A Hundred Thousand Worlds (30 page)

G
ail thinks of lions waiting for one gazelle to fall back from the herd. She hopes this is something that actually happens, although she’s never much enjoyed nature documentaries. In her head, a voice, vaguely British or possibly Australian, begins to narrate her actions.
The wily comic book writer lies in wait for her quarry. She is stalking the most dangerous prey: man.

The trouble is, Phil Weinrobe seems to be a pack animal. A group of editors and writers follow him around the convention floor like a bad smell. Sometimes this group includes Ed or Geoff, and part of her, the optimistic, compassionate part, wants to believe they might be talking her up, putting in a good word for her.

But there is no room for optimism or compassion in the heart of a mighty predator,
says the British or Australian narrator.
There is room only for the hunt.

Tomorrow she will kick herself for all of this, for not going through proper channels. A small amount of power can be difficult to recognize for what it is, and Gail has enough clout within the industry that she could set up a meeting with Weinrobe on any day in New York, given a bit of planning. She could be sitting with him in his office next week.

But the fierce killer thinks not of next week, only of this moment.

As she stalks him around the convention, she begins to quite like him. He seems like a friendly uncle. He talks to kids and to fans, he smiles a lot. She had initially imagined him approaching Geoff all cloak-and-dagger, in some dark alley in Chicago, like a drug dealer, or Slugworth
in
Willy Wonka.
But watching him, it seems more likely he came up and asked Geoff out for a beer. All very chummy. Very bro-y.

When her opening comes, it is exactly this bro-ness that causes it, and Gail sees it moments before it happens. What is the one place the pack will not go together? The one spot they will leave a single gazelle alone?

Gail takes up a spot next to the men’s room door, hiding her face behind the latest issue of
The All New R-Squad
. Sure enough, Weinrobe enters the men’s room solo.

The deadly man-eater strikes!

As the door closes, Gail sneaks in, her hip brushing the doorjamb as she does. She surveys the room. It is brightly lit and empty except for her and her prey, standing at the urinal. She considers options for securing the door, then pulls her hardback notebook out of the back pocket of her jeans and wedges it into the handle. It won’t hold for long, but it will hold for long enough.

She stands up stock straight in the middle of the men’s room and clears her throat, an abrasive sound that echoes off the tiles. “Mr. Weinrobe,” she says, “my name’s Gail Pope. I’m a comic book writer. And I have an idea for how we can kill off the Ferret. It’d be a long story, two years from death to return, the way I have it paced out. His death would drive Ferret Lass to the edge. She’d basically be the star of the title for that time. It would reinvent both characters, redefine them in a way that hasn’t been done in years. I know that sounds crazy, but I think you should hear me out.”

The only sounds in the room are the last few drops hitting the urinal. Phil Weinrobe has been facing the wall this whole time. “Well, you’ve got my attention,” he says. With what Gail thinks is an impressive amount of dignity, he packs his dick back into his pants and zips up. “But since I haven’t had my coffee yet, I’m not sure my attention’s worth much.”

He crosses past her to the sink and fastidiously washes his hands, a sign to Gail that he normally doesn’t bother and is putting up a show for her sake. “I don’t have a load of time today, as you can imagine,” he says. “But let’s walk and talk. Somewhere a little less uriney.”

“Okay,” Gail says, but remains standing in the center of the men’s room.

“Do you mind stepping out before me?” he says. “For appearances’ sake?”

Gail hurries out, peeking through the door for a second before darting to a spot ten feet away but highly visible, where she waits. Maybe he’s using this time to escape. She didn’t see any windows in there, but there’s plenty she doesn’t know about men’s rooms. After a couple of seconds, he emerges.

“There’s a stand at the far end,” he says. “Only passable coffee in the place. Took me years of coming to these things to find it.” He gives her an
After you
gesture and falls in next to her.

“I’ve been reading your run on
The Speck,
” he says. “People assume I don’t read any of the National stuff, but I do. I read a ton. I haven’t read a book without pictures in it in a decade, but comics I read a ton. That’s a weird book. Good weird. Real good weird. It reminds me of comics when I was a kid. Where OuterMan’s head would turn into a cockroach head for an issue, and then that’d never get mentioned again.”

“I had nightmares about that issue,” says Gail. “It was never my head that changed; it was always my parents’ or my teachers’. When I read
The Metamorphosis
in college, I thought it was a rip-off. When all the comics you read are Kafkaesque, Kafka doesn’t seem that weird.”

“I hear you’re off the book,” he says.

“Has everyone heard?”

“Why’d they drop you?”

“Creative differences,” says Gail.

“Editorial differences, you mean,” says Weinrobe. “Nothing creative about it. That whole thing they’re teasing, fridging the girl so the Speck goes dark? It’s been done. Change for the sake of change. That should be the motto over there.”

