by Bob Proehl
“Okay,” says Alex, putting his hand out to be shaken again, this time on business. “If I make a story out of it, I’ll tell it to you next time I see you.”
“All right,” the Idea Man says, shaking Alex’s hand once, twice, three times, the number of anything magic. He squats down. He lowers his voice until it is not reverse yelling but secret quiet. And he speaks.
PART TWO
The Silver Age
I had to work fast. I would draw three pages a day, maybe more. I would have to vary the panels, balance the page. I took care of everything on that page—the expressions of the characters, the motivation of the characters—it all ran through my mind. I wrote my own stories. Nobody ever wrote a story for me. I told in every story what was really inside my gut, and it came out that way. My stories began to get noticed because the average reader could associate with them.
—JACOB KURTZBERG
What did Doctor Doom really want? He wanted to rule the world. Now, think about this. You could walk across the street against a traffic light and get a summons for jaywalking, but you could walk up to a police officer and say “I want to rule the world,” and there’s nothing he can do about it, that is not a crime. Anybody can want to rule the world. So, even though he was the Fantastic Four’s greatest menace, in my mind, he was never a criminal!
—STANLEY MARTIN LIEBER
On the Road
“We should add more characters,” says Brett. He shovels another handful of corn chips into his mouth. Fred wanted to make the trip without stopping. But Alex spotted a Road Ranger outside of South Bend and they’d stocked up on provisions, none of which Valerie approved of. At Alex’s request, she agreed to sit up front with Fred so Brett and Alex could work. Fred’s been monologuing at her the entire time, on what Brett can’t imagine. He hopes Fred’s not sharing his opinions on the decline of Anomaly across the last half of its run. But Brett’s sure it has at least been mentioned. In the backseat of the van, Brett and Alex race to the bottom of the bag of Fritos. Alex leads.
“Iwa finken at,” says Alex, spraying wet crumbs. Rather than elaborate with his mouth full, he gestures for Brett to offer ideas.
Until now, Brett has only confirmed or clarified Alex’s ideas. Drawn them. Made them one degree more real on the page. He hasn’t contributed any new concepts. At best he’s refined some. The story isn’t his. It’s a bauble of thin glass. Now Alex hands it to him to carry.
“They leave the city,” Brett says. He looks at Alex to see if this is correct. Alex nods. “Outside the city, there’s—” He stops. They haven’t discussed what’s outside the abandoned city. There’s the stretch of beach behind them. Past that, the cave. But he can’t move the story backwards. “There’s nothing,” he says.
“Desert,” says Alex. Tears off a piece of beef jerky with his molars. Val had complained that these were basically pure salt. “It’s okay, though,” Alex tells Brett as he chaws away. “The robot knows where to find water.”
Every now and then, Val cranes around from her seat in the front and looks with a kind of horror at what they’re eating. Brett looks up at her, and she takes a breath as if to speak, then bites her lip and turns her attention away, back to the road. Alex seems to enjoy food to an extent inverse to how much his mother disapproves of it. Brett’s mother was less invested in what he ate than Val is. As a result, he probably never attacked a piece of beef jerky with the feral joy Alex demonstrates.
“They walk through the desert all day,” says Brett. “When it’s getting to be night—”
“When night falls,” says Alex. “In stories, night always falls.”
“Have you ever seen night fall?” asks Brett. Scowls with his eyes, then grins. Alex grins back and shakes his head. “When it’s getting to be night, they come to a hut.”
“Shouldn’t it be a tent? I think desert nomads have tents.”
“Are you telling this or am I?” asks Brett.
“No, no, go, with your huts,” Alex says, rummaging in a bag of chips.
“I never said there were nomads,” says Brett.
“It’s a desert; it should maybe have nomads, I’m saying,” Alex says, shrugging and pursing his lips.
“No nomads,” says Brett.
