A Hundred Thousand Worlds (17 page)

After a month, the attention Alex needed no longer felt constant and, as promised, Tim arranged for a babysitter near enough to the soundstage that Val could check in on Alex between takes. She reentered the world of
Anomaly
begrudgingly, shocked that nothing else had changed when everything for her was different, as she’d known in that first moment it would be. But once there, she could feel the relief of it, to be lost in someone else’s imaginary story, only a thing in Tim’s dream.

The line is starting to fill in again. The White Rabbit makes sure he stays in her field of vision as he paces back and forth, checking the time on his watch, on his phone. He can wait. Everyone else can wait.

“It gets worse,” she says. “Maybe Tim already knew that by intuition or empathy, but I didn’t, then. In the episode, it’s the Leader. He’s stealing time from them, stealing days and weeks and months to use elsewhere. I look at you and I think that. And whoever’d done it replaced that little person with a version of you that was even better; they did it over and over again, and every time I was so happy for what I’d been given, and so sad for what I’d given up. And every time, I knew that I’d be losing this one, too, any second now, the moment I blinked.”

A
lex’s superpower may be invisibility, he thinks as he darts unseen among convention-goers. It is a good superpower if you’re interested in sneaking, but Alex is not big on sneaking.

McCormick Place convention center could probably hold four or five Heronomicons inside it, he estimates. Not only is it much bigger in terms of floor space, but the ceilings are so high you could fly planes in here, if they weren’t full of ductwork and metal supports. Where Cleveland had chandeliers, Chicago has industrial drop lighting. Where Cleveland had velvety wallpaper, Chicago has concrete. Overall, Alex prefers Chicago.

The rules are different here, though. He is not supposed to leave the main hall. He has to check in once an hour, either with his mom or with one of the costume ladies, who are all really nice and all have his mom’s phone number. “If there’s trouble,” his mother told him, “find a sexy lady in a superhero costume.”

He imagines a network, a team of superheroines watching over him, patrolling this little imaginary city to keep track of him. It should make him feel good, but it doesn’t. It makes him feel like his mom doesn’t trust him anymore, because he made one mistake. At first, she’d said he wasn’t allowed out of her sight, but it was boring in the photo room, and even the Curator didn’t have time to talk to him. When he insisted, she set up the rules. He asked if he had to check in because he was being punished and she said, “No, it’s just because.” It’s not really an answer, and it makes Alex think about other questions he’s asked that haven’t gotten real answers, either.

Alex is on his way to Artist Alley when he sees Brett with a girl dressed as a kind of half person, half weasel. Alex calls out to him excitedly.

“Alex!” says Brett, happy to see him. He puts up a hand for Alex to high-five him. This is something a lot of adults do to kids, and Alex actually is a little over high fives. He enjoys fist bumps and thinks handshakes will be better once his hands are bigger. But he obliges, then looks at the girl to see if she wants a high five as well.

“Is this your son?” she asks Brett.

“How old do you think I am?” he says. She shrugs, indicating not just that she doesn’t know but that she doesn’t care.

“I like your costume,” Alex says to her.

“Thanks,” she replies. “Anyone ever tell you you’ve got great eyelashes?”

“Everybody does,” he says.

“It’s tough when they only want you for your looks, huh?” she says. With her pinkie finger, she carefully removes a bit of dark makeup that is attempting to find its way into her eye.

“I was hoping we could work on our story,” Alex says to Brett. He kind of whispers ‘
our
story’ so the girl doesn’t hear. “I’ve been thinking about the robot factory, and I think it has sensors that detect humans, so the robot has to go in alone.”

“What are you guys talking about?” asks the girl.

“Nothing,” Brett tells her. He turns back to Alex. “We’re going to go get something to eat,” he says. “Maybe you and I can meet up later to work on the story? When I get back to the booth?”

Alex knows there are real
later
s and fake
later
s, and this one is a real
later
. It still hurts to be put off. “I’ll go wait for you,” he says.

“Great,” says Brett. “I’ll be maybe twenty minutes.” The girl looks at him funny when he says this, but Brett doesn’t see it. They head off toward the food court, and Alex walks toward Brett’s booth, less motivated now.

Artist Alley, which in Cleveland was just that, is a flourishing neighborhood here, a small village of people, almost all of them boys, who all look roughly like Brett. It’s like they got every possible Brett from every
possible alternate dimension and put them right here. After crisscrossing the neighborhood several times and finally asking Brett-If-He-Were-Fatter-and-Had-a-Goatee if he knows where Brett’s table is, Alex finds Fred there by himself.

