by Bob Proehl
And over the Woman’s bare shoulder, in the doorway, framed by the darkness of his bedroom, is Alex, in his banana-colored pajamas, his expression lost in the low resolution of the digital image, excluded in the space between yes and no, zero and one.
With no appointment, with a mixture of rage and vindication, Val takes the photo to her lawyer’s office. She demands to see her right away, which, as she says it, she realizes is a ridiculous thing to demand. Instead, she waits. She calls the girl watching Alex and says she’ll be late, another hour or so. It’s three hours before her lawyer returns from court, but it feels like it’s worth it when she takes the picture out of the envelope.
The lawyer looks at her sadly. “It doesn’t change anything,” she says. “We could submit it as evidence of abuse, but we never alleged abuse.”
“It’s endangerment,” says Val, pointing to the picture as if it’s self-evident. “He let that woman near Alex.” And while her lawyer assures her there’s nothing that can be done, Val knows she will never let Alex be hurt, she will never risk handing him over to someone who could so casually let him near something so dangerous, so evil.
• • •
“I’ve been thinking about it, though, and I think it’s okay. Because your friend, she was always dead. She always had been dead. Right now she’s dead and even then before it happens, she had been dead now. The training has helped me to see that, which is why I’m ready to go home.”
• • •
Hands are shaken, shoulders are slapped. Flashbulbs fire, spark, explode. Tim is giddy, and Rachel, who is a moon to his sun, beams with the light of him. Andrew, the only loser among them, is playing at being sore, muttering “always a bridesmaid,” but it’s a role. When no one is looking, some second in between, he whispers in her ear, “You earned it, Valerie.” Later she will think, That was the last moment he was . . . and find there’s no word to finish the sentence.
He tells Rachel that since they’re the only ones with free hands, they should ditch the other two and go dancing. He demonstrates with the little dance from season two. Then he grabs Rachel, spins her around, and dips her in the overcrowded lobby and the cameras fire again.
Val looks at her award. She’s spent so long saying that things like this don’t matter. It’s difficult to admit how badly she was wrong. It does matter. Now that it’s in her hands, it matters very much.
“You two should go first,” says Rachel. “Andrew and I will follow behind you, bowing and scraping.”
Tim links arms with Rachel and gestures for Val and Andrew to do the same. Andrew takes Rachel’s arm: the awards on the outside, like a border, like a guard.
“Off to see the wizard,” says Andrew.
“We all go out together,” says Tim.
Me and My Eero
The trailhead opens like a mouth. Eero, on the leash, hangs back, looking to Alex for courage. Let the woods swallow me, Alex thinks and, giving the leash a tug, plunges in.
“It’s funny I’m going into the woods from Grandma’s house,” Alex had told his grandmother as he put his shoes on.
“That’s the safest way,” she said. “When Little Red Riding Hood headed back home after bringing the basket to her grandmother, the woods were wolf-free.”
“No wolves in these woods?” said Alex. He was not nervous, but like many kids who grow up in cities, he secretly believes all woods are full of wolves and bears and so on.
“Eero’ll be the closest thing to a wolf in there,” she said. At the sound of his name, Eero looked up and gave Alex a decidedly unwolfish grin. “You’ll need to keep him on leash,” his grandmother said. “Otherwise he’ll go running after everything that moves. There’s some deer in these woods, and I’d rather not have them harassed.” She was packing him a little bag with trail mix and apples. It should have been a basket, he thought.
“And stay on the path,” she said. “Your grandfather cut a very nice path through the woods. It’ll be overgrown a bit. No one’s seen to it in years. But you’ll be able to follow it easy enough. It’ll lead you in and around and back here home.”
It was important that a journey like this be preceded by rules and by warnings. Part of the job of adults was to set limits. But the last rule, the unspoken rule of any story or journey, is that all limits are suspect. All warnings show only the point where the last story stopped, the boundary past which the map is unmapped. The kingdom of Here There Be Dragons is the province of explorers, magicians, and kids.
