by Bob Proehl
“My friend let me watch some,” Alex says. He turns to his mother. “The Idea Man has them all on DVD. Shelves and shelves of them. He says you’re the best one,” he tells the man.
“Then your friend has excellent taste,” the man says.
“I don’t think I know what either of you is talking about,” says Val.
“The Curator. It’s a British TV show,” Alex says. “He used to be on it.”
“Long before you were born,” says the man. “Probably before your mother was born as well.” Slowly and carefully, he lowers himself to one knee so he’s at eye level with Alex. “Would you mind helping me?” he says.
“Sure,” says Alex.
“First cross left over right,” says the man. Alex takes the ends of the bowtie and crosses them. “Then bring that one under and up. And the other gets folded. That’s it. Now bring the first over and through and fold it behind. Now we pull the whole thing tight. There!” Val watches as Alex goes through the complex series of movements with surety, then finally pulls the whole thing taut into a perfect bow. And once the bowtie is on, she does recognize the man, from afternoon reruns on WTTW on days she was home sick from school. Painted fabric sets that occasionally billowed breezily. Rubber monster suits and plots with fever-dream logic. “So much easier when it’s someone else’s hands,” he says. “Mine shake something awful these days. My jazz hands, my wife calls them. But now we’re ready to play wax museum, eh?” He smooths out bits of his suit and straightens the tie.
“You’ve done these before?” Val asks.
“I hardly do anything else,” he says. “It seems seven years of playing a beloved hero has made me unqualified to play any other character.”
“I’m familiar,” says Val. But is she? She’s never tried to go back into television, and in the world of little New York theater, her time as Bethany Frazer has been irrelevant. It certainly hasn’t prevented her from getting roles; it even opened certain doors for her. Grant, her director on Millennium Approaches, told her once that Valerie Torrey helped the play work, but Bethany Frazer helped it sell tickets.
“Yours was the American time travel show?” he asks.
“Anomaly,” says Val.
“Couldn’t wrap my head around it,” he says, apologetic and not unkind. “Audiences in my day required much less science in their science fiction. Whenever we needed to explain something, we’d say particle this or morphogenic that. Introduce some machine with tron at the end of it. The episodes they’re doing now, you need to be Stephen Hawking to follow them.”
“They still make the show?” Val asks. The old man laughs.
“The Curator’s a British institution,” he says. “Fifty years on Auntie Beeb. Which makes me something of a museum piece, I guess.” At the far end of the room, the White Rabbit has returned. He’s leading a line of people, each of them with tickets in hand, and reading another long list of rules off his clipboard.
“Talent will spend as much time at their table as possible,” he says. “Please remember that talent, like you, need time to rest, recharge, eat, et cetera, so please be respectful of their need to take breaks. Head shots will be available at the table for signing, or bring your own item! Cash is the only method of payment accepted. Talent reserves the right to refuse to autograph any item they deem inappropriate. Bootleg merchandise is not allowed.”
The old man looks at the oncoming crowd wearily. “The Internet’s made Lazaruses of all us old television hacks,” he says. “Or zombies, perhaps.”
“It feels a little exploitative, doesn’t it? Charging people to take a picture with you?” says Val. She inspects her outfit, unsure if it’s photo-op worthy, but it’s too late to change now.
“A little monetary sacrifice at the altar of the television gods, it’s all right,” the old man says in a grand, airy tone. “Pays for the wife and I to pop over once a summer. Our daughter’s at University of Chicago. She’s getting a doctorate in economics.”
“That’s great,” says Val, because it’s the kind of thing you say when someone’s child is getting an advanced degree.
“This from two parents who could never balance a checkbook,” he says.
“You must miss her,” says Val, looking at Alex, who has staked out a corner of the room to sit and read in.
“They don’t stay his size forever, you know,” says the man. “You there,” he calls to Alex, who looks up immediately. “Stop growing. You’ll end up breaking your mother’s heart.” Alex smiles the way you would at a child who’s trying to be cute, then returns to his book. “It’s one thing I liked about The Curator,” the man says. “The idea that every few years, he becomes a completely different person. And the audience has to decide whether they like this new person or not.”
