A Hundred Thousand Worlds (23 page)

S
he wasn’t lying: the extra room gets great light. Particularly in the morning. Brett worries the shift in time zones will keep him up at all hours. But the first morning in her apartment, in her bed, the California sun reaches into his skull. Reconfigures all the gears in his clockworks. By the time she rolls out of bed, he’s been working for an hour. He cobbles together breakfast from the supplies in her kitchen. They eat granola and slices of oranges that are a little suspect. They return to bed giggling. Page three spends the day basking in sunlight, alone and unfinished. He goes back to it later in the evening, under a lamp that makes everything the color of clover honey. But he cannot get back to Proxima Centauri. So in a kind of defeat that is also a victory, he returns to bed. To her.

He was surprised Fred had approved of this plan. And with no protest or snark. He took it as a sign that Fred was finally recognizing Brett’s work as something that took time. Couldn’t be thrown together in the back of a speeding van. The pencils for the last issue were going to be rushed. But Fred agreed they should use the traveling money from Black Sheep to fly Brett ahead to Los Angeles to finish the pencils for the last issue while Fred brought the van the rest of the way. Monday morning, Fred drove both of them to the airport. Said goodbyes. Promised to meet them at the convention center on Friday. Even kissed her on the cheek, to the surprise of everyone involved.

And now it’s Wednesday morning. Los Angeles shakes him out of bed. Coaxes him to the drawing table with sunlight. The pages are white as fresh milk. Asking to be scarred with his pencils. When she wakes up, he
doesn’t hear her. She has to come in and say hello. Remind him she’s there. In this light, she’s amazing. Everything is amazing in this light. She looks over his shoulder as he draws. Circles become heads and torsos. She is going to meet her friend Nell for lunch. Nell is a doula. But she’s a doula for women who run modeling agencies. It is not quite a contact. Not quite an in. But it’s something. Anyway, Nell is buying. She invites Brett along.

It is hot in the apartment. Brett contorts himself so he doesn’t sweat onto his pages. When she comes back later in the afternoon, he’s glad to take a break. They work together on dinner. A stir-fry. She’s vegetarian. Which he did not know. They split a bottle of wine. Then another. He says he should get back to work. Get a few more hours in. But he doesn’t protest much.

Thursday morning, he checks his e-mail on her computer to see if Fred’s sent the rest of the script, but there’s nothing. He’s itching to continue. He knows where the story has to go; this far into it, there’s a momentum that makes everything inevitable. And after working with Fred for this long, it’s not unreasonable to predict what he will do next. Even if he’s wrong, he can waste a day working on something unusable or waste a day not working. It comes to the same thing.

She sleeps late. She burns the eggs. The smell pulls him away from his pages. They taste as if they’ve had bits of crayon mixed in. He excitedly explains a particularly knotted plot thread they introduced back in issue eight, “Hang On to Yourself.” He’d been worried they’d never manage to resolve it.

“Lady Stardust captures David’s personality, in this case a clown called Beep Beep, and hands him over to Factor Max, the spy agency he used to work for,” he says. “They claim they’ve found a cure for the Persona virus by integrating all of his possible identities. But Lady Stardust realizes that what they’re trying to do is turn David into a kind of personality aggregator, to make him into everyone at once. This David would be the ultimate information source for Factor Max, even if it meant David, her David, would be left forever drowning in a sea of personalities. Once
Lady Stardust discovers this plan, she kills Beep Beep and escapes the Factor Max base on Hammurab.”

He sounds more like Fred when he talks about
Lady Stardust.
His sentences stretch and entwine.

“All of that implies that David’s identities have an a priori existence. I always assumed they blip into being, complete with personal histories, and the universe fills in everyone else’s memories of them. But this means that David is becoming people who already are. Which also means that Lady Stardust is not killing off iterations of David, but actual people with real histories and families. I thought of her like a sculptor. Chipping away extraneous pieces to uncover David hidden in a block of personalities. But in fact, she’s a murderer, many times over. This being a comic book, we can’t let that slide.”

They move from the sink to the shower. She washes herself languidly. Vies for his attention. No avail. He is in deep space. Her signals are barely coming through.

“But what if,” he says, “what if the penultimate persona, the last faux David that needs to be killed before David returns to himself, is
her
? Is Lady Stardust? Then you could have this spectacular ending where she finds his antepenultimate identity and gets him onto a spaceship aimed at the heart of a sun, the center of Proxima Centauri. She confesses everything. How much she loves him. All the horrible things she’s done to get him back. In that moment there’s no turning back; she kills the antepenultimate David and then crashes the ship into the sun. A second later, David wakes up in bed with Lady Stardust, exactly where the series started.”