Gail wants a
NATIONAL COMICS: CHANGE FOR THE SAK
E OF CHANGE
T-shirt so bad right now.

“We’ve got the opposite problem,” says Weinrobe. “It’s the movies. It’s a blessing and a curse. Every time a character gets optioned, I say to myself,
‘Well, we won’t be doing anything interesting with him for a few years.’ Like
R-Squad
. Far and away our most boring book right now. In the eighties, we’d change the team’s roster every six months. Shake things up. Now they’re in the movies every two years, and the team people see in the movies is the one people want to read in the comics.”

Gail has heard this argument before, usually from Geoff. But she doesn’t buy it. More accurately, the moviegoers don’t buy it. If
R-Squad 2
did a billion-dollar box office, why isn’t
R-Squad
the best-selling monthly out there? Comic book readers read comic books. And comic book readers go to movies. But moviegoers don’t read comic books.

“On the other hand,” says Weinrobe, “it brings in money so we can do something interesting somewhere else. The Ferret movie frees my hand to launch three other books that sell below profitability. And we get to let some writer with a good idea turn the applecart over on another character. But until he’s off the big screen—”

“No killing the Ferret,” says Gail.

Weinrobe shakes his head. “I’d love to kill the Ferret. If it were up to me, we’d off
everybody
every couple years. It’s a dangerous business, being a superhero. I’d install a reasonable mortality rate in the Timely Universe. And characters would get old. I’m fifty-five now, and the Blue Torch is still running around like he’s twenty-two. Aging, endings: they’re what give stories weight. They’re what make a character matter. But to the people I answer to, the people who pay me? These aren’t characters. They’re properties.”

Gail begins to wonder what they’re talking about. She’s pretty sure her pitch has been rejected. Now she’s feeling like Weinrobe’s shrink. “I should let you go,” she says. “You probably get pitched crackpot stories all day.”

“I don’t get pitched near enough crackpot stories,” he says. “You’re friends with Geoff and Ed, right?”

At the moment, Gail is not feeling those strong bonds of friendship, but since there’s been no formal severing of the ties, she admits she is friends with Geoff and Ed.

“I say this with all the love in my heart,” says Weinrobe, “but those guys are hacks. They’re talented hacks, but still. People are going to look back on this era of superhero comics and they’re going to call it the Competent Age. And it’ll be guys like me who get the blame, and we’ll say we were following orders. Because that excuse always works.”

It is the first time Gail has heard anyone willingly compare himself to a Nazi war criminal. It’s surprisingly endearing.

“I’ve read your stuff for years, and I never once thought of hiring you,” he says. “Never thought,
She’d be great on
Red Emma
or
R-Squad. You know what I thought?”

“That I’d be a pain in your editorial tuchus?” Gail says.

“That you’d be a pain in my editorial tuchus,” he says. “That on a regular basis, you would be bringing me great ideas that I would have to turn down. And it would break my heart every time. Right now, saying no to this idea you’ve got for the Ferret? It breaks my heart. Because I want to read that book. But as an editor, you would be giving me tuchus pain, I’m sure of it.”

“Thanks?” says Gail.

“Here’s the thing. This thing with the Astounding Family. I’m very proud. The books, they’ll be fine. You’ve read those books already, even though those guys haven’t written them. But for me, it’s big. And for my bosses, I’ve brought the horses back into the stable. It puts me in the catbird seat, and it frees my hand to try something interesting.”

He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a business card.

“So here’s what I want,” he says. “I want you to come to me in New York. I want you to call me directly”—he hands her the card and points to the number on it—“and set up a meeting. I want you to bring me something entirely new. The craziest thing you can come up with. Cockroach heads. That’s what I want from you, I want cockroach heads.”

Gail imagines walking into the Timely Comics offices with a shoebox full of cockroach heads. In her imagination, all the staffers have kitten heads, for some reason. There are Geoff and Ed, adorably licking their paws. Here’s Phil Weinrobe, worrying a mouse.

“Can you do that for me?” he asks, breaking Gail’s reverie. She’s relieved when she looks up from the card and his head is not that of a calico.

“I can do that,” she says.

He slaps her on the shoulder, hard. It’s the first time a colleague has done this.

“You’re no good to me on
The Ferret,
Ms. Pope,” he says as he walks away. “I’ve got hacks for
The Ferret
.”

S
he’s the last person he wants to see. So naturally, here she is. Of all the gin joints.

Ferret Lass is at the bar Brett’s picked, at random, to get shitfaced in. She’s in her civilian clothes. Still wearing dark makeup around her eyes. Surrounded by a chorus of other stunning women and girls. Many of them still in costume. It looks like her natural habitat.

