by Bob Proehl
“But you’re the writer,” says Iota.
“Only as long as they let me be,” says Gail.
“They ever kill off a guy to give a female character motivation?” asks Red Emma, putting the last word in air quotes.
“I’ve never read a story like that,” Gail says.
Red Emma nods and pulls her fedora down over her eyes. She tries to lean back like a weary private detective about to catch some sleep, but there’s no room, and the attempt knocks over the Astounding Woman’s wig stand. Red Emma pretends not to notice. “Maybe you should write one,” she tells Gail.
“That’s just not how it works,” says Gail. “We work in tropes. Broad, familiar strokes. Women are in the story to get the men where they need to be. Dead lovers and mothers, mostly.”
Through the chair, Gail feels Val give a little shudder.
“Have any of you seen Alex this afternoon?” Val asks.
Welcome Party
“So tell me more about the boy and his robot,” says Brett. They are heading back from the bookstore, Alex with a copy of Adam Anti & Nothing but Flowers tucked under one arm and a too large paper cup of loganberry soda, slick with condensation, gripped in his other hand. When they got to the store, it became clear to Brett that while the kid knew, intellectually, what a loganberry was, he’d never had a loganberry soda. They stopped at a corner store to remedy that, and now the kid’s lips are a vampiric shade of maroon and his teeth pale pink.
“It’s not his robot,” Alex says. “It doesn’t belong to him.”
“But he fixed it,” Brett says.
“Just because you fix something,” Alex says, “doesn’t make it yours.” He slurps up the last of his soda. Rattles the straw around to see if there are any dregs left, then lets it hang at the end of his arm. “The boy and the robot,” he says, “go out of the cave and they’re by the ocean. Have you ever been to the ocean?”
“My girlfriend and I went last year,” Brett says. It occurs to him that the kid is making this up as he goes along. He tries to remember if it was like that when he was a kid, if stories came about in real time. They always seemed as if they were fully formed, but maybe it was only that the details, laid one on top of the other over time, became instantly set and immutable.
“You talk about your girlfriend a lot,” the kid says. “What’s she like?”
“She’s actually my ex-girlfriend,” says Brett.
“Do you ever talk to her?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you miss her?”
Brett shrugs. “Sometimes.”
“Oh.”
As they pass a trash can, Alex drops the cup into it like an afterthought. “What was the ocean like where you went?” he asks.
“It was big,” says Brett. “Biggest thing I’ve ever seen. We were still within sight of New York. But the city looked so small. Like it could fall into the ocean and the ocean wouldn’t notice.”
“That’s a good description,” says Alex. “That’s what it’s like for them, too. And the city is in the distance, just like you said.”
“Which city?” Brett asks. This is the first mention of a city.
“They don’t know,” Alex says. “But they can’t cross the ocean and they can’t go back to the cave.” He pauses at a corner. Brett knows the way back from here, but he waits. Let the kid figure it out himself. Correct him if he goes wrong. But he picks the right way, and they start down the last block back to the hotel. “Can you do a robot voice?” the kid asks.
Brett stops. No one has ever asked him to do a robot voice before. But it turns out it’s the kind of question he’s always wanted someone to ask him. “Does not compute, does not compute,” says Brett in a monotone. Alex considers.
“That’s not what he sounds like,” he says. “Do another one.”
Brett thinks for a minute, then begins flailing his arms wildly and spinning around, yelling, “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!” Alex has to duck to dodge, running around Brett in a circle.
“No!” he says, laughing. “Do a different one.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” says Brett. It’s not a particularly good HAL impersonation, but it’s unlikely the kid knows that.
“That was scary,” Alex says. They cross the street to the hotel. “Do robots have to sound like robots?”
“I don’t think there’s a rule,” says Brett.
“Then this one doesn’t,” says Alex, pulling open the heavy door to the hotel lobby. “He sounds regular. But he knows stuff. He knows lots of stuff about the city.”
