A Hundred Thousand Worlds

VIKING

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Copyright © 2016 by Bob Proehl

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ISBN 9780399562211 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780399562228 (ebook)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Heather, whose resemblance to Wonder Woman is not coincidental. And for Alex, who taught me to love the ending of
Superman
.

He told the man that in America it was nonsense to invent a country—what they ought to do was invent a planet.

—
Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart . . .

—
Tony Kushner,
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches

They bypassed the death of their reality by becoming fictional in ours.

—
Grant Morrison,
Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle
Mystery

I’d be writing a story for Kirby, and Steve Ditko would walk in and say, “Hey, I need some work now.” And I’d say, “I can’t give it to you now, Steve, I’m finishing Kirby’s.” But we couldn’t afford to keep Steve waiting, because time is money, so I’d have to say, “Look Steve, I can’t write a script for you now, but here’s the plot we’ll use for the next
Spider-Man.
Go home and draw anything you want, as long as it’s something like this, and I’ll put the copy in later.” . . . Okay, it started out as a lazy man’s device . . . but we realized this was absolutely the best way to do a comic.

—STANLEY MARTIN LIEBER

If America gave anybody anything it is ambition. Bad things would come out of it because some guys are in a hurry, but that doesn’t mean they’re evil or anything, it just means they fall into bad grace somehow. It was hard to find work. A friend of mine was going to go out to get a job because his mother told him to get a job, so he said, I’ll go out and draw pictures and they’ll pay me for them. And his mother said, “No son of mine will become an artist. You’ll sit around with berets in Greenwich Village and talk to loose women.” Of course, mothers were very conventional, everything was very conventional.

—JACOB KURTZBERG

A
lex Torrey, nine but small for his age, writes the names of the places on the exit signs in his notebook. Below each, he rewrites the name backwards. He reads them aloud, quietly, so his mother can’t hear him over the radio. Collections of random syllables. Impossible strings of consonants.

It’s tough work. But finding a magic word ought to be. There are useless abracadabras and hocus-poci lying around everywhere, but ones that still have magic in them, that haven’t had it all sucked out, are harder to find. Plucky kid reporter Brian Bryson spent days in the dim-lit archives of the Metro City Public Library, eyes bleeding tears behind thick glasses, before he stumbled upon the word that turned him into Captain Wonder, champion of six ancient gods.

“Excelsior!” Alex says. If it worked for Brian Bryson, it might still have a little magic in it. The word uttered, he is still a boy in the backseat of a Honda Civic. He
hmmphs
and returns to his list. Pronunciation and emphasis may be the key.

“Ac-aht-i.”

“Olaf-fub.”

“Alu-bath-sa.”

Nothing.

Most of central Pennsylvania had been dull, but occasionally there were Iroquois place names that sounded magical backward and forward. Alex chewed them like gum that refused to lose its flavor, then asterisked them in his notebook as worthy of further investigation.

Now and then, his mother checks the rearview and sees his lips forming odd shapes, but the sounds are drowned out by one sputtering NPR station after another. Alex cannot understand why she can’t bear him talking to her while she drives but she can stand the talk radio prattling on endlessly. As they pass from one station to the next, discussions are repeated, and Alex’s mother seems to take comfort in this. She laughs at the jokes again, nods with more insistent agreement at opinions she’s already heard.

Alex pages back through the notebook to what he wrote yesterday, about their visit to the Idea Man.
The G train rocks back and forth like a real train,
his notebook says
. The Idea Man’s building is like a castle.
And on a page otherwise blank, the thing he’d asked for, his parting gift. An idea. Alex feels special that this one was for him, that Louis didn’t write it into the Book like all the others, for anyone who can afford it to read.

There’s a boy. He wakes up in a cave, alone. He doesn’t know where he is or who he is. In the cave with him, there’s a robot, roughly the size and shape of a man. But it’s broken.

Alex tried to get more information, but the Idea Man clammed up.

“Does the boy know how to fix the robot?” Alex asked, and the Idea Man shrugged.

“I’m wondering that myself,” he said to Alex.

Now it’s Alex’s job to wonder, to ponder on it. Where there was nothing, now there is a boy, and a cave, and a broken robot. They form a still, quiet spot in the center of Alex’s mind, a blank made up of information he doesn’t have yet. Things he needs to fill in. Alex runs his finger along the words he wrote yesterday. They still feel carved into the page. Soon they’ll flatten out, but for now they are still paths across the page, still have depth and curvature.

