by Bob Proehl
“People are resistant.” She begins fidgeting again, as if every step deeper into this conversation is causing her physical discomfort. “Honestly, I think the comeback part would put a lot of people at ease.”
“I don’t want to do it,” Val says again.
“Then let me call up Grant right now and tell him you’ll do Perestroika,” says Elise, relieved. “Let me call up Royal Shakespeare and get you locked in as Gertrude.” Val puts her hand over her eyes. She feels as if she’s built a bridge, cobbled it together out of scrap wood, and on the other side of the bridge she and Alex are together and safe. And now she’s watching the planks of it fall into the gap, one by one. “You’re burned here,” says Elise. “It’s not fair, but you are.”
“Why am I burned and he’s working?” says Val, too loud. People’s heads turn toward her for a second; then they continue with whatever they’re doing.
Elise shrugs and sips whatever antioxidant-rich hot beverage she’s drinking and gives Val a direct look.
“He stayed,” she says.
Bye, Coastal
The water pushes and pulls at his ankles, moving in and out as if the ocean were breathing. It is not warm or cold, and it seems to find places in between his toes and wake them up, little spots of skin he’s never been aware of before now. It feels as if it’s bubbling, like soda, but he can tell it’s not. Around his feet it’s clear, but when he looks out at it, the ocean is exactly the color an ocean ought to be, and it stretches out forever. His back to the shore, Alex stands at the edge of the world.
“So what do you think?” his dad shouts from behind him. For a second Alex forgot about him, and everyone on the beach. Even the gulls were inaudible under the crash of the waves. Now, reminded, he turns his head, but not enough that his dad is in view, just enough to be heard.
“It’s pretty awesome,” he says.
“Have you ever been in the ocean before?”
Alex turns back to it. “Not this one,” he says. There have been trips to Jones Beach, to Rockaway Park. But the ocean there never seemed as vast as this one does. Alex always imagined that if you swam out from the Coney Island pier, you would loop back around to the city somehow, wash ashore in Red Hook or Battery Park. This ocean spreads off to nowhere, pours off the edge of the world.
“Do you want to swim in it?” his dad asks. He insisted they stop at a store near the boardwalk and buy Alex a swimsuit, which looks as if someone took a Hawaiian shirt and made it into shorts. Alex watches a wave crash, twenty feet out. In the moment before it crashes, it creates a tube Alex could easily walk through standing up.
“No,” he says. “I’m okay.”
His dad puts a hand on Alex’s shoulder, still tentative. It’s like they’re negotiating between handshakes and hugs, and every touch is a question. “So now you’ve been in the ocean,” his dad says. “You’ve come as far west as you can go.” There’s a question implied by the statements, a general Now what? that Alex doesn’t have an answer to. He turns back toward the shore and reads a sign posted nearby.
“What’s riptide?” he asks.
His dad follows his gaze, then says, “It’s a kind of an undercurrent that can pull you out to sea.”
“Oh,” says Alex. He wishes he had a notebook to write it down in.
“My understanding is,” says his dad, “it basically grabs you by the ankles and drags you out.” He demonstrates with his hands, one of them sliding under the other and whooshing out and away.
“Sounds bad,” says Alex.
“Yeah,” says his dad. They both stare out at the ocean. Alex is glad they came here. The bigness of the ocean almost negates the need to talk about anything. You can look at it and think about it, and the other person can do the same.
“Are there sharks here?” Alex asks after a couple of minutes.
“No,” his dad says. “No sharks.”
“That’s good,” says Alex. He tries to think of other things to say about the ocean that aren’t stupid or obvious, like That’s some big ocean there, or It’s too bad we can’t drink it, because ocean water makes you get thirstier instead of less thirsty. Now that they’ve exhausted the ocean as a topic, there’s not much else for them to talk about. Finally, quiet enough so his dad can pretend not to hear if he wants, Alex says, “You never called.”
“What’s that?” his dad says.
“You never called or wrote or anything,” says Alex. It’s not an accusation; it’s only a fact. What he meant to do was ask why, but his dad answers the question, even though it wasn’t asked.
“I figured your mom didn’t want me to,” says his dad.
“She didn’t,” Alex says, nodding. “For sure she didn’t.”
“Does she talk about me?” his dad asks.
“No,” says Alex.
“Oh.”
