A Hundred Thousand Worlds (7 page)

“S
o you remember at the end of season one,” she says, “everybody in the world knew about Anomaly Division.”

“Because they turned the Statue of Liberty back after it looked like Hitler for a while,” says Alex, which is exactly right. In the first season, Tim had an obsession with the Statue of Liberty. Three episodes featured the statue as a central plot point, including one about the assassination of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi before he could design it, and the season finale, in which history was altered so that the statue was of Hitler, still in a toga and holding a copy of
Mein Kampf
. But usually when Frazer and Campbell fixed some crime against the timestream, no one in the present was aware anything had happened. For reasons that wouldn’t be revealed until season three, because Tim hadn’t come up with them yet, everyone remembered the Statue of Liberty turning into Hitler, and everyone knew it was Frazer and Campbell and Anomaly Division who’d turned it back.

It was an inspired move on Tim’s part and helped set the show even further apart from other procedurals. It let the outside world in. “I was thinking about the Astounding Family,” he’d said when he handed Val and Andrew the scripts. “How they exist both as a critical force for good and as an object of celebrity worship. How that might affect their inner dynamics.” It was also incredibly prescient. By the time they reconvened on set for the second season, the show, which had barely hit the ratings numbers needed for renewal, had taken on a previously unheard-of afterlife on the Internet. Episodes shot to the top of download lists at legal and
illegal sites, and the phrase “digital tipping point” was used repeatedly, although it seemed to Val it meant something different each time she heard it.
Anomaly,
they’d been assured, still wasn’t making the network any money, but it was being watched by more people in the key demographics than any other scripted genre show on television. From the network point of view, the show was worth keeping alive as an experiment.

The first episodes of the second season had Frazer and Campbell appearing on talk shows and being offered endorsement contracts for luxury watches. For Campbell, who claimed he was a Neil deGrasse Tyson–style celebrity intellectual before falling through the time portal, it was a welcome return to the public eye. For Frazer, it was mortifying. She spent those episodes practically unable to work, feeling brutally exposed, culminating in episode five’s stalker storyline, done because it felt inevitable for a female in the spotlight. The episode, titled “Eratomania,” saw Frazer attacked in her home by a man who thought he’d met her in the future where he was from. It would later be pulled from syndication and from the DVD, but Val had already seen bootleg copies of it for sale at the con. She’d thought of buying them and destroying them, one by one, as if she could chisel away at the actual thing by eliminating the physical evidence of it.

In real life, neither Andrew nor Val adjusted well to their new celebrity status. Andrew might have been better prepped for it, having been something of a heartthrob in the world of soap operas, but it was quickly apparent that
Anomaly
fans had no interest in Andrew Rhodes; their love centered entirely on Ian Campbell. It was true of both male and female fans he encountered: in their minds, Andrew Rhodes was a nonentity, and Ian Campbell was real.

More than that, in his soap days, a whole two years past, there were fewer media outlets to deal with. In a given month, you could do two or three interviews and feel you’d done the work. Now there were daily requests from websites and video blogs, and to refuse was to risk alienating whatever subsect of the fan base that site serviced. The network made it
abundantly clear to Val and Andrew that they were to make themselves available to any fan who made any claim to being part of the media—new, old, social, or otherwise.

The resulting emotional burnout had little effect on Val’s life outside of work; she already spent most of her nights at home, or at Tim and Rachel’s. But for Andrew it was catastrophic. At the end of a day’s work and the interviews that followed, he couldn’t summon up the energy to appear at a restaurant, much less a club or a party. The steady stream of girls who appeared on the set at the end of the day, partly so they could be impressed by a real television set and partly so the crew could be impressed by Andrew’s prowess, slowed to a trickle and then dried up.

Andrew was not shy about public lamentation, but after a few weeks Val began to see the edges of a real loneliness rising up from under the shiny surface he presented to her and the rest of the crew. He became a regular at Tim and Rachel’s weekly dinner parties, which he’d once begged off with a string of excuses so creative and far-fetched even Tim had to be impressed. The Andrew who showed up at their house in Laurel Canyon (“Manson country,” Rachel would say after a few glasses of zin) wasn’t the blustery star who showed up on set, but a polite young man who’d grown up poor in North Texas and had buried his accent when he ran off forever at seventeen. Who’d been applying to graduate programs in English when a casting agent for
Sands in the Hourglass
either cruised or discovered him at a coffee shop near UCLA. He talked about his good looks as a resource he was slowly squandering and had insightful praise for the talents of every other member of the cast, especially Val. This Andrew was trying less hard to be liked, and as a result was much more likable.