After only a few minutes walking down the throat of the trail, Alex knows he has been gulped. The trail takes a couple of turns right at its start, so the entrance disappears quickly behind him. Eero sniffs at everything and strains at the leash every time there is a noise. There is always noise. Alex hears the arrhythmic woodblock clacking of the upper parts of trees knocking together in the wind, tittering and chirruping of birds, scuttle of small things across leaves.
Alex listens, but there is nothing except the chirrups and titters and scuttles. Sitting behind him, Eero whines, unhappy to be still when everything else in the woods is moving. Alex looks down and sees that the shadow of the tree points away from the trail, down a naturally occurring channel of space running perpendicular to his grandfather’s path.
“Come on, Eero,” he says, and the two of them tromp along the long shadow the tree casts along the bed of leaves.
At some point before being lost becomes terrifying, it is raw and thrilling. When they stayed on the path, Alex and Eero walked slowly, stopping to smell this or examine that. Now they run and bound, leap over hurdleous logs and swing from trapezal branches. The sun comes through the upper leaves in yellow slats that slap Alex playfully across the eyes. He has left his grandparents’ woods and entered his own. If there are bears here, they will be bears that dance and know old Russian songs they’ve overheard Babu singing while she cooks. If there are wolves, they will be the kind that invite you to ride on their backs, burying your hands in the soft white blankets of their fur.
Alex rushes unscathed through bushes and brambles. Ahead is a hill, and because there is no point in breaking only some rules, Alex lets Eero off the leash to race ahead. As Alex pistons his legs to scale the hill, blissfully aware of the hindrance of his own weight, Eero stands at the top, barking encouragement, beckoning Alex to come see what he sees.
Out of breath, Alex crests the hill and immediately turns to look back the way he came. The woods spread out below him and he can see the trail his grandfather carved out, snaking through them like a crooked scar.
Eero barks again to call Alex’s attention forward, so Alex turns to see what they’ve found, what Eero has been waiting to show him. On the other side of the hill is a lea, grassy and free of trees, circled by the woods. Grazing there are deer, dozens maybe, or a dozen at least. They mill about, becoming impossible to count. The deer do not notice Alex and Eero watching them from the top of the hill. Eero runs excited circles around Alex, and Alex wonders if the dog’s impulses are playful or predatory. Eero barks once, louder than before, and all the deer, all dozens or dozen of them, turn their heads as one to regard Eero and Alex. Eero stares back at them, his whole body tensed, coiled, ready to strike.
Alex lays his hand on the back of Eero’s neck, feeling the taut muscles beneath his wiry fur. He can’t see his grandmother’s house, and certainly he can’t see New York. New York is becoming harder to think about, and sometimes he has to check his notebook to remember the specifics of things. But there’s nothing wrong with here, and this moment of not knowing where he’s been or where he’s going.
Tomorrow they’ll leave for Chicago and another hotel and another convention. Everything, the whole trip, has seemed like a ceremony, like a long way to say goodbye. Alex thinks about what could be in California that could change things so radically, but the only thing he knows about California is that his father lives there. And in that moment, he
knows that his father is waiting for him in Los Angeles. His mother is taking him to his father, to stay. His first thought, figuring this out, is a bright blue thing: I’m going to see my dad. His heart leaps up at the thought, in that second before it’s pulled back into his chest with missing New York, and then into his stomach by wondering where his mom will be in all of this, why she hasn’t told him before now what’s going to happen, and what it means, to stay. For how long? Forever?
The dog gives out a little huff, followed by a low growl. “Stay, Eero,” he says. “Let them be, Eero.” With a resigned whimper, the dog’s body goes slack and he sits, then lies down in the grass. Alex sits, then lies down too, in the grass, at the top of the hill, in the summer sun. The deer lose interest in them and return to grazing. Alex eats some trail mix and feeds a treat or two to Eero, who accepts them as a consolation prize. After a while, by mutual decision, they all head back into the woods.
