A Hundred Thousand Worlds (32 page)

A
lex is somewhat impressed. His father seems like he knows everybody here. The convention floor is packed with people, but at each of the booths for a movie studio or a television channel, the people who are working stop everything to say hi to his dad. People who are there for the convention ask for autographs or high fives or pictures. He’s sure it’s probably like this for his mom, too, but they never got the chance to just walk around. It makes Alex feel like he’s secondhand famous.

But Alex is here today on a mission, and he has no time for distractions. He’s got to get free of his dad, at least for a little bit.

“Can I wander around a little?” he asks his father.

“Did your mother let you wander around?” his father asks. The use of the past tense bothers Alex. His mother is still alive, can still let him do things, or forbid them. He wonders how long this will go on: his requests met with questions of precedent. It would be an easy system to take advantage of.
Did your mother let you ride a motorcycle?
Yup.
Did your mother let you eat nothing but pizza and ice cream?
Sure did!

“I’m allowed,” he says.

“I think you should stay with me,” says his father. “It’s too crowded in here.” His father is shying away from contact with anyone, as if they’re carrying some disease.

This does not fit with Alex’s plans. “I’ve got people I need to talk to,” he says.

“You’ve got people?” says his father. “You’re a big Hollywood player already?”

Alex does not like the tone and does not have time for this. “I’ll see you at the panel thing,” he says, counting on the fact that his father hasn’t developed the clairvoyant
Oh no you don’t
skills his mom has. He uses his invisibility powers. He uses his superspeed. In seconds he is out of sight of his father. He’s running full bore through the Los Angeles Comic-Con, through its streets and down its alleyways, and for the first time he thinks maybe he will keep running. For the first time, he cannot think of a reason to stop.

He runs down Artist Alley and sees Brett bent over his pages, and Alex thinks of running right by him, but he stops, skidding on his heels in front of Brett’s table, panting, cheeks flushed.

“Are you busy?” he asks.

Brett hesitates before he answers, which makes Alex worry. “I am, a little. What’s up?”

“We have to finish,” says Alex.

Brett sighs, and his face scrunches up into a face he’s never seen Brett make before. It’s a face Alex’s mom makes that means an excuse is coming.

“Is there any chance we can finish later?” Brett asks. “I’ve got a meeting in a half hour, and I have to do the dialogue and captions on these.” He holds up the page he’s working on. It shows whatever you’d call a car chase if it happened with spaceships. A space chase? A fleet of spaceships chase one solitary ship from the upper left corner of the page to the lower right.

“I’m not sure I’m going to be here later,” Alex says.

“That sounds dire,” says Brett.

“What’s
dire
?”

“Desperate,” says Brett. “Bad.”

“I’m trying not to think about it like that,” says Alex.

“Something you want to talk about?” asks Brett. And it is. It’s something Alex has wanted to talk about for a long time, and there’s been no one for him to talk about it with. Not his mom and not the Idea Man, and then who else is there? He wants to tell Brett everything that’s happening, but there’s no time anymore.

“We have to finish,” he says. And maybe it’s the way he says it, but Brett says okay and puts away the stuff he’s been working on and takes out his sketchbook.

“Where’d we leave off?” says Brett. “They’d been swallowed by a giant metal worm.”

“It was a train,” says Alex. “It was always just a train.” He sounds disappointed by this realization, but the story is changing behind him. The Golden City is becoming only Cleveland after all, and the shape-shifting girl was Brett’s girlfriend, whom Alex has never even met, or maybe the girl with the tail. If it weren’t written down and drawn in Brett’s drawings, all of the magic would be draining out of it. Alex has to get the rest of it told while there is still magic in it.

“So where did the train take them?” says Brett.

“To the last city.”

“What’s the last city like?” Brett sits with his pencil held above the page. Whatever Alex says now, whatever city he creates, will become real.

“It’s like New York,” says Alex. “It’s a lot like New York, only it’s still being built. The Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Public Library, everything is still being built. But the Astounding Tower and the Brooklyn Academy of Magical Fundamentals, they’re being built, too.”

His heart has not slowed down since he stopped running; if anything, it’s beating faster. He’s racing again, standing here in one place. On the page, scaffolding forms around the Astounding Tower.

“There are people,” he says, “not like in the Golden City. This city is full of people. And they go to work, but not all the time. They have time to play in the park and ride bikes. In the summer there are pools and fire hydrants that spray out water for kids to play in, like the movies.” And there are the kids, jumping around in the spout of a hydrant, and behind them other kids are on bikes, cruising toward him as if they’re about to jump out of the page.

“It sounds nice,” says Brett.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s nice,” says Alex. “And there are heroes. Not like
Captain Wonder or the Ferret, not superheroes. But regular people who are heroes. Only it’s not the same people all the time. They take turns.”

Brett flips to a blank page.

“So what do they do, now that they’re here? The boy and the robot?”

