A Hundred Thousand Worlds

by Bob Proehl

  “You look unhappy with me right now,” she said.

  “I look unhappy with you?” he said. This was always the rookie response, to overstress the pronouns.

  “You do; you look unhappy with me. Right now.”

  “I look unhappy with you right now,” he said, moving the emphasis. Back and forth like that, feeling the words shift and morph through their repetition. Their attention so focused on one another that it was indistinguishable from attraction. In the classes she’d taken at the Acting Studio, in New York, a good exercise ended with you wanting—needing, almost—to either punch or fuck your partner. This tension usually escalated into laughter, breaking the scene, and the same held for Andrew and Val, aided no doubt by the fact that Andrew always brought a bottle of wine to the sessions. And then there was a Friday, late, when Val started the exercise with “You have big teeth,” a standard opening, but one that brought all of her attention to his mouth. She stared at it as the words bounced back and forth between them, and as he said, for the seventh time, “I have big—” she stopped him with a kiss, and he repeated it back at her, escalating. When she paused for a breath, she pulled back and examined his face, worried, frantic that this had only been part of the exercise. Then he kissed her, something new. As she pulled him toward the couch, something her acting coach used to say at the beginning of each class popped into her head and she giggled into Andrew’s neck as his kisses moved down her shoulder.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “The moment,” she said, “is a tricky fucker.”

  In the morning, she woke up to the sound of coffee grinding and Andrew whistling the overture to Love for Three Oranges. She found him in the kitchen, adorable in boxers and socks, pouring two cups.

  “This is good,” he said, tentative, half asking.

  “This is good,” she said.

  The producers were determined to keep Andrew around, so the writers had to construct the second half of season three as “Campbell light,” with Andrew appearing in the minimum number of episodes his contract required. At first, Val had looked forward to carrying the show on her own. Frazer had become a sidekick, and this was her opportunity to retake the reins. Fans responded well, but Val had trouble finding Frazer’s character without Andrew to play off of. On her own, Bethany Frazer seemed not efficient and professional but cold and hard.

  “Through season three,” Val says, “Frazer is at Anomaly all alone. She was working alone before Campbell showed up, but now she realizes she’s alone. And Campbell, he’s been zapped into the past. And he was used to being alone, too, because he’d used his time ray to zap himself around time before. But sometimes being alone is okay until you realize you’re alone, and sometimes it takes being not alone to figure that out. While Frazer’s trying to find all these clues to where in the timestream Campbell is, and Campbell’s trying to find time portals the Leader left behind so he can get back to the present, they’re both starting to figure out how much they need each other.”

  Tim wrote two scripts for the finale: one that would serve as a series finale and one that would set up season four. Val signed on to do Othello with Shakespeare in the Park at the end of the summer, even though it might mean she’d be in New York when shooting was supposed to start for the new season. But then the advance reviews started to trickle in on two of Andrew’s movies. Not only had they been panned, but he had been singled out for abuse. Critics called him arrogant and flat. “Attractive cardboard,” said one. He showed up at her apartment, looking as if the air had gone out of him. She cooked him dinner, although she hadn’t had any appetite for days. She poured him wine, but none for herself. Earlier that day, she’d done the math and calculated that by the time Othello was in production, she’d be showing, and no one wanted a pregnant Desdemona. But that conversation could wait.

  “Let’s sign,” she said, as if it was what she wanted. He offered hollow protests, but he was obviously relieved. It was important she never let him think that she’d given something up for him. It was important that he hadn’t had to ask.

  That night, they invented lists of demands to submit to the network, to justify having held out as long as they had. The network gave them everything they wanted. The show was saved.

  “So they fall in love while they’re not around one another?” Alex says. He’s curled up next to the dog now, the two of them like a pair of parentheses.

  “Something like that,” Val says. She wonders if children can ever understand the way their parents are in love, or that their love could possibly exist outside of the children themselves. It would require the child to look at her parents as people completely separate from herself. And if Val is unable to think of her mother that way, she wonders if it is even possible for her to understand herself as separate from Alex, now that he is here, now that he is the inexorable thing in her life.

  She continues a summary of that season, a plot so convoluted that when they were shooting the episodes, she’d sometimes have to have Tim explain to her what was going on, but Alex either understands it all on his own or is losing interest, because his questions and interruptions taper off, and by the time Frazer and Campbell are reunited in the season finale, his breathing is tinged with a soft, gentle snore.

  Val quietly climbs out of the bed and makes her way downstairs. Brett and Fred have already retired, and her mother is sitting on the couch with an afghan covering her legs and Eero covering her bare feet. The living room smells of spices Val could not name and is the temperature particular to rural summer evenings. In New York right now, the day’s heat would be struggling and failing to dissipate, trapped like a bug under a jar, but here, where there is nothing but space, the heat leaves behind it a cool that feels like an absence rather than an imposition.

  “Is he asleep?” her mother asks.

  “More or less,” says Val. Her mother curls her legs under her, displacing the dog and making room for Val on the couch. Val sits, and for a second Eero looks up at her beseechingly. But when Val doesn’t pat the couch or her lap to invite him up, he retreats to his own bed.