She says nothing during these ruminations. After the shower and the fiery death, she shoves Brett onto her bed. Fucks him without looking at him. Stares out the window, even when she comes. He wonders if she fucked him to shut him up. He lies on the bed as she gets dressed. He offers to go with her to run her errands. She says “No, it’s fine.” She doesn’t say where she’s going. When she’s likely to be back.

He gets dressed. Returns to his drawing table. He fills a bowl with almonds, which he eats over the next several hours. While he works.

It’s late when she gets back. She’s drunk. Wearing something nicer than when she went out. Something she must have just bought. Her body seems rumpled, while her clothes are crisp. He asks what she’s been up to. From the other room she calls something that sounds like
friends.
It could be something else. Sometimes she wants to fuck when she’s drunk. But not tonight. She heads directly to the bedroom. Brett considers joining her, even after he hears her hitting the bed still in her new clothes. But he looks at the page he’s working on, at the unfinished panel. Lady Stardust destroying the ship’s steering mechanism after she’s set the controls for the heart of the sun. She stands completed in the foreground. The mechanism has only been sketched in. Brett knows precisely how it should look. He worries he might not remember in the morning. The mental image he’d come back to would be a lesser version of the one he has right now. He adjusts the light and returns to work.

You assume their gods are weak. Strong gods would never have let their people be conquered. So you spit on their shrines. You behead their statues, as you’ve beheaded so many of their followers. You shit in their temples, and when, just as you are wiping your ass, one of their feeble gods appears to you, why would you cower? Why would you kneel? Their people are reduced to nothing. Aren’t, then, their gods even less than that?

But this god with his winged heels, who looks haggard, who may have at one point been in the battlefields among his people, in a way that your gods don’t need to, because they are powerful even from the sky, he looks at you. And in that moment he sees in you all of the sins of your people. Every fire set, every town sacked, every woman raped, although you yourself never took part in this aspect of victory. Strange to your comrades, your love for your bride makes you not want to fuck other women, because you find the prospect unpleasant.

And he casts you out.

You are in a strange place. A place you know is not on your earth, even though you have never considered that there are places other than your earth. Things, great and mighty things, stride above you, tripodal. Around you scuttle armored beasts on six legs. They are like the water striders and crayfish you would snatch at in the creeks near your village as a child. But huge, and metal. You do not yet have the word
alien,
but soon it will be given to you, when the people of this planet, who are like you but colored like grass and with eyes that glow red, place the small worm, the worm of words, in your ear so that you can hear them and understand their jabbering. One of
the water striders attacks you, but your sword severs his leg and you are saved. It is only after you have saved yourself that you realize you have also saved a group of the green people’s smallings, who were on an outing. You are taller than they. They think your tunic and your helmet are a hard skin. You are a hero to them.

The three-legged things, they tell you, are carnivorous. The six-legged creatures are scavengers and ultimately harmless. And the green people who look just like you, only green, with their women who look just like women, call themselves Derridians. And their planet is Derrid. But they have never heard of Earth.

Their mages have ideas. To cast you deep into the black, that you might land on your home somehow. Because of course your home is somewhere, out there in the black. They offer to fire you, like a stone from a slingshot, with no target in mind. They have the magic to do this.

You know a stone fired at random cannot hope to hit its target. And if there is this world out there, so far away from yours, what worlds might you hit, slung from this one into the ether? You are treated well here, hailed as a protector. Their girls cast their bright red eyes at you in a look you can understand. That look is not so alien.

But she is out there. Your bride who allowed you to go to war, to defeat the Romans and their gods so that you could be glorious among the tribe, so your child in her belly could be heir to that glory. And if their mage can fling you out into space with even a hope of finding your way back to her? It is a small risk to take.

“I
t smells like my junior high school out there,” says Gail as she steps into the ladies’ dressing room. Something apparently went wrong with the air-conditioning at the Los Angeles Convention Center last night, and while it is cool on the convention floor now, this morning when she arrived it was stifling. In the dressing room, the girls are two to a fan. They are all in costume already, except for Val, who Gail supposes is in a costume of a sort.

“It is rank with boy,” says Flail.

“It reeks of boy,” says Flog.

“Avoid areas with low ceilings,” Gail warns them. “It collects. It eddies.” She sits down next to Val and hands her a bottle of water, which Val silently accepts. At some point during the train ride here, Gail became a bit of a mother to Val, bringing her food or sending some with Alex when he went back to their berth. Checking in now and then, trying to coax Val out for a walk, or to take some air when they stopped. Gail had begun to think of her in terms of a puppet, not so much one with its strings cut as one from which the enlivening hand has been removed.

