A Hundred Thousand Worlds (33 page)

G
ail skips the greenroom and heads right off the front of the stage at the National Women in Comics Panel. She doesn’t put her head down and barrel through, although she wants to. She takes her time and takes compliments and shakes hands, until, of course, she gets to Geoff.

“What the fuck was that?” he says, not angry so much as panicked.

“Was I wrong?” she says. She puts her hand on his back and pulls him along with her through the crowd, meaning they’re attracting twice as many fans and moving half as quickly. It also means their conversation has to be carried on in staccato sentences between greeting well-wishers.

“I’m not saying you were wrong,” Geoff says, then stops to answer one quick question about the Astounding Family announcement. “But.” Signs an old issue of
OuterMan.
“Why now?”

“I had an audience,” says Gail, autographing the first issue of
The Diviner
she wrote. “They asked.”

“I can fix this for you,” he says. He poses for a quick picture with a fan dressed as the Blue Torch. “I’ll call Breverton.”

“I don’t want it fixed,” says Gail as they step out of the lecture hall and onto the main convention floor. Security has cleared a space to allow this room to empty before the
Anomaly
panel, which is in a half hour. Twenty feet away, a horde is waiting to get into the room. The staff is going to open up dividers and make the room four times bigger, at least. The math works out.

“Let me call him,” Geoff says, and before Gail can protest, he’s gone, probably to find cell phone reception so he can save the day. Gail runs
her hand back through her hair. She’s sweating like Nixon. She wants to drink ten beers and run a lap around the outside of the convention center and curl up in a ball and cry. Preferably in that order.

She sees that Brett has walked around the edges of the line, which snakes back and forth through a maze of velvet rope such that it’s actually a square of people about the size of a basketball court. He seems like he’s looking for someone he knows who will let him cut the line, but panel queues are like breadlines in pre-glasnost Russia. There are no friends here, only stony-faced comrades. He comes over when he sees her, then pauses.

“Are you okay?” he says.

“I’m not sure I am, actually,” says Gail.

He points at the room, which is still emptying out. “This was the women-in-comics panel, right?”

“National Women,” she says.

“Aren’t you pretty much the only woman who writes for them?”

“Not anymore,” she says, raising her eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

“They hired someone new?”

“I think I quit,” she says. Then she says it again, to hear it out loud. “I think I just quit National.” She hasn’t said the words, and Geoff was right: it can probably be fixed. Not by her, mind you, but Geoff can still fix it.

A girl who looked like she was probably an undergrad at one of the UC schools had asked a pretty straightforward question. “As a woman, do you feel like you have creative freedom in your job at National?” And Gail decided she would give a straightforward answer.

“Oh, not at all,” she said. “But it has nothing to do with being a woman. It’s the nature of working as an intellectual-property generator for a multinational corporation. But as a woman, as the only woman writing for National at the moment, I’m pretty well insulated.”

“Insulated how?” asked Joy, one of Gail’s editors, who was moderating the panel. But Gail couldn’t tell if Joy was offering her an out or egging her on to tell the whole truth. There could have been a mischievous glint in Joy’s eye, or it might have been a reflection of Gail’s own.

“If National fired me,” she said, “they’d have to hire another female writer within, I’m going to say, three months. As long as I’m the token woman writer on staff, I’ll be okay. Like right now, they’re replacing me on
The Speck & Iota
with Ryder Starlin. Who, shockingly, is still alive. They told me this at the same time they asked me to come out and wave the diversity flag for National all summer. Which I thought was a little tactless. But, wait, what was your question?”

Everyone laughed, maybe a little uncomfortably. Gail tried to read Joy’s expression, but Joy avoided eye contact for the rest of the panel. Which was probably all the information Gail needed to determine the steaming pile of shit she’d stepped in.

“I probably didn’t quit altogether,” Gail says. “I just don’t have an immediate job right now.”

“Me neither,” says Brett.

Gail punches him lightly on the shoulder. “You have your drag-queens-in-space thing,” she says. She picked up the first three issues from Fred yesterday, and they were good. They were more fun than most of what she’s read recently. They didn’t have the same feeling of being written while wearing mental handcuffs.

Brett shakes his head. “Just submitted the last issue,” he says.

Gail wants to congratulate him, but his face says he’s not up for congrats. “So now what?” she asks.

“No fucking idea,” says Brett.

“Me neither,” she says. She checks the time on her phone. The panel starts in twenty minutes. “You know that thing you were talking about last night,” she says, “with the Visigoth?” He shrugs. “That was a good idea.”

“It’s like an idea for an idea,” says Brett, as if that’s a bad thing. As if that’s not where things start.

“You and what’s-his-name should work on it,” Gail says. “Pitch it to Timely. He’s got an in there now.”

