by Bob Proehl
In the main hall, a dragon’s head the size of a compact car looms over the booth for a video game company. Twelve-foot statues of intricate Japanese battle robots twist and bend at the waist, move their sword-bearing arms slowly downward, then back up. If you’re close enough, you can hear the strain of the animatronics whirring inside them. On one of the walls, there’s a huge banner with the cast of the R-Squad movies, and another, smaller and cheaper-looking, with a grinning picture of Toby Melvin, from the sixties television version of The Ferret. They look like they belong at a fascist rally. What’s impressive to Brett is the absence of comic books. There are dealers off in one corner of the room with long boxes and bargain bins. Timely has a booth, with their enormous clock logo floating over it. And somewhere, Russell and Marisha are here with stacks of books and T-shirts with Black Sheep’s logo. But calling it a comic convention when there’s such a predominance of other things seems a gross misnomer.
Fred finally shows. In a rush. Flustered. Runs right by Brett. Brett hoped for a discovery. A coming upon. He gets up, approaches Fred at the back of the concierge line, taps a shoulder. Fred spins. Actually pirouettes. Quick, with a harried grace.
“You’re early,” says Fred. “Where’s Ferret Lass?” Sounds jilted. This is the bill due. The one Brett didn’t have to pay in Chicago. This hurt, this damage.
“We’ve decided to see other people.”
“Is that right?”
“Something like that,” says Brett. They start making their way toward Artist Alley, through the crowd.
“I’ve been a dick this trip,” says Brett. “No excuses, just I’m sorry.”
Fred mulls. A second longer than he needs to. Theatrical. Overacting.
“It’s nothing,” says Fred. “Although I could have told you this would happen. If you’d bothered to ask.”
“I know.”
“You’re too trusting,” says Fred. There is a moment. Maybe they’re supposed to hug. Shake hands and laugh about it. The moment passes. Such an easy reconciliation. Shows the strength of the friendship. Or the opposite. A “nothing personal” aspect to the whole thing. They’re more partners than friends. Collaborators. Then what happens after Lady Stardust is done? If they start something new, does the counter of their friendship set back to zero? Will it be a different friendship altogether?
“So did you hear?” says Fred on the escalator. “Levi Loeb died last night.”
A jolt. He’d been struggling with the last page, before she got home. “Going to bed,” she muttered, slamming the door behind her. Brett turned back to the failed attempts at the last page. Blocky. Lifeless. He asked himself how Loeb would draw it. He imagined the scene from an angle he’d never try on his own. Skewed. Hitchcockian. A Loeb angle. And it clicked. It flowed. It was Loeb’s, but it was Brett’s, too. It was borrowed and original. Pencil scarred page and there they were. Lady Stardust and David. From the beginning, but different. A change not in them or outside them but in the play between. The interface of subject and object. Place where skin meets skin.
In the morning, Brett made coffee. Toast. She seemed genuinely sad when he told her he was going to check in at the hotel near the convention center. Gave him a long kiss goodbye. Her mouth tasted like stale booze and wheat toast.
“It makes me feel bad about missing the panel in Cleveland,” says Fred. “A guy that age, you know your opportunities to see him are limited. Still, something seemed permanent about him. Perpetual? And Brewer still looks like he’ll dance on our graves. Bathes in the blood of virgins, most likely. I was never that big into Loeb’s side of the argument anyway. You want to know who’s pulling the weight in a collaboration, there’s one test: post-partnership output. Who’s the Simon and who’s the Garfunkel? Look at Lennon and McCartney. When’s the last time you willingly listened to Wings?”
Brett thinks Lennon’s post-Beatles stuff is as bad as McCartney’s, but he stays quiet as they descend into the scrum of another crowd.