Later, when there is a lull, Val goes over to the corner and slides down the wall to sit next to Alex. “Hey, Rabbit,” she says, “how about that story I owe you?” Alex doesn’t say anything, but he closes his book and tucks it in his backpack. For a moment it looks as though he’s trying to figure how to position himself. As if he doesn’t know how to listen to a story unless they’re curled up in bed. He folds his hands in his lap and looks at her expectantly.
“Frazer is eight weeks pregnant,” she says. “This is season four. She hasn’t told anyone yet, not even Campbell. Anomaly Division gets called in on a series of couples who claim their pregnancies have been sped up. You know how long a pregnancy is supposed to be?”
“Nine months,” says Alex.
“Some of these are lasting three weeks, but the babies are being born perfectly healthy. Not premature at all. And once they’re born, they’re growing up too fast. Walking at one month. Talking at nine weeks.
“It’s funny,” says Val, wandering off the story’s path a little, “because we all think that. That it’s happening too fast, maybe even that something might be wrong. But we think time is passing quicker than it should, not that the child is actually growing up faster than they ought to, even though that’s how we say it: They grow up so fast. Looking back, I’m amazed at how Tim nailed that feeling, even though he and Rachel never had kids. It was before you were even around.”
She finds it easier to remember Andrew during the pregnancy than to remember herself. He attacked the pregnancy like it was a problem to be solved. He brought home bags of prenatal vitamins, of lotions and creams. He read half a dozen books and took notes on all of them; she’d find Post-its around the apartment that read “folic acid supplements” or “increased levels of prolactin.” She began to feel like the sole patient in an overly specialized hospital, but didn’t notice that as this went on, Andrew became more interested in the pregnancy than in her: the two became oddly separated. They talked about the varying effects pregnancy could have on a couple’s sex life, but never noted the effect it had on theirs, which was to bring it to a mutually and tacitly agreed-upon halt. He looked at her now like the mother of his child and touched her gently as if she might break. She was so grateful for his help, his solicitous assistance, that she assumed the physical bond between them would be easily repaired after, later. That it hadn’t been severed but only put aside.
“There were weeks of the pregnancy that stretched out into months,” she says, “or felt like they did. Nausea and backaches and constant trips to the bathroom. And then I was huge and I couldn’t remember getting huge, or being a little big. All of the interim states had passed me by before I had time to notice them.
“And then you were there,” she says.
He leans in against her, tucking his head into her armpit. There was a moment, that first day in the hospital, when Tim and Rachel had left and Andrew was asleep in the chair in the corner. Val and her baby, whose name they hadn’t decided yet, alone for the first time; his heart, which had a day before been inside her, beating next to hers, and she felt as if she was returning to herself after a long time away. Eve
rything will be different now, she remembers thinking, with no idea what would be different or how, whether it would be better or worse.
The major difference in those first few weeks was a break from everything outside of herself and Alex, one enforced by the sheer exhaustion resulting from Alex’s constant need for attention, for feeding, for holding. Val had continued shooting right up to the day before she went into labor, even though she moved with all the grace of a zeppelin. Tim and the other writers had come up with a couple of Frazer-free scripts they’d shoot after the baby was born, and he held things off as long as he could so Andrew could have time away from the set, but a week and a half after Alex was born, Andrew had to go back to shooting, working longer-than-normal days to make up for the time they’d lost, until the longer-than-normal days became the norm. Each week, Tim would drop by to see Alex and ask Val if she felt ready to come back, and each week she said no, not yet. When she saw Andrew, he was usually asleep on the couch as she passed through to the kitchen to get water or a snack during one of Alex’s brief periods of quiet.