“They walk around,” says Alex, “and everyone knows them. Everyone’s seen them before, but they won’t say anything. They’re all so surprised. They guide the boy and the robot to the center of the city.”

Alex stops, out of breath. He doesn’t want them to be here. He doesn’t want them to come to the center of the last city, but it’s time. It’s time for the boy and the robot to come home.

“Tell me what’s there, Alex,” says Brett.

“There’s a statue,” he says. “Of the boy and the robot, together. It’s not a golden statue, because the people all made it themselves. It’s made of car parts and toasters and bits of aluminum foil and toys that weren’t even broken, but the kids wanted them to be part of the statue even if it meant they could never play with them again. It’s a beautiful statue; it shines like it was gold. It shines better than gold, because every part of it shines differently, all together.

“And there’s a plaque that explains it all. There was a terrible battle, and the boy and the robot, it was their turn to be heroes. They won the battle and they saved the city. They saved everyone. But to save them all, the boy and the robot had to forget. They had to forget everything, even that they were heroes.

“And at the bottom of the plaque is their names. Both their names.”

Alex is tired and he wishes he were home. He wishes he could curl up in his bed in his room and listen to the city noises with his eyes shut until he fell asleep.

“What are their names, Alex?” says Brett.

“I don’t know,” Alex says. “You can give them names if you want.”

Brett puts his pencil down, and for the first time, Alex looks at this last drawing, the boy and the robot surrounded by all of their friends, looking up at the statue they’ve built for them. “I don’t think I need the
story anymore,” says Alex. “I think I only needed it to get me here. I don’t need to know their names. If you do, though, you can give them names. It can be your story from now on.”

Alex opens up his backpack and takes out the rolled-up drawings he’s been carrying around for the past two weeks. They are like maps, and one by one he takes them out of his backpack and lays them on the table in front of Brett.

“But who were they battling against?” Brett asks. “And what happened to the shape-shifting girl? How did the boy know how to fix the robot?”

“Those are all good questions,” says Alex.

Brett grins at him, and Alex knows there’s a part of this that Brett doesn’t understand. Brett grabs him by the shoulders. “When we get back to Brooklyn,” Brett says, “I’m going to come to your house and shake you until you give me the answers.” To prove he’s serious, he shakes Alex back and forth and side to side. Alex lets himself feel all kinds of discombobulated, and when the shaking stops, it takes a second before he can see Brett’s face clearly again. Brett’s face has gone all blurry.

“I’d like that a lot,” says Alex. He shakes Brett’s hand, because he’s not sure you’re supposed to hug at the end of a co-mission. It’s a good handshake, though. Then Alex turns and, using his superspeed, runs away at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour.

F
or some reason, the kiosk in the convention center that sells phones is lined with mirrors. It’s important, Val supposes, to see how it will look held up to your cheek, or how you will look gazing down into it. No less important than with a necklace or a top, and you expect jewelry and clothing stores to be mirrored. But every time she sees her reflection, she’s surprised she doesn’t look as haggard as she feels. As if the coat of makeup the girl studiously applied, chattering the entire time about Val’s cheekbones and the strength of her jawline, is blocking Val’s exhaustion, shielding it from the world.

The phone she settles on is brown, like an extra-shiny chocolate bar. She can picture it against Alex’s cheek, and the way it will resonate with his eyes, making them seem unfathomably dark and deep. She worries he might look brooding, or that when he’s older his eyes will give him a monkish appearance. But it’s only a phone, and by the time he’s old enough to brood, it’ll be at least outdated, or more likely obsolete, and he’ll have replaced it with another. She pays for it and, stepping out of the kiosk, cracks the plastic shell of its packaging like a lobster claw. She hesitates before throwing away the instructions, but kids never need instructions for pieces of technology like this. It’s all built to match some intuition that only appeared in the population a generation after Val’s. With great care, as if a typo would form a permanent disconnect between them, she programs her number into the phone and labels it
VALERIE TORREY.
She immediately corrects this to
MOM
.

She tucks the new phone into one pocket and pulls her own phone
from the other. For a moment she examines it, noticing for the first time that the color, a fire-truck red, must look like an angry wound against the pale of her skin. When she gets back to New York, she will buy a new phone. One that matches her eyes. When she gets back to New York, she will buy any number of new things, she will become the kind of woman who shops, who treats shopping as a primary or even sole activity for a day. Maybe it won’t stick, but she can try it out. When she gets back to New York, she will buy a new Val. One that matches her eyes.

She programs Alex’s new number into the phone, the 310 area code seeming like an obvious error. When she’s done, she checks the time. Tim is late. Tim is always late, on the rare occasions he leaves the apartment. He never used to be. It was a running joke among the
Anomaly
crew that turning the lights on in the morning was strictly a union job and Tim was violating contracts coming in as early as he did. But now Tim is unaffiliated with time, the two having little use for each other. Louis tries to keep him on schedule, and Tim is generally obedient. But it’s only that he understands he’s supposed to be somewhere when expected, not that he feels any push to do so. He’s shrugged off the burdens of letting people down and created for himself a world where nothing is expected of him, and anything that’s given is treated as a gift.

