A Hundred Thousand Worlds

by Bob Proehl

  Andrew has taken longer to come back to the real world. He watches each episode as it airs, then takes to the fan sites to see the reaction. He’s constructed a number of aliases so he can comment without being recognized. He hasn’t hidden it from her; sometimes over dinner he tells her what they’re saying, talking about commenters as if they’re actual people. She hoped that this hiatus between seasons would be their chance to recalibrate as a couple, to redraw the map for all three of them, but Andrew hasn’t played the role of father with the commitment he brings to his character on-screen. His performance is stiff and unconvincing, and sometimes seems like it’s cribbed from fifties sitcoms.

  Unlike Tim’s, Andrew’s tux fits him like a second skin. He has been working out excessively this year, to the point that Tim had to ask him to tone it down; his new physique was dangerously close to becoming a plot point. He had too much to drink and not enough to eat at dinner, but Val didn’t say anything. In the lobby, she simply pointed him at people and stood slightly behind as he chatted them up. But she’s also happy the television awards come early in the proceedings, since his face has a slackness that might signal nodding off in the near future.

  “Real fathers are never big,” Tim explains. “Oedipus rears his eyeless head. Surrogate fathers, stepfathers, sure. Stepfathers are hot this year, maybe because there’s not a cultural archetype for—” Rachel puts her hand to his lips, then turns to Val.

  “It’s going to be you,” she says.

  • • •

  “Another way. Subjectively we experience three dimensions of space and one of time. But time also has more than one dimension. You need to think of timespace as one thing, a multidimensional system, a geometric supersolid. You’re thinking about the shooting, but where is it? Why can’t you point to it? It exists, but where? Nonlinearity gives you this, lets you think this way. It jumps you up from the surface of timespace so you can see the past and future as a single object. Not up, really. But think of the circle again and draw an arrow up from it. Then think of standing on the drawing of the circle, and now where is up? You see? When the airplane was invented, we learned for the first time to think in three spatial dimensions. When nonlinearity was invented, we were freed from a one-dimensional reckoning of time.”

  • • •

  Rachel is covered in blood. It spreads across the sky blue of her dress, her pretty dress, like some awful sunset. It drips onto the star of Montgomery Clift. It is splattered across the stars of Harold Lloyd and Fay Wray and Gene Autry. Is Tim screaming? Someone is screaming, and it’s not Andrew. Andrew is standing constellations away. On the star of Hattie McDaniel or the star of Rod Serling. His mouth opens and closes like a fish’s. Val will remember this later: that it is Tim screaming and Andrew silent like a trout. Two men have grabbed the Woman by the arms, and the gun has fallen onto the star of Clint Eastwood. Such a little gun. So much blood to come from such a little gun. Val cannot hear what the Woman is yelling as they pull her away, but there are words to it. Words are what makes it yelling. Screaming is the sounds Tim makes. Feral sounds with size but no shape. His shoulder is bloody, but it is not Rachel’s blood, which pools in handprints pressed into concrete in a golden age. Tim has been shot as well, but he is only screaming for her, for Rachel. A pop star new to the charts this year in a dress cut nearly to her navel holds Tim back, improbably strong despite her waifish frame. The ground is littered with golden statuettes, dropped in a panic. Val and Rachel were holding hands when the shots were fired, so now they are on the same star, and people are pushed back from them, gravity in reverse. Val is holding Rachel’s head in her lap and pressing on the blood as if she can push it back into Rachel’s heart, but no, it’s too much, or she’s pushed too hard. Bubbles form on Rachel’s lips, paler than her lipstick. “I want to look like the evil queen in a Disney cartoon,” she’d told Val in the car, but no makeup could hide the kindness in her face. Her eyes dart frantically, looking for someone who isn’t Val, blind to Val’s presence with her in this broken moment.

