by Bob Proehl
There are practically no other kids here, which is stupid, because there’s so much stuff for kids here. There are card games and action figures, there are bobblehead dolls and stuffed superheroes, but there are no kids anywhere to play with them. It makes Alex feel bad for the toys, and it makes him think of his toys back in their apartment in New York. What will happen to all the things he didn’t bring? Will she throw them out? Will she keep his room like a shrine and never go in there, never dust it or anything so it’s like one of the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History? There are things in his room he still wants: most of his books, a couple of the toys, his Mets hat. Why did he not bring them?
Three May Keep a Secret
“You met with him or you had a meeting?” Gail asks. Whatever the answer is, she’s annoyed. Ed does not have a face made for smiling. There’s something unsettling about him when he smiles. He looks like a predatory animal wearing a funny hat.
“I don’t know what the difference is,” he says, setting a round of beers on the table. And then there’s this: Ed buying two rounds in a row without being asked. Usually, Ed skips out after the second round or begrudgingly buys the third after all three of them have sat dry for at least five minutes. This despite the fact that he’s making more than both of them. Or at least more than she is. There has been some body-snatching, mind-wiping foofaraw going on here in Chicago.
It’s late and they’re at a bar on Chicago’s South Side that Ed picked out. It is a perfect bar for Ed to have picked out, because it gives the impression of being divey without actually being a dive. Ed showed up an hour and a half late because Phil Weinrobe, Timely Comics’ editor in chief, had asked him to grab a drink.
“If you’re not sure, then you met with him,” she says.
“I can’t talk about it,” says Ed, beaming like he’s just gotten laid.
“Then it was a meeting,” concludes Gail, picking up her beer and trying to consume as much of it as she can before the real Ed returns and asks for it back.
“You can’t talk about it?” asks Geoff, sounding hurt. Geoff has a face made for smiling. When he smiles, he looks like an adorable animal wearing a funny hat. Gail decides she is drunk.
“You guys are the competition!” says Ed. “You’re the enemy.”
Gail slaps the table and points at Ed. “Exclusive contract,” she says. Ed smiles coyly. “Three years.” Ed smiles coyly. “Five years!” Ed smiles coyly. “Truckful of money,” she yells. People are starting to look at them.
“They gave you the Ferret,” says Geoff. Gail realizes that she and Geoff, who is also drunk, are projecting their own desires onto Ed’s meeting.
“I wouldn’t want the Ferret,” Ed says dismissively. Then he gives them that grin again, that sharklike grin. A shark wearing a fez, maybe. “It’s bigger than the Ferret.”
“The Ferret movie grossed half a billion,” says Geoff, who for one thing thinks about comic book characters in terms of their dollar value as intellectual property but also probably writes fanfic about the Ferret in his spare time. “What’s bigger than the Ferret?”
“‘Death of the Ferret,’” Gail says, muttering it into her beer. Everyone pauses, like when a gymnast vaults into the air and you’re waiting to see if she’ll stick the landing. Gail takes a deep breath. “The Gentleman kills the Ferret,” she explains. “Lures him into a trap and beats him to death with his bare fists. Ferret Lass goes crazy and seeks revenge. Kills the Gentleman, takes over the whole criminal empire of New York.” She realizes both of them are looking at her and not speaking. The same thing happened at one of their bullshit sessions years ago, when Geoff offhandedly said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there had been a cruise ship full of people from OuterMan’s home planet of Nebulon who’d been light-years away when the planet exploded and they showed up on Earth, a hundred aristocratic cruise-goers, all with the powers of OuterMan?” It was a silence and a stare that meant a real idea had been thrown on the table like a rummy card and they were waiting to see if the person who’d tossed it was going to pick it back up. She’s stuck the landing.
“You gender-bended the Ferret,” says Geoff.
“No, I didn’t,” Gail says. “I killed the Ferret.”
