by Bob Proehl
“Me?” asks Fred.
“Shura,” she says to Alex, “show him where the mattress is in Dedulya’s study and help him lug it upstairs.” Val feels a twinge from hearing the room at the end of the first-floor hall still referred to as her father’s study, even though it serves now as a storage closet for unneeded household things and items she and her brothers have never bothered to reclaim or remove from their parents’ house. “You,” says her mother, pointing at her menacingly. “Sit yourself on that couch and don’t get up until dinner is ready. Never do I get to take care of my own daughter.”
Sibling Revelry
Gail loves Ron’s neighborhood in Chicago, dotted as it is with Eastern European churches that look like they’ve been delivered from some outdated version of the future. When he first moved here ten years ago, right after their parents had kicked him out, the streets of Ukrainian Village had been full of little babushka ladies and bearded Cossack-looking gentlemen. Now it was changing, smoothing out like wrinkles in a shirt until there was nothing left but the middle class. But the churches are still there, foreign, unsettling, and strange.
A plastic bag of Chinese food in one hand and a six-pack of Goose Islands in the other, she trudges up the back stairs of Mac’s American Pub to Ron’s apartment. The food at Mac’s is lackluster, the clientele are mostly White Sox fans, and the bar vomits loud drunks into the street at last call, but Ron figures living above a bar is saving him a couple hundred a month in rent. He’s on the phone when she gets there, still at work hours after he’s gotten home.
“Well, we’re not going to cede them that point,” he says as he opens the door. Once Gail’s inside, he continues pacing, gesticulating as if the person on the other end can see him. “We’re not going to cede them any points, we’re not giving them an inch.” Not for the first time, Gail’s heart breaks a little at the sheer bigness of Ron’s apartment. There ought to be a law against one person having this much living space.
“I’ve got to go,” says Ron. “My sister’s here. Don’t do anything until tomorrow. Okay? Okay.” He hangs up the phone, sets it on the counter, and then puts up his hands as if it might be covered in herpes.
“I work with idiots, is what it is,” he explains. “The firm should be called Mouthbreather, Moron and Manchild.”
“Mouthbreather, Moron, Manchild and Pope,” says Gail. “If you’re fantasizing, at least give yourself a partnership.” She puts the beer and food down on the counter. “I brought provisions.”
They hug, Gail trying to assess whether or not he’s bonier than last time she saw him. He looks healthy, but it’s a stretched kind of healthy. It has an intensity and determination to it that she doesn’t like.
“How was the train?” he says, holding tight to her. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at the station.”
“You’ve got fancy lawyer things to do,” she says. “I can take the L. I’m a big girl.”
“You’re getting to be,” he says.
“Don’t start on me, Jack Sprat.”
“Is this why you brought food? You assume I don’t eat?”
“You think any of this is for you?” she says. “Get plates.”
“Plates,” he says. “You New Yorkers are so uptight.”
Ron’s the youngest, three years younger than Gail. He’d still been living with them when Gail came out to their parents in a letter written in her University of Chicago dorm room, drunk on bad wine and Frank O’Hara poems. When they told him Gail would no longer be welcome in the house since she had chosen a life of sodomy and debauchery, Ron first explained to them that lesbians didn’t engage in sodomy, and then informed them that he, on the other hand, did. Four hours later, he showed up at Gail’s dorm with a black eye and a suitcase.
“I went to the place on Division,” she says, “and got a slew of stuff. I should have let you pick.”
“You’ve got to go to the South Side for decent Chinese,” he says. He opens a beer and hands it to her, then one for himself. “We should go to Won Kow while you’re here, sit in Al Capone’s booth.”
“Al Capone died of syphilis,” says Gail.
“I’m sure they’ve cleaned it since.” He dumps half the container of lo mein onto a plate; it slumps out like a dead octopus. “Do you think this place uses MSG?”
“No,” says Gail. “I don’t think about it at all.”
