by Bob Proehl
“Good,” she says, surprised to realize it’s true. She’d been determined to stay awake, to catalog every breath and twitch, but sleep took her minutes after it had claimed him.
“You should take a bath,” she says, then wonders why. There is the curious question of what condition he should be in when she hands him over to Andrew. It won’t prove anything if Alex is presented clean and pressed, and there is a part of her that wants to send Alex to his father with a trace of her presence still on his skin. But he’s quick to comply, and before she can rescind the suggestion, the bathroom door is closed, the water running. After a few minutes, she knocks lightly on the bathroom door.
“Rabbit, can I come in?”
“Sure,” he says. He has found the complimentary bubble bath, and his body now rests under an iridescent white moonscape. Alex lifts a mountain of it in his cupped hands and blows it away like dandelion seed. Islands of it cling to his shoulders and dot his hair.
“Maybe I should have brought more stuff,” he says, concentrating on shaping the bubbles, building towers out of them, then swatting them away.
“Was there something you wanted?” she asks. She almost adds “from home” but stops herself. He considers her question, making the face like a cartoon of someone thinking: brow furrowed, lips screwed into a knot.
“No,” he says. “It feels like more stuff would be good. If you’re going someplace you don’t know. To take stuff with you.” He drops a handful of bubbles that fall slowly to the surface and join seamlessly with the others, as if they’d never been divided.
“I’m going under,” he says. “Help me rinse after?” And without waiting, he slides down the length of the tub until his head is submerged, his face dipping below the sea of bubbles and disappearing beneath them, floating under their translucent screen but fractured, as if she’s seeing him through the kaleidoscopic eye of an insect: his face pixels and facets that are not him but suggest him, as something not whole but of parts, moments, images.
When he is done, they take the elevator downstairs and walk the two blocks to the convention center. With each step, she becomes a little less herself, a little more her character. It’s such a gift to have a mask you can hide behind. A skin you can slip into when your own feels threadbare and abraded. As she takes her seat in the booth, she is Bethany Frazer, because Bethany Frazer is the only person she can manage to be right now.
The skin fits poorly and is stiff from disuse. When fans begin to approach, she discovers an old fear. Reflexively, she shies away from them all. She scans the room for danger, for a potential shooter. As if it had been Frazer who was shot at and not Val. Or maybe it’s Val’s fear and Frazer’s vigilance working together. A team up. The thought came to her once: Frazer would have stopped the shooter. It was alien and nonsensical and true. But there are limits to how we can invoke our fictions to protect us, she thinks, even as she sits behind the gauzy scrim of a woman she once helped invent.
She listens to herself greet them, cheery and warm. Her answers to questions about the show are clever and confident. She thinks how easy it would be, from now on, to simply pilot Frazer around, drive her through days like a vehicle that passes less through space than through time. Days are things to be gotten through, traversed. She could sit silently in this corner of herself, pulling levers and flipping switches as Frazer hurtles through time at sixty minutes per hour.
And thank you, it did change the medium, and yes, they were more like family than co-workers, and no, she didn’t think it was a paradox per se, Tim was always good at avoiding those types of things, and it’s so hard to pick a favorite, and of course she didn’t set out to be a role model for girls, but still that’s very nice, very flattering, to meet you, I’d be happy to, that camera there, and how do you spell her name, but no, no she can’t imagine there’s much chance after all these years and all this time.
She feels a pressure on her arm that can only be Alex’s hand. She’s kept the exact measure of its balancing weight against her, constant even as he’s grown. How can he be a constant and always in flux? Her little paradox.
He’s standing next to her with his book tucked under one arm, his whole body tilted away from her by the weight of his backpack. “I wanted to stay with you for a while,” he says. “If I won’t be in the way.”
She feels her skin tear and rend, the weave of it too weak to hold together through this. And they’ll all see. They’ll see there’s nothing underneath. Like pulling a sheet away from a Halloween ghost to find there’s no trick-or-treater, just the air and an empty piece of cloth. She stares at Alex, unsure how to answer.
