by Bob Proehl
“Every time things change, they get worse,” he says.
He can feel that Brett is nodding. “Seems like that sometimes,” says Brett. “But I think that’s only when you let changes happen and you don’t change anything yourself. When you make the changes yourself, maybe things get better.”
“Is that what you do?” asks Alex.
“Me?” says Brett, laughing a little. “No, but maybe I should start.”
Alex sniffs, a big sniff that pulls the crying part of himself back inside the rest of him and puts it aside. He thinks about scooting away, but he feels good right here, resting on Brett. “Do you ever miss your mom?” he asks.
“She’s going to be back in a little bit,” says Brett, who must have thought Alex was asking about his own mom and not about Brett’s.
“No, you,” says Alex. “Do you miss your mom?”
“Sometimes, sure.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Huh,” says Brett. “I usually see her at Christmas. But we came out here to see Debra’s parents last year. It’s weird when you get older. A lot of times you’re supposed to be in two places at once. That was the first year since my dad left that I didn’t go home for Christmas.”
“Your dad left?”
Brett nods. “When I was a little older than you.”
“How come?”
Brett takes a second to think about this. “I don’t know,” he says. “All he ever told me was ‘It’s not about you,’ which as a kid isn’t enough of an answer. Isn’t now, really.” He stabs a dumpling with the end of his chopstick and eats it.
“Do you ever see him?”
“Yeah,” says Brett. “He lives in New York now. Sometimes he calls me up to go have a beer. Sometimes I go.”
“Are you like friends?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” says Brett. “I mean, he’s my dad. That doesn’t change. Even if you want it to.” He looks down at Alex. “My dad’s the one that got me into comics. He used to come home from work with them and we’d read them together.”
“I have a friend in New York who sometimes reads comics with me,” says Alex.
“When I got a little older, he’d take me to the comic book store with him. Every Wednesday when the new comics came out. Even though he had to drive past it on the way back from work, he’d come home, pick me up, and we’d go together.”
“What did you do after he left?”
“My mom offered to start taking me, but it didn’t feel right. So I would ride down there on my bike after school. It was as far as I was allowed to ride by myself. I think my mom only let me do it so I could keep some kind of routine. It was a way to know time was passing.”
Alex thinks about the ways he measures time. He thinks about his watch, which just goes around and around. How do you know time’s moving forward? There are pencil marks on the doorjamb in their apartment to keep track of his height, and that’s a way to know. But what happens when you stop growing?
“Do you ever call your dad up to go have a beer?” he asks.
“Never have,” says Brett. He sounds kind of proud about it.
“So do you see him more than your mom?”
“No,” says Brett. “By ‘Sometimes he calls me up’ I mean like once a year.”
“And how long since you saw your mom?”
“I guess it’s been a year and a half.”
Alex thinks about how long a year and a half is. It would contain two of at least one thing that happens once a year. A year and a half could include two birthdays, or two summers, or two Christmases. “That’s a long time with no mom,” he says.
“I guess it is,” says Brett.
Alex struggles with this state of momlessness, how someone can have a mom who is not there. The primary and undeniable fact of his mother has always been her nearness, her presence. Will she still be his mom if she isn’t there to cuddle him, or even to sit next to him on the couch?
“Does your mom know where you are?” he asks. “That you’re in California?”
“No,” says Brett. “I didn’t tell her about this trip.”
Alex sits with this thought a minute, that not only would he and his own mother not be together, but they might not even know where the other one was. Any time they spent apart was always defined by place and duration. I’m going to the store, I’ll be back in twenty minutes. I’m going downstairs for a drink, I’ll be back in an hour. It seems impossible to think that soon he will not know where she is all the time, and she won’t know where he is, either. His position in space has always been in relation to hers and now, without that, he wonders if he’ll be like a boat on the whole ocean, where you can’t see land in any direction, and the sun cycles over you day after day.
No More Stories
The drinks have made everything bright and disconnected. She drives the rental back to the hotel, and L.A.’s legendary traffic is hundreds of pairs of suns burning out of the darkness at her, leaving trails on her retinas. In the lobby, the elevator, the hallway, she is still watching headlights come at her again and again.
She offers to pay Brett, but he declines. He’s a good kid. She lets herself hope that he will stay here, that it is love between him and the girl—which one was it? Maybe he will stay here and Alex will have at least one friend, one known quantity in a strange city.
Val thinks about how badly she has squandered her last couple of days with Alex. From the moment they left her mother’s, depression has been on her like a thick black cloud. All she can think of is the ending, and it’s causing her to lose this time with him, making her unable to pull herself from the deep well that has opened in her chest.
