A Hundred Thousand Worlds (29 page)

T
he official announcement is at the Timely panel in the morning, but everyone knows already. The big comics websites go into a twenty-four-hour news cycle around the conventions, and NerdFeast.com ran the story late last night. PanelAddict.com, always a little more respectful of information embargoes, held it until after it was announced officially, but the story was ready to drop as soon as Phil Weinrobe said the words “The Astounding Family is back at Timely” and the crowd in Hall H, who’d queued up overnight to hear it from Weinrobe’s mouth, sleeping on the concrete like unwashed piles of superhero laundry, went nuts.

But Brett wasn’t in Hall H, and he didn’t read it online. His friends and colleagues, none of them could wait to tell him, the moment he got to Artist Alley this morning. They were buzzing to give him the bad news. It’s a sign of where he is in the pecking order, high up enough that people place a value on ruining his day.

Fred approaches. Brett wonders whether his first words will be a shitty attempt to apologize or a shitty attempt to explain.

“I think that once I’m in,” he says, “I can bring you in. Like, they let me in through the front door, then I come open up the back door for you.”

Brett’s never actually punched anyone, though he’s sketched a hundred punches. He could consider it research.

“It developed organically,” says Fred. Gestures toward the room where the panel was held. “I was out for a beer with them, and they were talking about this project. And Phil said it needed a man-on-the-street angle, so
I threw out some ideas and he liked them. He said, ‘Why don’t you write it for us?’”

An apology is not coming. Fred has already justified his actions to himself. The only option is to point out some of the flaws in Fred’s story.

“The whole time you’re out for beers with the publisher of Timely Comics,” says Brett, “it didn’t occur to you to call me?” Nitpicking about character motivation is pretty standard for comics fans. Most of them understand that smart characters sometimes have to make stupid decisions. For the sake of a good story. It’s called
picking up the idiot ball
. But Fred hasn’t made a mistake. The idiot ball is in Brett’s hands. Fred’s clearly given this betrayal a lot of thought. He answers without a pause.

“You know what, it didn’t. After you blew off all of Chicago to stay in your room and fuck Ferret Lass? And after you’ve spent more time collaborating with some kid than with me on the book we’re supposed to be finishing? And after you’ve been generally a whiny little asshole lately about who does the work and who gets the credit? No, I did not feel necessarily inclined to invite you along.”

“Nor did you feel inclined to tell me about it all week.”

“We were sworn to secrecy,” says Fred.

“Did you pinkie-swear? Cross your heart and hope to die?”

“It’s called a non-disclosure agreement, asshole,” says Fred. “Look, this is a good thing for us.”

“It’s a good thing for you, Fred. Just you.” Brett thinks this would be an excellent line to walk away on. He takes a step to go past Fred, but then stops. “What about the meeting with Black Sheep tomorrow? Are you even showing up?”

“About that,” says Fred, looking at his shoes. “They want me at a story summit tomorrow. Me and Geoff and Ed and the whole editorial staff. They rented us a cabin in Big Sur where Kerouac used to go.”

“You hate the Beats!” says Brett. This seems like a valid point of protest.

“It’s not like we’ve got the pages,” says Fred. “We were going in there to beg for another extension.”

Brett is proud of himself that he saw this coming. He brought his portfolio with him. Silently, aware of every second of the pause he is creating, he reaches in and pulls out a stack of twelve pages. Pencils finished. Awaiting the letters. Waiting for the script. He hands them to Fred, who flips through them, frantic.

“When did you do this?” he says.

“Finished the other night,” says Brett. “I’ve been cleaning them up.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

This is a good question.
It was going to be a surprise
would be a bad answer. But it’s the true one. Sometime soon, later today probably. Brett was going to whip these out. He’d imagined them spending the evening working on the script. Beers in the hotel room. Bottle of whiskey for when it was done. All these plans made, and none of them shared. No one likes surprises, ultimately.

“It was going to be a surprise,” Brett says.

Fred goes through the pages again. Slower now. “These are good. This is . . . I couldn’t have come up with a better ending.”

“You couldn’t have come up with an ending,” says Brett.

“Anyway,” says Fred. He hands the pages back. “It’s your story. Tell Black Sheep I’ll give up my writer credit for the last issue.” Brett is still glaring at him. “I’ll give up my writer credit for the trade. Put your name all over it. It could be big for you.”