“Look,” says one of the fans from back a bit in the line. “It’s Owen. It’s Owen all grown up.” There are murmurs of agreement, because this is something all of them wanted, all of them needed to know. What happened to Owen? What happened to Frazer and Campbell’s child?
Yes, she thinks. He’s Owen. Frazer’s child. It’s a way to keep her skin intact. There are enough stories, enough fictions to get them both through today.
“Yes,” she says, quiet, absent, looking at Alex but seeing Owen, who was never Alex but sometimes a crew member’s baby and sometimes a doll and sometimes just a weight, something for her body to adjust to.
“Mom,” says Alex. He squeezes her arm and the sheet comes off the ghost, the skin splits, but it is a deft motion, like yanking a tablecloth out without tipping a wineglass or candlestick.
She pulls Alex up onto her lap, the weight of him returning weight to her until she is again a thing of mass and substance in the world. She smiles hard and bites his ear lightly, and as each fan approaches, she introduces him again and again saying, “This is my son, Alex. This is my son.”
The Idea Man Cometh
He enters the convention hall as if everyone’s been waiting for him to appear, but it’s just Alex and his mom, standing in the lobby to greet the Idea Man when he arrives. Still, it’s a good entrance, because the lobby is all windows and they’re all facing east, so it’s like the Idea Man has stepped out of the sun and into the Los Angeles Convention Center. Alex is happy to see him but can’t help wishing he’d come at some other time. Alex expects he’ll be starving for visitors eventually, in bad need of friendly faces. But today he isn’t sure he has enough of himself to share with anyone but his mom.
“There’s something about the Los Angeles air that I missed,” the Idea Man says. “It’s the stink of machines. New York smells like ten million people, but L.A. smells like ten million cars. It’s dizzying.”
“That’s the lack of oxygen to the brain,” Louis says.
Alex tries to assess which incarnation of the Idea Man this is, and he’s pretty sure it’s the one who’s like a ringmaster at the circus. This is his favorite version of the Idea Man, although Alex suspects it’s also the one furthest from whoever the Idea Man really is. This version has no sadness in it; it’s all grins and babbling. It’s a performance, for sure, but it’s a fun one.
“Val,” he says, “how are you?”
“I’m good, Tim,” she says, and Alex is reminded that his mother is a performer, too, a professional one. If her acting isn’t as over the top as the Idea Man’s, it’s as convincing in its quiet way.
“Why are we standing in the lobby?” he asks Louis. “All lobbies are essentially the same room. Alex,” he says, “I want to go among the mad people. Alice had it all wrong.”
He puts out his hand to be led, and Alex takes it. The Idea Man, as a joke, resists, making Alex pull him along, through the gaping entranceway and onto the convention floor. But Alex can still hear his mom talking to Louis behind them.
“I can’t do this today,” she says. “I can’t take care of him. I took the afternoon off from signing so I could spend a last couple hours.”
“I know, Val,” says Louis. “He knows, too. Honestly, I think he wanted to see Alex one last time.”
&n
bsp; “Dear God, this place is a nightmare,” the Idea Man says, grinning. “The problem is too much and not enough all at once. It’s making me wish my eardrums would pop. Can we get it a little louder in here?” he yells to no one in particular.
“He’s been like this since we got off the plane,” Louis informs Alex.
“Don’t file your little reports on me, Lawrence. You’re not my nurse; you’re my amanuensis. You should be writing down everything I say.” Louis pulls out a notebook and stands poised.
“Hi, Tim,” says Val, who is behind him by this point.
“Just a second, Val dear, I’m establishing setting.” He walks into the room, leaving Val, Louis, and Alex with no choice but to follow. “Look at all this. It’s fantastic. A hundred thousand worlds. What I love most, because I’m a hideous narcissist, is knowing many of these worlds are mine. You know what all of this is, don’t you? This is the immune system of the human soul. Superheroes, space rangers, time cowboys, they are the T cells of the spirit. They were always here to save us. We made them to save us.”