  • • •

  “You’re her. But you’re older. Are you from the future? Are we in the future now? I’ve wanted so much to talk to you. To tell you how sorry I am. Or I was. Has it happened yet? I think it’s happened for me already and you were younger then. It all feels present. It always feels like right now, so when five minutes from now is ten years ago and last week was twenty years after that, it’s all right now. I’m here and I’m talking to you but also right now I’m shooting her. Because if you can’t tell if it’s future or past, then it’s right now. It all happens at once, all the time.”

  • • •

  At the trial, the Woman calls Andrew Ian, or sometimes Agent Campbell. She apologizes to the court that she’s broken agency protocol; relationships between agents are strictly forbidden. It’s important to her they understand that Agent Campbell deserves none of the blame. She pursued him. Even knowing it could cost her her place in Anomaly, she couldn’t stay away. She followed him for weeks, sitting two barstools down from him at Wood & Vine, running on the treadmill behind him at the gym. He was the one who broke it off, a week before the shooting, because it was wrong for a senior officer to take advantage of a junior agent like her. She had recorded that phone call, him explaining that the preservation of the time continuum was more important than their feelings for each other, him choosing his duty to Anomaly over his love for her. In the recordings, he sounds more like Campbell than like Andrew; there’s a way he used to deepen his voice a quarter-octave and slow down its cadence as soon as the cameras were on, and Val can hear it here. She details the ways he took advantage, the places and times. Her testimony is like the juiciest parts of a Harlequin romance, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s in her early twenties, built like an aerobics instructor, and exuding the feverish sexual energy of a true manic. The judge allows it, leans pruriently toward the witness stand as the Woman speaks. It would seem like she’s role-playing if not for the obvious conviction in her eyes. She is an agent of Anomaly, an international organization dedicated to stopping threats to the timestream. For the past several months, she has been romantically involved with Special Agent Ian Campbell.

  There is so much evidence. The Woman kept copious notes. She saved hotel receipts. Took pictures on her phone. Even recorded calls from Andrew, sometimes on his way to see her, laying out the things he would do to her when he arrived. She says maintaining evidence is an essential part of training for all Anomaly agents.

  The defense insisted on a competency evaluation, but the law only asks that the person on trial be able to understand that she is on trial. The Woman assured the evaluator that she understands early-twenty-first-century law and that, even though she is not from this time, she is subject to the jurisdiction of the time she currently inhabits. The defense pleads not guilty by reason of insanity, but the people on television all say it won’t work. Things are different since John Hinckley, they say. Your delusions cannot necessarily protect you in a court of law. The Woman is aware of what she did and why she did it. She saw another woman with her lover and, in a jealous rage, tried to kill her. Unfortunately, she missed.

  While the Woman’s delusions may have no legal bearing, the press is fascinated, and the trial drags on for weeks, even though the salient facts are quickly established. Val skips days to visit Tim in the hospital, although he does not talk, just stares into space. The doctors say he will not eat, and the skin of his face hangs limply off the bones like clothes draped over the back of a chair. They say they are quieting his mind so it can heal. This does not fit with Val’s conception of how a mind works. It is a nice way to get around saying that when Tim is not full of Thorazine, he is screaming.

  There are news vans parked outside their house all the time. For the first three weeks after the shooting, even as information about his affair surfaces, Andrew does not move out of the house. It isn’t so much a matter of him refusing to leave as it is th
e shock of Rachel’s death keeping them both in a kind of stasis. Although Val wants him gone, she also doesn’t want to be alone, and, strung between those two desires, she does nothing to kick him out. They occupy opposite poles, Andrew sleeping on the couch in his office, Val in Alex’s room, their bedroom empty. He is usually up and out of the house before she and Alex are awake. But one morning, during jury selection, they find themselves at the breakfast table together, through some accident of scheduling. In the living room, Alex crashes trucks together. Andrew says how there are couples that get through things like this.

  “We’re not one of those couples,” she says, realizing it’s true as she says it.

  The next day, he’s gone.