It’s funny how something Fred was once so upset about now matters so little to him. Maybe it’s because the last week he’s been so close to the work, so invested in the world of Lady Stardust, that Brett is hurt not that he’s being stepped over, but rather that the work they’ve done together, the world they made together, is so easy for Fred to throw away.

“That’s very big of you,” says Brett.

“Stop sounding like I’m the asshole here. If you’d gotten an offer, you’d have taken it.”

“Besides,” says Fred, “this is me getting us a foot in the door. After this project, they’ll want me on something else. And that’s when I say, ‘I want to work with Brett Kazan. We’re a team.’”

Fred actually holds his hand out for Brett to shake it, and Brett stares at it and laughs. A better liar could have sold it, but Fred misses the mark entirely, and Brett decides that it’s the perfect exit line.

V
al isn’t sure when it happened that cookie-cutter copies of public places began to resonate with one another. Airports are, of course, the worst, forming as they do a massive rhizome that sprouts in the outskirts of various cities but is in fact one huge and singular being. Val hasn’t traveled by plane since she first moved to Los Angeles. But for a long time, she’s found she can’t go into a chain restaurant without the feeling that she’s present in all iterations of the restaurant, and that everything happening in each of them will become apparent to her all of a sudden, a palimpsest over the room she’s physically in at that moment.

So when Elise wants to meet at a Starbucks, Val is worried. She is aware she’s the millionth person to use the word
venti
that day. The cardboard cup, new, fresh, feels like it’s been handled by every commuter from here to Portland, Maine, and when they sit down to talk, Val feels wired into a vast network of coffee shops, their conversation quietly broadcast to each of them.

“You,” says Elise, “look like hell.”

Elise, who is twenty years older than Val, could easily pass as Val’s younger sister. She is vibrant and golden, where Val feels drained. She’s drinking something that is not coffee, like green tea or maté or chai. Something that you drink when you’re thinking short- and long-term at once. Val is drinking coffee, black, large.

“It’s a rough day,” says Val.

“Where is the boy?” asks Elise, looking around with the hungry eyes of an aging aunt. Elise’s two daughters are close to Val’s age, and when
Val was still in L.A., Elise took a grandmotherly liking to baby Alex. “I thought you were both coming out here.”

“He’s with his dad,” says Val.

“Seriously?” Because the dissolution of Val’s marriage was so closely tied to the collapse of Val’s professional life in L.A., Elise was de facto involved in both. She retains a strong loathing for Andrew. “Something we should talk about?”

“No,” says Val, “please.”

Elise waits another beat in case Val wants to change her mind. “All right,” she says. “To business?”

“Please,” says Val.

Elise lays both hands on the table. “You need to come to a decision on
Perestroika
basically before you finish your coffee,” she says. “And a decision on Royal Shakespeare before we walk out of here.”

Val looks out the window, which is heavily tinted. “I’m not ready to decide on either of those,” she says.

“Then you are going to lose both,” says Elise. “And losing both will make it harder for me to find you something else after.”

“What is there locally?” says Val, watching Elise’s sepia-tone reflection to see how she reacts.

“Locally here?” she says.

“You knew I was coming,” says Val. “Have you asked around?”

“I have,” says Elise. Val is waiting for Elise to reach into her overlarge bag and pull out a stack of scripts. That’s how Val pictured this going. But Elise doesn’t move. “There aren’t parts for you right now,” she says. “There’s one, which I imagine you’ve heard about.”

“Assume I haven’t,” says Val.

“Tiger’s Paw is considering an
Anomaly
movie,” Elise says. “There’s a draft of a script. It’s a smart, low-budget sci-fi piece. And everyone’s waiting on you.”

“I don’t want to do it,” says Val.

“Then there’s no work.”

“Nothing?”

Elise fidgets. Val knows she should have warned Elise that this conversation was coming, but she didn’t want to say it out loud, back in Cleveland. Now Elise is struggling for a way to tell Val something she should have already known, or at least suspected. “You know when I say ‘people think,’ that doesn’t include me, right?”

Val closes her eyes. “What do people think?” she says.

“They think you kidnapped Andrew’s kid and ran off,” says Elise. “It wasn’t a story in
Variety
or anything, but that’s the widely held opinion.”