Val sits on a bench. She wants to call Alex, but she knows it would only ring to the phone in her other pocket. She thinks of calling Andrew’s phone, but the thought of having to ask to speak to Alex is so hateful it pushes away even the desire to talk to her son. She finds herself hoping Alex will use this phone only to call her, never program in another number, not even his father’s. The phone will be like the hotline between the White House and the Kremlin. Private. Secure. He can keep it under glass, for emergencies, and he’ll never say
Hold on, Mom, I’ve got another call.
A direct line, flimsy tether.

When Tim arrives, ten minutes late, below his average, he looks dapper.
Remarkable,
Val thinks,
that we’re all bringing not our best selves to this, but selves that are better than us, more polished and better mended.
Maybe the panel will be a series of meltdowns, veneers dissolving into crying jags and screaming fits.

“You look terrible,” he says as he sits down next to her. “Not that exactly. But you look like you’re doing terribly. Have you slept?”

“No,” she says, unsurprised that Tim’s clairvoyance has seen right through her. From the moment Andrew made contact again, told her the terms he was exacting, Tim has been her only confidant. Now she’s regretting her choice, unsure how much he remembers of what’s going on, how much of their confidence he’s retained. She doesn’t have it in her now to explain it all to him again, but she needs someone she can talk to who doesn’t need recaps.

“You should,” he says. “Sleep. Most important meal of the day. And the beds at the hotel are very nice.”

“Squishy, Alex said,” she recalls. She’s amazed how quickly she’s switched to the past tense for him, some grammatical demon in her already letting him go.

“Yes,” Tim says brightly. “Squishy. That’s right. He’s good with words, your boy.”

“He’s not my boy anymore,” says Val.

“Well, that’s nonsense,” Tim says. As if he knows sense from nonsense. As if Val hasn’t listened to him babble on at length, or helped Louis prune the leaves of the Book that no one would want, that would make people question why they’d come there at all. You invest ridiculous efforts in raising a child, with some always unspoken hope that he’ll reach a point where he’ll be grateful, but where did her efforts on Tim’s behalf go? Were they thrown into some hole in the past that he can’t bring himself to remember? Or has she spent all these years shoveling clouds into a ditch, hoping to fill it even though her efforts evaporate the moment they leave the spade? And if that’s the case, can she count those efforts wasted?

“They want to do an
Anomaly
movie,” she says. “Andrew. Some of the writers from the show. A producer somewhere, I don’t know.”

“Why would they want to do that?” he asks.

“There’s money in it,” she says, more a question than an answer. “All they’re waiting on is me.”

“Are you keeping them waiting?” he says.

“I didn’t want to do that to you,” says Val, putting her hand on his. She hates the little part of herself that feels proud for saying it, but that little part breaks up when Tim says, “Do what to me?”

She’s turned the thing over and over in her mind and tried to find a way to say yes that isn’t selfish. But so far, she’s been unable. It always boils down to hurting her friend to keep her child, or not even keep him but retain him. Stay with him. She’s tried to take herself out of the equation, weighing only the benefit to Alex against the harm to Tim. Even in that, she has to think of the actual benefit to Alex of having her around and not its reverse. She’s come into this conversation without knowing how she wants it to end, which is always a dangerous thing with Tim, who prefers scripts.

“Take your creation from you,” she says.

“Do you want to do it?” says Tim. “This movie?”

There is nothing in her that wants it, not for herself. It is a means to an end and nothing more. “It’d be a reason to stay in L.A.,” she says.

“It seems to me you already have a reason to stay in L.A.,” says Tim.

“But there’s no work,” she says. “No one here wants Valerie Torrey unless she’s playing Bethany Frazer.”

“That could change,” he says. “You’d have to give it time.”

“I’ve got offers,” she says. “In New York, and in London. Alex would love London.”

“Louis said something about Gertrude,” says Tim.

Val laughs. “I’d be leaving my son to play one of the worst mothers in theater.”

“That could be your gimmick,” says Tim. “Follow this up with Mama Rose and Jocasta. Maybe
Psycho: The Musical
.”

“Will you write it for me?”

Tim smiles at her, and it’s an old smile. It’s the one he gave her when
he cast her, the one he gave her when she told Tim and Rachel she was pregnant. It’s a smile that affirms everything and forgives everything.

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting something for yourself,” he says. “I think parents forget that their children want to see them happy.”

“Their children also want to see them,” says Val. “I don’t think I can give him up and go back to New York to live my life.”

“You also can’t give up your life to stay here,” he says. “If you want my blessing, you’ve got it. I’m just not certain you want it.”