“But Ferret Lass, she’d drop the ‘Lass.’ She’d be the new Ferret.”
“You could run with that for at least three years,” says Ed.
“Next Ferret movie’s in two,” Geoff says. “He comes back from the dead before the movie drops. Fights the new Ferret.”
“She fights him,” says Gail. “He comes back bad.”
“You’d gender-bend and heel-turn the Ferret,” says Geoff, clearly impressed.
“You should pitch that,” says Ed.
“I’d need a meeting first,” Gail says, taking a deep swallow of beer to indicate the conversation is over. But the three of them are still mulling the idea, and Gail fights to keep herself from writing it on a bar napkin. She hopes she is not too drunk to remember it.
“It’s a crossover,” says Geoff, going back to playing twenty questions with Ed.
“Timely doesn’t do crossovers,” Ed says. “We do events.”
“You said ‘we,’” Gail points out. “You never say ‘we.’ You’re all Team Corporate Overlord now?”
“So it’s an event,” says Geoff.
“You are bursting. You are bursting to tell us.” She notices a little sh in her esses.
“I have been sworn to secrecy,” says Ed, putting his hand in the air. “All will be revealed in time.”
Remedial grinning lessons. Japanese smiling schools where they put a pencil behind your eyeteeth until your face learns the feeling of a natural smile.
“In time for the next round?” asks Gail, who is surprised to find her glass is empty.
“Los Angeles,” Ed says gravely. This is better. Gravely is better. It’s more Ed.
“This is the Los Angeles announcement,” says Geoff. There have been rumors for months that Timely will be announcing something big in Los Angeles. All the blogs have been running wild speculation about it. Gail was convinced Timely had hired the Mad Brit back, but when she saw him wandering the convention floor that morning, Phil Weinrobe wasn’t holding his beard for him.
“It relates to the Los Angeles announcement,” says Ed.
“You are a terrible person for not telling us,” Gail says. “You are worse than a hundred Hitlers for not telling us what this is.”
“Don’t you want to be surprised?” says Ed, sounding a lot like Geoff. “Just once, don’t you want to go into something unspoiled?”
Anomaly Hiatus
The hotel restaurant’s menu attempts to serve all comers. It is a culinary United Nations. Along with hot dogs and steaks, there is an extensive offering of pastas and curries. An entire page details stir-fry options; another, falafel, kibbeh, and tabbouleh. Val and Alex sit there for an hour, and Alex doesn’t eat. Not won’t but doesn’t.
It’s a savvy trick on Alex’s part that in these situations he doesn’t present resistance or declare his intentions not to do something. He simply doesn’t.
Won’t she could break down. Doesn’t is a reed that bends with wind. When the waitress comes around and Val insists that he order something, he chooses a hamburger, plain, which goes cold on the plate while Val works her way through a massive Cobb salad.
She asks if anything is wrong, and he makes a noise that resembles the letter M.
Missed, skipped, and refused meals have always been crises for Val. Alex is an engine, burning through calories at an alarming rate. The caloric intake required for sustenance, let alone growth, is daunting to her, and most meals barely end before she’s contemplating the next one. On the occasions Alex will not eat, she finds herself less interested in the cause than obsessed with the idea that without food he will grind to a halt, or collapse like a puppet with cut strings. In the pas
t, she’s tried to force the issue, over stomachaches and queasiness, over the rare claim that he doesn’t like this food or that. But the amount consumed ends up outweighed by the effort expended in its consumption. Her current defeatist strategy is to let it go and leave the food around, trusting he will find his way to it when he needs it, but part of her wants to reach across the table and stuff the hamburger into him like stolen goods into a burglar’s sack.
The waitress asks him if everything is okay, and he nods. She boxes it up for them to cram into the tiny hotel fridge, hopefully to be eaten cold later.