“So tell me about the life of the mind,” he says, once they’ve settled into the couch and are picking apart various dishes with chopsticks.
“I’m getting dumped off The Speck,” she says, carefully choosing a crab Rangoon.
“No shit?”
“Zero shit,” she says, taking a swig.
“What are they moving you on to?”
Gail shrugs. “Admiral Animorph & His Danger Rangers?”
“You’d be great on that,” he says. “Lesbian lemurs.”
“Sapphic sea otters.”
“Dyked-out dugongs.”
“What the fuck is a dugong?” she asks.
“It’s like a manatee.”
“So why not say manatee?”
“I thought we were doing alliterative.”
“Forget all that shit, how’s your superhero life?”
He blushes. One of the things she loves about her little brother is that he actually blushes. As much as she knows it’s not true, part of Gail has always thought of her own sexual orientation as a natural result of growing up in a house full of boys. Their older brothers are scrappers, three-sport athletes, and mighty chasers of women. But Ron has always been the family’s resident alien, kind in a family that values toughness, quiet among men who bellow. When he started at a law firm that specialized in blocking deportations, he proudly declared to Gail that “being a rich lawyer is probably the only thing that would get me back into that house. So I’m going to be a poor lawyer forever.” And if he didn’t manage to dodge at least a modest amount of money, he could always say he fought on behalf of Mexicans and the like, which would kill any chance of reconciliation.
“Everything’s terrible and everyone is awful,” he says. “At least once a week, I have to remind myself how much progress has been made, and that we’re not shooting people as they hop the fence, and that there’s a million kids in schools who will never get deported. Then I get to work and someone has made it his mission in life to kick some poor cabdriver out of the country. Has dedicated himself to ruining this guy’s life in the service of some abstract idea of I don’t even know what.”
“Tin-pot Hitlers,” she says.
“Don’t go Hitler,” he says, sighing. “I spend all day trying not to think of them in terms of Hitler.”
“You’re doing good work,” she says, holding out the neck of her beer to be clinked.
“I’m shoveling shit against the tide,” he says, clinking.
For a while, they stare out the window at the intersection. His apartment has a pseudo-turret, a bubble in the northwest corner of the room that hangs out onto the street. It’s perfect for people watching, especially after a sporting event. Tonight the corner is quiet. The people heading into the bar aren’t drunk enough to be interesting yet, and neither are the people leaving this early. Later, this corner will be bro-tacular, and they’ll be through the six-pack and into whatever else he has on hand, commenting on each drunken hookup or faux fight.
“You talk to Mom?” asks Gail. Independent of each other, they both got back in touch with their mother two years ago around Christmas. Neither of them admitted it to the other for a year, and even more surprising, their mother never mentioned to Gail that she’d heard from Ron, or vice versa. They both had excuses for why they’d broken down and made contact, Gail’s involving rum and Prince’s “Another Lonely Christmas” playing on Hot 97.
Ron takes a long swig of beer, then holds the bottle against the side of his face. “Two months ago,” he says
.
“Three,” says Gail.
“I’m in the lead,” Ron says.
“She say anything remarkably awful?”
“No,” he says. “It’s better when I’m not dating anyone. I feel this weird compulsion to tell her about it. You ever get that?”
“I’ve never dated anyone.”
“Drama queen.”
“I’ve never been dating anyone when I’ve talked to Mom.”
“But would you tell her?”
“Maybe,” says Gail. “Maybe I’d tell her in totally gender-neutral terms. Maybe I’d date someone named Pat or Terry and tell Mom all about her so she could have dreams about me and a banker in a Brooks Brothers suit when in reality I’m banging some Sarah Lawrence prof I met at Cubbyhole.”
“Sarah Lawrence prof?” says Ron, scooting forward.
“It was hypothetical,” says Gail. There’d been an M.F.A. student from Hunter, briefly, but that was hardly the same thing. “You know Mom reads all my comics?” she says, changing the subject.