Alex has just started to describe the layout and design of the city the boy and his robot have arrived at, its abandoned golden spires that the boy dimly remembers, when they are attacked by a mob of women, all but one of them in superhero costumes. The one who is not in costume grabs Alex and swoops him into her arms. Clutches him tightly to her. Turns away from the rest of them. Brett recognizes her immediately.
“You’re Alex’s mom,” he says.
“Where have you been?” she says to Alex. Ignores Brett.
“I went to get a book,” he says. Her shoulder muffles the sound.
“You had everyone in a panic,” she says. She rocks him back and forth the way mothers do to get their babies to sleep. Like she’s going through the motions of calming Alex down to calm herself.
“I was at the bookstore,” Alex says.
“Where?” she says. Alex tries to get the map out of his back pocket, but his arms are pinned by her embrace.
“It’s on Larchmere,” says Brett. Half of the costumed women glare at him. Even the Diviner, through her blindfold. He looks at the girl dressed as Ferret Lass for sympathy. She bites her darkened lower lip nervously.
“We were about to call the police,” Val says. Not to anyone in particular, but loudly enough that everyone in the lobby hears.
“I was okay, though,” says Alex. “I was with Brett.” He still sounds bright and happy. But Brett begins to see the severity of the situation. He would back away, but two women in bondage gear stand behind him, arms crossed authoritatively.
“What were you thinking?” Val demands of Brett. She sets Alex down and steps in front of him protectively.
“He said you said it was okay,” says Brett. Now he can’t remember if this is exactly what Alex said.
“And you didn’t think to check?”
Brett thinks of the moment before they left. The wave. He’d read approval into it, but there’d been nothing there. He wonders if the kid tricked him, and if so how willing to be tricked he had been. He looks at Val, wanting to apologize. Two nights ago, he was flirting with her in the hotel bar. Badly, but still. She bears down on him as if she were his own mother, and Brett feels like he’s shrinking. Regressing to Alex’s age in front of an audience he notices now includes Fred, who watches over Ferret Lass’s furry shoulder pad.
“I should have you arrested,” Val says.
“He didn’t do anything,” says Alex from behind her.
“You could have gotten him killed.”
“It seems like everybody’s okay,” says Ferret Lass, not quite stepping in front of Brett, but putting a hand on his chest and pulling him away from Val.
“Stay out of it,” warns the Diviner.
“I’m sorry,” says Brett. “I didn’t think—”
“It’s okay,” Ferret Lass says to him quietly.
“He didn’t do anything,” says Alex. He steps between Val and Brett. His cheeks are flushed, and his huge brown eyes are full. They glisten like glass marbles in a fishbowl. “He took me to the bookstore to get my book. Because you wouldn’t.” He throws this at her like an accusation.
“Alex, go upstairs,” she says softly, still looking at Brett.
“He’s my friend,” says Alex, crying now, “and he’s helping me with m
y story.” He is such an abject little thing that Brett wants to pick him up and hold him. He knows that if Val would look at Alex right now, her heart would break the same way Brett’s is breaking and everything would be all right.
“Alex, go upstairs,” she says again, louder. Alex stands there for a second. Still below her line of vision. He stares at her, then at Brett, then runs off. Once he is gone, the fight goes out of Val. When she speaks, her voice is quiet. Without panic or malice.
“I don’t want you talking to him again, do you understand? I know you were trying to help him. I know. But we’re fine. We’re fine, and we don’t need any help.” She walks past Brett. She very softly thanks the other women, who form a buffer between Brett and Val. Keeping the two of them apart. None of them look angry with him, just pitying. It’s a basic rule of nature: you don’t come between a mama bear and her cub. The looks they give him call him out for not knowing that, or not remembering. Sometimes the simplest rules are the hardest to remember, proscriptions grow vague and milky from a lifetime of disuse. Over shoulders bare and caped, he can see Val making her slow and deliberate way up the stairs.