“Fuck him,” says Brett.

It’s a hard-sounding statement, anger tempered by resignation. Not
the kind of thing you get over. “I was wondering if that was a
Fuck him
situation,” she says.

“I should quit,” says Brett. “I should go back to New York and get a real job and make up with my girlfriend back home.”

Gail laughs. “What the hell’s a real job?”

“I don’t know,” says Brett. “One where you wear a suit.”

“Sounds awful.”

“It does.”

They both contemplate a job where you have to wear a suit. One that you have to go to every day. One that doesn’t follow you around and live in your head.

“It wouldn’t have to be the Visigoth,” she says, almost to herself.

“Huh?”

“I mean, why play with someone else’s toys?” she says. Something is picking up speed, coming together. “We could write an epic space-opera-type thing and not have it be a Timely character or a National character. We could make something up.”

“We?” says Brett.

Gail scratches her nose and shrugs. “You got a job?” she says.

“No.”

“Me neither.” It’s not quite an idea, but it’s an idea for an idea. There would be a lot of logistics to work out. It would be a collaboration, which is not Gail’s thing. She hates to admit it about herself, but she likes having an artist she can treat a little like an employee. This would be more like a partner. Still, she’s seen the kid’s work. He sure can generate intellectual property.

“You going to Val’s thing?” she asks.

“I was thinking about it,” says Brett. “But the line looks nuts.”

“I’m on the list,” says Gail. It’s one of the coolest things you can say. She thinks about polishing her nails on her shoulder after saying it.

“There’s a list?” says Brett. Gail turns to the woman with the clipboard, who is about fifty and works for the convention center. She clearly doesn’t give a single fuck about what’s going on. At Chicago and Cleveland, all the
staffers were also rabid fans. This woman looks like she can’t wait until these geeks clear out and make room for the boat show.

“Gail Pope,” says Gail. “I’m on the list, right?”

“Yep,” says the woman, who does not think “I’m on the list” sounds as cool as Gail thinks it does.

“Do I get a plus one?” says Gail.

The woman gives her a long, withering stare. Gail prays that when she is fifty, she has a stare like that in her arsenal of stares. “Honey,” the woman says, “I couldn’t give a fuck.”

“Perfect!” says Gail, clapping her hands excitedly that she guessed the number of fucks the woman would be willing to give. “We’ll go to this,” she says to Brett, “and then we’ll grab a drink after and discuss.”

The woman lets them both into the hall, where dividing walls are being beaten back into their holding pens. The room is vast now, as if it wants to remind them both that the most popular comic book on the market is read by a fraction of the number of people who watch the worst-rated network television show.

“I’m supposed to go to this other thing with . . .” Brett trails off.

“Ferret Lass?” says Gail.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Can’t say I blame you,” says Gail. “She seems like a good egg.” Gail’s not sure exactly what she means by this, having never used the term “good egg” before. What she’d like to communicate is that the girl is cute and seems smarter than she lets on. But to the best of her knowledge, there’s no word for that. “What about the make-up-with-your-girlfriend-back-home part of the plan?” she asks.

“That was more of a long-term plan,” says Brett as they take their seats in the front row. What he means is that it was more of an admitting-defeat-and-becoming-someone-else’s-idea-of-a-grown-up plan. She wonders if, like herself, Brett measures himself against some imaginary parental scale according to whose measurements he is permanently unfinished, immature.

“When I started writing
The Speck,
” she says, sounding a little like a seasoned veteran offering advice to the wide-eyed rookie, “I had ten years plotted out. I only got to write three.” She thinks about those dead stories, stories she would have loved to write. Then she files them away, next to ideas about killing the Ferret, or a story where Red Emma learns that her husband faked his own death, arranging the deaths of their children to do it. There’s the one where the whole R-Squad lose their powers and they all leave the R-Estate and take on day jobs. In the end, it’s a trap designed by Labrinthyne, but the book is months and months of Medea trying to get a modeling career going and Computron working a shitty job in middle management. She hates Computron so much. “I don’t believe in long-term plans,” she says. “Ferret Lass, you think she’d mind if I was there and we talked shop for a bit?”

“Probably not,” says Brett.

“Well, then,” Gail says, “let’s make some short-term cosmic plans.”

