A Hundred Thousand Worlds (9 page)

Not only are you jobless, but you are fine with it. Fucking fine with it. Fuck your friends and their “graphic design” gigs. Graphic design is for fuckers who used to think they were artists. Graphic design is where creativity goes to die. Fuck those guys.

The girl behind the bar, ack. If you were single, oh my God. But you’re not single, and also you’re broke. So you hope that picture of her you drew on the bar napkin and left as a tip doesn’t make her think you’re a cheapshit. Because you’re not a cheapshit. You’re just broke.

And you have to piss. Like a racehorse. Like your molars are swimming. And of course there’s some asshole making out in the men’s room. There is always some asshole making out in the men’s room on a Friday night, as if that’s worth everyone else’s inconvenience. As if you couldn’t just make out in the bar, for fuck’s sake, without denying everyone else a place to piss.

So you take it out in the alley. Which smells of trash that hasn’t been picked up in two weeks and two weeks of other fuckers’ piss. One more sign you’re not having an original idea. But something rustles in the trash bags, in the piles of garbage, and once you’ve emptied your bladder you climb over to see.

Dropped into the black vinyl of the garbage bags is a man, no bigger than a nine-year-old and the color of fresh-cut grass. He is leaking blaze-orange blood from his nostrils, which are disproportionately large and weirdly close to his eyes. He holds out a flashlight to you, royal blue.

“Take this torch,” he says, “and carry the blue light of justice throughout your sector. Protect the oppressed, defend the innocent, punish the—”

And he dies. He just fucking dies. So there’s this torch that’s all about protecting the innocent, and it’s in the hands of this little green dude. Who wants you to take it. Who told you to take it.

So you take the fucking torch.

Little do you know, there’s a whole thing. That it’s basically the intergalactic police. There’s a whole training module the torch downloads directly into your fucking brain. And now, because you picked this thing up, you are an officer in the Blue Torch Armada. By virtue of plucking something out of the garbage. And it doesn’t pay shit.

The weird thing is, it’s great. You fly off to other planets and stop civil wars between the purple people and the orange people or whatever. Because it’s always really clear that either the orange people or the purple people are total fuckers and whoever isn’t total fuckers, you side with them. When you’re active, when you’re out there, it’s great.

Of course there are down times. There are days, sometimes weeks or months, where no one is fighting a war in space. And you’re just living in your neighborhood, where the women cross the street to avoid you, sometimes. And the men mutter “lowlife” and “scumbag” under their breath, sometimes. Gallery owners don’t return your calls, even though you diverted an asteroid from destroying the fucking planet and some gratitude is maybe in order. A freelance client stiffs you on your fee, even though you could incinerate her with a thought. The time away, the secrecy, is fucking your relationship. You give it another week, maybe. And you look to the stars, waiting to go to war.

A
bar is a wonderful place to work. So long as you’re willing to look standoffish, which Gail most certainly is. She feels the aberrant blue glow of a laptop screen in a dimly lit hotel bar is like the bright coloration of a poisonous insect, warning off those who might think it a good idea to talk to her. There’s a script page that’s been nagging at her all day, a story beat that’s missing. It’s tougher when you’re moving things to an ending. Beginnings are so much simpler—everything can sprawl out. But endings have to winnow to a point, and it’s easier to trip and stumble into it than to smoothly spiral downward.

Part of the problem is that it’s not her ending she’s moving toward. It’s the first time Gail’s encountered this, but there’s a problem that may be unique to comic book writers, which is that the story will go on without you. With only three months to go, everything had to move faster than she’d planned, stories that would have played out over six issues compressed to five pages, foreshadowings foreshortened. Mostly it isn’t that hard. But there was a tack she’d wanted to take with the Iota’s professional life, establishing her not just as the Speck’s girlfriend but as a scientist in her own right. After all, he’d only discovered how to shrink himself and then rashly decided to try the process out; she was the one who’d figured out how to return him to actual size. Iota was going to finish her degree and take a job at Metro City University, where, over time, she’d come to outrank the Speck, who would never get tenure as long as he was skipping office hours to go help the Vengeance Troop by entering someone’s
bloodstream or defusing a nuclear bomb by stabilizing the uranium isotopes at its core.

She’d decided to skip a lot of the necessary steps and have the university hire Iota straight away. It would have been hard to get action-packed storylines out of Iota toiling on her dissertation anyway. But the scene between Iota and the Dean, where he knows she’s secretly Iota and she knows he’s secretly Ominus, but neither knows the other knows, isn’t playing out right.

She shuts her laptop and spins on her barstool to survey the room. Sometimes the background noise of a dozen conversations can stimulate whatever part of the brain writes dialogue. But tonight the words are lying flat on the page, and the scene comes off like a bad high school production of
Oleanna
. She sips her beer. None of this has to be done now. She’s already a month ahead on scripts, and she planned these weeks as dead time. But still, that scene. It’s not right. The characters keep running their lines in her head and not clicking.

