A Hundred Thousand Worlds (14 page)

“What happens if you don’t go?” her mother asks, as if the question has never occurred to Val, as if she didn’t ask it with every exhale. “If you say you’re staying in the middle of nowhere with your mother in the house where you were raised. Where Alex will have two dogs to wrestle with and woods to play in and he’ll never eat sushi till he goes to college.”

“They’ll take him from me,” Val says. This is the conclusion of all paths that don’t take her and Alex to Los Angeles, a point where rational thought brings its boot down on every hope, every emotion. “I violated the custody agreement. I completely fucking ignored the custody agreement. They’ll take him away from me.” It makes no sense to her that now only her mistakes count for anything and the statute of limitations has run out on all of Andrew’s sins. But her lawyer has assured her it’s true. At best, they’ll award Andrew lost time: all the days that should have been his to spend with Alex for the past six years. At worst, they’ll remove Alex from her custody. Months of sleepless nights have reduced it to a brutal mathematic, a heart and a feather on a scale.

“I can give him up for two years,” she says, “or I can lose him forever.”

Everyone like you is dead. They’ve been dead forever. No one is like you. No one is like you at all.

Not only is this true, but you’re reminded of it constantly. Every time you look at anyone, your eyes move right through the skin, like yours but as easily rent as tissue paper, to the fragile bird-like bones underneath. To muscles that cannot hoist cars in the air, much less change the direction of planets. You see the differences between them and yourself as easily as they see the differences among themselves, the meaningless divisions of race and ethnicity they hold all-important.

So breakable. They are like glass, like china. How is it you come from a race made of such sturdier stuff than they, and yet your people are dead and these people with their bones of spun sugar thrive?

You avoid touching them, as much as possible. Your grip can crush coal into diamonds; the potential to casually shatter one of them, to accidentally rip and tear and break, is overwhelming. Even with the woman who raised you, whose embrace had a fierceness to it, who squeezed your indestructible body until tears welled in your impossible eyes, you could never chance it. You could only stand stock-still, arms at your sides while her love for you crashed against skin that could never be cut, never bleed.

When you walk among them, you take on the affect of someone clumsy and gun-shy. The words
contact inhibition
loom large in your mental landscape, the way a cell knows to stop growing the moment it touches another cell. You seem to bumble. In the near-lost language of the woman
who raised you, you act the schlemiel. But you are always under control, every muscle of you. To truly bumble into that wall might destroy it.

Unless they need you. Unless some certain death is barreling down upon them. Only then can you swoop in and pick them up, as gently as you would a baby bird. In those moments, you can cradle them in your hands, soft as they are, slight as they are. In those moments, they can break through your skin and save you.

I
f it is as difficult to get out as it is to get in, there’s no risk of the Woman escaping,
Val thinks as the guard hands back her ID. Although Val called from New York to arrange this visit two weeks ago, the clearance procedure still takes up most of the morning. So much work to get into a place she doesn’t want to go.

Val walks across the yard that separates the guard tower from the ring of cells. A basketball game stops to observe her. It is not the individual players who stop, but the collective organism of the game, casting twenty of its eyes on her. Along the edges of the wall, cigarettes dangle from hands, the ripe cherries at their ends winking as a warm-hot breeze moves lackadaisically across the yard. Val is led by a corrections officer named Iris. Iris a messenger of the gods, frequent guide into the underworld. Into but not through. Iris also a flower, and goddess of the rainbow. Colorful name in a gray place, and in a gray uniform. Etymologies and theogonies clatter and clang in Val’s head and she wishes she was not here. Anywhere else. She will take back her promise. She cannot do this, not for Tim or Rachel or herself. She is not strong enough. Even her hate is not strong enough. But everyone is watching her—from the guard tower, from the cells, from the yard, Iris a few feet ahead, wondering why Val has paused. Val wants to go, exit, but after all, this is a prison and it’s not like they just let you leave.

•   •   •

“I know you,” the Woman says. Jittery, scratching at an irritated spot on the back of her neck. “Or I did know you? Or will? It gets so confusing. They
don’t tell you that in training. There ought to be a course for verb tenses and knowing. Epistemology of tense.
I knew you. I will have known you.
I’ve told them this, but I think the training is woefully inadequate when it comes to the psychological impacts of nonlinearity. But who’s an expert? Who’s been there and back? Nonlinear is forever. Nonlinear is for life.”

Her skin is fish-belly pale, and her hair, long, brown, is a mess of matting and knots on the left side, like a section of a lawn that’s never been cut or tended. But while her body judders, her eyes fix on Val’s with the empty calm Val remembers from the trial.

“We think of time as if it’s a straight line,” she continues, “but it’s more like a bubble. Except that’s not exactly right, either. It is to a bubble what a bubble is to a circle drawn on the ground. The last part isn’t as important, but if you can begin to think in terms of the bubble, you can abandon the idea of time passing. You can sit out the dance of now and then. Even causality. It doesn’t disappear; it becomes myriad. Everything causes everything all the time.”