  “It’s nice having a house full of boys again,” her mother says. “It makes the place feel heavier. Less likely to blow away.” What Val remembers a house full of boys feeling like is loud: her father preferring to bellow from the next room rather than come find the person he was talking to, and her brothers racing around outside yelling in the voices of whatever breed of mortal enemies they happened to be that day: cowboys and Indians, Martians and astronauts, commies and G-men.

  “You should sell the house, Mom,” she says, not for the first time. “Come live in New York.”

  “New York is no place for dogs,” her mother says. She has a list of complaints about New York, reasons for not moving. For years, Val’s asked her mother to come live in New York because it would make Alex happy and because it would be better for her mother than living in the woods and because Val wouldn’t have to worry about her anymore. But this time, it’s that Val wants her mother with her, who doesn’t want to be alone. Her mother seems to know this, although it doesn’t change her answer. “I like my house,” her mother says, “especially when my family’s in it.” She puts her hand on Val’s knee. “Honey,” she says, “what are you doing here?”

  “There are things I need to do here,” Val says. “We’re booked at the convention in Chicago this weekend. It’s one of the bigger ones.” She can see now all of the tasks she’s put in front of her, how she’s made a line, a mechanism to move her forward, a conveyor belt that will gnash her up at its end. “We have to be in Los Angeles in two weeks. Not even. A week and a half.”

  “No, you don’t,” her mother says, angry with her, for her. “It’s as simple as you don’t go. You stay here. With me. Or you go somewhere else.”

  “I can’t, Mom. I should have known when I took Alex this was going to happen. Sooner or later, Andrew would decide he’d look good
as a father.”

  “So let him go knock someone else’s daughter up and leave mine out of it.” Val smiles at this. Her mother never liked Andrew, as much as he poured on the charm. It had driven him nuts, which made him act even more charming, which made her like him even less. Even during the time she loved Andrew, she got a kick out of seeing him struggle to rope in those few people who didn’t succumb. It was an obsession with him, being universally liked, something he’d been able to talk about but never get over. Andrew told her once that when his mother had remarried, when Andrew was ten, his new stepfather sat him down and told him that while he’d never love Andrew like a father loved a son, he wanted them to be friends. But despite Andrew’s constant efforts, his stepfather never treated him as much more than a roommate and was palpably relieved when, at seventeen, Andrew announced his intention to move out. During the run of Anomaly, Andrew had been a regular checker of discussion boards, and still kept boxes of letters from his time on Sands in the Hourglass, often handwritten, both fan and hate mail, soap opera watchers being apparently more traditional than sci-fi fans in the way they relayed their opinions to actors.

  “I don’t think he wants the whole mother/child package at this point.” What Valerie suspects is that Andrew has reached a point where he needs a gimmick to continue going after younger girls, and Alex is cute enough to induce womb-ache in Andrew’s target demographic. Maybe if he were an ugly child, she wouldn’t be in danger of losing him. It’s not a charitable thought, but charity is for people with things to give away.

  “What happens if you don’t go?” her mother asks, as if the question has never occurred to Val, as if she didn’t ask it with every exhale. “If you say you’re staying in the middle of nowhere with your mother in the house where you were raised. Where Alex will have two dogs to wrestle with and woods to play in and he’ll never eat sushi till he goes to college.”

  “They’ll take him from me,” Val says. This is the conclusion of all paths that don’t take her and Alex to Los Angeles, a point where rational thought brings its boot down on every hope, every emotion. “I violated the custody agreement. I completely fucking ignored the custody agreement. They’ll take him away from me.” It makes no sense to her that now only her mistakes count for anything and the statute of limitations has run out on all of Andrew’s sins. But her lawyer has assured her it’s true. At best, they’ll award Andrew lost time: all the days that should have been his to spend with Alex for the past six years. At worst, they’ll remove Alex from her custody. Months of sleepless nights have reduced it to a brutal mathematic, a heart and a feather on a scale.

  “I can give him up for two years,” she says, “or I can lose him forever.”

  Secret Origin of OuterMan

  Everyone like you is dead. They’ve been dead forever. No one is like you. No one is like you at all.

  Not only is this true, but you’re reminded of it constantly. Every time you look at anyone, your eyes move right through the skin, like yours but as easily rent as tissue paper, to the fragile bird-like bones underneath. To muscles that cannot hoist cars in the air, much less change the direction of planets. You see the differences between them and yourself as easily as they see the differences among themselves, the meaningless divisions of race and ethnicity they hold all-important.

  So breakable. They are like glass, like china. How is it you come from a race made of such sturdier stuff than they, and yet your people are dead and these people with their bones of spun sugar thrive?

  You avoid touching them, as much as possible. Your grip can crush coal into diamonds; the potential to casually shatter one of them, to accidentally rip and tear and break, is overwhelming. Even with the woman who raised you, whose embrace had a fierceness to it, who squeezed your indestructible body until tears welled in your impossible eyes, you could never chance it. You could only stand stock-still, arms at your sides while her love for you crashed against skin that could never be cut, never bleed.

