by Bob Proehl
“You are?” says the heavy man. “That’s fantastic.” When he says something is fantastic, you believe that it is fantastic, or at least unusually good. Alex likes him. “Here I was thinking you were the guy who could help me find the guy, when actually you’re the guy. It’s great stuff, really great. Do you know Geoff?”
“I don’t think we’ve met,” says the other man, whose name must be Geoff, holding out his hand. Fred, without getting up, shakes his hand, then awkwardly stands up and quickly sits down again.
“I figured all writers knew each other,” the heavy man says. “Isn’t there some bar where you all go to drink whiskey and mope?” Fred shakes his head feebly. The heavy man turns to Alex and sticks out his big, meaty hand, which Alex stands up to shake.
“Phil Weinrobe,” he says. His handshake is firm and vigorous, and Alex feels as if the upswing might lift him right off the ground. “I’m the editor at Timely Comics. They pay me a ton of money to make writers do their jobs.”
“Alex Torrey,” Alex says. “I’m a writer, too.”
“Is that right?” says Phil. “You’ll have to pitch to me someday.”
“I’d like that,” Alex says, although he has no idea what pitching has to do with being a writer.
“This your kid?” Phil asks Fred.
“No,” says Fred. “He’s a fan.”
“Your parents let you read this stuff?” says Phil, surprised.
“I get to read whatever I want,” says Alex, deciding that from here on out, this will be true. Phil turns away from him, and Alex knows his role in the conversation, the little cameo adults leave for kids in the beginning of an encounter, is over.
“I used to work for Black Sheep,” says Phil, “back in the day. A lowly assistant editor. Back then we specialized in teen romance comics and adaptations of television shows. You ever read the comic book version of ALF?” Geoff and Fred shake their heads. “Neither did anybody else. Which is why I no longer work for Black Sheep. Honest to God, when I was twenty-five, I thought people would line up to read a comic about an alien puppet. Who’s your editor over there?” he asks Fred.
“Russell Maddox,” he says.
“He on your back?” asks Phil. He’s talking to Fred, but he’s looking at Geoff. “Riding you about continuity, market viability?”
“I’ve only talked to him twice,” says Fred.
“See that?” Phil says. “The lone genius. Free of editorial interference. You know the difference between an editor and a writer?” Phil asks no one in particular.
“Pay grade,” says Geoff.
Phil laughs, a loud laugh that shakes his entire body. Alex wonders if there’s some connection to Santa Claus that requires all heavy men to be jolly. “That’s good, that’s good.” As quickly as he started laughing, he stops. “The difference is, an editor is not a writer. It’s the first thing I tell my editors. You are not a writer; let the writers write the books.” Geoff and Fred both nod solemnly, because the way Phil has said this indicates that it is an important piece of wisdom. “You got the time?” he asks Fred.
Fred and Geoff both scramble for their phones, but Alex checks his watch. “Five oh five,” he says.
Phil claps his hands together and then slaps Geoff on the shoulder again. “That’s excellent. That’s excellent news. Me and Geoff here were about to go get a beer.” He looks around as if there might be a bar right here in Artist Alley. Geoff is looking around, too, but he seems to be checking to see if he’s been spotted.
“There’s got to be a bar around here somewhere,” says Phil. He turns to Fred and gives him a smile that makes Alex think of Willy Wonka. “You want to come for a beer with us?” he asks.
“Yeah,” says Fred excitedly.
“Do you have somebody to watch your table for you?”
Fred looks around frantically. “My artist was supposed to be here an hour ago.” He says “my artist” the way you’d say “my puppy.”
“Artists,” says Phil, and all three of them chuckle. “Some other time, then.”
“No, wait,” says Fred. He kneels down to get at eye level with Alex. “Kid,” he says, “can you watch the table for an hour? I’ll give you twenty bucks.”
“Sure,” he says. Fred takes his wallet out, and as he hands Alex the twenty, he leans in even closer.
“If Brett comes back,” he says quietly, “tell him I went for a walk. By myself. To clear my head.”