“No-no, nomads!” says Alex. As if he’s chastising some desert tribe for packing up their tents too soon. This cracks him up. His laughter consists of trying not to inhale whatever combination of junk foods currently fills his mouth. “Hut is good,” he concludes.
“There’s a girl who lives in the hut. About the boy’s age.”
This stops Alex cold. For the first time since they’ve started talking about it, he speaks with an empty mouth, crisp and clear.
“Are they going to end up boyfriend/girlfriend?”
Brett hasn’t thought about this. “It’s a girl in a hut,” he says.
“You can’t give him a girlfriend when he doesn’t even have a name,” Alex says. This is what Brett was worried about when he took over. That he’d ruin it somehow.
“I didn’t say she was going to be his girlfriend,” he says.
“She isn’t,” Alex decides. “She’s from the city. The next city.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” says Brett, although he hadn’t been. He pauses to see if Alex is going to take the narrative back. He doesn’t. So, tentatively, Brett continues. “She was thrown out of the city,” he says. “Because of her powers.”
“She has powers,” Alex says. Less a question than a first bite. Chews this idea to see how it tastes.
“She’s a shape-shifter,” says Brett. Alex looks unsure about this.
“Like a mutant?”
“Are there mutants in this story?” Brett asks. He wishes there was a set of rules he could follow to avoid moments like this. Alex considers. Then shakes his head. “So, not a mutant,” Brett says. He is stumped. He decides the best thing to do is ask. “Where does she get her powers from?”
“She doesn’t know,” Alex says. “She wasn’t born with them. At some point she just had them.”
“There’s a lot of things in this story people don’t know,” Brett says. Takes a small piece of jerky and grinds it between his teeth. Val is right: it’s like a piece of leather designed to carry salt. But as he gnaws on it, his mouth floods with the overwhelming salinity of it. It is painfully good. The kind of good that induces discomfort.
“That’s what the story is for,” Alex says. “For finding out.”
“She doesn’t want to go with them,” Brett says. “She doesn’t want to go back to the city that threw her out.”
“The boy and the robot need her help,” says Alex. “There are guards at the city gates. They need her help to get through. But she doesn’t want to help them. Because what you said. The city, it threw her away. So why should she go back?”
Brett makes a first attempt. “Do they have anything they can give her? Can they pay her for her help?” Alex shakes his head. Obviously wrong. Can’t give the boy and the robot pocketfuls of treasure at this point, because it’d be convenient. What good would treasure be to a shape-shifting girl who lives in a hut in the desert? What could she possibly want that they, or anyone, could offer?
“The boy tells her,” Alex says. “He explains he doesn’t know his name. And the girl, because she’s a shape-shifter, she doesn’t have a name, either. She did, but they took it away from her.”
“That’s good,” says Brett. Draws the girl, listening. Sadness settling over her face. A nameless boy and a nameless girl, explaining themselves to each other. The boy’s hands are out, pleading. Once the figures are rendered, he pauses, wishing they hadn’t set this scene in the desert. Nothing to work with. No background. But then he can see it. A living, moving thing. Octopal arms of sand, drifts that have undulated for a hundred years. Lines come forward, wrap around the boy and the girl, float between them. It obscures them
from the viewer and from themselves. They can hardly see each other through the sand.
Home-Cooked Meal
There are apps you can buy that track the progress of someone traveling long-distance to visit you, or track your own progress toward someone. Valerie’s mother must have come with this software pre-installed. Val could have called from the road to say they’d be there in an hour, but she didn’t, and her mother is still standing on the porch when the van pulls into her driveway. Fred cuts the engine, and the front door of the house shoots open, firing two border collies toward the new arrivals.
“A van now?” her mother says, shouting to be heard over the enthusiasm of the dogs. “Are you one of the soccer moms?”