  When you walk among them, you take on the affect of someone clumsy and gun-shy. The words contact inhibition loom large in your mental landscape, the way a cell knows to stop growing the moment it touches another cell. You seem to bumble. In the near-lost language of the woman who raised you, you act the schlemiel. But you are always under control, every muscle of you. To truly bumble into that wall might destroy it.

  Unless they need you. Unless some certain death is barreling down upon them. Only then can you swoop in and pick them up, as gently as you would a baby bird. In those moments, you can cradle them in your hands, soft as they are, slight as they are. In those moments, they can break through your skin and save you.

  Visiting Hours

  If it is as difficult to get out as it is to get in, there’s no risk of the Woman escaping, Val thinks as the guard hands back her ID. Although Val called from New York to arrange this visit two weeks ago, the clearance procedure still takes up most of the morning. So much work to get into a place she doesn’t want to go.

  Val walks across the yard that separates the guard tower from the ring of cells. A basketball game stops to observe her. It is not the individual players who stop, but the collective organism of the game, casting twenty of its eyes on her. Along the edges of the wall, cigarettes dangle from hands, the ripe cherries at their ends winking as a warm-hot breeze moves lackadaisically across the yard. Val is led by a corrections officer named Iris. Iris a messenger of the gods, frequent guide into the underworld. Into but not through. Iris also a flower, and goddess of the rainbow. Colorful name in a gray place, and in a gray uniform. Etymologies and theogonies clatter and clang in Val’s head and she wishes she was not here. Anywhere else. She will take back her promise. She cannot do this, not for Tim or Rachel or herself. She is not strong enough. Even her hate is not strong enough. But everyone is watching her—from the guard tower, from the cells, from the yard, Iris a few feet ahead, wondering why Val has paused. Val wants to go, exit, but after all, this is a prison and it’s not like they just let you leave.

  • • •

  “I know you,” the Woman says. Jittery, scratching at an irritated spot on the back of her neck. “Or I did know you? Or will? It gets so confusing. They don’t tell you that in training. There ought to be a course for verb tenses and knowing. Epistemology of tense. I knew you. I will have known you. I’ve told them this, but I think the training is woefully inadequate when it comes to the psychological impacts of nonlinearity. But who’s an expert? Who’s been there and back? Nonlinear is forever. Nonlinear is for life.”

  Her skin is fish-belly pale, and her hair, long, brown, is a mess of matting and knots on the left side, like a section of a lawn that’s never been cut or tended. But while her body judders, her eyes fix on Val’s with the empty calm Val remembers from the trial.

  “We think of time as if it’s a straight line,” she continues, “but it’s more like a bubble. Except that’s not exactly right, either. It is to a bubble what a bubble is to a circle drawn on the ground. The last part isn’t as important, but if you can begin to think in terms of the bubble, you can abandon the idea of time passing. You can sit out the dance of now and then. Even causality. It doesn’t disappear; it becomes myriad. Everything causes everything all the time.”

  • • •

  “It’s going to be you,” whispers Rachel, grasping Val’s hand in the dark and squeezing it. “I can feel it.”

  The theater is filled with the mix of professionalism and fraternity common at office holiday parties. The awards shows are an attempt to convince the public that movies stars, television stars, pop stars, are all one big group of co-workers, punching the clock, churning out culture the same way other companies churn out marketing reports or widgets. In-jokes and backslapping. Gleeful hugs and affectionate kisses on cheeks. The illusion of community is important.

  “She’s right,” says Tim, leaning across his wife to whisper, too loud, to Val. “Mothers are big this y
ear. Look at the Oscars. Mothers cleaned up.” His tuxedo, picked out by Rachel, tailored by a team of Eastern Europeans whose ancestors outfitted czars and archdukes, must be lined with bees. He twitches and winces inside it as if being repeatedly stung. Any time Val sees him in anything other than T-shirt and jeans, it feels as if something has gone wrong with the world. This is Val’s third nomination and Andrew’s second, but the academy seems to have finally discovered Tim, who is up for Best Director of a Dramatic Series, along with nods for Best Writing and Best Series. Rachel insisted he dress up.

  Rachel pushes Tim back into his seat. “It’s not going to be you because you’re a mother,” she tells Val. It hurts to talk about motherhood in front of Rachel. She and Tim tried for years, and it was only this winter that the doctors told her it was highly unlikely they’d be able to conceive. They’ve been like parents to Alex, who spends many shooting days in Rachel’s painting studio and whose first burblings sounded a lot more like “ray-ray” than “mama.” “It’s going to be you because you’ve earned it,” she says. “And this is the year they’re going to get over their snobbish aversion to science fiction.” There is something amazing about the way Rachel says “snobbish aversion,” as though the words themselves are things not to be touched.

  “What about fathers?” Andrew asks no one in particular. He’s been distant since they wrapped the season. It’s taken awhile for Val to find her way back to her own personality, to pack Bethany Frazer in the closet, but slowly, she’s remembered who she is when she’s not being someone else. Alex helps; he has held his mother in his mind, never changing.