“Hey, you,” she says. Comes up and kisses him. On the lips, but maybe only friendly. Whatever it means, it makes him feel awful.

“So here’s the boy,” says the Diviner. “We thought she was hiding you away somewhere.”

“Her little fuck puppet,” says Flail. Slurs the
f.

“Dick in a box,” says Flog.

“Ignore them,” says Prospera. “They’re drunk.”

“Ignore them regardless,” says Red Emma.

“So you’re crashing our hen party?” asks the Astounding Woman.

“That term is a patriarchal diminutive,” says Flail.

“I’m glad you’re here,” says Ferret Lass. Brett gets the feeling he’s here at her request. But it’s her ability to make the best of any situation. To accept givens and work with them. “The perverts at this bar are only buying drinks for the girls in costume.”

“Get it while you can,” says the Diviner. “If I dress like this next week, they’ll lock me up.”

“I am so glad to be out of that tail,” says Ferret Lass. “I swear I’m burning that thing tomorrow night.”

“You’ll lose your deposit,” says the Astounding Woman.

“What are you both drinking?” asks Iota. “I’d rather buy a round than have another of these guys breathing down my shirt.” Ferret Lass asks for a beer, and he asks for the same.

“So what’s your trouble, kid?” says the Diviner. “Most guys would be a little cheerier with her on their arm.”

“I would,” says Red Emma, throwing Ferret Lass a wink.

“Fred signed with Timely,” he says.

Ferret Lass looks at him. Sweet. Caring. “I don’t know what that means,” she says.

And Brett, who came in to drink alone, tells the whole story. To her. To all of them. It does make him feel better. They rub his shoulders. They pat his back. They make sympathetic noises. They say awful things about Fred. He’s been in conversations like this with groups of guys. Commiserating. One or the other of them complaining, usually about a girl. The base attitude of those sessions falls somewhere between competition and annoyance.
Yes, your heart got broken. But mine got broken, run over by a bus, and then burned. Life sucks. Wear a helmet.
Maybe he imagines it, or has been programmed to think of women as inherently sympathetic. But as his story ends and others chime in with accounts of their own betrayals, there’s no sense of one-upmanship. They are trying to get at something. Find a common thread that can, if pulled painstakingly, unravel the entire thing. Soon he’s had several drinks. Is, for the most part, not talking. Not even planning to talk. Not attending to someone else to glean a jumping-off point or rebuttal. A rein he can seize to steer the conversation back to himself. He listens, and it is an all-consuming thing to do.

“A few years ago, a friend and I were going to launch a fashion line,” says Ferret Lass. Her turn has come around. “Which, I know, in L.A. is a stupid idea. But we were young.”

“Not the wizened hag you are now,” says the Diviner.

Flail, who has been nodding off, looks up. “Fashion is—”

“Shut the fuck up,” says Red Emma.

“It feels like a similar thing,” says Ferret Lass. “She took a job with Rodarte. Used designs we’d worked on together for the interview. She never even told me she was going for the job.” She drinks from a fresh beer. A boy with trouble keeping his eyes in his head had timidly approached Red Emma and ended up buying all of them, Brett included, a round. He was then dispatched back to his table.

“So what’d you do?” asks Brett. What he needs is a plan. A revenge plot. Some hell-hath-no-fury stuff.

She shrugs. “Got over it, I guess. It ruined the fashion thing for me. I never went back to it. But that might have been for the best. It’s different than with you. With us, she was the talented one anyway. It was a shitty thing to do, but she’s making some nice stuff now. I bought one of her dresses last year.”

Brett will never buy any of Fred’s comics. May boycott Timely altogether.

“You can’t let this stop you from drawing,” she says. “Maybe it’s a sign you need to start writing your own stuff. You were practically writing the book anyway.”

The only advice Debra ever gave him was to get out of the business. Which, probably, was good advice. He wants to kiss Ferret Lass. The whole time Prospera is talking about how her boyfriend slept with her sister while she was away at NYU, Brett wants to kiss her. There are probably blinking lights over his head that say
WANTS TO KIS
S YOU.
After another beer, the intensity of it fades. Her arm is around his waist. Hand rests on the edge of his pocket. If he looks at her, he’ll want to kiss her. So he looks the other way.

A couple of tables from them, he sees Alex’s mother. Obviously upset. A friend is consoling her. Brett recognizes her as Gail Pope, who used to
write
The Speck.
He takes Ferret Lass’s left hand in his own. Removes her arm from his waist. Misses it immediately.

“There’s a friend of mine over there,” he says. Their faces so close. “I’m going to go check on her.”

“Okay,” she says. Smiles. Not sure what he’s doing or how he’s managing to do it, Brett walks away.