She spots him in the corner of the bar, at a table by himself. There’s a whiskey in front of him that hasn’t been touched. The ceiling lights conveniently avoid falling on him, and if she hadn’t seen him at the panel today, she wouldn’t recognize him, but it’s him for sure. Gail packs her laptop into her bag, then hesitates. What does she possibly have to say to Levi Loeb? It’d be weirdly like meeting God.

But how many chances do you get to meet God?

“Mr. Loeb,” she says. He looks up from the stain on the table he’s been examining. His eyes are milky blue behind thick lenses. “My name’s Gail Pope. I’m a comic book writer.”

“Miss Pope,” he says in a voice rasped by a half-century of smoking, “if you know a thing about me, you know that’s about the worst way you could introduce yourself. Terrible way to make a living.” She winces. Maybe she should mention that she’s German while she’s at it—that’d go over real hot.

“Well,” she says, “it beats my old job clubbing baby seals to death.”

He chuckles. “That pay by the hour?”

“By the seal,” she says.

“Siddown, kid,” he says. He makes a feeble attempt to kick out a stool for her. She pulls it out and takes a seat. “Who do you write for?”

“National.”

“Pfft.”
The noise generates a small cloud of spittle. “Queers.”

Gail smirks. “Some of us, yeah.”

Loeb puts his hand over his eyes and shakes his head. It might be a gesture to indicate she’s too sensitive, but it looks like genuine remorse. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he says. “My age, you forget which words have become awful. You like girls then?” As casually as he might have asked if she liked the Cleveland Browns or pinot grigio.

“Who wouldn’t?” she says.

“Good for you,” says Loeb. “Find a nice girl, settle down. Why not? It worked for me.” The weird, lazy bigotry of the Greatest Generation.

“Who do you write?” Loeb asks.

“The Speck and Iota,” she says. “And the Perfectional.”

“Huh,” says Loeb. “Those are all Jersey Sapolski’s characters. I was still at Heston when he came up with them.” Gail is ashamed to admit she’s never read the old Heston issues. She bets Geoff has. “Sapolski was queer, too,” Loeb says. “Homosexual, I mean.”

“He was?” says Gail.

“We all knew,” Loeb says. “Not that any of us cared. Christ, the office of every comic book office in New York was full of people no one wanted. Jews, Italians, Greeks, queers. Everything except women, to be honest with you. Well, there were the secretaries.” Loeb’s eyes drift away, probably imagining some toothsome piece long since passed away. “I remember Jersey, though. Sharp dresser, like they are. Ran around with so many women you’d think he was putting a softball team together. But you could tell. We all spent so much time together, you knew guys like you’d
gone to war with them.” He nods to himself, spins his whiskey glass around slowly, twice. “I always liked Jersey.”

“I didn’t know you worked at Heston,” says Gail. She wishes Geoff were here, except that later she’ll get to tell Geoff about this and he’ll be achingly jealous. Still, he would be able to cite any comic Loeb had ever worked on.

“Before I went to Timely,” he says. “Before I paired up with Brewster. It was hack work. All of it was hack work back then, but the Heston stuff, ach.” He turns his head away from the table as if he’s been served some entrée that disgusts him. “No spark, you know?”

Gail thinks about Iota and Ominus engaging in dry contract negotiations, debating dental plans and sabbaticals. “Yeah, I know.”

“National was the same way,” he says. “All brains and no heart. Except at Heston there were no brains, either.”

“So you left Heston for Timely?” she asks.

“No, I was working both,” says Loeb. “When we came up with the Astounding Family, I was still drawing
Krazy Kritters
and
Friday Night’s for Heartbreak
at Heston.” Gail has never heard of either title. She is aware that there were whole genres of comics that got swept away in the second wave of superheroes, the wave Loeb was mostly responsible for. She imagines an alternate comics industry in which talking-animal comics are ubiquitous. “Once
Astounding
was a hit,” says Loeb, “Brew convinced me to hitch my cart to Timely. Told me we’d make millions.” He shakes his head. “He was half right.”

“So why are you here?” asks Gail, somewhat gingerly.

“My son’s picking me up,” Loeb says. He glances around the bar to make sure his son isn’t already here. “He doesn’t get off shift till late. Figured I’d have a drink, but this stuff burns my guts.” He tilts the whiskey glass backward, then forward.

“No, I mean why are you at the convention?” says Gail.

“Well, they’re paying me, for one,” says Loeb, chuckling that low lung rumble. “I don’t know. Burying the hatchet, I guess? Better than being
buried with it. Fifty years. It’s a long time to be angry.” At this he takes a sip of his drink and, if his face is any indication, regrets it instantly. “And they’re putting my name back on the books,” he adds. “Phil Weinrobe, he’s a good enough guy. He’s trying to do right by me. More than Brew ever did.”