Against this backdrop, the show told some of the weirdest stories of its entire run. The woman who had July 12, 1982, as a pet, in a birdcage in her living room, and kept it alive by playing nothing but Duran Duran and the Clash on her record player. The widower whose tears stopped time, who’d park his car in front of a bank, sit in the driver’s seat, and stare at a picture of his dead wife until he wept. Then, sobbing, he’d rob
the bank while everyone else was suspended like fruit in a Jell-O mold. The historical romance writer with a half dozen pen names whose bodice-ripping heroes and swooning heroines began bleeding into real history, distracting John Wilkes Booth backstage at Ford’s Theatre or seducing Torquemada and ending the Spanish Inquisition.

“My favorite,” says Val, “was episode seven. A whole neighborhood in Queens—”

“Which one?” says Alex. He has never been to Queens, and really the episode took place outside Boston, but it seems like a way to give him a sense of context without too much distraction.

“In Astoria,” she says. “The whole neighborhood turns back to the way it was in the fifties. All the stores, and all the cars.”

“And the people?”

“The people are still the same people, but they dress and act like it’s the fifties. The episode starts with a woman from Brooklyn taking the subway to see her sister. She gets off at the Astoria stop and all the men are tipping their fedoras at her. When she arrives at her sister’s apartment,” Val says, “her sister, who as we’ve heard her talking about on the phone has blue hair and nose rings—”

“She was punk rock?” says Alex.

“Exactly,” says Val. It’s a kind of catchall term Alex uses to describe the hipsters who hang out near Tim’s place in Greenpoint, scaring the old Polish ladies; the tattooed punkers who loll about Washington Square Park waiting for 1987 to come around again; and, maybe most correctly, the three young black kids who play a beautiful and, to Val, incomprehensible sprawling of instrumental metal out front of the Forty-second Street stop. “Her punk rock sister is wearing an apron and baking a pie,” she says. Val remembers the girl who played the sister, her blue Mohawk tamped into a bizarre approximation of a poodle cut, perfect midwestern teeth glimmering out between a zipper of lip piercings. She’d knit between takes, stabbing the sock she was working on with her needles to avoid anything resembling downtime.

“Pies can’t be punk rock?” Alex asks.

“Maybe,” says Val. “But I’m pretty sure aprons can’t be. I’m probably not the best resource on what’s punk rock.”

“You’re regular rock,” says Alex, as if stating a fact.

“I’m more easy listening,” says Val.

“So what happens when her sister is baking pies?” says Alex.

“The woman calls Anomaly. Frazer and Campbell have to go undercover.” To demonstrate, she pulls the covers over her head and waits for a laugh that doesn’t come. She peeks back out, and Alex is waiting for her.

“Do they have secret identities?” he says.

“Donald and Alicia Stone,” she says. Tim thought this was very clever, a gender reversal of the leads on
The Donna Reed Show,
Donna and Alex. Val had assured him no one would get it, but since their fandom existed in a universe of linked signifiers, his little joke killed.

“They’re pretending to be married?” says Alex.

“They’re pretending they’re in the fifties so they can blend in,” she says. “When they’re out in public. When they’re alone, they’re normal.”

By the time they shot this episode, Val and Andrew had taken to hiding out after the crew left, ordering Chinese from Century Dragon and eating it on set. Andrew was tired of going out into the real world, and for Val this world was as much her home as her apartment was. Andrew got chicken lo mein, every time. Val would pick the dishes whose names best obscured their content. Planet Chicken. Art of Dragon. Four Happiness. Some of it was inedible and some of it was overwhelmingly delicious, but she never kept track. Sometimes she’d open the carton and know this was something she’d had and hated before, but she’d eat it all the same. Andrew would try a bite of most of them, if they didn’t look too intimidating. He filled his iPod with classical music, which they both wished they knew more about, and each night they’d listen to a new composer and discuss. In the beginning it was dull, because what can you say about Beethoven or Bach? But as it progressed, their opinions diverged and deepened. He liked Shostakovich and she liked Prokofiev. They both
hated Mahler. The music seeped into their work lives: he’d whistle a snatch of a Chopin mazurka after they’d nailed a scene. She’d hum Ravel’s “Bolero” when they seemed stuck in an endless repetition of takes.

“After a few days, though,” she says, “the fifties start to creep in on them. Campbell starts smoking a pipe and listening to Bing Crosby.”

“Who’s Bing Crosby?” says Alex.

“A fifties singer who smoked a pipe,” says Val.
And beat his children,
she thinks. “Frazer starts wearing aprons and cooking. Even though she doesn’t know how.”