When Val and Andrew found time to talk, it was like they were speaking in different languages. Val would report on Alex’s moods, digestive issues, minor developmental milestones. Andrew would recount plot details and rumors going around the set. In some ways, she was aware she was making a little world sufficient unto itself and that she was waiting for Andrew to find his way in. But in those weeks, he became even further invested in the show, spending time in the writers’ room contributing ideas, bringing home books on multiversal theory and the epistemology of time travel, most of which would end up dropped on the floor by the couch, barely read.
After a month, the attention Alex needed no longer felt constant and, as promised, Tim arranged for a babysitter near enough to the soundstage that Val could check in on Alex between takes. She reentered the world of Anomaly begrudgingly, shocked that nothing else had changed when everything for her was different, as she’d known in that first moment it would be. But once there, she could feel the relief of it, to be lost in someone else’s imaginary story, only a thing in Tim’s dream.
The line is starting to fill in again. The White Rabbit makes sure he stays in her field of vision as he paces back and forth, checking the time on his watch, on his phone. He can wait. Everyone else can wait.
“It gets worse,” she says. “Maybe Tim already knew that by intuition or empathy, but I didn’t, then. In the episode, it’s the Leader. He’s stealing time from them, stealing days and weeks and months to use elsewhere. I look at you and I think that. And whoever’d done it replaced that little person with a version of you that was even better; they did it over and over again, and every time I was so happy for what I’d been given, and so sad for what I’d given up. And every time, I knew that I’d be losing this one, too, any second now, the moment I blinked.”
Island of Misfit Toys
Alex’s superpower may be invisibility, he thinks as he darts unseen among convention-goers. It is a good superpower if you’re interested in sneaking, but Alex is not big on sneaking.
McCormick Place convention center could probably hold four or five Heronomicons inside it, he estimates. Not only is it much bigger in terms of floor space, but the ceilings are so high you could fly planes in here, if they weren’t full of ductwork and metal supports. Where Cleveland had chandeliers, Chicago has industrial drop lighting. Where Cleveland had velvety wallpaper, Chicago has concrete. Overall, Alex prefers Chicago.
The rules are different here, though. He is not supposed to leave the main hall. He has to check in once an hour, either with his mom or with one of the costume ladies, who are all really nice and all have his mom’s phone number. “If there’s trouble,” his mother told him, “find a sexy lady in a superhero costume.”
He imagines a network, a team of superheroines watching over him, patrolling this little imaginary city to keep track of him. It should make him feel good, but it doesn’t. It makes him feel like his mom doesn’t trust him anymore, because he made one mistake. At first, she’d said he wasn’t allowed out of her sight, but it was boring in the photo room, and even the Curator didn’t have time to talk to him. When he insisted, she set up the rules. He asked if he had to check in because he was being punished and she said, “No, it’s just because.” It’s not really an answer, and it makes Alex think about other questions he’s asked that haven’t gotten real answers, either.
Alex is on his way to Artist Alley when he sees Brett with a girl dressed as a kind of half person, half weasel. Alex calls out to him excitedly.
“Alex!” says Brett, happy to see him. He puts up a hand for Alex to high-five him. This is something a lot of adults do to kids, and Alex actually is a little over high fives. He enjoys fist bumps and thinks handshakes will be better once his hands are bigger. But he obliges, then looks at the girl to see if she wants a high five as well.
“Is this your son?” she asks Brett.
“How old do you think I am?” he says. She shrugs, indicating not just that she doesn’t know but that she doesn’t care.
“I like your costume,” Alex says to her.
“Thanks,” she replies. “Anyone ever tell you you’ve got great eyelashes?”
“Everybody does,” he says.
“It’s tough when they only want you for your looks, huh?” she says. With her pinkie finger, she carefully removes a bit of dark makeup that is attempting to find its way into her eye.
“I was hoping we could work on our story,” Alex says to Brett. He kind of whispers ‘our story’ so the girl doesn’t hear. “I’ve been thinking about the robot factory, and I think it has sensors that detect humans, so the robot has to go in alone.”
“What are you guys talking about?” asks the girl.
“Nothing,” Brett tells her. He turns back to Alex. “We’re going to go get something to eat,” he says. “Maybe you and I can meet up later to work on the story? When I get back to the booth?”