•   •   •

“It’s going to be you,” whispers Rachel, grasping Val’s hand in the dark and squeezing it. “I can feel it.”

The theater is filled with the mix of professionalism and fraternity common at office holiday parties. The awards shows are an attempt to convince the public that movies stars, television stars, pop stars, are all one big group of co-workers, punching the clock, churning out culture the same way other companies churn out marketing reports or widgets. In-jokes and backslapping. Gleeful hugs and affectionate kisses on cheeks. The illusion of community is important.

“She’s right,” says Tim, leaning across his wife to whisper, too loud, to Val. “Mothers are big this year. Look at the Oscars. Mothers cleaned up.” His tuxedo, picked out by Rachel, tailored by a team of Eastern Europeans whose ancestors outfitted czars and archdukes, must be lined with bees. He twitches and winces inside it as if being repeatedly stung. Any
time Val sees him in anything other than T-shirt and jeans, it feels as if something has gone wrong with the world. This is Val’s third nomination and Andrew’s second, but the academy seems to have finally discovered Tim, who is up for Best Director of a Dramatic Series, along with nods for Best Writing and Best Series. Rachel insisted he dress up.

Rachel pushes Tim back into his seat. “It’s not going to be you because you’re a mother,” she tells Val. It hurts to talk about motherhood in front of Rachel. She and Tim tried for years, and it was only this winter that the doctors told her it was highly unlikely they’d be able to conceive. They’ve been like parents to Alex, who spends many shooting days in Rachel’s painting studio and whose first burblings sounded a lot more like “ray-ray” than “mama.” “It’s going to be you because you’ve earned it,” she says. “And this is the year they’re going to get over their snobbish aversion to science fiction.” There is something amazing about the way Rachel says “snobbish aversion,” as though the words themselves are things not to be touched.

“What about fathers?” Andrew asks no one in particular. He’s been distant since they wrapped the season. It’s taken awhile for Val to find her way back to her own personality, to pack Bethany Frazer in the closet, but slowly, she’s remembered who she is when she’s not being someone else. Alex helps; he has held his mother in his mind, never changing.

Andrew has taken longer to come back to the real world. He watches each episode as it airs, then takes to the fan sites to see the reaction. He’s constructed a number of aliases so he can comment without being recognized. He hasn’t hidden it from her; sometimes over dinner he tells her what they’re saying, talking about commenters as if they’re actual people. She hoped that this hiatus between seasons would be their chance to recalibrate as a couple, to redraw the map for all three of them, but Andrew hasn’t played the role of father with the commitment he brings to his character on-screen. His performance is stiff and unconvincing, and sometimes seems like it’s cribbed from fifties sitcoms.

Unlike Tim’s, Andrew’s tux fits him like a second skin. He has been working out excessively this year, to the point that Tim had to ask him to
tone it down; his new physique was dangerously close to becoming a plot point. He had too much to drink and not enough to eat at dinner, but Val didn’t say anything. In the lobby, she simply pointed him at people and stood slightly behind as he chatted them up. But she’s also happy the television awards come early in the proceedings, since his face has a slackness that might signal nodding off in the near future.

“Real fathers are never big,” Tim explains. “Oedipus rears his eyeless head. Surrogate fathers, stepfathers, sure. Stepfathers are hot this year, maybe because there’s not a cultural archetype for—” Rachel puts her hand to his lips, then turns to Val.

“It’s going to be you,” she says.

•   •   •

“Another way. Subjectively we experience three dimensions of space and one of time. But time also has more than one dimension. You need to think of timespace as one thing, a multidimensional system, a geometric supersolid. You’re thinking about the shooting, but where is it? Why can’t you point to it? It exists, but where? Nonlinearity gives you this, lets you think this way. It jumps you up from the surface of timespace so you can see the past and future as a single object. Not up, really. But think of the circle again and draw an arrow up from it. Then think of standing on the drawing of the circle, and now where is up? You see? When the airplane was invented, we learned for the first time to think in three spatial dimensions. When nonlinearity was invented, we were freed from a one-dimensional reckoning of time.”

•   •   •

Rachel is covered in blood. It spreads across the sky blue of her dress, her pretty dress, like some awful sunset. It drips onto the star of Montgomery Clift. It is splattered across the stars of Harold Lloyd and Fay Wray and Gene Autry. Is Tim screaming? Someone is screaming, and it’s not
Andrew. Andrew is standing constellations away. On the star of Hattie McDaniel or the star of Rod Serling. His mouth opens and closes like a fish’s. Val will remember this later: that it is Tim screaming and Andrew silent like a trout. Two men have grabbed the Woman by the arms, and the gun has fallen onto the star of Clint Eastwood. Such a little gun. So much blood to come from such a little gun. Val cannot hear what the Woman is yelling as they pull her away, but there are words to it. Words are what makes it yelling. Screaming is the sounds Tim makes. Feral sounds with size but no shape. His shoulder is bloody, but it is not Rachel’s blood, which pools in handprints pressed into concrete in a golden age. Tim has been shot as well, but he is only screaming for her, for Rachel. A pop star new to the charts this year in a dress cut nearly to her navel holds Tim back, improbably strong despite her waifish frame. The ground is littered with golden statuettes, dropped in a panic. Val and Rachel were holding hands when the shots were fired, so now they are on the same star, and people are pushed back from them, gravity in reverse. Val is holding Rachel’s head in her lap and pressing on the blood as if she can push it back into Rachel’s heart, but no, it’s too much, or she’s pushed too hard. Bubbles form on Rachel’s lips, paler than her lipstick. “I want to look like the evil queen in a Disney cartoon,” she’d told Val in the car, but no makeup could hide the kindness in her face. Her eyes dart frantically, looking for someone who isn’t Val, blind to Val’s presence with her in this broken moment.