“The Civic died in Cleveland,” Val says, climbing down from the van to be greeted by Eero and Eliel, who demand her full and immediate attention. Eero, younger by five years, jumps up to greet her face to face, while Eliel nudges somewhat pathetically at her knees. Val retains a soft spot for the older dog, whom she associates more closely with her father, and after gently deflecting Eero’s attentions, she kneels down to embrace Eliel around the neck.
The house is a two-story A-frame her father built when Val was eight and his architecture firm was enjoying a string of boom years. It’s simple and intentionally rustic, with none of the self-conscious flourishes that adorned their house in Chicago, which had always seemed to Val more like an advertisement for her father’s professional skills than a real home. It had been intended as a summer retreat, but when her father got sick and left the firm, he and Val’s mother had moved here permanently so he wouldn’t be constantly faced with reminders of the person he’d been as his faculties quickly dwindled. Her mother lives here by herself now with the dogs, and the house forms a perfect backdrop for her, its angularity complementing her roundness. Val thinks of her father constructing it this way: a circle inscribed in a triangle, floated onto a field of deep green. The image is one of a protective sigil, something arcane drawn for protection.
A little warily, the dogs go to investigate Brett and Fred as they load out of the van. They are not used to strangers and—since Val’s father died four years ago and her brothers, as her mother is quick to point out, never come around anymore—unaccustomed to men. Eero hangs back a second, then jumps up onto Brett, while Eliel waits patiently for attention from Fred.
“And these boys?” says her mother, easing her weight down the porch steps as if she’s testing the stairs for creaks. She has some vague complaint regarding her knees, but Val’s been unable to pin her down on which knee is ailing, much less force her mother to see a doctor. She looks quizzically at Fred and Brett. “I remember my Shura being smaller. And there only being one of him.”
“Babu!” yells Alex as he jumps out of the van. It’s a word he might grow out of any day, and Val holds the sound of it tightly in her mind, taking an impression of it to play back later. Alex runs across the gravel drive, Eero at his heels, and flings himself at his grandmother. With impressive stalwartness, she catches him in her thick arms and lifts him with an easy strength.
“Now this is my Shura!” she says, holding her head back to inspect him. “You’ve gotten big! Not so big”—she indicates Brett and Fred as baseline measures of bigness—“but big.” She sets Alex down, and the dogs are on him immediately, licking and pawing. “Who are your bodyguards, Lera?” her mother asks.
“These boys gave us a ride from Cleveland,” Val says. “Mom, this is Brett and Fred.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Torrey,” says Brett, setting down his bag and going to shake her hand.
“‘Mrs. Torrey’ he calls me,” she says, swatting his hand away and pulling him into a brief but firm hug. Fred must understand this is protocol and steps forward to receive the same. “Toropov is our name. Too ethnic for television, my Lera decided.”
“Give it a rest, Mom,” calls Val as she pulls one of her bags from the trunk. “You sound like the fiddler on the roof.”
“Your boy gets none of his own culture fifty-one weeks out of the year,” says her mother, louder than she needs to. “The few days I see him, I have to overwhelm him with Russianness.” She reaches down and grabs a hank of Alex’s hair, shakes it affectionately. “I’m going to read him Pushkin to put him to sleep.”
“You hate Pushkin,” says Val as she carries her bags up the porch steps.
“Bite your tongue,” hisses her mother, following her. “Aren’t you going to invite your bodyguards to stay for dinner?”
Since their hugs, Brett and Fred have been standing on either side of the van. It isn’t clear whether they’re waiting to make their exit or to receive further instructions. Val is aware that everyone is looking at her to see what will happen next, particularly Alex, who is giving her the same face he has when he wants to keep pigeons he’s found in the park as pets.
“They can’t stay, Mom,” she says. “They’ve got to be in Chicago tomorrow morning.”
Her mother looks at her with fierce disappointment. “It’s a long drive to Chicago, and getting dark already.” Val realizes the decision was never hers to make. “They drive you all the way from Cleveland and you’d put them back on the road in the dark?” She waits for her mother to add a scathing This is the way I raised you? but thankfully it doesn’t come. “We’ll feed them and they can sleep in the attic.” She looks at Brett and Fred, making some inscrutable calculation in her mind. “Are you two . . . goluboy?”