Upstairs, Alex gets into his pajamas and brushes his teeth wordlessly, without being asked. It’s a bad sign, because he is fastidious about not eating after he’s brushed his teeth. Once he’s out of the bathroom, Val goes in, shuts the door, and sits on the edge of the tub, sweatpants gripped in her right hand. It’s a testament to what an agreeable child Alex is that she has so few coping strategies for when he’s not. Negative emotions usually float through Alex like ducks down a stream. She’s thought that his basic mood has something melancholic about it, but real sadness and pronounced anger come upon him rarely. When they do, they strike quickly and dissipate just as fast. She tries to think of times he’s been this recalcitrant and can only think of the car ride from California to New York when he was three. She’d left her lawyer’s office that day, the manila envelope gripped in her hand, and walked to a copy shop a few blocks over. Scanning to make sure she wasn’t being watched, she took the picture out and copied it once, in black and white. The result was grainier than the original, and it was harder to make out Alex in the doorway. She thought for a second that she could copy this one, then the result, spiraling down into lower and lower resolutions until Alex was no longer in the picture at all, and that somehow that would fix everything; it would keep Alex safe and erase or at least obscure Andrew’s sin. But she slipped the copy and the original back into the envelope and went home, sending the babysitter on her way with a generous tip. Andrew wouldn’t be home until the following day. He was on a shoot up in Vancouver, the shift from L.A. to a cheaper location being a sure sign that the movie was running over budget. She found boxes in the back of a closet from when they’d moved in and packed as much as she could. Then, with the last of the packing tape, she affixed the copy of the photo to the door, layering strip upon strip of tape over it so he’d have to claw and scrape the last little bits of it off the door with his fingernails.
She made so many mistakes those first few days. In deciding to run and not walk away, she’d left too much behind. Too many of Alex’s things, jobs left unfinished, friendships severed. Tim.
Alex refused to eat and wouldn’t leave the car. Although he’d been potty-trained for over a year, he regressed, forcing Val to stop at a Walmart in the southern tip of Nevada to buy diapers. He screamed bloody murder in the parking lot as she forced them on, convinced someone was going to call the cops, who would arrest her for kidnapping. When she had to haul him out of the car to go into the motel they ended up at the first night, he’d kicked and flailed at her, making inchoate noises so loud the desk clerk gave Val the key card to the room without payment, suggesting Val come back “when the little guy’s calmed down.” That night, he slept in the bathtub with the door closed, refusing to come out, refusing to talk to her. Thankfully the lock was too high and too elaborate for him to work it, but Val let him stay in there alone and, exhausted, fell asleep sitting outside the door, listening to him cry.
The next morning, all that rage had been spent. Silently, he ate a muffin from the continental breakfast and got into the car. He’d consented to being diapered, but mumbled “Gotta go” when he needed to for the rest of the drive, and on the third day he went without them. On the fourth, she threw them away at a rest stop in Pennsylvania, not wanting to bring them with her into whatever new life awaited her and Alex in New York.
This feels like an echo of that: he punished her for taking him away from Andrew, even though he couldn’t have known what was going on, and now he’s punishing her for taking him back to Andrew. Val stands up and pulls on her sweatpants, leaving her skirt on the bathroom floor. She ventures back into the room. Alex sits cross-legged on the unused bed, his book open on his lap.
“Hey, Rabbit,” she says, “how about a story?”
“No, thanks,” he says quietly, not looking up.
“You sure?” she says. “There was an episode I had in mind.” He doesn’t respond. Val isn’t sure Alex has ever refused a story before. A curious thing about being a mother is how little newness it involves. Routines may at times feel oppressive, but the entry of newness is disruptive, frightening.
“You want to cuddle?” she says, sounding to her own ear desperate and weak.
“I want to read my book,” he says. Rebuked, she goes to the other bed, pulls the sheets out of their tight tuck, and slips herself in like a letter into an envelope. She turns off her light and lies on her side watching him, but when he looks up and sees her, she rolls to the other side and stares at the blinds. They are lit buttery yellow from the lamp next to Alex’s bed, and although he doesn’t shut off the light, she never hears him turn a page.