V
al stands at the edge of the stage as they begin to let the crowd into Hall H. Tim is late. Andrew is late. As she watches people find their seats, Val imagines that it will be only her on the stage; questioned, scrutinized. From somewhere behind her, she hears the busy noises of Tim arriving, a flurry of questions and corrections. But at the same time, she sees Alex and Andrew enter through the back of the hall, hand in hand. They’re walking together, neither leading the other, and although fans wave and tug at Andrew, he stays leaned over toward Alex, bent like a flower toward the sun. It’s a tropism they never teach you, a way to stay in earshot with someone so little, so low to the ground that his words have trouble rising to adult ears. Val scans Alex’s face for harm, for sadness, but there’s only a bit of worry. Andrew sits him down in the front row and squats down on his haunches to talk to him, eye to eye. She strains forward as if she might be able to hear what he’s saying, but the room is full of buzz and chatter, and Alex’s face is eclipsed by Andrew. Val can see his hand resting on Alex’s shoulder, right where it meets his neck. Something is passing between them that Val is not a part of, and when Andrew stands and Alex’s face is revealed, the worry is gone. She wonders what Andrew might have said, and then wonders what she might have said, if it was her there. What words might change that face? As Andrew makes his way up to the stage, Alex spots her peeking from the edges and waves with a frantic happiness, but stays pinned to his seat.

The moderator claps his hands. “Oh good, we’re all here,” he says. He pulls Val back from the edge of the stage and arranges them all in a line:
Andrew, Val, Tim. “I’ll bring you out one at a time,” he says. Then he steps out onto the stage and buzz and chatter focus into a roar.

It is hard to remember who you were six years ago, because it involves thinking about who you are right now and carefully subtracting everything that’s happened to you in those six years. As Val sits on the dais between Tim and Andrew, waiting for the panel to start, all she wants is to leap over the table, grab Alex, and hold him until everything else falls away. But something Val knows now that she did not know six years ago is that you keep your promises, one way or another. You keep them willingly or you keep them with blood in your mouth and a pain in your stomach that doesn’t abate, only spreads.

So she is doing this thing she agreed to. She will be, for a little while, a younger version of Valerie Torrey, one who was inextricably linked with a fictional woman named Bethany Frazer. Val thinks about how much their lives dictated each other’s, how Valerie’s pregnancy caused Frazer’s, how the infidelity of Frazer’s partner and lover, Ian Campbell, equally fictional, bled into the real world and destroyed Valerie’s marriage. How in the end they both chose to run, Frazer disappearing completely into wherever it is a character goes when her story ends. Val disappearing ineptly, only for a time, and then washing up on shore here like something broken.

She flips a switch in her head and six years disappear and she is thankfully not in this moment anymore. She cannot even see Alex in the audience, only the fans in an undifferentiated mass.

When the questions begin, it becomes apparent that Tim has found the same switch somewhere in the cluttered maze of his own head. He is charming and funny and fierce. He’s the person he used to be, and for a second she thinks how unfair it is that this is the version of Tim that Andrew gets to see, the one he’ll walk away thinking is real. But the thought fades, and despite herself she is enjoying being here with both of them again.

“Can you explain how timespace works?” a fan asks.

“Yes,” says Andrew flatly. This gets laughs.

“Timespace works however Tim says it works when the cameras roll,” Val says. This gets more laughs.

“I’m a very powerful man,” Tim says. More laughs. The tone is set: they will all quip their way through this. They will smile and be clever, because clever is safe. They field several questions this way, playful with the audience and with one another.

“Where do you think Bethany Frazer is right now?” someone asks her. Val tries to come up with a quip, but the question sticks with her. She thinks Frazer may be in her head, that maybe an actress carries all of her characters inside herself like dresses in a suitcase. Or maybe she’s six years ago in a direction Val can’t point to. She thinks about Gail, who must be in the audience somewhere, and that maybe Frazer is in her now, or out in some space of pure idea and story that people go to whenever they need something from it. The answer she gives, of course, is simpler than all that.

“I’d like to think she’s peacefully raising her child somewhere. But that doesn’t sound like Frazer to me. I imagine she’s fighting. For her past, or her future. Or for her child.”

This does not get laughs, but solemn nods. Someone asks Andrew the companion question, “Where is Ian Campbell right now?”

“Assembling an evil army to invade the past,” he says without pause. It cracks them up, partly because of the contrast with her answer. Six years, and one thing has not changed: Valerie is still playing Andrew’s straight man.

A fan asks what was going to happen in the seventh season, and Val and Andrew both defer to Tim.

“It was always supposed to end with Ian dropping back into the past, into that cow pasture in Kansas, his mind addled, remembering nothing. It was always going to end where it started. To my mind, there are only two valid endings: death and return. And they’re the same. I like our ending better, though, because all of you have written your own seventh season in your heads. You started from the moment the sixth season ended. In your heads, Campbell and Frazier are having adventures and discovering
things I never could have come up with. We stopped when everything was still possible, and I always liked that.”

“Speaking of death,” says one audience member, “what do you think about the death of Constance Robinette, who hanged herself in her cell early this week?”