“So do I,” says Ron, defensive. “I’ve got a whole long box of them.”
“Aw, you even know the word ‘long box.’” Ron had never been her kind of geeky when they were growing up. It was her older brother Tom who had gotten her into comics, giving her his issues of R-Squad when he was done with them.
“But Mom?” says Ron.
“It’s all we talk about,” Gail says. “She talks about the Speck and Iota like they’re real people. She asks me how they’re doing. She’s going to be crushed I’m not writing it anymore.”
“You’ll have to tell National to give you another hetero fantasy couple to write,” Ron says, hauling himself up from the couch. “You want another?” he asks, which is not really a question at this early stage of the night.
Summering
The room is a small right triangle, and once it was his mom’s. The bed is tucked into one of the vertices, a sixty-degree angle. This means the wall meets the other wall at a thirty-degree angle, and that wall meets the floor at ninety degrees. This year, they’ve been doing geometry on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Although it’s his mother’s least favorite subject to teach, Alex loves the language of it, every hypotenuse, arc, and sector.
Eliel is wedged between Alex and his mother, asleep. He has the stink of an older dog, meaty, not unpleasant, and coming from somewhere no bath or hose can reach. Alex leans on him slightly, careful not to apply too much weight.
“Why doesn’t Babu want you in her kitchen?” Alex asks. There are so many things to understand about the room, beginning with its shape. In Alex’s mind, the only rooms that are not cubic are found in museums, and they aren’t simply rooms, they’re about rooms. They say something about what it means to be a room, instead of just being rooms themselves. Then there’s the idea that his mother did not grow up in this room but “summered” here. Alex knows the transitional seasons can be used as verbs—he’s been known to spring and fall himself—but he’s never summered or wintered. Home is supposed to be a singular thing, something that exists in one place and persists in time. It doesn’t sound like a luxury to Alex to have a summer home and a winter home; it sounds confusing. He imagines he would always miss whichever home he wasn’t in and worry if it was okay without him.
“She doesn’t want me in there because she knows I’ll check the labels,” Val says.
“Check them for what?”
“For things that are bad for you.”
“Babu wouldn’t feed me anything that’s bad for me.”
“Sometimes Babu doesn’t know any better,” she says. He likes it here, he likes coming to stay here, but sometimes he feels as though his mother and grandmother are fighting over him, tugging at both his arms. This wouldn’t be so bad except that he thinks the fighting is not about him so much as it’s about something that came before, or something that was always there and still is.
“You didn’t tell me a story last night,” he says.
“I was upset,” she says. This is not an apology, only an explanation.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” says Alex. This too only explains.
“I know, Rabbit,” she says. “I’m not used to you being so big you can run off by yourself.”
“I wasn’t by myself. I was with Brett.” Alex regrets this after he’s said it.
“He’s nice, huh?” she asks. There is something resigned in her voice that calms Alex’s fears. Brett is no longer the enemy; he’s paid for his mistakes.
“He’s my friend,” Alex says.
She rolls over to face him, half her face visible over the sleeping border collie. “Tell me about what you guys are working on.”
Alex shakes his head vigorously. “You owe me a story,” he says. “An extra one. Two episodes.” His mother rolls back over and looks back up at the ceiling.
“Storyline again?” He nods, and he’s not sure if she sees it out of the corner of her eye or knows from the way the bed shakes, but she nods, too. “Which season?”
“I want to hear how Frazer and Campbell fell in love,” he says.
“Huh,” says his mother. “There’s not an episode for that.” She always stares off into space when she’s telling about storyline episodes. Freak-of-the-week episodes, she pays extra attention to his face to make sure she’s not scaring him, but when she tells storyline episodes, it’s like the words are written very faintly somewhere and she’s straining to read them.
Alex pulls himself closer to her, displacing Eliel, who moves somewhat grudgingly around Alex’s legs and situates himself behind Alex. Alex wants to tell her he’s not so big he can run off by himself, but the words get caught and he puzzles over them. He tries to decide if they’re true, and whether or not he wants them to be.