“Does she bake pies?” Alex asks.

“No,” she says, “she doesn’t make it that far. She’s in the middle of trussing a chicken when she realizes what’s going on.”

“Why does she trust a chicken?” he asks.

“Truss,” she says. “It means ‘tie up.’”

“Oh,” he says. “So what is going on?”

Always more perceptive than Val, Rachel asked the same thing while putting extra touches to a piece that was already beautiful but evidently not beautiful enough.

“Nothing,” Val assured her. “Nothing.”

“She remembers,” says Val, “that they’ve been there before. There was a rip in time, in the first season, and a biker gang from 1958 had been terrorizing the neighborhood. They’d managed to get the bikers back where they belonged, but they couldn’t seal the rip.”

“Something came through it?” says Alex.

“A zeitgeist,” she says. Before he can ask what that is, she adds, “The spirit of an age.” He still looks at her quizzically. “The way people, generally, thought and felt about things. The way they imagined themselves.”

He considers this. “Was it like a ghost?” he says.

“Yes,” she says, relieved. “It was like the ghost of the fifties.”

“What did it look like?”

“In a way,” she says, “it looks like the whole neighborhood. It looks like fedoras and aprons. Pies and trussed chickens. But we couldn’t have Frazer
and Campbell fighting a pie. So the ghost looks like a dad from an old TV show. A sweater vest and smoking a pipe. He calls Frazer ‘little lady’ and he’s all black and white, and lines of static run up and down him all the time.”

“What did she do?” he says.

“She tries to reason with him,” she says. “To get him to go back to where he came from. But he didn’t want to. He knew if he went back there, he’d die. He’d seen it when the bikers came through, that he only had a few years left before he was replaced. So he came here, and he was determined to stay here, in this little place, forever. He had Campbell try to attack her.”

Alex gasps, and Val regrets choosing this episode. “What’d she do?” he asks, nervous.

“There was a pop song,” she says. “He kept singing it the whole way they were driving up. All through the start of the episode. The song of the summer. She sings it to him and he snaps out of it.”

“That’s it?” says Alex, obviously disappointed.

“It makes sense,” she says, a little too insistent. “It reminds him of the modern world.”

“How does it go?” he asks.

“You’re not serious.”

“Sing it,” he says, crossing his arms defiantly.

“I can’t sing,” she says. This should be a point of understanding between them. She doesn’t do lullabies; she does stories.

“Could Frazer?” he says.

“Not really,” she says. “That’s what made it funny. She even did a little dance.” As soon as she’s said this, she knows it’s a mistake.

“Do it!” he says, sitting up.

“I don’t remember it.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not,” she says.

“Teach it to me,” he says. She thinks of all the things it would be better to teach him in this limited time they have left.

“All right,” she says, “get up.” She swings her feet out of the bed and he clambers over her. “Put your feet like this,” she says, adopting a wide stance with her knees pointed slightly in. He follows. “It’s not a good dance,” she says. “That was kind of the point. But put your fists up.” Like a tiny boxer, he does. “And then it goes like this.”

B
rett is on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf 4.24 light-years from Earth. It’s never been called anything but Proxima Centauri, this planet. Life here exists only in cities under massive protective domes. The domes were found abandoned and in ruinous disrepair when Earth explorers made landfall centuries ago.

Brett wants
Lady Stardust
to end here, because this is where it began. A bar called Clandestino where Lady Stardust works as a dancer for the Syndicate. She meets David Jones. Newly hired bartender. They fall desperately in love. Her boss, Ocelot Spider, the color of a melted orange Creamsicle, spindle fingers striped and spotted, makes plans to sell her contract to his cousin, Manatee Spider, on Mars. David reveals he’s an undercover agent of Factor Max. Before they can escape, he’s betrayed. Captured by the Spiders. The two of them are brought to the basement of Clandestino. Ocelot injects David with the Persona virus, an alien organism that throws its victim’s personality and appearance into a state of flux. As they carry him away, David takes on a half-dozen faces. A panel apiece. Each one from her point of view. That night, before she’s shipped to Mars, Lady Stardust is recruited into Factor Max by Ron Marxon, David’s former partner. He tells her that by killing each of the identities David changes into, she has a chance at purging the virus from his system. Restore his original self. The last page is a close-up. Teeth together, lips apart. Barrel of a ray gun resting against temple. Tear trailing mascara down cheek.