The name drops into the room like an anvil onto a mirror. Andrew looks as if he’s been slapped, and Val moves immediately to put her arms around Tim, as if this could protect him. For six years, the name has not been spoken around him, and she’s scared that hearing it now will break even the pieces of him to pieces.

She searches through the garbled mess of their conversation in the cell to find some clue that this was coming. She tries to look at that moment through the lens of Constance Robinette’s death. It should be an easy thing to do. She can look at her life, or Tim’s or Andrew’s, through the lens of Rachel’s death. But the time she spent in the cell with the woman who murdered her friend has nothing more to reveal. Only ramblings about time and love and freedom, nothing that means anything.

She’s stunned when Tim pulls the microphone closer to himself and begins, softly, to speak.

“Stories infect us,” he says. “They enter through our brains and they cross the blood–brain barrier until they are in every part of us. Generally it’s benign. It’s an infection that keeps us alive, keeps our hearts beating. Somehow this story that we all loved, that brought all of you here, turned malignant in Constance. It mixed itself with other stories in her blood and changed into something terrible. There must have been so much pain in her. So much hurt and damage. I can’t blame myself anymore for what Constance did. I can’t blame her, either. That’s all in the past, and we’re not. Not anymore. Next question.”

Val looks at Tim to make sure he’s not too badly shaken. He looks pale, drained. Andrew looks tired as well, but more specifically, he looks careworn. It’s a look she’s seen staring back from many mirrors, after nights awake worrying about some tiny thing with Alex that turns out to
be nothing, a stomach bug or a sniffle. Or some vast generality of him, future abstractions that, to stay up fretting about them now is what her mother calls “borrowing trouble.” Val wonders what it was for Andrew, what pea under his mattress kept him tossing and turning. But she also takes a little comfort, knowing now that Andrew must care enough about Alex to lose sleep.

She wishes they could end the panel right here. They are all so tired. They’ve all come so far to be here.

Another fan raises his hand. He is about Val’s age and looks familiar.

“Trevor!” says Tim excitedly. The color comes back into his cheeks. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Trevor Whitly. He was one of the writers on
Anomaly
.” The audience applauds, and as Val remembers Trevor from back then, one of the few writers Andrew was close with, she realizes what’s going on. He’s a plant. Andrew put him in the audience to ask about the movie. Even with Tim here. There’s some sort of plan here, something Andrew’s worked out. At the very least, it puts Val on the spot. She thought she had more time, but what gave her that idea? Everything is ending right now.

“How about
Anomaly: The Movie
?” Trevor asks, as if it’s only now occurring to him.

“Not for me,” says Tim. “I said goodbye to all that years ago. You could write it, Trevor.” She looks at Andrew, and he’s struggling to contain himself. He couldn’t have asked for a better answer. And then Tim continues. “Of course, I’d rather see you come up with something on your own than comb through our old production notes for salvageable ideas. It seems like the only good of it would be nostalgia. A pull to return. If I could go back, yes, I would love to go back to the set with you, Trevor, and with Val and with Andrew. With everyone. But it wouldn’t be everyone. It wouldn’t even be me—not that me, from back then. And that’s who I want back. Part of that me calls out to this me. That’s what you’re feeling, Trevor, I’d bet on it. But if that pull is strong enough for you, then you’ve got my blessing.” He looks at Val as he says this.

“I’d be all for it,” says Andrew, jumping in. Val imagines he’s been
champing at the bit, wanting to cut Tim off so he can say
Yes, yes, I’ll do it, it’s happening
.

Val is aware that everyone’s looking at her now, expectant. Andrew raises his eyebrows at her, encouraging her to affirm it, make it so. Val finds Alex in the audience, pushing the crowd back so they’re only a curtain behind him. He’s making his thinking face, his mouth screwed into a tiny knot and his head tilted to one side. There is no nostalgia for Val about those times; she’s spent years drawing the poison out of the years that came before, like sucking venom out of a leg that, other than being snakebit, is a perfectly good leg. She’s tried to keep that time pristine and unsullied by what came after. If she goes back, she’ll have to bring everything with her. But if there’s no pull backwards, there is a fear that she doesn’t know the way forward from here. She can have a past she doesn’t want or a future she doesn’t know. She looks at Alex, who smiles. She will find a way to be with him, to be there for him. But Bethany Frazer is not his mother, even if in some sense she’s the woman who gave birth to him. His mother is Valerie Torrey, and there’s no place for her here anymore. She can’t go back to being that other woman; it would be as bad for her as it would be for Alex. She’ll find another way. She smiles back as she leans toward the microphone.

“No,” she says, feeling lighter as the word comes out. “I don’t think that’s something I’d be interested in doing.” In the corner of her eye she sees Andrew deflate, and she can feel some power move from him into her, a strength created by negation, the energy released when an idea, unwanted, dies.