She is sad and relieved that he doesn’t ask for a story, because what story could she tell him now? What’s the story that comes after the end? In the only way she could, she’s told him everything. But now she thinks there must have been episodes she missed, plotlines she left out. All through this trip, she’s been listening to the complaints of Anomaly fans that in the end it didn’t hold together. It went on and on, wandered sometimes for a full season in a direction that didn’t make sense. It contradicted itself at times; it changed its past to fit with its present, and when it was finished, there was no resolution. No closure. But why should they expect something of television that life wasn’t going to provide? What entitled anyone to resolution, and who ever promised closure?
Once in an interview, a fan asked Tim to tell him the answers, and Tim looked at him and said, “You don’t want the answers. The answers are ‘All of time is a mess, and we plod through our little section of it.’ Answers are like orgasms and picnics: they’re never as fulfilling as you hope they’ll be.” She wants more questions between her and Alex, more mysteries for them to solve together, instead of answers that don’t amount to anything, or make sense in light of what’s come before.
He gets into his pajamas without being asked, performing that incredible reversion to a younger self by putting on things that are fuzzy, soft, and overlarge. She asks him if he’s ready for sleep and he nods, so they curl up together under the blankets of one of the hotel beds. She hopes he doesn’t notice she is holding him too tight, her arms locked around his little body like it might repel itself from her, like a magnet whose poles switch.
In the dark, they are not sleeping. Alex shifts against her and, thinking he might be wriggling free, she pulls him in tighter, closer.
“Mom?” he says. A sound of upward-swooping birds, a sound headed skyward.
“Yes, Rabbit?”
“You don’t have to be upset,” he says. “You don’t have to be sad.”
As he says this, Valerie knows it was never Alex she was protecting from this moment. He is so much stronger than she is. She can remember every fall he ever took and how each time her heart leaped into her throat, and how each time he popped back up a
nd continued on his way as if nothing had happened. She wasn’t protecting him; she was protecting herself.
“Rabbit,” she says, “I have something I need to tell you.”
“It’s okay,” says Alex. “I already know. I figured it out a while ago. I wanted to tell you before, but I didn’t know how.”
These are the exact words she was going to use. Because the moment to tell him has always been before. The right moment is always already past; it is happening right now somewhere else in the geometrical supersolid of timespace. She can point to it from where she is. She can see it flying by her like the headlights of passing cars.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” he says.
“It is,” she says, not believing it. “It’s not forever.”
“How long for?” he says.
“Two years,” she says. “You’re going to live with your dad for two years.”
“Where will you be?”
She realizes here is her biggest mistake in all this. She’s had time; she could have made plans. She spent so much time and energy flailing against what was happening, she never made any proper preparations for when it happened. She wanted so badly to stop it, she never formed a backup plan for if she failed. Which she has.
“I’m not sure yet,” she says. “I have to go back to New York, at least for a while.”
“Then you’ll come back?”
“I’ll try,” she says. His breath is rapid, as if he might start to cry. If he does, she will take him and run again. They will disappear forever, better this time. They will change their names and not hide in the open like idiot rabbits waiting to be snatched up by something predatory. She’ll do it right this time.
“I don’t think I like it here,” he says. “I want to go back to New York.”
“You can’t,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because I made a mistake, a long time ago,” she says. “I did the wrong thing, and now we have to make it right.” She doesn’t believe this, even as she says it. The blame is on her, yes, but there’s no way of correcting, or if there is a way, this isn’t it.
“So if I stay here,” says Alex, “that fixes it?”
“It starts to,” she says.
He breathes in deep, then exhales. “Okay,” he says. “Everything is going to be all right.”
He says this with such confidence, and she wants so badly for it to be the truth, that she lets herself believe it. Not just for a moment, but from now on. Because nothing she believes will change anything about the ending, but believing everything will be okay could change how some of the last pages go. So she believes him, lets herself, chooses to.
And a minute later, he is sound asleep.
Secret Origin of the Astounding Family
Upon consideration, caring may be the thing the equation cannot accommodate. You sit in what your son refers to as Dad’s Wondering Chair and allow your mind to examine, again, the Moment. The cone that winnows all of your possible pasts into that moment, excluding any pasts that don’t bring the four of you into that particular jungle on that particular day, that don’t lead to you discovering the artifacts that gifted or cursed each of you with astonishing powers. The limits of your causal pasts constricting finally to a point and then exploding outward to include all of your possible futures, an ever-widening array of them. Your daughter, eleven, flits into the living room, the delicate insectile wings on her back flapping too quickly to be seen. She hovers above the coffee table, drops down to select an issue of People, brushing aside the issues of National Geographic and Discover you piled on top of it, and whisks back out of the room. On the floor near the couch, your son, four, makes shapes, tiny homunculi, out of nothing at all, shaping the building blocks of matter into playthings and setting them into herky-jerky motion on the hardwood.