  • • •

  “You can understand, then, how I was jealous, how easy it is to be jealous when it’s all now. Because what I saw was him with you. But what it was is he had been with you. It was like I was watching something on television, something that was already over. Had happened. But it is happening, too.”

  • • •

  Val has followed the Woman’s progress as she’s been shunted from one facility to another like Goldilocks sampling porridges and beds, across four states in the first year. Each facility she ends up in, she refuses anti-psychotic medication. Some facilities insist more strongly than others, Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Oregon even appealing to the Ninth Circuit for the right to compel her to take haloperidol, which, coincidentally, Tim was being treated with at the time of the case. When Coffee Creek lost the appeal, they sent her here to Normal, Illinois, where no one is interested in advancing her treatment. This is a place where you put things no one cares about and forget them.

  Should Val feel better that this woman, whose name she has struck from her memory, is now a ruined husk? Does she thrill to think of the woman whose frenetic beauty jittered on the witness stand, promising burn scars, cuts, and abrasions to a tabloid audience that wanted her by the bowlful, and how little this woman, chewing on her split ends, resembles her? Her skeleton threatens to tear the sallow paper of her skin and caper about like a drunken marionette. Does it make Val happy to know that the Woman must live in this room, a space without windows or time, or that the cell reeks of acrid, panicked sweat? As the Woman babbles, displaying for Val the shards of a mind that was once at least a warped mirror, is there a victory to be claimed?

  Tim insisted Val come to see the Woman. As proof that she was locked up. He said he’d been having dreams where she was spirited away. He said he’d seen her on the street in Greenpoint, from out his window, only it wasn’t her. Fantasy stuff, episode fodder. But he insisted and she agreed. She knows how different it is for him. There were times, in the first months after the shooting, that Val had envied him his hospital bed and his catatonia. As if he was taking a vacation from the reality of what had happened and it would all be cleaned up when he came back. But even more than Val, Tim lives in that moment permanently. Part of him will always be there on the sidewalk, screaming.

  Val’s navy blue suit is crisply pressed, but she can feel the heat of this place, its dank, wearing the edges off it, threatening to eat through the shield of it and curl itself, wet and somehow cool like a fish, like the tentacle of some mollusk, against her skin, against her belly. The sight of this woman, the little that is left of her, the ugly stain that remains, does not make Val happy, or angry, even though parts of her want these things. It is something worse than hate, because it goes not simply outward, from Val to the woman like a rain of arrows. It snakes and twists and goes in every direction at once, until Val’s life is permanently entwined with the Woman’s and it is impossible to blame her for Rachel’s death and Tim’s shattered psyche and her own ruined marriage, without crediting her for the last six years of raising Alex on her own. Val can’t go back in time to the moment, erase it, and imagine a life for herself as good as the one she’s led. Maybe it’s a failure of imagination on her part, but she can’t picture that version of herself, six years older: still married, still working in television and having dinner at Tim and Rachel’s once a week. It might have been a lovely life the Woman destroyed, but Val doesn’t pine for it, which leaves her in this terrible place and wondering if she doesn’t owe this woman gratitude, a thank-you for destroying everything Val ever thought she wanted.

  • • •

  “I’m glad I’m being debriefed. Although I’m surprised they called you in, given your personal connection to the case. It’s important the agency get as much information from me as they can. And it gives me time to reflect. It’s funny to think of time as something to give or take. Any day, they’ll be done with me. Not any day: tomorrow. As soon as the today loop stops. As soon as they shut it off.”

  • • •

  The divorce proceedings proceed. There’s nothing Val wants, so there’s nothing to argue about. All assets are neatly divided like a pie neither of them wants to taste.

  Regarding Alex, it comes down to the Solomonic slice. She wants sole custody with supervised visitations, but her lawyer wards her off. The State of California does not consider adultery a factor in determining custody, she tells Val. Even the demonstrable craziness of the Woman is a nonfactor. If the relationship was ongoing, it would be, certainly. But the Woman is locked away, and there’s no chance of her doing Alex any harm. If anything, her incarceration is to Andrew’s advantage.