“Okay,” says Alex. He won’t actually lie to Brett, but maybe he won’t say anything. Technically Fred is going for a walk; it’s just that he’s walking to somewhere and not by himself. Alex can leave all of that out.
As the three of them leave, Phil puts his arm around Fred’s shoulders the same way he kept doing to Geoff.
“Kid must be some fan,” Alex hears him say.
Once they’re out of sight, Alex picks up the first issue of Lady Stardust and tries to read it. But his mind is on the Anomaly ending. It’s not a good ending at all. It turns out it’s better not to know who’s behind the mask. Until you know, everything is possible. Once a story ends one way, all the other ways it could end disappear. Once it’s one person behind the mask, it isn’t everybody else.
After a few minutes, Brett comes by, and seems surprised to see him.
“Hey, Alex,” he says. “Where’s Fred?”
“He went for a walk,” says Alex, without adding any other details.
“Huh,” says Brett. “He left you in charge?”
“He gave me twenty bucks,” says Alex.
“That’s surprisingly generous for Fred,” Brett says. He sits down next to Alex.
“You guys don’t seem to like each other very much,” says Alex.
“I like Fred fine.”
“He’s angry at you because you made him miss the Mad Brit.”
Brett smiles. “I knew about that,” he says. “I was just about to call him, in fact. I fixed it.”
“How’d you fix it?” says Alex.
“I was over at the Black Sheep booth, talking with our editor, Russell. And he’s going out for drinks with the Mad Brit tonight, and we’re invited along.” Brett looks very pleased with himself, and for a second Alex is excited, because it sounds like he’s invited, too.
“Fred will be happy,” says Alex.
Brett shrugs. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he says.
“Is he your best friend?” asks Alex. It’s a concept that’s a puzzle to him, one he’s read about more than experienced. Even among the kids he knows in New York, there are very few best-friend pairings. Kids drift toward and away from each other. Alex has friends who are good for swing sets and friends who are good for museum trips. He has going-to-movies friends and going-for-ice-cream friends. None of them is better than the others, and none of them are best.
“I guess so,” says Brett.
“How does that happen?” asks Alex. “How did you get there?” It seems right to Alex that best-friendship would be a place you arrive at, after some time.
Brett shrugs. “He was the only person I could talk to about comics,” he says. “We kind of got stuck together.”
“But now you could talk to anybody about comics,” says Alex. “All these people.”
“I’d have to meet them,” Brett says. “Find out all kinds of stuff about them. Everything we agree on or disagree on. Things about them that bug me. With Fred, I already know all that, so it’s easier.”
Alex thinks it’s exactly the opposite: meeting people is easy, staying friends with them is hard. You’d have to all stay in one place, you and your friends. It’s so much simpler to make friends as you go along, then say goodbye to them when you leave. Of course, it’s important he believes this now.
Management
Once she finds him, Val hangs back, taking this opportunity to observe Alex in the wild. He becomes mor
e adult when she’s not there. His gestures are broader, more sure. He is taller, maybe, or stands up straighter. Part of it is mimicry: he’s taken on some of Brett’s mannerisms since Cleveland, most notably a habit of letting his hair fall over his eyes, only to sweep it back dramatically. He is learning to perform adulthood, albeit the adolescent variety of adulthood he’s encountering at these conventions, which is eerily similar to the type on ready display in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, or in Tim’s, for that matter. Val wonders what adulthood looks like in California and what tics and gestures Alex will pick up in his time there.
But it’s also true that Alex is performing childishness for her sake, responding to a need, a signal she must be broadcasting. The past few days at her mother’s, she’s felt the same pull, the draw of an overacted helplessness as the natural response to her mother’s constant message, spoken or unspoken, of I’m here to help.
Rather than interrupt, Val seeks out one of the rare places in the convention hall where there is enough cell reception to make a call, and enough distance from the spazzy chatter of the convention-goers. She finds a corner to stand in, surrounded by a miniature tribe of teenagers sitting cross-legged on the floor with their noses buried in comic books, unaware of one another or the thousands of people around them.