Inner Circle
It is exactly the kind of restaurant he would like. It is designed with visibility in mind; it answers the question What if a restaurant was also a zoo? Seating is divided between two groups: those there to be seen and those there to see them. The latter are in a ring around the elevated platform where the former dine. Even within the raised ring, there are subdivisions. Just like Hell, Val thinks as she scans the room. At the very center is a small cluster of A-listers, surrounded by concentric circles of B-, C-, and D-listers. The diners in each ring look enviously inward at the next, and those in the center look warily at the outer circles from which they’ve come and to which they could easily return. Outward motion is easy. You only have to fail once. To move inward or to remain at the center, you have to succeed every time. Sometimes even that isn’t enough.
Andrew waits for her at a table in the inner part of what she judges to be the C circle. C for “cable.” He stands and pulls out her chair for her.
“I just got seated,” he says. “Haven’t even ordered a drink.” Val had made a calculated guess how late Andrew would be, then showed up twenty minutes later. She felt this would establish something of a power dynamic. Not only does Andrew’s nonchalance tells her the effort was wasted, but the effort of performing such a calculation demonstrated how the power between them was balanced.
“You look great,” says Andrew as she sits down. He sells the line, and she feels her cheeks flush in a reflexive response to having her appearance complimented, particularly when she knows she does not look great: she hasn’t slept more than four consecutive hours in the past week, and today has been her longest uninterrupted span of consciousness since the convention in Chicago. Her dreaming and waking states are blurring together into one long, gray smear of semi-consciousness and half-life. This morning she showed up at the convention without makeup, and the girls performed a team lift to make her presentable, an effort she fears has not held up through the day’s heat.
“You look puffy,” she says, having no incentive to flatter or appease him. But he laughs at this and orders them drinks, guessing, correctly, that she takes her martinis the same way she did when they were together.
“It’s part of the role,” he says. “I finally have producers asking me not to go to the gym.”
“They can’t get you a fat suit?”
“They don’t want fat,” he says as the waitress arrives, lightning fast, with their drinks. “They want puffy.”
“You’re hitting it out of the park, then,” she says. She wants to be all barbs, but she can barely find the sharp edges in herself. She wants to be Dorothy Parker, but after a week at her mother’s in Illinois, she feels more like Dorothy Gale. She sips her martini. Two at most, she quotes to herself. Three, I’m under the table. “How’s the show?” she asks.
He shrugs and swallows the better part of his bourbon. She never understood how he could drink whiskey in the summer. “We’ve been renewed for one more season. That’ll probably be it. There’s only so many variations on lovable-loser-fucks-women-half-his-age.”
She thinks of saying, “He’s supposed to be lovable?” But she doesn’t want to give the impression she’s watched the show, which he probably assumes anyway.
“We need to talk logistics,” she says.
“I’m glad you brought that up,” he says. “I have this idea.” He finishes the rest of the whiskey and signals for another. It is something of a prop for him, in both the theatrical and the emotional sense, but her martinis are no less so. “I’ve been talking to some people. Very preliminary, but it’s gotten to where we’re one piece short. What would you think about an Anomaly movie?”
She laughs, almost spitting gin at him. “Andrew, I’m sorry to crush your dream on this, but Tim can’t write a movie. He can barely write a grocery list. He’s been housebound with an in-home assistant for years.”
“I wasn’t talking about Tim,” he say
s. “I run into some of the old writers every now and then. They’ve got ideas. And there’s studio interest.”
“Tim wouldn’t allow it.”
“It’s more up to Tiger’s Paw than it is up to Tim,” he says.
“You’ve looked into this?”
“There was no point going forward without looking into it. I put a lawyer on it.” Val imagines meetings in smoke-filled rooms. The lawyer she pictures is a cheap private eye from a B movie. “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,” he says.
“I’ve never thought about it,” she says.
“You should,” says Andrew. “I’ll be straight with you, Valerie.” She’s always hated it when he uses her full name. “All bets are off if you’re not on board. No one wants to see an Ian Campbell solo flick. It’d be good for you, too. Better than these little plays you’re doing.”