After a dinner that makes Alex feel heavy and woozy, he and his grandmother play checkers at the kitchen table. The first couple games she very obviously lets him win, but then he manages to goad her into playing for serious and she wins the next four. He likes watching her win: she lights up like she’s a kid herself. She talks trash, says things like “Bet you didn’t see that coming!” as she double-jumps his men. The sky behind the trees goes fiery orange and his attention begins to drift away from the game. He is thinking about the robot. When they left off, the boy and the girl from the desert and the robot had gone into the city. They were standing outside the gates of the factory, watching the other robots going in to work. He is wondering where his mother is, and decides it’s worth trying to ask.
“She had grown-up stuff to do, Shura,” she says. He can tell from her tone that he won’t get any more information out of her, so he begins to act tired, yawning and stretching. His mother told him once that yawning is contagious, and as evidence of this, Eliel begins to yawn and stretch along with him.
“Babu?” he says. “Is it all right if I go to bed?”
She smiles at him. “This is what good country air does for you. It keeps you awake when you should be awake, then knocks you right out when it’s time to sleep.” She offers to tuck him in, but he declines, so she kisses him on both cheeks and his forehead, says, “Goodnight, Shura,” and pats him on the butt to send him on his way. Eliel trods along after him, while Eero lets out one last mournful whine. Alex stops, goes back into the kitchen, and gives the younger dog a vigorous rub behind the ears.
“You were a good dog today,” Alex whispers. He presses his forehead against Eero’s forehead and thinks those same words at him: You were a good dog.
They reach the room Alex is staying in, and Alex has to help Eliel up onto the bed. The old dog is asleep in moments, snoring loudly and occasionally releasing farts that are audible but seem to drift away from Alex, mercifully.
He tries reading some of Adam Anti & Nothing but Flowers, but he keeps thinking about what he knows now. Turning the fact over in his mind to find a crack in it, some way for it not to be true. He returns the book to his backpack and takes out an issue of The Astounding Family that the Idea Man gave him. The pages are yellowed and crispy. The colors, which must have jumped off the page once, are badly faded, printed so that if you bring the comic closer to your face, they stop being colors and become a collection of little dots pressed together between the thick black lines. When Alex’s mother comes in, he is not so much reading the comic as examining it, as if it were an object from an archaeological dig, a journal of one family’s strange adventures.
“Hey, Rabbit,” she says, “I thought you’d be asleep. Babu said she’d tuckered you out.”
“I waited for you,” he says. She looks like she’s lost a hundred games of checkers in a row. She’s doing that thing where she puts her fingers on her eyes and presses, like she’s pushing them back into her brain.
Tomorrow he will ask her. They will talk about California and what’s going to happen, like they should have already. It will be easier if they can share it. It’s getting harder for her, carrying the secret of it. He should have known what it was sooner. But right now she is tired, and he scoots over so she can lie down on the bed. He holds on to her and presses his head against her shoulder.
He can feel, through his forehead, through her shoulder, that she’s in California already, that maybe she’s been in California since before they left New York. She’s in a place they’re not together anymore. He doesn’t know how to bring her back here, to this room where she used to sleep as a kid, where there’s a dog and him and California is still in the future and not now, not here. Since he doesn’t know how to bring her here, all he can do is ask her to meet him somewhere else. “Tell me a story?” he asks quietly.
“Not tonight, Rabbit,” she says, her voice barely there.
Anomaly S04E03
After the casual, loosely structured weekend at Cleveland’s Heronomicon, Val assumed the role of celebrities at these things was to sit in an assigned place for a certain amount of time, and not much else. But when she arrives at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center with Alex in tow, she’s handed a booklet titled “Windy City Comic Con Talent Code of Conduct” and assigned a handler who goes over the code in detail as he whisks her away from the main convention floor and down a side hallway.
