yes, but there’s no way of correcting, or if there is a way, this isn’t it.

“So if I stay here,” says Alex, “that fixes it?”

“It starts to,” she says.

He breathes in deep, then exhales. “Okay,” he says. “Everything is going to be all right.”

He says this with such confidence, and she wants so badly for it to be the truth, that she lets herself believe it. Not just for a moment, but from now on. Because nothing she believes will change anything about the ending, but believing everything will be okay could change how some of the last pages go. So she believes him, lets herself, chooses to.

And a minute later, he is sound asleep.