Alex is aware that they’re moving west with some kind of intention, as if they’re checking off things on the way. It’s not simply a trip for the sake of a trip, but he can’t figure what the purpose is. He’s tried to glean as much information as he can—from her, from the Idea Man before they
left—but it doesn’t amount to a full story. Something is missing: a motive, some reason.

A number of times, he’s asked her how long they’re going for altogether. It’s not an important question; there’s nothing in New York that won’t wait for him. But each time, she changes the subject. Alex’s suggestions for things they might do on the drive back, which have included, in no particular order, Mount Rushmore, seeing a cowboy, Old Faithful, seeing a prairie dog, and Canada, have likewise been deflected. It’s as if they’ll get there and slingshot back to New York in a second, or keep going west, across the ocean until they hit land again, and then make their way around the world to end up once again safe in their apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

Alex thinks of their car traveling across a green sea.
Traveling
is the strongest magic word he knows. That and
home
.

“Ago-hay-uc,” he says, knowing it’s not right even as he chokes it out. Magic words sound like magic words.

Alex closes the notebook and opens the book he was reading,
Adam Anti & the Book I Read
. It is the first in a series about a boy who grows up in Brooklyn before discovering he has magic powers. He’s almost done with it, but he has the second one in his backpack. His mother packed his clothes and then threw open their biggest suitcase in the middle of Alex’s room and told him to add anything he wanted, anything he thought he might need. He looked around his room, assessing six years’ accumulation of toys, and, closing the suitcase like a great giant clam, he picked two books and some notebooks off the shelf and declared he was ready to go.

Alex dives back into
Adam Anti,
which is exciting, even if his favorite parts were the ones set in Brooklyn. It’s amazing when a story brushes up against your real life; it feels as if the characters might pass you on the street. As he reads, he glances up often to keep an eye on the road signs as they zip past, loving the story he’s reading, but worried he might miss a magic word as it goes by.

“M
om?” he calls from their bedroom at the Holiday Inn Cleveland. The word soars upward through an octave like a freed bird. Valerie Torrey, in the bathroom with the door open, waits. Sometimes these calls are a kind of sonar, a sounding to confirm her location. She yanks the floss out from between her molars and holds it taut, ready across her thumbs.

“Mom?” he calls again. Higher now and tinged with the beginnings of worry.

“What’s up, Rabbit?” she calls back. It’s a new nickname between them, inspired by the upper incisors that now outsize the milk teeth in his broad smile, and his always prominent ears, an inheritance from her side.

“What’s a vestibool?”

“Vestibule? It’s a kind of porch.”

“Oh.”

She waits to hear if another question is coming, but there’s quiet. She goes back to violently working at her teeth and gums. She watches the feral faces she is making in the mirror, faces made entirely of teeth. Maybe when they get to Los Angeles, these are the faces she’ll show Andrew. She will bare her teeth like a cornered animal trying to overstate the threat it presents. When the interviewer asks,
How did you protect your child from that awful, awful man, Miss Torrey?
she will smile with her lips pressed firmly together and say quietly,
I showed him my teeth
.

When she is done, she takes a brush out of her travel bag and starts on her hair with similar aggression. The heat in the car has kinked it to the point of knotting. Walking out of a Brooklyn salon two days ago with Alex in tow, she felt like a convincing version of Bethany Frazer, the woman she played on television’s
Anomaly
for over a hundred episodes, enough for syndication and the steady checks that came with it. She was the sleek Valerie Torrey of six years ago, whose life had never fallen apart, who’d never kidnapped her own child and run, who’d never been caught. In the glare of the bathroom lights, she looks like a shabby Halloween costume of that woman, the woman she’ll be playing again at the convention tomorrow morning. She pulls a lock of hair down in front of her eyes between two fingers and examines the ends. They branch like the ends of neurons. There is no hurry now, no rush to anything. Everything is becoming inevitable, the future coming in like permanent teeth that have always been there, hiding inside the gums waiting, nestled against the skull.

“Mom?” Alex calls, swooping upward again. It brings her back into the world and her heart rises to meet the sound.

“What’s up, Rabbit?”

“What’s
chivalrous
?”

“Why don’t you make a list and we’ll go through it together?”