“Little plays,” she repeats, pressing her lips together tightly. These are the moments a martini makes an excellent prop: it can be pulled through tight lips, strained through clenched teeth.
“You know I never got theater,” he says. It is like an apology in the way a fish stick is like a fish. “It’d give you a reason to be in L.A.”
“I can find work on my own,” she says.
“It’s harder than you think,” says Andrew. “It took me three years to land the part I’ve got, and it’s not that great of a part. People only think of me as Ian Campbell. I’m not saying it would be the same for you. I’m saying: this would be work. And near Alex. And the way the show left things, it’s not like we’d have to do love scenes. We could even be enemies if you wanted. I’m happy to play the villain.” He smiles at her, or maybe the curve of his glass looks like a grin, a half-circle. Val wants to break something against him—not that it could do any damage, but for the sound of it.
“All right, we’re not doing this,” she says. She bends down, picks up her purse from the floor, and sets it in her lap. She removes the manila envelope and puts it on the table between them.
“What’s that?” says Andrew.
“Open it,” she says.
Andrew unseals the envelope and pulls out the photo. He looks somber. She can’t help feeling a little smug. Her trump card is down.
“Alex can stay with you for the next couple days,” says Val. “You two can catch up, throw a baseball around. But after that, he’s coming back to New York with me.”
“Val,” he says, “this doesn’t change anything.”
“I think it does.”
“It’s been six years,” says Andrew. He puts the picture back into the envelope and sets it back on the table. “I’m not that person anymore. I haven’t been for a long time.”
Val slides the envelope back toward him. “I’ll show it to Alex,” she says. “I’ll tell him everything. I’ll tell him who you are.”
Andrew drops his head, folds his hands in his lap. A posture of contrition, classical almost. “You mean you haven’t told him already?” he says.
“Of course not,” she says. “I wanted to keep him safe from it.”
“You can’t keep him safe, Val,” he says. “If you don’t tell him, and if he doesn’t know already, he’ll find out. Her, the shooting, all of it. He’s going to find out, probably soon. Who I was. If I were still that person, Val, I wouldn’t be here with you. I wouldn’t want Alex back in my life. But I do. I’m ready.”
“Why weren’t you ready then?” she asks. Everything is emptying out. “What was wrong with you then?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “When Alex was born, you know, you say to yourself, I’m a dad now, and then you expect to feel different. Like, not a little, but completely different. I was waiting for this massive change to drop on me like a ton of bricks. And I was scared. No one told me that, but those first few days, I was so busy being scared of Alex—that I’d break him, or that I’d fuck him up somehow. It was such a relief to go back to work, where I knew what I was doing. And work became more real for me. You and Alex were together all the time, and there was something between you immediately that I didn’t have. And I thought about my dad, and I thought, Maybe this is it. Maybe being a dad is not radically different from not being a dad. So I put myself into work more, and I drifted away from you, and from Alex. And when . . . she showed up, I was already in this world of fans and fiction. I thought it was a game, or a story. It didn’t feel like real life. Nothing did.”
“I should go,” says Val. “I should be spending this time with Alex.”
He stands up immediately, and she wonders if he is going to pull out her chair for her. “Wait,” he says. “Wait.” She sits back down and then hates herself for sitting back down. She is glad she did not finish her drink before attempting to leave, and does so now. “Tell me about him,” Andrew says. “Tell me what he’s like.”
For a moment, Val forces herself to see Andrew as a father, not as the man she left. It is an overly generous move. He’s had no interest in the role for six years, and now he wants notes on how to play it. But she has to remind herself that he isn’t awful, and that she is not handing Alex off to a monster but to a man who happens to look like someone she had the reason and energy to hate six years ago.