“Why would anyone think that?” says Val.

“Andrew was here,” Elise says, “and you weren’t. He was moping around looking bereft. He got a lot of sympathy.”

“I bet he did,” says Val, but it’s been too long, and she no longer has a mental list of the women who might have lined up to offer Andrew their sympathies. But aside from that, even in the face of all the evidence against him, it was difficult to hate Andrew when you were in a room with him. Had she stayed in L.A., seeing him every week to hand Alex back and forth, she would have forgiven him, too.

“I’m not suggesting he painted you in a poor light,” says Elise. “But the story that went around was you ran off.”

“So nobody wants me?” Val says.

“People are resistant.” She begins fidgeting again, as if every step deeper into this conversation is causing her physical discomfort. “Honestly, I think the comeback part would put a lot of people at ease.”

“I don’t want to do it,” Val says again.

“Then let me call up Grant right now and tell him you’ll do
Perestroika,
” says Elise, relieved. “Let me call up Royal Shakespeare and get you locked in as Gertrude.” Val puts her hand over her eyes. She feels as if she’s built a bridge, cobbled it together out of scrap wood, and on the other side of the bridge she and Alex are together and safe. And now she’s watching the planks of it fall into the gap, one by one. “You’re burned here,” says Elise. “It’s not fair, but you are.”

“Why am I burned and he’s working?” says Val, too loud. People’s heads turn toward her for a second; then they continue with whatever they’re doing.

Elise shrugs and sips whatever antioxidant-rich hot beverage she’s drinking and gives Val a direct look.

“He stayed,” she says.

T
he water pushes and pulls at his ankles, moving in and out as if the ocean were breathing. It is not warm or cold, and it seems to find places in between his toes and wake them up, little spots of skin he’s never been aware of before now. It feels as if it’s bubbling, like soda, but he can tell it’s not. Around his feet it’s clear, but when he looks out at it, the ocean is exactly the color an ocean ought to be, and it stretches out forever. His back to the shore, Alex stands at the edge of the world.

“So what do you think?” his dad shouts from behind him. For a second Alex forgot about him, and everyone on the beach. Even the gulls were inaudible under the crash of the waves. Now, reminded, he turns his head, but not enough that his dad is in view, just enough to be heard.

“It’s pretty awesome,” he says.

“Have you ever been in the ocean before?”

Alex turns back to it. “Not this one,” he says. There have been trips to Jones Beach, to Rockaway Park. But the ocean there never seemed as vast as this one does. Alex always imagined that if you swam out from the Coney Island pier, you would loop back around to the city somehow, wash ashore in Red Hook or Battery Park. This ocean spreads off to nowhere, pours off the edge of the world.

“Do you want to swim in it?” his dad asks. He insisted they stop at a store near the boardwalk and buy Alex a swimsuit, which looks as if someone took a Hawaiian shirt and made it into shorts. Alex watches a wave crash, twenty feet out. In the moment before it crashes, it creates a tube Alex could easily walk through standing up.

“No,” he says. “I’m okay.”

His dad puts a hand on Alex’s shoulder, still tentative. It’s like they’re negotiating between handshakes and hugs, and every touch is a question. “So now you’ve been in the ocean,” his dad says. “You’ve come as far west as you can go.” There’s a question implied by the statements, a general
Now what?
that Alex doesn’t have an answer to. He turns back toward the shore and reads a sign posted nearby.

“What’s riptide?” he asks.

His dad follows his gaze, then says, “It’s a kind of an undercurrent that can pull you out to sea.”

“Oh,” says Alex. He wishes he had a notebook to write it down in.

“My understanding is,” says his dad, “it basically grabs you by the ankles and drags you out.” He demonstrates with his hands, one of them sliding under the other and whooshing out and away.

“Sounds bad,” says Alex.

“Yeah,” says his dad. They both stare out at the ocean. Alex is glad they came here. The bigness of the ocean almost negates the need to talk about anything. You can look at it and think about it, and the other person can do the same.

“Are there sharks here?” Alex asks after a couple of minutes.

“No,” his dad says. “No sharks.”