Secret Origin of the Blue Torch
Not only are you jobless, but you are fine with it. Fucking fine with it. Fuck your friends and their “graphic design” gigs. Graphic design is for fuckers who used to think they were artists. Graphic design is where creativity goes to die. Fuck those guys.
The girl behind the bar, ack. If you were single, oh my God. But you’re not single, and also you’re broke. So you hope that picture of her you drew on the bar napkin and left as a tip doesn’t make her think you’re a cheapshit. Because you’re not a cheapshit. You’re just broke.
And you have to piss. Like a racehorse. Like your molars are swimming. And of course there’s some asshole making out in the men’s room. There is always some asshole making out in the men’s room on a Friday night, as if that’s worth everyone else’s inconvenience. As if you couldn’t just make out in the bar, for fuck’s sake, without denying everyone else a place to piss.
So you take it out in the alley. Which smells of trash that hasn’t been picked up in two weeks and two weeks of other fuckers’ piss. One more sign you’re not having an original idea. But something rustles in the trash bags, in the piles of garbage, and once you’ve emptied your bladder you climb over to see.
Dropped into the black vinyl of the garbage bags is a man, no bigger than a nine-year-old and the color of fresh-cut grass. He is leaking blaze-orange blood from his nostrils, which are disproportionately large and weirdly close to his eyes. He holds out a flashlight to you, royal blue.
“Take this torch,” he says, “and carry the blue light of justice throughout your sector. Protect the oppressed, defend the innocent, punish the—”
And he dies. He just fucking dies. So there’s this torch that’s all about protecting the innocent, and it’s in the hands of this little green dude. Who wants you to take it. Who told you to take it.
So you take the fucking torch.
Little do you know, there’s a whole thing. That it’s basically the intergalactic police. There’s a whole training module the torch downloads directly into your fucking brain. And now, because you picked this thing up, you are an officer in the Blue Torch Armada. By virtue of plucking something out of the garbage. And it doesn’t pay shit.
The weird thing is, it’s great. You fly off to other planets and stop civil wars between the purple people and the orange people or whatever. Because it’s always really clear that either the orange people or the purple people are total fuckers and whoever isn’t total fuckers, you side with them. When you’re active, when you’re out there, it’s great.
Of course there are down times. There are days, sometimes weeks or months, where no one is fighting a war in space. And you’re just living in your neighborhood, where the women cross the street to avoid you, sometimes. And the men mutter “lowlife” and “scumbag” under their breath, sometimes. Gallery owners don’t return your calls, even though you diverted an asteroid from destroying the fucking planet and some gratitude is maybe in order. A freelance client stiffs you on your fee, even though you could incinerate her with a thought. The time away, the secrecy, is fucking your relationship. You give it another week, maybe. And you look to the stars, waiting to go to war.
The Sense of an Ending
A bar is a wonderful place to work. So long as you’re willing to look standoffish, which Gail most certainly is. She feels the aberrant blue glow of a laptop screen in a dimly lit hotel bar is like the bright coloration of a poisonous insect, warning off those who might think it a good idea to talk to her. There’s a script page that’s been nagging at her all day, a story beat that’s missing. It’s tougher when you’re moving things to an ending. Beginnings are so much simpler—everything can sprawl out. But endings have to winnow to a point, and it’s easier to trip and stumble into it than to smoothly spiral downward.
Part of the problem is that it’s not her ending she’s moving toward. It’s the first time Gail’s encountered this, but there’s a problem that may be unique to comic book writers, which is that the story will go on without you. With only three months to go, everything had to move faster than she’d planned, stories that would have played out over six issues compressed to five pages, foreshadowings foreshortened. Mostly it isn’t that hard. But there was a tack she’d wanted to take with the Iota’s professional life, establishing her not just as the Speck’s girlfriend but as a scientist in her own right. After all, he’d only discovered how to shrink himself and then rashly decided to try the process out; she was the one who’d figured out how to return him to actual size. Iota was going to finish her degree and take a job at Metro City University, where, over time, she’d come to outrank the Speck, who would never get tenure as long as he was skipping office hours to go help the Vengeance Troop by entering someone’s bloodstream or defusing a nuclear bomb by stabilizing the uranium isotopes at its core.