“I need this one now,” he says plaintively. “I can’t skip over it.”

“Gentlemen being kind and polite to ladies,” she says.

“Oh.” Never
thank you,
just
oh,
as if he would’ve figured it out in a second anyway. She shakes her hair out and regards her reflection one last time. By the sixth season of the show, she’d internalized an image of what she was supposed to look like and dropped her weight to below her pre-pregnancy level. Her face became sharp and angular, and magazines, when they talked about her, stopped using modifiers meant to gently undermine their compliments. Her mother called after each episode aired that season to be sure she was eating. Now her face is softly rounded, like
it was when she first became Bethany Frazer, like it was when she left the Midwest for school in New York, all too aware of every cliché she was embodying. She wonders if, moving across the country toward her point of origin and then away from it, she will transform back into that girl, then into the Hollywood version of herself she briefly became. She wonders what version of herself she’ll be when she returns to New York alone.

Leaving the bathroom light on, she stands in the doorway and watches Alex, propped up on the far bed. He’s shut the book he was reading and opened his notebook. She listens as he reads aloud what he’s written there.

“Ac-aht-i,” he says.

“Olaf-fub,” he says.

“Alu-bath-sa,” he says.

Each one is pronounced deliberately, like an incantation. Sometimes he lets her look through the notebook. The pages are a hoarder’s trove of language. Names of pasta shapes and streets in Boerum Hill. Phonetic approximations of the Yiddish phrases passing Hasidim muttered on the sidewalks near their apartment. Lately it had been words plotted out backwards, as if to untie them like knots and release something trapped inside. She asked Alex what he hoped a real magic word might do and he only shrugged.

“Ago-hay-uc,” he says. This impossible child. Sometimes she dreams she’s made him up, and in the dream she is a woman who lives alone in an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, teaching acting classes to fill her days, putting herself to sleep each night with gin on the rocks because she’s forgotten to get tonic and can’t be bothered with the ritual of fixing a martini. The dream is not a day in the life of this woman, it is all of her days at once, the flood of years Valerie would be drowning in if she hadn’t been thrown this lifesaver, this impossible child. When she wakes up from this dream, she goes to his room and stands in the doorway watching him, like she’s doing now.

He looks up from his notebook, fixing her with his eyes—huge, dark,
not hers. She wonders how long he’s known she’s been standing there. How much of her watching he’s allowed, tolerated. She is always wondering how much he knows.

“Mom, they have Showtime,” he says.

“That’s nice, Rabbit,” she says, knowing what’s coming next.

“Can I watch my dad?” he asks. Last year, Andrew landed a role on a cable sitcom about a washed-up, sexually promiscuous actor. A role he was born to play, Val thought at the time. With a certain amount of schadenfreude, Val let Alex watch the show, even though it was wildly inappropriate for an eight-year-old. It satisfied a need in Alex that Val had come to accept, but now she wonders if this wasn’t the door that let Andrew back into their lives.

“Rabbit, it’s all reruns till fall. Why don’t you read some more?”

“They’re all sleeping,” he says, patting the book gently.

“You can wake them up,” she says. “It’s your book.” He looks at her as if she’s suggested something incredibly rude.

“Okay, Rabbit,” she says. “What time is it on?”

“Ten to ten thirty,” he says, bouncing on his knees on the bed. The book, forgotten, thumps to the floor.

“Little late,” she says, shaking her head as if reconsidering.

“Mo-om.” This one dive-bombs, then pulls up at the last second. She forces a grin.

“Only if you’re in your PJs by quarter till,” she says. “Maybe I’ll get prettied up and go down to the bar for half an hour.” She’s never been able to stand watching the show with him, the way he leans forward toward it. Even when Andrew felt more distant, less of a threat, she couldn’t take the feeling of the three of them together. “Maybe I’ll meet a prince,” she says.

“You’re already pretty enough to meet a prince,” he says. Like his dark eyes, this quick charm is Andrew’s, but it’s no less effective for its source. In Alex’s eyes, she is ready to play Valerie Torrey, or Bethany Frazer, or
whatever role tomorrow offers. She jumps onto the near bed and clambers over it with a flailing of arms and legs. She leaps across the gap between the two beds to Alex, who giggles and cowers. With cartoonish chomping noises, she plays at devouring his ears.

“You are the most delicious rabbit since Easter,” she yells, and Alex squeals with joy under her assault.