Alex knows there are real laters and fake laters, and this one is a real later. It still hurts to be put off. “I’ll go wait for you,” he says.
“Great,” says Brett. “I’ll be maybe twenty minutes.” The girl looks at him funny when he says this, but Brett doesn’t see it. They head off toward the food court, and Alex walks toward Brett’s booth, less motivated now.
Artist Alley, which in Cleveland was just that, is a flourishing neighborhood here, a small village of people, almost all of them boys, who all look roughly like Brett. It’s like they got every possible Brett from every possible alternate dimension and put them right here. After crisscrossing the neighborhood several times and finally asking Brett-If-He-Were-Fatter-and-Had-a-Goatee if he knows where Brett’s table is, Alex finds Fred there by himself.
“Hey, kid,” says Fred. Fred has not yet called him anything other than “kid.” “Brett’s not here. He’s out hunting ferrets,” Fred says.
“Huh,” says Alex. “She’s a ferret.”
A man stands next to Alex paging through Brett’s portfolio, kind of Brett-If-He-Dressed-in-Nicer-Clothes-and-Was-from-Jamaica-or-Somewhere-Like-That.
“These are great,” he says to Fred. “Do you do commission pieces?”
Fred sighs loudly again and rolls his eyes. “I’m the writer,” he says, pointing to his name on the cover of an issue of Lady Stardust. “We are distinguishable from artists in that we show up on time.”
The man walks away without another word.
“You weren’t very nice to him,” says Alex.
“I’m not feeling very nice today,” says Fred.
“How come?”
Fred sits up and looks directly at Alex for the first time. Alex can tell he’s deciding if whatever he’s about to say is worth saying to a kid. He has seen people make that decision a hundred times before.
“Look,” he says, “I don’t want to badmouth Brett, because it loo
ks like you guys have this whole OuterMan-and-OuterKid thing going on. It’s adorable. But he’s got certain responsibilities, and he’s shirking them to go shtup his lady friend.”
“What’s stup?” says Alex.
“Shtup, shtup, kid,” says Fred. “It’s Yiddish—you’ve got to get the sh sound back here.” He raises his chin and pinches right under his jawbone.
“So what’s shtupping?”
“I’m not sure I should be talking to you about this,” says Fred, and from that Alex knows exactly what shtupping means.
“They’re having sex,” he says, less interested now that the mystery’s solved. He tries to lean his chair back like Fred’s, but it doesn’t feel safe and he puts all four legs back on the ground.
“Like right now: he’s supposed to be here to watch the table so I can go see the Mad Brit talk.”
“What’s the Mad Brit?”
Again the eyes roll, and this time they stay pinned to the ceiling. “He’s the greatest writer in the history of comics. He’s a personal hero of mine, and I am not a person who has personal heroes. He’s also speaking right over there”—Fred points to the other end of the convention hall—“right now. And I’m stuck here, being asked if I’ll do a drawing of Ferret Lass for ten bucks, which is ironic, because Brett is currently—” Fred looks back down at Alex. “Never mind.”
“Did you ask him to stay?”
“No, but he knows how important this is to me.”
“So you told him it was important to you.”
“He should just know.”
“Can I say something mean?”
“Go nuts, kid.”
“That’s stupid. It’s one of the stupidest things adults do. Things are broken and things are important and they don’t say anything. They don’t say anything and nothing gets fixed.”
Without waiting for a response, Alex walks away, too, just like the man looking at the drawings did. He’s mad at Fred, even if there’s nothing to be mad at Fred about. Walking away with a really angry face helps a little, but the fact that there’s nothing to be mad at Fred about makes it harder to stop. Alex considers finding a spot to sit and read Adam Anti & Nothing but Flowers, but for some reason he feels angry at the book. He thinks about going to talk to his mom, but then his angry feeling gets even worse. So he just wanders around the convention hall, which seems like a big empty space now, the ceilings too high and the concrete floors slapping against the bottoms of his feet and everything loud and echoing.