“The most important thing,” he says, “is that we try, as much as possible, to discourage non-official photography.” He is short, balding, and pudgy, with an officious air, a clipboard, and a red windbreaker with WCCC STAFF emblazoned on the back. Val is beginning to form the thought that he reminds her of the White Rabbit when she hears Alex softly singing, “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.” Moments like this confirm for her that he could be no one’s child but hers.
“Of course,” the White Rabbit says, “complete containment is impossible. But if someone asks to take a picture with you, respectfully decline and suggest they purchase a ticket for one of the photo ops. Someone will be making the rounds at the signing tables selling them.”
“Purchase a ticket?” says Val.
“It’s all in your contract,” the White Rabbit says. Val hasn’t read the contract. Everything was set up by Elise, who’s in the business of reading contracts and must have thought this was all perfectly normal. “You’ll receive thirty percent of net on all ticket sales, over and above your flat-rate fee.”
“How much are tickets?” says Val, not so she can figure out her cut, but because the entire thing sounds preposterous.
“Fifty dollars,” says the White Rabbit.
“Fifty dollars?” she says, shocked.
“Listen, I know, all right?” says the White Rabbit. They’ve arrived at a door that seems to be their destination, and he takes a moment to give her a patronizing eye roll. “Talent always thinks theirs should be higher,” he says. “But we’ve been doing this for quite a while, and we put a lot of thought into the price points. Trust me, we’ll all make more money with you at fifty than we would at seventy-five.”
“People are going to pay fifty dollars to get their picture taken with her?” asks Alex. The White Rabbit nods enthusiastically.
“We’ve sold—” He checks his clipboard. “Eighty-three tickets so far.”
Alex looks impressed. “Being your kid has saved me hundreds of dollars,” he says. The White Rabbit lets them into the room, where a trio of photographers and a trio of assistants putter with equipment. Diffused flashbulbs go off at random intervals, and the White Rabbit is soon distracted by some other crisis. Val stands somewhat dazed until one of the photographers’ assistants grabs her and says, “Torrey.”
“Yes,” she and Alex say simultaneously. The assistant ignores Alex.
“Stand here,” he says, pointing to a spot in front of a backdrop bearing the Anomaly logo: a highly italicized A leaning over a tightly packed, sans serif grouping of the remaining
letters. Val does as she’s told. The assistant runs a light meter over her like a Geiger counter, then barks, “Two’s a go” over his shoulder and flits off.
“You’re a go, Mom,” says Alex.
“For now, Rabbit,” she says. “Later I’ll be a went.” He laughs at her little grammar joke. He’s in better spirits this morning than he has been. They borrowed her mother’s truck and drove up last night, checking into the hotel near the convention center late. Both of them had been exhausted from the sheer amount of food her mother had compelled them to eat, stuffing them as if they were headed for a food desert rather than the financial district of Chicago. Once they were settled in, there was a feeling they’d returned to the path, a place where they knew better how to behave toward each other. But there was something forced or off about it. All of her jokes seemed strained, and sometimes she could tell he wasn’t reading his book, but using it to shield himself from her attention.
An older man, well into his sixties, dressed in a red crushed-velvet three-piece suit, approaches Val and Alex.
“Excuse me, miss,” he says with a crisp, upper-class British accent. “Might I trouble you?” An untied bowtie hangs limply over his neck, and he holds up the useless ends of it in his fingertips.
“I don’t know how to tie one,” says Val. He has a great plume of white hair and sparkling blue eyes. His teeth are straight, but his smile is crooked, leaning to the left as if his mouth wants to make room for an absent pipe or cigarette.
“They’re ridiculous,” he says, dropping the end. “But no one recognizes me if I don’t wear it. ‘Give the people what they want’ and all.”
“He’s the Curator,” says Alex. He’s looking up at the man, wide-eyed.
“Indeed I am,” he says. “You’re a little young to have seen my era of the show, though.”