Living Arrangements
The sun is coming in at a steep angle through the slats of the hotel window blinds. That means it’s late. Not the New York sun. Heartier, more robust, a midwestern sun. Surprised he didn’t notice it before now. The clock next to the bed reads 11:11. Seems like it should be significant.
“Let’s not get out of bed,” says Ferret Lass. Rolls and throws her arm over him. Not sure if she means today or ever. He is fine with either.
“Fred will be angry with me,” he says. The past week with Fred has been strained, and it’s not anyone’s fault. It’s been a team effort. Ferret Lass called Tuesday to get together. Brett tells himself he wouldn’t have gone if there’d been work to do. But Fred hadn’t given him more than three script pages to pencil, and that included one that read “Full-page spread: vast barren starscape.” Brett told him they didn’t have room for full-page establishing shots at this point, and Fred sulked for an hour. In the absence of work, spending time with Ferret Lass seemed permissible and preferable to watching Fred sit at the hotel room desk and affect the postures of the tortured writer, trying to mine bits of genius from his skull. But when Brett returned early the next morning to accusations that he’d broken the creative flow, he turned right around and called Ferret Lass to see about going out for breakfast.
Things had gotten better, and by Friday morning they were almost at the halfway point they’d promised to Russell at the beginning of the week, due in no small part to Brett’s advancing the plot on his own late Thursday night while Fred slept. He presented the pages, still in sketch rather than finished pencils, to Fred the next morning, before coffee had been acquired. “We can work with it,” Fred muttered, and Brett resisted the urge to tell him to fuck off and draw it himself.
“Fred’s not your girlfriend,” she says. The first time this word has been used. By either of them. It makes him nervous.
“Are you my girlfriend?” he asks. Tentative. He’d be fine with either answer. She laughs. She is so pretty. He always thought of Debra as pretty. She is, but in an everyday, meet-you-at-a-bar way. Here is this impossible kind of pretty. If he drew her into the comic, Fred would tell him to draw someone more realistic. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?” he asks.
“I called Iota and told her I was sick,” she says. “The organizer can’t keep track of us. Every time he sees one of us up close, all the blood rushes from his brain to his dick. Besides, there’s so many cosplayers here, they barely need us.”
“What exactly is it you’re supposed to do?” Brett asks.
“I asked about this,” she says. Raises one finger. She is about to deliver a thorough answer. “It used to be the comic book companies would hire girls like me to come and work cheesecake. Hang around the
booth attracting attention. But some of the female fans called bullshit, and rightly so. Because objectification. But at the same time, guys who show up at a con have certain expectations of what they’re going to see. So the people running the convention hire us to do the same thing the comic companies used to hire us to do. Because capitalism.”
“What difference does it make if you’re hired by the company or the con?”
“We never say we’re hired by the con,” she says. “We never say we’re hired at all. No one ever gets angry directly at us. But they don’t know who they should get angry at. So no one gets hurt.”
It’s the longest he’s ever heard her talk. Her voice is the only thing about her that is more attractive when she’s in the costume than out of it. Impressed by her assessment of things, he realizes she hasn’t answered his question about what they’re hired to do. It isn’t important.
“You should come to Los Angeles,” she says. Out of the blue. “After the convention.”
“What’s in Los Angeles?” he asks.
“Me.” This is something he didn’t know. That she lives in Los Angeles. Two lists: Things He Knows on the left and Things He Doesn’t Know on the right. He finally has something in the left column.
“You mean to visit?” he asks.
“If you want to visit,” she says. Sounds a little disappointed. “Or you could come live with me.” He looks at her to see if she’s joking. He hasn’t known her long enough to know what she looks like when she’s joking. “I have a big apartment on La Cienega,” she says. “It gets good light in the morning. There’s a room you could draw in.”