Louis picks up on the second ring, consistently. Behind his voice, New York sounds burble in through the open windows of Tim’s apartment. Brooklyn has a pulse and music in deep summer that almost justifies the humidity and the smell. Hearing it, she wants to pick Alex up and run east again. She wants them to spend their summer picnicking in McCarren Park, or on the steps of the public library, instead of trudging inexorably west. It’s a momentary want. A pointless thing, so she puts it away.
“How did it go at the place?” Louis asks.
“It was awful,” she says. “It was honestly terrible.”
“He shouldn’t have asked you to do that,” says Louis, a rare instance of him taking sides against Tim in anything. “I can’t imagine how hard that was for you.”
“There are worse things,” she says. One of the teenagers grouped around her feet snorts, probably at something he’s reading. “How is he?” she asks Louis, expecting his trademark sigh. Instead there’s a pause.
“I’m not sure,” Louis says, which must be incorrect; Louis knows Tim’s moods better than he knows his own. The oppressed must always study the oppressor, he once told her. “Since yesterday,” he says, “he’s been very . . . positive.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.”
“Unreasonably positive,” Louis says. “You should talk to him.”
“Put him on.”
She’s seen this once before, two years before she found Louis. Tim had become convinced he’d woken up on a particular morning with all his broken parts glued back together. He’d called up Val to tell her about it. He had thought up a new series for her to star in and walked her through three seasons’ worth of storylines and plot beats over the phone. They discussed networks that might be interested in the pilot, and the logistics of shooting in New York. Because it was something she wanted so badly for him, for both of them, she’d let herself believe all of it. That afternoon, she got a call from an MTA security guard to come pick Tim up from Fourteenth Street. He’d made it into Manhattan on his own, no mean feat from Greenpoint, but couldn’t go any further. The MTA guard had found him curled up under a pay phone, shaking uncontrollably. After that, it was a week before Val could get him out of bed, or even pull back the curtains to let in the light.
“Val!” he calls as he takes the phone from Louis. The word jumps out of him before the phone reaches his lips, causing it to zoom at Val from halfway across the country. “I was thinking of you this morning. I had the weirdest feeling you were running some errand for me. Like I’d asked you to go get me bagels or fastnachts from down the block. Then Lawrence reminded me you were in Chicago, which I knew, and isn’t that funny? Thinking you were running an errand for me in Chicago? Pick me up some deep-dish pizzas. Or—Leonard, what do they have in Chicago? . . . No, but what are they famous for? . . . Oh, never mind. Val, how are you?”
All of it spills out of him, manic and breathless. Although she’s worried about him, Val can’t help feeling angry: she went to see the Woman at his insistence, and he doesn’t even remember he asked.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Things here are fine.”
“I’ve been thinking about this thing in Los Angeles,” he continues. “For the anniversary. Of the show.” Tim always avoids speaking the name of the show, just as he never says his wife’s name, or the Woman’s. “It’s a panel? So there’ll be other people there. Maybe some of the writing staff? I haven’t talked to any of them in ages. And you’ll be there. I’d have you there. I think I could handle it. I think I could manage. I’ve asked Louis to get us plane tickets. I’d rather not fly, naturally, but it’s the only reasonable way. Manageable. Manageable is my watchword, Val. I am expanding my conception of what I can manage. It’s impressive, I think.”
Val knows there’s no way she can deal with Tim along with everything else in Los Angeles. Shouldn’t being in the same room with Andrew, or with the Woman, win her a reprieve from further troubles? Shouldn’t she be allowed to lose everything and have that be the end of it? She doesn’t want to take this moment away from Tim, this moment in which he thinks he’s unstoppable. But she has to stop him.
“There will be fans, Tim,” she says, pronouncing the word as close to fangs as she can. “Hundreds, maybe two thousand fans. They’ll want handshakes and autographs. Pictures with their arms around you. They’ll want a little piece of you, each of them. It’s been difficult. Not tensing up when each one approaches me. Not screaming at them to back away. They’re so devoted. To us. To Anomaly.” She lets the word hang for a second, cruelly. “But there are times all I can think about is how easily that devotion could turn on me. I’m handling it okay.” She pauses enough that she could have added and I’m not insane. “But you need to think, Tim, about if you can handle it. About if you can manage.”