“Hey, kid,” says Fred. Fred has not yet called him anything other than “kid.” “Brett’s not here. He’s out hunting ferrets,” Fred says.

“Huh,” says Alex. “She’s a ferret.”

A man stands next to Alex paging through Brett’s portfolio, kind of Brett-If-He-Dressed-in-Nicer-Clothes-and-Was-from-Jamaica-or-Somewhere-Like-That.

“These are great,” he says to Fred. “Do you do commission pieces?”

Fred sighs loudly again and rolls his eyes. “I’m the writer,” he says, pointing to his name on the cover of an issue of
Lady Stardust
. “We are distinguishable from artists in that we show up on time.”

The man walks away without another word.

“You weren’t very nice to him,” says Alex.

“I’m not feeling very nice today,” says Fred.

“How come?”

Fred sits up and looks directly at Alex for the first time. Alex can tell he’s deciding if whatever he’s about to say is worth saying to a kid. He has seen people make that decision a hundred times before.

“Look,” he says, “I don’t want to badmouth Brett, because it looks like you guys have this whole OuterMan-and-OuterKid thing going on. It’s adorable. But he’s got certain responsibilities, and he’s shirking them to go shtup his lady friend.”

“What’s
stup
?” says Alex.

“
Shtup
,
shtup,
kid,” says Fred. “It’s Yiddish—you’ve got to get the
sh
sound back here.” He raises his chin and pinches right under his jawbone.

“So what’s
shtupping
?”

“I’m not sure I should be talking to you about this,” says Fred, and from that Alex knows exactly what
shtupping
means.

“They’re having sex,” he says, less interested now that the mystery’s
solved. He tries to lean his chair back like Fred’s, but it doesn’t feel safe and he puts all four legs back on the ground.

“Like right now: he’s supposed to be here to watch the table so I can go see the Mad Brit talk.”

“What’s the Mad Brit?”

Again the eyes roll, and this time they stay pinned to the ceiling. “He’s the greatest writer in the history of comics. He’s a personal hero of mine, and I am not a person who has personal heroes. He’s also speaking right over there”—Fred points to the other end of the convention hall—“right now. And I’m stuck here, being asked if I’ll do a drawing of Ferret Lass for ten bucks, which is ironic, because Brett is currently—” Fred looks back down at Alex. “Never mind.”

“Did you ask him to stay?”

“No, but he knows how important this is to me.”

“So you told him it was important to you.”

“He should just know.”

“Can I say something mean?”

“Go nuts, kid.”

“That’s stupid. It’s one of the stupidest things adults do. Things are broken and things are important and they don’t say anything. They don’t say anything and nothing gets fixed.”

Without waiting for a response, Alex walks away, too, just like the man looking at the drawings did. He’s mad at Fred, even if there’s nothing to be mad at Fred about. Walking away with a really angry face helps a little, but the fact that there’s nothing to be mad at Fred about makes it harder to stop. Alex considers finding a spot to sit and read
Adam Anti & Nothing but Flowers,
but for some reason he feels angry at the book. He thinks about going to talk to his mom, but then his angry feeling gets even worse. So he just wanders around the convention hall, which seems like a big empty space now, the ceilings too high and the concrete floors slapping against the bottoms of his feet and everything loud and echoing.

There are practically no other kids here, which is stupid, because
there’s so much stuff for kids here. There are card games and action figures, there are bobblehead dolls and stuffed superheroes, but there are no kids anywhere to play with them. It makes Alex feel bad for the toys, and it makes him think of his toys back in their apartment in New York. What will happen to all the things he didn’t bring? Will she throw them out? Will she keep his room like a shrine and never go in there, never dust it or anything so it’s like one of the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History? There are things in his room he still wants: most of his books, a couple of the toys, his Mets hat. Why did he not bring them?

“Y
ou met with him or you had a meeting?” Gail asks. Whatever the answer is, she’s annoyed. Ed does not have a face made for smiling. There’s something unsettling about him when he smiles. He looks like a predatory animal wearing a funny hat.

“I don’t know what the difference is,” he says, setting a round of beers on the table. And then there’s this: Ed buying two rounds in a row without being asked. Usually, Ed skips out after the second round or begrudgingly buys the third after all three of them have sat dry for at least five minutes. This despite the fact that he’s making more than both of them. Or at least more than she is. There has been some body-snatching, mind-wiping foofaraw going on here in Chicago.

It’s late and they’re at a bar on Chicago’s South Side that Ed picked out. It is a perfect bar for Ed to have picked out, because it gives the impression of being divey without actually being a dive. Ed showed up an hour and a half late because Phil Weinrobe, Timely Comics’ editor in chief, had asked him to grab a drink.