“That’s good,” says Alex. He tries to think of other things to say about the ocean that aren’t stupid or obvious, like
That’s some big ocean there,
or
It’s too bad we can’t drink it,
because ocean water makes you get thirstier instead of less thirsty. Now that they’ve exhausted the ocean as a topic, there’s not much else for them to talk about. Finally, quiet enough so his dad can pretend not to hear if he wants, Alex says, “You never called.”

“What’s that?” his dad says.

“You never called or wrote or anything,” says Alex. It’s not an accusation; it’s only a fact. What he meant to do was ask why, but his dad answers the question, even though it wasn’t asked.

“I figured your mom didn’t want me to,” says his dad.

“She didn’t,” Alex says, nodding. “For sure she didn’t.”

“Does she talk about me?” his dad asks.

“No,” says Alex.

“Oh.”

“But maybe
I
wanted you to,” he says. “To call. Or write.”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know,” says Alex. Because it wasn’t an all-the-time want, but a sometimes want. It would pop into his head every now and then, when he’d see a kid with both his parents in the park or on the subway, that he wanted to talk to his dad right then. Usually it happened when he saw dads with little kids—not babies, but before kindergarten. Dads that still picked up their kids a lot, or put them on their shoulders. Alex’s mom gave him plenty of cuddles, but when he watched someone being lifted like that, it was hard not to want it, if only for a moment. “A lot of my friends don’t have dads,” he says, trying to move the conversation from the specific to the general. “We’re in a homeschool group. It’s mostly moms. Even some of the kids who have dads, they don’t see them.”

“You know,” says his dad, “I lost my dad when I was about your age.”

It’s kind of the first thing Alex has ever learned about his dad. He thinks that most kids don’t have to know things about their parents. They don’t know their stories, or their histories. The stories he knows about his mother before he was born come mostly from his grandmother, and are usually about either how wonderful she was as a baby or how difficult she was as a child. They are stories told to him about his mother, but they are really about Alex, in a way, about how he and his mother are similar, and about how Alex’s mother and grandmother are similar. But meeting his father like this, as a fully formed person, totally separate from Alex himself—maybe they need to learn things, stories, about each other. Maybe that’s the way. “Your dad died?” says Alex.

“Cancer,” his dad says. Alex has heard the word used enough to know that it doesn’t need any details to come after it. It’s just a way people die.

“Then he wasn’t
lost,
” says Alex, emphasizing the last word. “He was gone.”

“Yeah,” his dad says. He reaches down and scoops up a handful of ocean water, and for a second Alex thinks he might drink it. But he lets it pour back down.

“You were lost,” says Alex. “To me, anyway. There’s a kid in our group who doesn’t have a dad. Or his dad’s not around. He makes up stories about him. Where he’s a soldier or a pirate or stuff. It’s different all the time.”

“That’s sad,” says his father.

“Not really,” Alex says. “He had all these imaginary dads. I just had one.” One imaginary dad is what he means, but it feels strange to say this to his real dad. “I watch your show,” he says instead.

“Your mom lets you?”

Alex nods. “I insist,” he says. “I have some questions.”

His dad shifts from one foot to the other. “There’s a lot about the show that we can discuss when you’re older,” he says, which means he thinks Alex has questions about the sex parts. Alex doesn’t want to know anything about the sex parts and can imagine a version of the show where they’re all cut out.

“Why is he so sad?” says Alex.

“Ted?”

“Yeah. Everybody else on the show,” Alex continues, “if they get to kiss one girl, it’s a big deal, and they’re happy. But he kisses a different girl every show, and he’s still sad all the time.”

His dad thinks about this for a minute. He scoops water again, this time letting it drop from one hand over the other before it returns to the ocean. “He doesn’t love any of them,” he says.

“Why not?” says Alex.

“He can’t,” says his dad.

Alex shakes his head. It doesn’t work like that. It’s possible to not love a particular person, like when Alex was five and Serenity from his homeschool
group fell in love with him and Alex had to tell her that he didn’t love her back. She cried the whole rest of the playgroup. But it’s not something you can’t do in general. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he says.

“Some people are so broken inside,” says his dad, “they can’t love anyone.”

Alex looks at him, examining him. “Are you like that?” he asks.

“I was,” says his dad, “for a long time. I think I’m better now.” Alex wants to stretch this answer out so that it explains everything, but all it does is make him wonder where it is they are now, and what either of them should expect will happen.