Undecided, he curls into the angle described by the wall and the bed, tangential to curves described by mother and dog.
Anomaly S03E12
“It started in season three,” she says. “There’s something in TV called the Moonlighting effect. It’s where there’s a couple that doesn’t get along, but the audience wants them to fall in love. Or they think they do. So the writers make it happen, and then the audience decides it’s not what they wanted and then the show gets canceled.”
“This happens because of the moon?” Alex says.
“No, that’s just what it’s called.” She remembers the insistent matchmaking of the fans. On the Internet, people wrote shockingly explicit pieces of erotica featuring Frazer and Campbell. There is a weird disconnect reading someone else’s writing about what you’re like in bed, but she and Andrew used to recite some of the racier ones for the amusement of the guys in the writing room. Not acting them out, of course. Sometimes she’d even read them to herself and think it wouldn’t be like that at all. The fantasies tended to be either violent or tender, the former all lust with no love, the latter all love with no lust. It wouldn’t be like that, Val would think. It would be both at once.
“All season, there have been clues that everything they’ve dealt with, all the problems in time, have been caused by someone called the Leader,” she explains. “But no one knows anything about him. Until Frazer and Campbell catch some bad guys trying to tamper with the NIST-F1, which is our master clock.”
“What’s a master clock?” asks Alex.
“It’s the clock every other clock is set to,” she says. “Like if your watch said nine thirty, and mine said nine thirty-two, and we wanted to know which was right, we could check them against the NIST-F1.”
“Oh.”
“So these bad guys tell Frazer and Campbell that the Leader is planning on altering the FOCS-1, which is the master clock of all master clocks, so that all of the clocks fall out of sync.”
“Why would the Leader do that?” asks Alex.
Even Tim hadn’t had a good answer for that. The network wanted the show
to have a big bad, so Tim complied with the biggest bad he could muster: a vague threat that tied every other plotline together. But the plotlines were so diverse and resistant to the idea of a single motive that when the Leader showed up, he had to remain part cipher, part trickster god. There had been hints dropped for eleven episodes before he finally made his appearance. Going into shooting, they had a fabricated mask and a vocoder, but no actor to play the villain. At the very last minute, Tim had grabbed one of the gaffers, put the mask on him, and told him to stand “in a menacing way.”
“They finally catch the Leader in Switzerland, where the FOCS-1 is kept. They have him at gunpoint, and he tells them he’s actually one of them from the future.”
“You said ‘he,’” Alex says. “So the Leader is Campbell.”
“I said ‘he,’” she explains, “because the Leader has a deep robot voice that sounds like a ‘he.’ But it could be either of them. Anyway, before they can figure it out, the Leader”—she says this with emphasis, avoiding any gendered pronouns—“zaps Campbell and he disappears to somewhere in time.”
“What does he zap him with?”
“By ‘he,’ do you mean the Leader?” she asks. Alex giggles. “A time ray, I guess?” she says. Tim was never big on the science behind things. “The Leader is from the future, so the Leader has all kinds of future technology.”
Andrew had actually been zapped by the movie gun. His agent convinced him he’d never make the jump from television to leading man, so, with his contract coming up at the end of season three, he’d started taking roles in smaller films. “Big parts in little movies,” he’d told Val. What worried him was that, more than anything he’d done before, these parts called for legitimate acting, something closer to Val’s career experience than his own. “They’re going to realize I’m a mug,” he told her. He asked her about classes she’d taken. He borrowed her copy of An Actor Prepares, by Stanislavski, because he’d heard of it. She’d grinned and told him he didn’t have enough pathos to be a Method actor, and a week later, when he returned the book and admitted she was right, she introduced him to some Meisner exercises. The moment rather than the method, being present with another actor rather than being deep in your own character’s head. The two of them stood in her living room, sizing each other up, then finding one thing about the other to speak out loud.