It’s a terrible thing to do, and she wishes she had the time or the energy to handle this some other way. But she can’t have the possibility hanging over her. She can’t deal with one more thing. Tim is silent on the other end of the line, except for the smacking sound his tongue makes when it’s gone dry. She can visualize the way he must be opening and closing his mouth as if tasting something unpleasant, metallic.
“You might be right,” he says finally, quietly. “Anyway, the airports are a nightmare in the summer. Packs of harried parents, brats in tow. Lyndon,” he says, holding the phone away from his mouth, “what about a shadow group that controls all the world’s airports? Governs them like a city. Yes, I know the difference between a story and a setting. Val,” he says into the phone, “I have to go. The help is getting uppity. I’ll see you when you get back?”
“Of course,” she says. He hangs up before she does and without saying goodbye, which is strange for Tim, who loves goodbyes.
A Tom Waits Kind of Lame
Gail racks her brains to think of what she might have done to deserve this. She’s willing to accept that this must be something she brought on herself. Something this bad could not simply happen. But only a major transgression against God or justice or karma could possibly warrant this level of punishment, and to the best of her recollection, Gail has never killed a nun or kicked a puppy or stolen a clown’s wallet.
She’s sitting next to Russell Maddox, the editor in chief of Black Sheep Comics, who gave her a proper start in comics, in a bar booth at a piano bar called the Zebra Lounge. It is a uniquely awful bar. Gail’s never been to a piano bar before. When Russell proposed meeting up here, Gail figured it could go one of two ways. It could be cool in a Tom Waits kind of way, or lame in a Billy Joel kind of way. It turns out the Zebra Lounge is lame in a Tom Waits kind of way. Every sur
face is either mirrored, covered in high-lacquer red linoleum, or upholstered in faux zebra hide, giving the entire room a vertiginous array of stripes. The ghosts of old cigars still haunt. At the piano, a kid who probably studies music at UIC growls and grumbles his way through “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” followed by a rendition of “Cabaret” that goes all in on male pathos. Tourists stuff twenties and requests into his tip jar, and Gail can only imagine what horrors are being added to the set list.
Worse than the bar is the company. Not Russell, of course; Russell is great. And the kid across from her, Brett, who works either for or with Russell, and his girlfriend, whose eye makeup makes her look like she’s been cast as Sexy Zombie #3 but whom Gail recognizes as Ferret Lass from the convention, they both seem all right. Gail’s barely been able to talk to them, though, because sitting dead in the middle of the booth, drinking his fifth glass of straight grain alcohol to preserve his purity of essence, and looking more like an unshaved hobo forced into a fancy outfit than the Dark Wizard of Comic Books, is the Magus himself, Alistair Sangster.
She shouldn’t use the word hobo, probably. It could be considered offensive. Derelict is better. Hobo implies a bindle, and is particularly American. For all the appellations he’s accumulated over his thirty-some-year career, Gail’s always thought his early nickname from the comics press suited Sangster best. She’s always thought of him as the Mad Brit.
“We’re coming to the end of comics,” he says, in answer to a question nobody asked. “About time. It’s all a fucking chrysalis anyway. Comics are the telephone booths of culture. A mild-mannered reporter steps in and flies out a god.” He flutters his hands upward, then slams them down on the table. Ferret Lass jumps. “But once the culture soars off, the booth’s no good anymore. Who needs a telephone when you’ve got telepathy?” He leans back, and Gail is pretty sure he’s grinning somewhere inside that beard, immensely pleased at his little wordplay.
“I’ll be out of a job,” says Russell, who’s being ingratiating. Russell’s got a dog in this fight, of course. If he could get Sangster to publish something with Black Sheep, it’d be a license to print money. And an easy day’s work for Russell, since Sangster reputedly does not allow his scripts to be edited. The only reason Russell would be caught dead in a place like this would be on Sangster’s demand.