“Is it enough?” asks Gail. He looks so broken, she can’t imagine anything would be enough. She wants to sign over her paychecks to him and bake him a cake.

“No,” he says flatly. “If I ever see Brewster Brewer again, I’ll—” He stops, and Gail watches the anger slip away from him. “I’ll probably buy him a drink,” he admits. “He’s the last of us left alive. Jersey killed himself in seventy-eight; Eisler and Dysart, they were at National, but we used to drink together at Bemelmans when we were flush. They both went with cancer twenty years ago. Stanchek was an asshole, but he died broke and half blind in some shitty home. He created the Flag Bearer. Brew didn’t have a thing to do with it, even if he took all the credit. Poor Stanchek.”

Again, she thinks how Geoff would know all these names, but she also thinks about her own position. She’s paid by the issue, no long-term contract. She makes rent, but she’s not saving anything, and the freelancers’ union charges multiple limbs for minimal health insurance. Fifty years on and she’s not sure anything’s gotten better but the page rates.

“It’s great, though,” he says, “to see what it all looks like now. It’s another planet, isn’t it? Kids in their costumes and all. Good for them.”

“It is, you know,” she says. “The capes and the spandex and all. They protect you. They make you believe you can be better.”

He nods and muses on this. “Me,” he says, “I’m tired and I don’t believe in superheroes anymore.” He and Gail sit quietly for a minute. “You got the time?” Loeb asks.

She checks her phone. “Nine thirty.”

“Bries is late,” he says with a sense of inevitability. “We named him after Brewer. Did you know that was Brew’s real name? Bries Borowitz. His secret identity. He wanted me to change my name, too. Something less Jewy,
he said. Something alliterative and goyim. Bries, my Bries, was ten when they kicked me out of Timely. I’m ashamed to admit, I took it out on him for years. We’re only now speaking again. So it’s okay he’s late, I guess.”

Gail thinks about putting a hand on his shoulder, or patting him on the back. Any of the gestures she’s seen her male colleagues do, the ones that say
Buck up
or
Walk it off
. Because he’s not of a generation you can hug, unless you’re related to him, and maybe not even then. There is too much space and time between them to connect properly. “You mind if I keep you company?” she asks.

“Sure thing, kid,” says Loeb. “If I nod off, check my pulse.”

“I
cannot believe you fucked Ferret Lass,” says Fred. “In her costume. In her fucking costume! Does that make you a furry or something? Because I have dibs on all sexual deviance in this friendship.”

Brett snuck back into their room early this morning, sheepish and surprised to find Fred already awake. Last night at the bar, Fred said he wanted them on the road by eight. So they could make Chicago at a reasonable hour and rest up for their signing at Quimby’s. Brett dimly remembers this. He can recall a moment before he was talking to Ferret Lass. Staring at her as she talked to Iota and ExSanguina. In a state where he was slightly too drunk to be clever, but sober enough to know he couldn’t be clever. Every so often, Ferret Lass turned and looked at Brett, then looked down at her drink. Finally she said, “I don’t think it’s fair the way that woman was yelling at you.”

Brett shrugged. “She’s looking out for her kid,” he said. Ferret Lass scooted over to discuss, and someone must have turned the volume down on Fred, because Brett doesn’t remember him saying another thing all night.

“The sad thing is,” Fred says, “I don’t even know enough about ferrets to make a proper string of ferret jokes. Do they have scent glands? I feel like I should mention something about her scent glands.”

After Brett left the hotel bar with her last night, this is likely the kind of conversation that ensued among the all-male corps of artists he’d left behind. If he’d watched one of his fellows leave with Ferret Lass, he might even have participated. Something about boys in aggregate leads to a locker room ethic. But he and Fred are not those kinds of guys. Being not that
kind of guy is not only a defining aspect of who he is, or how he thinks of himself; it’s also one of the only pieces of leverage he has with women. When he and Debra first got together, she made it clear she’d chosen him because he was “not like most guys she met.” Over time this became not a virtue but a problem. Ferret Lass had picked him out of a crowd at a moment he was more broken than anyone else in the room. More vulnerable. If he ever sees her again, he’ll ask her why that was.

For now he helps Fred pack up the van. He submits to a brand of masculine ribbing that seems like it was written for two other characters. He is too tired to protest. He wonders if he should call Debra. This is the first girl he’s slept with since her. Meaning the only non-Debra sexual partner he’s had in almost three years. It’s not that he can’t think what he’d say; he can’t even determine what his tone would be. Calling to brag? Apologize?

But thinking about it, last night didn’t have anything to do with Debra. It wasn’t revenge or a final severing of ties. Maybe that was the best sign that things with her are over—the fact that Brett could hook up with someone else and it didn’t involve Debra at all.

He loads his sketchbook, with some of the drawings he did of Ferret Lass last night. He remembers something she said as he left this morning. How all the cosplay girls are carpooling to Chicago together. And he realizes he never found out her secret identity.