Brett looks at Val, then back at her mother. “I’m not sure,” he says. From somewhere in her teenage past, a spring of mortification wells up in Val. The house and the commanding presence of her mother have worked an awful magic: she is fifteen again.
“She’s asking if you’re gay,” says Val, realizing she doesn’t know the answer to this.
“I am, Mrs. Toropov,” says Fred. Val is surprised less by the answer, which is news to her, than by the graciousness and openness with which it’s given. It is possible he is one of those boys who are especially good with mothers. “But Brett here is as straight as they come.”
“Hmm,” her mother says, heading into the house. “Only asking. With Lera’s friends . . .” She throws her hands in the air. New developments in the world like acknowledged homosexuality she’s taken to treating with a bemused curiosity that points itself toward acceptance rather than understanding. She seems to think of them the way she thinks of the Internet: fascinated that it is there but utterly uninterested in how it might work.
As if she’s leading them in a parade, they all follow her into the house: one daughter, three boys, and two dogs. “There’s an extra mattress down the hall. It’s musty a little.”
“We can’t stay, Mrs. Toropov,” says Brett, but it’s a halfhearted declaration, and would have carried more weight if he’d tried it from the window of the van. Now that her mother has gotten them into the house, it will be impossible for them to leave.
“You’ll stay, and you’ll stop calling me that,” orders her mother. “No one wants handsome young men to call her an old lady’s name. It’s Hildy, and I’m hearing no more debate this evening. Shura, tell me about your trip.” She and Alex disappear into the kitchen, where Val is sure she is feeding him terrible things, things she has stockpiled for this visit. Val stands in the living room with Brett and Fred, the three of them able now for the first time to assess what has happened, the manner in which their lives have been hijacked by a senior citizen in drawstring pants.
“I’m sorry,” Val says. “She wasn’t always like this. She was born in Decatur.” The change happened sometime in the year after Val’s father died. Val sometimes thinks that when her mother lost the role of supportive housewife and, later, caretaker, she replaced it with a kind of stock character, a bit of comic relief. But when she does, she becomes aware of how often she imposes ideas about herself on her mother, and the unfairness of doing so.
“She seems great,�
� says Brett, smiling.
“If she’s feeding us,” says Fred, “you don’t need to apologize.”
Even as an adult, Val doesn’t want to hear that her mother is great; she wants her mortification to be confirmed so it is not something in her head. But it’s an inhospitable sentiment, and it reminds Val how unkind she’s been since the hotel parking lot in Cleveland.
“Also, thank you,” she says, her head lowered. “I should have said before. You didn’t have to drive us all this way.” This she addresses to both of them, but then she turns to Brett. “I know you must have better things to do than draw pictures for a nine-year-old the whole trip.”
“He’s a cool kid,” Brett says. Val wonders why the feeling this elicits is the inverse of being told her mother is great. It’s as if she wants to be credited for everything good about Alex despite everything that’s wrong with her own mother, as if she’s the fulcrum on which the balance of three generations shifts.
“And thank you, Fred,” says Fred, “for keeping me entertained even though you were driving the whole time.”
“He likes you,” Val says to Brett. “And I shouldn’t have bitten your head off yesterday.”
“You’re a riveting conversationalist,” Fred continues to no one but himself, “and all around a real catch.”
“I get overprotective,” says Val.
This moment of reconciliation is curtailed as Val’s mother emerges from the kitchen. “You, the skinny one,” she says, pointing to Brett, who is no skinnier than Fred. “My Shura says you’re a fancy comic book artist. You know how to cut potatoes?”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Brett.
“You call me ma’am again, I break your fingers. For you I have two jobs. You cut potatoes and you keep Lera out of my kitchen. And you, with the face.”