The sprawl and space opera are all Fred. In the details, Brett can read the story of his own life, barely transformed. He’d been working as a
barback at Clandestino, on the Lower East Side, when he met Debra. Fred hadn’t even bothered to give their space bar a different name. He and Debra felt star-crossed. Her a lawyer for a large firm uptown. Him not hip enough to work the bars closer to his apartment, not qualified to do more than barback in Manhattan.

She was a master of disguise. Slick and professional uptown. Classy but fast downtown. Trashily hip in Brooklyn. These changes were even more amazing to Brett once they’d moved in together. From his drafting table in the bedroom, he’d watch her enter the bathroom a high-powered corporate lawyer and emerge moments later a Greenpoint hipster.

Brett puts his pencil down on the still-blank page. The convention hall is starting to bustle. In a corner of the hotel’s double ballroom, a sound guy checks mics that won’t be used until the panel tomorrow. Interns lay out swag for Timely and National on the signing tables that line one long side of the room.

Brett sets up the offerings at his table. Issues of
Lady Stardust
in stacks plentiful enough to assure they don’t look like a rinky-dink operation, but not so plentiful that they suggest a surplus. Brett’s portfolio open to reasonably priced sketches, recognizable characters. Toward the back, the covers of issues two through eleven. Priced significantly higher. Brett doesn’t want to sell them. The prices reflect the point where money outweighs his sentimental attachment. He was surprised how low those numbers turned out to be. The pencils for the cover of issue one he gave to Debra for her birthday last year. Fred has not let him forget this. Brett wonders if Debra’s thrown it out by now, or if it’s rolled up in a tube in their old apartment. Sometimes he checks eBay to see if she’s put it up for sale, at a price that reflects the point where money outweighs her sentimental attachment.

His display enticingly arranged, Brett wanders away from his table to check out his neighbors. There’s a hierarchy to Artist Alley. Those on the lowest rungs, who’ve brought work samples and self-published comics in the hopes of being discovered, stay bolted to their tables. The fear someone might show up the moment you get up to use the bathroom or get a
sandwich is paralyzing. They smell like the nearest Kinko’s, and their fingertips are black with toner. At the end of the day, the items they’ve handed out will float on top of overflowing trash cans near the exits, or skitter across the parking lot. The next day they’ll be back before anyone else arrives. Suffer through it all again.

The artists at the top show up late. Disheveled. Hungover. Bored. Their tables are waiting for them at the far end of the Alley. Everything set up by interns who appear throughout the day to offer coffee, sandwiches, beer. Artists are contracted to appear for stints of two or three hours. They stay exactly that long. They leave with fans still in line and clutching pivotal issues to their chests.

Then there are those in the middle. Like Brett. They hover near their tables but don’t need to constantly attend them. They have fans. Sparse, but dedicated. There’s money to be made selling pencils or taking short commissions. If an opportunity presents, they visit the tables of artists higher up the food chain, converse while the more prominent artist distractedly signs autographs, tosses off hundred-dollar pencil sketches.

The midlevel artists also serve as ambassadors for the bracket of success they inhabit. The realm of the reasonably achievable. In this capacity, Brett looks over the sketchbook of a local artist two tables down. A sense of anatomy learned solely from reading comics. Women with hourglass waists and volleyball breasts. Men as broad across the shoulders as they are tall. But the kid has an eye for facial expressions. A Viking shield-maiden’s face contorts with rage as she brings a sword down. A cleric, hooded, sneers with contempt, and the contours of the lip form a line like the edge of a violin. Brett nods approvingly. Then spots Alex headed toward the
Lady Stardust
table.

“Robot boy!” says Brett.

“I’m not the boy with the robot,” Alex says calmly as Brett comes over. “He doesn’t know what his name is yet, but it’s not Alex. Plus we made him blond, remember?”

“Sorry about that,” says Brett.

“It’s okay. I’m not insulted.” Brett watches him fiddle with things on the table. Picking up comics and putting them down. Organizing Brett’s pens and pencils into straight lines. He feels confronted with an alien intelligence. He has no idea what is going on in this kid’s head. But he remembers being a kid. He tries to remember how he thought about things. Not what he thought, but the method by which he reached his conclusions. He comes up empty.

“I have a favor to ask you,” says Alex, his hands folded in front of him.

“Another commission?” Brett asks.

“Exactly,” says Alex. “A bigger one this time. A field trip.” Brett’s not sure he likes the sound of that. But Alex barrels on. “Have you read any of the Adam Anti books?” he asks.

“I did,” says Brett. “My girlfriend gave them to me for Christmas a couple years ago.”