•   •   •

“You’re her. But you’re older. Are you from the future? Are we in the future now? I’ve wanted so much to talk to you. To tell you how sorry I am. Or I was. Has it happened yet? I think it’s happened for me already and you were younger then. It all feels present. It always feels like right now, so when five minutes from now is ten years ago and last week was twenty years after that, it’s all right now. I’m here and I’m talking to you but also
right now I’m shooting her. Because if you can’t tell if it’s future or past, then it’s right now. It all happens at once, all the time.”

•   •   •

At the trial, the Woman calls Andrew Ian, or sometimes Agent Campbell. She apologizes to the court that she’s broken agency protocol; relationships between agents are strictly forbidden. It’s important to her they understand that Agent Campbell deserves none of the blame. She pursued him. Even knowing it could cost her her place in Anomaly, she couldn’t stay away. She followed him for weeks, sitting two barstools down from him at Wood & Vine, running on the treadmill behind him at the gym. He was the one who broke it off, a week before the shooting, because it was wrong for a senior officer to take advantage of a junior agent like her. She had recorded that phone call, him explaining that the preservation of the time continuum was more important than their feelings for each other, him choosing his duty to Anomaly over his love for her. In the recordings, he sounds more like Campbell than like Andrew; there’s a way he used to deepen his voice a quarter-octave and slow down its cadence as soon as the cameras were on, and Val can hear it here. She details the ways he took advantage, the places and times. Her testimony is like the juiciest parts of a Harlequin romance, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s in her early twenties, built like an aerobics instructor, and exuding the feverish sexual energy of a true manic. The judge allows it, leans pruriently toward the witness stand as the Woman speaks. It would seem like she’s role-playing if not for the obvious conviction in her eyes. She is an agent of Anomaly, an international organization dedicated to stopping threats to the timestream. For the past several months, she has been romantically involved with Special Agent Ian Campbell.

There is so much evidence. The Woman kept copious notes. She saved hotel receipts. Took pictures on her phone. Even recorded calls from Andrew, sometimes on his way to see her, laying out the things he would do
to her when he arrived. She says maintaining evidence is an essential part of training for all Anomaly agents.

The defense insisted on a competency evaluation, but the law only asks that the person on trial be able to understand that she is on trial. The Woman assured the evaluator that she understands early-twenty-first-century law and that, even though she is not from this time, she is subject to the jurisdiction of the time she currently inhabits. The defense pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, but the people on television all say it won’t work. Things are different since John Hinckley, they say. Your delusions cannot necessarily protect you in a court of law. The Woman is aware of what she did and why she did it. She saw another woman with her lover and, in a jealous rage, tried to kill her. Unfortunately, she missed.

While the Woman’s delusions may have no legal bearing, the press is fascinated, and the trial drags on for weeks, even though the salient facts are quickly established. Val skips days to visit Tim in the hospital, although he does not talk, just stares into space. The doctors say he will not eat, and the skin of his face hangs limply off the bones like clothes draped over the back of a chair. They say they are quieting his mind so it can heal. This does not fit with Val’s conception of how a mind works. It is a nice way to get around saying that when Tim is not full of Thorazine, he is screaming.

There are news vans parked outside their house all the time. For the first three weeks after the shooting, even as information about his affair surfaces, Andrew does not move out of the house. It isn’t so much a matter of him refusing to leave as it is the shock of Rachel’s death keeping them both in a kind of stasis. Although Val wants him gone, she also doesn’t want to be alone, and, strung between those two desires, she does nothing to kick him out. They occupy opposite poles, Andrew sleeping on the couch in his office, Val in Alex’s room, their bedroom empty. He is usually up and out of the house before she and Alex are awake. But one morning, during jury selection, they find themselves at the breakfast table together, through some accident of scheduling. In the living room,
Alex crashes trucks together. Andrew says how there are couples that get through things like this.

“We’re not one of those couples,” she says, realizing it’s true as she says it.

The next day, he’s gone.

•   •   •

“You can understand, then, how I was jealous, how easy it is to be jealous when it’s all now. Because what I saw was him with you. But what it was is he had been with you. It was like I was watching something on television, something that was already over. Had happened. But it is happening, too.”