“If you’re not sure, then you met with him,” she says.

“I can’t talk about it,” says Ed, beaming like he’s just gotten laid.

“Then it was a meeting,” concludes Gail, picking up her beer and trying to consume as much of it as she can before the real Ed returns and asks for it back.

“You can’t talk about it?” asks Geoff, sounding hurt. Geoff has a face made for smiling. When he smiles, he looks like an adorable animal wearing a funny hat. Gail decides she is drunk.

“You guys are the competition!” says Ed. “You’re the enemy.”

Gail slaps the table and points at Ed. “Exclusive contract,” she says. Ed smiles coyly. “Three years.” Ed smiles coyly. “Five years!” Ed smiles coyly. “Truckful of money,” she yells. People are starting to look at them.

“They gave you the Ferret,” says Geoff. Gail realizes that she and Geoff, who is also drunk, are projecting their own desires onto Ed’s meeting.

“I wouldn’t want the Ferret,” Ed says dismissively. Then he gives them that grin again, that sharklike grin. A shark wearing a fez, maybe. “It’s bigger than the Ferret.”

“The Ferret movie grossed half a billion,” says Geoff, who for one thing thinks about comic book characters in terms of their dollar value as intellectual property but also probably writes fanfic about the Ferret in his spare time. “What’s bigger than the Ferret?”

“‘Death of the Ferret,’” Gail says, muttering it into her beer. Everyone pauses, like when a gymnast vaults into the air and you’re waiting to see if she’ll stick the landing. Gail takes a deep breath. “The Gentleman kills the Ferret,” she explains. “Lures him into a trap and beats him to death with his bare fists. Ferret Lass goes crazy and seeks revenge. Kills the Gentleman, takes over the whole criminal empire of New York.” She realizes both of them are looking at her and not speaking. The same thing happened at one of their bullshit sessions years ago, when Geoff offhandedly said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there had been a cruise ship full of people from OuterMan’s home planet of Nebulon who’d been light-years away when the planet exploded and they showed up on Earth, a hundred aristocratic cruise-goers, all with the powers of OuterMan?” It was a silence and a stare that meant a real idea had been thrown on the table like a rummy card and they were waiting to see if the person who’d tossed it was going to pick it back up. She’s stuck the landing.

“You gender-bended the Ferret,” says Geoff.

“No, I didn’t,” Gail says. “I killed the Ferret.”

“But Ferret Lass, she’d drop the ‘Lass.’ She’d be the new Ferret.”

“You could run with that for at least three years,” says Ed.

“Next Ferret movie’s in two,” Geoff says. “He comes back from the dead before the movie drops. Fights the new Ferret.”

“She fights
him,
” says Gail. “He comes back bad.”

“You’d gender-bend and heel-turn the Ferret,” says Geoff, clearly impressed.

“You should pitch that,” says Ed.

“I’d need a meeting first,” Gail says, taking a deep swallow of beer to indicate the conversation is over. But the three of them are still mulling the idea, and Gail fights to keep herself from writing it on a bar napkin. She hopes she is not too drunk to remember it.

“It’s a crossover,” says Geoff, going back to playing twenty questions with Ed.

“Timely doesn’t do crossovers,” Ed says. “We do events.”

“You said ‘we,’” Gail points out. “You never say ‘we.’ You’re all Team Corporate Overlord now?”

“So it’s an event,” says Geoff.

“You are bursting. You are bursting to tell us.” She notices a little
sh
in her esses.

“I have been sworn to secrecy,” says Ed, putting his hand in the air. “All will be revealed in time.”

Remedial grinning lessons. Japanese smiling schools where they put a pencil behind your eyeteeth until your face learns the feeling of a natural smile.

“In time for the next round?” asks Gail, who is surprised to find her glass is empty.

“Los Angeles,” Ed says gravely. This is better. Gravely is better. It’s more Ed.

“This is the Los Angeles announcement,” says Geoff. There have been rumors for months that Timely will be announcing something big in Los Angeles. All the blogs have been running wild speculation about it. Gail was convinced Timely had hired the Mad Brit back, but when she saw
him wandering the convention floor that morning, Phil Weinrobe wasn’t holding his beard for him.

“It relates to the Los Angeles announcement,” says Ed.

“You are a terrible person for not telling us,” Gail says. “You are worse than a hundred Hitlers for not telling us what this is.”

“Don’t you want to be surprised?” says Ed, sounding a lot like Geoff. “Just once, don’t you want to go into something unspoiled?”