This morning, Alex came to Gail’s hotel room, asking if she could help his mom get ready. But by the time Gail got to their room, Val was dressed and prepared to meet the public, looking like a copy of herself. Two-dimensional and blurred slightly around the edges. Gail and Alex each took one of Val’s hands and, not sure whether or not she needed to be led, guided her down to the dressing room.

“I was hoping there would be more film people,” says Spectacle Girl,
wearing a baggy sweatshirt over her tights. Her accent is thick, like in a high school production of
Oklahoma!
Gail imagines it is always warm wherever she’s from, because she never stops shivering, all of her exposed, tanned skin permanently pricked with gooseflesh.

“Because you’re an actress now?” asks Red Emma.

“I could be,” says Spectacle Girl, defensively.

“She’s got better odds than we have,” says the Diviner.

“We could play her lesbian mothers,” says Red Emma.

“I’m not dykey enough to play anyone’s lesbian mother,” the Diviner says.

“That’s okay. I’m dykey enough for both of us.”

“Look at her,” says the Diviner, pointing at Spectacle Girl. “She could play sixteen.”

“If she was a man,” says Red Emma, “she could play sixteen till she was thirty.”

“By thirty she’ll be washed up,” says Flail.

“By washed up she means doing theater,” the Diviner explains to the rest of the room.

“What about you, Writer Lady?” ExSanguina asks Gail. The way she says it makes Gail feel like a superheroine, like the rest of them. Writer Lady, harnessing the power of a thousand word processors. Beware her mighty revisions! “Why don’t you write for the movies instead of comic books?” says ExSanguina. “Money’s got to be better.”

“You know how few women write comic books?” Gail asks. “There’s even fewer women writing movies. Of all the movies made, let’s be generous and say only three-quarters are about men.”

“More like nine-tenths,” says Red Emma.

“And of course all of those are written by men,” says the Astounding Woman.

“Of that remaining fourth,” says Gail, “three-quarters of
those
are written by men, too.”

“Leaving us a quarter of a quarter,” says ExSanguina.

“A sixteenth!” says Flog.

“Very good, dear,” says the Diviner. “Gold star for you.”

“So it’s hard to break in,” says ExSanguina.

“It’s nearly impossible,” says Gail. “And I’ve already done the nearly impossible once. I’ve managed to climb to the middle of my industry. To the point I can pay my rent as a writer, and a couple people read my books. And maybe some of those are girls who will grow up to be comics writers. I didn’t have that. All the writers I looked up to were men. If I tried to jump over, I’d be at the bottom again.”

“But you’re an established writer,” says ExSanguina. “That must help.”

“I’m an established comics writer. Middle rung in comics is slightly below bottom rung in movies.”

“Better working than looking for work, at our age,” says the Diviner.

“What difference does age make if you’re a writer?” says Red Emma. Gail cannot decide if she likes Red Emma’s contrary nature or can’t stand it, or just wants to see what’s under her trench coat.

“Age makes a difference to everybody,” says the Diviner.

“You had to be thirty when you started,” says Spectacle Girl to Val, who has been silent this whole time, sipping her water in the corner. She turns as if she’s just woken up.

“Twenty-eight, when I started,” she says quietly. “Grande dame.”

“Ancient,” says the Diviner.

“TV’s different,” says Val. “The box is more forgiving.”

“That’s going to be the title of my autobiography,” says Red Emma.

“Won’t be forgiving for long,” says the Diviner. “Higher definition means more visible lines.”

“Means younger actresses,” says the Astounding Woman, as if she is cautioning them.

“Twenty-one-year-olds playing forty,” says the Diviner.

“And then they all expect that’s what forty will look like,” says Red Emma.

“I used to watch you when I was a kid,” Spectacle Girl tells Val. “Season four and on. You rocked old.”

“I was thirty-two,” says Val.

“You were a MILF,” says Spectacle Girl.

“I despise that term,” says the Diviner.

“Why?” asks Flail. “It denotes a category of sexuality more easily applied to women of an advanced age.”

“Don’t say ‘advanced age,’” says the Astounding Woman.

“It denotes dual purpose,” says the Diviner. “‘Look at her. She’s good for
two
things: bonking and breeding.’”

“I saw you in
Playboy of the Western World,
” says ExSanguina. “In New York. Four years ago?”

“You saw that?” says Val.

“I wouldn’t have known it was you if I hadn’t known,” says ExSanguina. “You looked completely different. It was incredible.”

“It felt incredible,” says Val, as if she’s realizing it as she says it. It’s the first time in days that Gail has seen her look at all animated. “It was like remembering someone I used to be.”