by Bob Proehl
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.”
Convincing Arguments
Brett 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 cove
rs 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.