“He’s not like anything but himself,” she says. “I used to think he was the best parts of you and me with everything awful sifted out, but he’s not. It’s like everything you and I ever pretended to be, he is. He’s smart. He’s so smart. And he is caring. He cares about everything and everybody in a way I’ve only ever managed to care about him. There’s nothing cold in him, Andrew. And if you take that away from him, I’ll never forgive you.”
Again he has the advantage, because there is something left in his drink. “You’re never going to forgive me anyway,” he says, and gulps the rest of it down.
“You’re right, I’m not,” she says. “But he already has.”
Takeout
Greedily, Alex devours crab Rangoons, pork dumplings, and shrimp egg rolls. He has ordered a meal of appetizers, all of them gloriously fried. His whole dinner is things that should come before dinner; he is the present dining on the past. Brett made the uninspired choice of chicken lo mein, but Alex generously shares one of everything with him. They sit on the floor of the hotel room, the Chinese food containers laid out between them as if they are planning a great battle.
“So you’re thinking,” says Brett, with lo mein dangling from the corner of his mouth, “they leave the city of industry and get swallowed by a giant metal worm.”
“It’s boring if they have to walk again,” Alex says. He flinches as the word boring gets away from him. It’s one his mother strongly discourages, being of the opinion that only people who aren’t particularly bright get bored.
“And eaten by a giant metal worm is more exciting,” says Brett.
“Not eaten. Swallowed.”
“Difference?”
“Digestion. The worm doesn’t digest them; he holds them in his stomach. Like he’s carrying them.”
“All right,” says Brett after a pause, “I buy it. So what happens once they get swallowed?”
Alex is happy that Brett has liked everything he’s added to the story so far. He was worried Brett would be upset that the shape-shifting girl decided to go home, but he seems okay with it. This next part is riskier, though.
“I thought they could live there for a while,” says Alex. “Inside the metal worm. There’s light in there, because the worm runs on electricity, and there’s food, because of all the other stuff the worm has swallowed.” Alex has thought this part out extensively; he has calculated that the boy and the robot could live happily and comfortably there for a year, at least. “They could live there and be friends,” he says.
“Doesn’t make for a very exciting story,” says Brett. It is exactly what Alex knew he was going to say, but it still makes him angry. He wants to throw hi
s chopsticks on the ground, but he doesn’t. He holds them tightly, so tightly they’re about to break.
“Why does the story have to be exciting?” he says, a little louder and higher-pitched than he wanted to. “Why do things have to happen? Why can’t this story be ‘They were friends and they had some sandwiches and nothing else happened?’”
By the end he is yelling, which he was trying not to do. His breath is coming in quick, hitching gasps, and his eyes are burning, which is not cool. Which sucks.
“Then it wouldn’t be a story,” says Brett.
“Maybe I don’t want it to be a story anymore,” Alex says. “Maybe I want it to stop right here.” He crosses his arms with a huff.
Brett puts his hand on Alex’s knee, then scoots around to sit next to him on the floor. Alex thinks that this is the first time they’ve touched in any way other than shaking hands. Alex leans into him and puts his head on Brett’s chest, and now the thing he can’t stop is that he’s crying. It starts out as tears, and he thinks maybe it’s okay and Brett won’t see it, even if he can feel that now his shirt is all wet, but once Alex is aware there are tears, he starts sobbing, he can’t stop. He doesn’t want Brett to see him like this, because he doesn’t want Brett to think he’s a baby—no one wants to be on a co-mission with a baby. He wants to be brave and adult, but he lets Brett hold him as he cries and he thinks, I made it this far, which is a brave thought, even if it feels very small.
“It doesn’t work like that,” says Brett. “Everything changes, all the time. Even if you tried not to change, things would change around you till you’d have to. It’s like you’re a story, not a picture.”
Alex knows this, and he knows about sharks and how they have to keep swimming or they’ll die, and how you can’t stop moving ever because the earth is moving you through space at ridiculous speeds, speeds that, when you think about the fact you’re moving that fast, you feel like a superhero. He knows you can’t stop, you never get to stop.