Debra had intended it as a pretty major gesture. She was trying to like things he liked. It was how much make-believe she’d be willing to swallow. There was no way she could have known it wasn’t
his
type of make-believe. “Of course
those
are the kind of books she likes,” said Fred contemptuously when Brett told him. It was like pouring bourbon for a Scotch drinker to prove you liked whiskey. It occurs to him now that he should have valued the attempt more than he did. But it is too late for all that.

“I finished the second one last night,” says Alex.

“The second one, that’s
Adam Anti & the Wild Wild Life
?”

“Exactly,” says Alex. “It’s where Adam and Matilda and James are on summer break and they’re experimenting with magic outside of school even though they’re not supposed to.”

“And Adam finds out his parents aren’t his parents,” says Brett.

“Is that a rule in stories?” asks Alex. “That your parents are never your parents? It’s like that for Mister Astounding, and for Adam. But for Moses, too, in the Bible, and Dorothy in
Oz
.”

“I think it’s a thing a lot of kids think about,” says Brett. “What if their
life wasn’t their life. When I was a kid, sometimes I felt like I had so little in common with my parents that I must have been adopted.”

“I finished that one,” Alex says, “and now I need to get the third one.”

“The third one’s no good,” says Brett. “They go off to fairyland. They never say it’s fairyland. But it’s full of tiny people with wings. The cool thing about the
Adam Anti
books is that they’re regular magic stories but they take place in Brooklyn.”

“He lives right in my neighborhood,” Alex says.

“You live in Brooklyn?” says Brett. Alex nods. Proud. “Me, too.” They look at each other a little differently. There’s something about when you meet someone from home abroad. How there’s an instant bond you’d never feel if you met the person at home. “Anyway,” he continues, “the third one felt like anyone could have written it,” Brett continues. “It’s my least favorite book in the series.”

“But it’s the next one,” says Alex. Kind of shrugging.
You know how it is
look about him. “So I need to read it.”

Brett nods. “I guess the rest of the books don’t make much sense if you don’t read the third.”

“So I need you to take me to this bookstore,” says Alex. “It’s called Loganberry Books. A loganberry is a cross between a blackberry and a raspberry. I called already and they’re holding a copy for me. It’s not that far.”

Brett does not know the ins and outs of hanging around children, but he’s pretty sure this idea is not okay.

“Can’t your mom take you?” he asks.

“She’s signing autographs,” says Alex. “There’s a big line. She said it was okay.”

“Maybe I should go check with her,” says Brett.

“I told her I knew you already,” says Alex. “See, look.” He climbs up onto Brett’s chair, turns toward the tables at the head of the room, and starts waving his arm broadly. Like he’s trying to flag down a plane, or say
goodbye to someone on her way to sea. Trying to attract someone’s attention. Brett can’t see who through the crowds. Then he sees a hand, definitely female, returning Alex’s wave.

“Is your mom a writer?” he asks. Guessing from where the table is.

“No, she’s just my mom,” says Alex. “I wouldn’t ask you except you don’t have a line right now.”

He tries to figure out if the kid is actually being tactful. The way Alex says “right now” implies he knows that Brett will be swamped with fans. Later. Soon.

“The lady at the desk printed me a map,” Alex says. He pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of the back pocket of his jeans. Shows it to Brett. “It’s close enough we can walk.” The whole idea seems increasingly bad to Brett. It feels more and more like kidnapping. Some arrest-worthy offense.

“We can talk about the boy and the robot on the way,” Alex says. “It’s perfect.”

Brett wants to see the Levi Loeb panel that’s in less than an hour. He needs to work on the last issue. He should be trying to pick up a few more commissions. But he remembers Sunday afternoons when he was nine. Begging his father for a ride to the comic book store to buy the issue where OuterMan dies. On the TV, the Steelers ran up the score on the Bills.
After the game,
his father said,
right after the game
. Even though the comic book store would be closed by then. By the time his dad stopped by on his way home from work the next day, they’d be sold out. He’d needed to know how it happened.

“Is your mom going to be okay with this?” Brett asks. He knows he’s already lost the argument. He’s already given in.

“I told you,” Alex says brightly, “she said it was okay. She understands I need to get it right now.”

Any kid would understand. Anyone who can remember what it’s like when a story stops in its middle. That’s how it is for Brett with
Lady Stardust
right now. He’s pretty sure that the kid’s mother won’t understand at all. But
in the kid’s voice, Brett hears a language he used to speak fluently and has almost forgotten.

Brett calls to Devlin. Next table over.

“Watch my shit for me, hey?” he says. Devlin nods enthusiastically. Because this is a favor, and favors create bonds. “C’mon, robot boy,” he says to the kid. “Let’s make it quick.”