She’d decided to skip a lot of the necessary steps and have the university hire Iota straight away. It would have been hard to get action-packed storylines out of Iota toiling on her dissertation anyway. But the scene between Iota and the Dean, where he knows she’s secretly Iota and she knows he’s secretly Ominus, but neither knows the other knows, isn’t playing out right.
She shuts her laptop and spins on her barstool to survey the room. Sometimes the background noise of a dozen conversations can stimulate whatever part of the brain writes dialogue. But tonight the words are lying flat on the page, and the scene comes off like a bad high school production of Oleanna. She sips her beer. None of this has to be done now. She’s already a month ahead on scripts, and she planned these weeks as dead time. But still, that scene. It’s not right. The characters keep running their lines in her head and not clicking.
She spots him in the corner of the bar, at a table by himself. There’s a whiskey in front of him that hasn’t been touched. The ceiling lights conveniently avoid falling on him, and if she hadn’t seen him at the panel today, she wouldn’t recognize him, but it’s him for sure. Gail packs her laptop into her bag, then hesitates. What does she possibly have to say to Levi Loeb? It’d be weirdly like meeting God.
But how many chances do you get to meet God?
“Mr. Loeb,” she says. He looks up from the stain on the table he’s been examining. His eyes are milky blue behind thick lenses. “My name’s Gail Pope. I’m a comic book writer.”
“Miss Pope,” he says in a voice rasped by a half-century of smoking, “if you know a thing about me, you know that’s about the worst way you could introduce yourself. Terrible way to make a living.” She winces. Maybe she should mention that she’s German while she’s at it—that’d go over real hot.
“Well,” she says, “it beats my old job clubbing baby seals to death.”
He chuckles. “That pay by the hour?”
“By the seal,
” she says.
“Siddown, kid,” he says. He makes a feeble attempt to kick out a stool for her. She pulls it out and takes a seat. “Who do you write for?”
“National.”
“Pfft.” The noise generates a small cloud of spittle. “Queers.”
Gail smirks. “Some of us, yeah.”
Loeb puts his hand over his eyes and shakes his head. It might be a gesture to indicate she’s too sensitive, but it looks like genuine remorse. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he says. “My age, you forget which words have become awful. You like girls then?” As casually as he might have asked if she liked the Cleveland Browns or pinot grigio.
“Who wouldn’t?” she says.
“Good for you,” says Loeb. “Find a nice girl, settle down. Why not? It worked for me.” The weird, lazy bigotry of the Greatest Generation.
“Who do you write?” Loeb asks.
“The Speck and Iota,” she says. “And the Perfectional.”
“Huh,” says Loeb. “Those are all Jersey Sapolski’s characters. I was still at Heston when he came up with them.” Gail is ashamed to admit she’s never read the old Heston issues. She bets Geoff has. “Sapolski was queer, too,” Loeb says. “Homosexual, I mean.”
“He was?” says Gail.
“We all knew,” Loeb says. “Not that any of us cared. Christ, the office of every comic book office in New York was full of people no one wanted. Jews, Italians, Greeks, queers. Everything except women, to be honest with you. Well, there were the secretaries.” Loeb’s eyes drift away, probably imagining some toothsome piece long since passed away. “I remember Jersey, though. Sharp dresser, like they are. Ran around with so many women you’d think he was putting a softball team together. But you could tell. We all spent so much time together, you knew guys like you’d gone to war with them.” He nods to himself, spins his whiskey glass around slowly, twice. “I always liked Jersey.”