  Meeting in her lawyer’s office, Andrew says “I’m still his father” at least a half-dozen times, as if it’s a catchphrase he’s trying out. This seems to be his major justification for joint custody, but it’s a legally valid one. Val tries to write out descriptions of Andrew as a father that make him seem unsuitable, but it’s all absences and omissions. He wasn’t there when Alex rolled over for the first time. He doesn’t know what breakfast cereal Alex likes. Her lawyer says Andrew will never exercise the joint custody agreement even if they give it to him. She says Val will end up with sole custody in fact if not on paper, and that in the end, Andrew will only want a weekend here or there, the trips to the zoo and the beach rather than the committed work of a parent. Her lawyer has seen all this before; she knows the type.

  There are stacks of papers to be signed. For days, Val goes to the lawyer’s office and signs until her wrist aches and her hand is cramped into a talon, but finally it is done. Val reaches the last signature without knowing it and spends the first few moments of her divorced life waiting for another piece of paperwork to appear in front of her. She and Andrew shake hands as if there are cameras watching. They choose a time on Friday afternoons for him to pick up Alex and a time on Sunday evenings to drop him off, and Val realizes with a measure of disgust that all this paperwork has not removed Andrew from her life. They are tied together, and Alex is the knot that does it.

  It goes on for a month, for two. Val begins to understand that the show will never start up again, that they should have been on set weeks ago. Tim is still in the hospital, and no one from the network has contacted her. The seasonal rhythm that has structured the past six years of her life is broken, the last tether to snap. She wants to mourn Bethany Frazer, but it would be such an insult to Rachel, the kind she would have suffered through with quiet grace if she were alive. Val begins making the adjustments necessary to being a single mother, which center around carving out pockets of Alex-less time to get other things done. Andrew mentions that he is always available to help, but she doesn’t want his help. Once a week is the most she can stand to see him.

  It’s during one of these Alex-less hours, while he is being watched by the teenage girl from across the hall and Val is stopping by her lawyer’s office because some little bit of money has been released from escrow, that she is approached by a woman from the district attorney’s office. Val remembers seeing her in the courtroom. She wears her hair the way Val used to, back in season one. Val remembers her because when she first saw the woman, she thought it was Bethany Frazer, haunting the trial
. She was worried for that split second that she had cracked, and in the next second she reasoned that it would be okay if she did, and that no one could blame her. But details asserted themselves: the too-sharpness of the nose, the too-slightness of the body. The woman became someone else, someone who wasn’t Val.

  She hands Val a manila envelope. She is shaking her head, and Val isn’t sure what she’s recriminating herself for. There was a picture that was not shown at the trial, the woman from the district attorney’s office explains. She’d held it back, because there had been so much evidence already, and there had been leaks out of their office. Val knew this, of course; on one of the days she’d skipped the trial, she sat in Tim’s hospital room and watched pictures of Andrew and the Woman pop up on Court TV. There on the sidewalk, the woman from the district attorney’s office explains that celebrities open themselves up to this kind of thing, they paint targets on themselves when they step in front of a camera, but the kids, the kids should be off-limits. It’s in the envelope. Val has only to open it and look.

  Val goes to a coffee shop near her lawyer’s office. She doesn’t order anything, just sits at a table alone. People type on their laptops and check their phones. There is the general clatter that reaffirms to all of them they are living in a city and it is important they are right here, all of them. Val takes out the photo as if it’s an X-ray or a CAT scan. Good news does not come out of manila envelopes. Good news is never extracted.

  The photo is grainy and pixelated, taken by a cell phone. She recognizes the Woman, and from the position of the photo she can tell that Andrew took it, and that the Woman is on top of him, shirtless, head thrown back. Val recognizes their house, their living room. The windows looking out onto the park, the William Eggleston print of a bicycle fallen over on the sidewalk that she’d bought for an unreasonable price without telling Andrew, and that sat now in a bank vault waiting for the last of the papers to be signed.