He stops abruptly. “Lazarus, I need coffee,” he says.
“I’m not sure that’s a great idea.”
“It’s my idea, and is, therefore, a great idea. Take Valerie with you. Alex and I need to talk.”
Alex’s mom looks stricken, and Alex doesn’t want to part from her, even for a second. But Alex knows from experience that when he’s like this, the Idea Man is a force of nature, and it’d be as easy arguing with a tornado as trying to convince him how important it is that they stay together.
“Come on, Louis,” says Val. “Let’s be quick about it.” The two of them walk away without looking back.
“So what do you think of California so far?” says the Idea Man after they’ve gone.
“I don’t think I like it,” says Alex, knowing he hasn’t seen enough to judge.
“Give it time,” says the Idea Man. “When are you going to your dad’s?”
“Tonight,” says Alex, looking at his shoes. “Someone’s picking me up at six.”
“An hour of last things, then,” the Idea Man says. “The first thing you need to do is have your dad take you to the ocean. No one can love California until they’ve seen the ocean.” Alex remembers, sort of, something the Idea Man said about the mermaids singing. He thinks it will be good for their first day if he and his dad have something they can talk about, and something they can look at together.
“What can you tell me,” the Idea Man asks, “about the boy and the robot?”
“I’ve got lots to tell you,” says Alex. “But it doesn’t have an ending yet.”
“That’s fine. Some of my favorite stories don’t have endings.”
“How do you know if the story’s supposed to have an ending?”
“You ask the story. The story is working with you to figure itself out, to answer its own questions. If it has an ending, it’ll let you know.”
The question Alex wanted to ask was: What happens if the ending isn’t the one you want? What he wants is to be able to step in, before the ending happens, and change it, although he knows the Idea Man would probably say that’s cheating and makes for a bad story. But he’d mean for the readers. And Alex knows it’s important to give the readers a good story. But what he’s wondering is if it’s important to make the characters happy, too, if there’s something they’re owed for coming this far, and for trying so hard. And if both things are important, which is more important? And if he can’t make both happy, whom should he choose?
Walk of Fame
Alex scuttles on toes and fingertips, nimble and insectile. His tailbone points skyward, his backpack adds to the spidery look of him as he scurries, star to star, between tourists and other passersby. Some stars he skips and others he stops at; there is no indication why some warrant attention. The pauses are the only thing allowing Val to keep up.
“Ee-taf el-Kubra,” he says to one star.
“Dub toe-bah.”
“Iz-ed zan-rah.”
Then off to another, nearly toppling midwesterners as he goes. Under normal circumstances, Val wouldn’t allow him to crawl on the ground like this, being convinced that “when we are in public we walk on our feet” is a solid parental baseline for behavior, even if Alex doesn’t always see it that way. But she’s not going to spend their last few hours chastising him, and she has to admit that, for what he’s trying to do, this down-facing, water-strider method is better suited than the chin-to-chest, eyes-to-pavement posture of everyone else on the sidewalk, who constantly bump into one another and mutter apologies.
“Mom,” he says, his head swiveled back toward her, “who’s Marlene Die-trick?”
“She was an actress in the fifties,” she says. “She was very pretty.”
“Oh,” he says and scampers to another star.
“Mom,” he says, “who’s Nat King Cole?”
“He was a singer,” she says. “Your babu loves him.”
“Was he a king?”
“No, that’s just what people called him.”
“Oh.”