You can imagine alternate pasts in which you do not care, in which you are not so insistent that you all undertake these adventures together. You have told your wife you owe it to the children to let them experience everything possible. There is so much that is possible. But it’s not the real reason. It’s that nothing feels real to you without them there. No experience truly happens until you can see it on their faces. Your caring for them is a desperate, hungry thing, a need bigger than the need to go, to see. And it’s that caring that brought you all to the moment, to the incident. If not for your need, your daughter might have gone on to college, happily anonymous, joyfully normal. Your son, whose abilities may have no upper limit, who may know no boundary between desire and reality, could have played T-ball and not been any good at it. Could have learned that he loved to draw and become an artist, the kind who draws greeting cards or illustrates comic books. Your wife could be up for tenure instead of prepping for another talk show appearance that will dwell on the domestic advantages of her extendable, almost fluid limbs.
The only one worse off would be you. You would be commonplace and dull, the same normalcy you wish for them weighing on you like a curse. Some days you might look at your children and your wife, and wonder if they were the reason you were so ordinary. If they might have held you back from something better.
And then you feel a tug at the cuff of your pant leg. Your son holds up for display a tiny, misshapen man, body like a pear, its arms stretched upward to be lifted. Its little black eyes blink at you, and your son beams proudly at what he’s made. In an upper corner of the room, your daughter has abandoned her celebrity magazine for a science journal whose articles are over even your head. The sun falls in through the window and lights up iridescent veins in her wings. And from the next room, your wife calls out. “Honey, there’s an article here about a temple in the Urals—you’ve got to see it.” Her arm snakes down the hall with impossible grace and places the article in your lap. There’s a photo, taken from the base of a mountain with a telephoto lens. High up the mountain, there’s the barest speck, a black dot on a white field, hardly discernible as a man-made structure. The article describes the attempt to reach it, the unscalable mountain, the treachery of the climb. Impossible, the article concludes. But someone must have reached it. Someone built this impossible temple in its impossible location. And now it sits there, unreachable, unreached, unexplored.
“Kids,” you say, rising from your Wondering Chair, folding the article and tucking it under your arm, “go pack some winter gear.”
Fan Fiction
If she doesn’t move, the day won’t have to start. If she can only manage to stay still, the time on the clock will never change, the light will never ladder its way across the floor, and they can stay held in the amber of this moment forever. But then Alex stirs, not waking but considering it as a possible option, and the moment is broken. Val kisses the top of his head, his hair matted with night sweat, the slight hircine stink of his oncoming adolescence lurking behind the boyish, milky smell of him. Sometimes Val would hold him in such a way that she could serendipitously smell the top of his head like this, an olfactory reminder of feeding him as a baby. But this barnyard scent says more about who Alex will be than who he’s been.
Val extracts herself from him, removing her arm from under his head and lowering it back onto the pillow. He inhales deeply and, like a flower blossoming in reverse, draws every extremity in tight, condensing a tiny bud of self out of the sprawl he was a moment before.
She is hesitant to leave him alone, even for a second. The thought that he might wake up and find her gone is terrible. But the day is in motion now, and there’s little point in fighting it. Val is caught in it like a shoelace in an escalator, drawn to the top, to the end, to the metal teeth that are static, sharp, and impossible to bargain with.
In the bathroom, she strips down and examines herself in the wide mirror. The multiple lights above and around the sink dispel any true shadows but cast leering penumbrae across her like dark grins. She searches her body for one hard angle, something to hold on to among
the curves, but today there are only slumps and slouches to her. In the shower, she finds that her skin is buzzing with a painful alertness, and her scalp protests every tug of hair. She turns up the water’s heat so it might scald her, but it only hurts, only burns.
Wrapped in towels, she comes out of the bathroom to find Alex sitting up in bed, rubbing his sleep-puffed eyes with one hand and holding her phone to his ear with the other.
“That’s great,” he says. “That means we’ll get to see you soon.” Her gut clenches, reminding her how long it’s been since she’s eaten anything, and she watches Alex’s face, his genuine brightness, as he hangs up the phone.
“Who’s that, Rabbit?” she asks, sure she already knows.
“Louis,” he says, and the thing in her gut relaxes, only to re-exert its pressure higher, at the base of her throat. “He and the Idea Man will be here this afternoon. They’ll meet us at the convention.”
Val grabs the phone from him too quickly, too violently. He looks at her, afraid he’s done something wrong. She navigates the screens, about to call Louis and tell him, “No, turn back, go back to New York and wait for me there on the other side,” but then all the energy goes out of her arm. There’s no point. No way to stop them when they’ve come this far. She puts the phone on the nightstand.
“That’s great, Rabbit,” she says, aware of how unconvincing she must sound. With both her hands, she tries to fix his hair, patting down cowlicks and attempting to unearth the part somewhere under this mess of dark wire.
“How’d you sleep?” she asks.
“Good,” he says. “This is a better bed than the one in Chicago. Squishier. How about you?”