At the corner of La Brea and Hollywood, Val feels they’re coming up on an event horizon, a last moment when their destination can still be changed—the nature of this outing, these last hours together, altered or salvaged. It’s two hours still before the car Andrew’s sending—and how like Andrew is it to send a car rather than show up himself—will pull up in front of the convention center to snatch Alex away. They could catch a cab down to the Tar Pits; Alex would love it, and the model elephant, half-submerged in the muck, trumpeting her plight to her family on the shore, would serve as a good parting image. She could remember their splitting like a sinking into blackness, tusks and trunk flailing ineffectively upward even as the bulk of the body is pulled down against its own striving—indeed, because of it. As she thinks this, she understands they are not approaching an event horizon but past it, falling toward their destination, pulled inescapably down.
“Take a right up here, Rabbit,” she calls. It’s only a couple of steps before she rounds the corner herself and Alex is in sight again. So is the theater, casting its shadow across the boulevard like a fork. Seeing it now, Val is sure she’s doing the right thing, or at least the wrong thing for the right reasons. She’s thought of what happened here as part of her story, the Story of Val and Andrew, which ended years ago. But it’s Alex’s story, too. His life was changed here as much as hers, and he deserves to know. More now and here than ever before, Val needs to explain herself to Alex, to be understood by him. He has an understanding of her, but she needs him to have this one, the one that grows out of this place and what happened. She wants to apologize to him for what she did and the way his life had to change as a result.
Then there’s the other part, the part that’s easier to explain to herself but harder to admit. She wants to warn him, to ready him to protect himself. She needs to tell him that Andrew never gave a fuck about anyone but himself, and people have been hurt as a result. People have died, right here. She needs to know that Alex will be constantly on his guard, will see Andrew as a potential threat, or at least a vector by which harm might come. She needs him to know what happened here so she can feel he’s safe.
“Mom, it’s a pagoda,” he says, pointing at the theater. “It even has dragons.” Before she can comment, he’s discovered the footprints and handprints in the concrete and is busy comparing the size of his own hands to those of the celebrities commemorated here on the forecourt.
“Rabbit,” she calls, “can you come sit with me a minute?” He bounds over to a bench and climbs into her lap. She thinks of the way zoo animals raised by humans sometimes fail to realize they’re full-grown and accidentally injure their trainers by applying their adult strength to childlike gestures. What gestures will be unavailable to them in two years, and in what ways will she no longer be able to hold him,
even if he’s willing?
“I wanted to talk to you about your dad,” she says, and she feels his body tense. There is a part of Alex they’ve never spoken about that wants a father, even if it’s an absent one. That part may even need a father so that Alex can understand himself and how he fits into the world. Without Andrew there, Alex has constructed him, insubstantial but in a basic way good, a goodness born out of Alex’s sense of himself as good. If told about the things Andrew has done, there’s a risk Alex will do exactly what Val did years ago and take that badness into himself, constructing culpability out of connection. What does it say about her that she was married to a man like that? Val has spent years wondering this. For Alex, it’s the reverse: What does it say about Alex that Andrew, this new, terrible Andrew that Val is about to give him, is part of him?
Here, where her past brushes closest to her present, where there will always be shots firing and Tim screaming and Rachel bleeding out in Val’s arms, it should be easiest to slip the poison in. But even here, she can’t do it.
“Your dad,” she says. “Sometimes he has trouble thinking about other people. Because he was alone for so long and only had to take care of himself. I think, Rabbit, you’re going to need to take care of yourself more than you’re used to.”
She wonders how poorly she’s prepared him for this, how taking care of him as best she could might in the end have done him harm.
Without looking up at her, he says, “It’s all right, Mom. I can do anything if I have to. Even if I haven’t before, I still can.”
“I know you can, Rabbit,” she says.
“I can take care of myself. And you. And maybe even my dad, if he lets me. I don’t know how yet, but I know I can do it.”
As was the case last night, his sureness and her desire to believe him, her wanting him to be right, come together, and everything will be all right, if only because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
“We should go back,” he says. “It’s almost time.” He stands up and takes her hand and leads her, because he’s the stronger of the two of them now, if he hasn’t been all along.