“But maybe I wanted you to,” he says. “To call. Or write.”
“Did you?”
“I don’t know,” says Alex. Because it wasn’t an all-the-time want, but a sometimes want. It would pop into his head every now and then, when he’d see a kid with both his parents in the park or on the subway, that he wanted to talk to his dad right then. Usually it happened when he saw dads with little kids—not babies, but before kindergarten. Dads that still picked up their kids a lot, or put them on their shoulders. Alex’s mom gave him plenty of cuddles, but when he watched someone being lifted like that, it was hard not to want it, if only for a moment. “A lot of my friends don’t have dads,” he says, trying to move the conversation from the specific to the general. “We’re in a homeschool group. It’s mostly moms. Even some of the kids who have dads, they don’t see them.”
“You know,” says his dad, “I lost my dad when I was about your age.”
It’s kind of the first thing Alex has ever learned about his dad. He thinks that most kids don’t have to know things about their parents. They don’t know their stories, or their histories. The stories he knows about his mother before he was born come mostly from his grandmother, and are usually about either how wonderful she was as a baby or how difficult she was as a child. They are stories told to him about his mother, but they are really about Alex, in a way, about how he and his mother are similar, and about how Alex’s mother and grandmother are similar. But meeting his father like this, as a fully formed person, totally separate from Alex himself—maybe they need to learn things, stories, about each other. Maybe that’s the way. “Your dad died?” says Alex.
“Cancer,” his dad says. Alex has heard the word used enough to know that it doesn’t need any details to come after it. It’s just a way people die.
“Then he wasn’t lost,” says Alex, emphasizing the last word. “He was gone.”
“Yeah,” his dad says. He reaches down and scoops up a handful of ocean water, and for a second Alex thinks he might drink it. But he lets it pour back down.
“You were lost,” says Alex. “To me, anyway. There’s a kid in our group who doesn’t have a dad. Or his dad’s not around. He makes up stories about him. Where he’s a soldier or a pirate or stuff. It’s different all the time.”
“That’s sad,” says his father.
“Not really,” Alex says. “He had all these imaginary dads. I just had one.” One imaginary dad is what he means, but it feels strange to say this to his real dad. “I watch your show,” he says instead.
“Your mom lets you?”
Alex nods. “I insist,” he says. “I have some questions.”
His dad shifts from one foot to the other. “There’s a lot about the show that we can discuss when you’re older,” he says, which means he thinks Alex has questions about the sex parts. Alex doesn’t want to know anything about the sex parts and can imagine a version of the show where they’re all cut out.
“Why is he so sad?” says Alex.
“Ted?”
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�Yeah. Everybody else on the show,” Alex continues, “if they get to kiss one girl, it’s a big deal, and they’re happy. But he kisses a different girl every show, and he’s still sad all the time.”
His dad thinks about this for a minute. He scoops water again, this time letting it drop from one hand over the other before it returns to the ocean. “He doesn’t love any of them,” he says.
“Why not?” says Alex.
“He can’t,” says his dad.
Alex shakes his head. It doesn’t work like that. It’s possible to not love a particular person, like when Alex was five and Serenity from his homeschool group fell in love with him and Alex had to tell her that he didn’t love her back. She cried the whole rest of the playgroup. But it’s not something you can’t do in general. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he says.
“Some people are so broken inside,” says his dad, “they can’t love anyone.”
Alex looks at him, examining him. “Are you like that?” he asks.
“I was,” says his dad, “for a long time. I think I’m better now.” Alex wants to stretch this answer out so that it explains everything, but all it does is make him wonder where it is they are now, and what either of them should expect will happen.
More Deadly Than the Male
Gail thinks of lions waiting for one gazelle to fall back from the herd. She hopes this is something that actually happens, although she’s never much enjoyed nature documentaries. In her head, a voice, vaguely British or possibly Australian, begins to narrate her actions. The wily comic book writer lies in wait for her quarry. She is stalking the most dangerous prey: man.
The trouble is, Phil Weinrobe seems to be a pack animal. A group of editors and writers follow him around the convention floor like a bad smell. Sometimes this group includes Ed or Geoff, and part of her, the optimistic, compassionate part, wants to believe they might be talking her up, putting in a good word for her.
But there is no room for optimism or compassion in the heart of a mighty predator, says the British or Australian narrator. There is room only for the hunt.
Tomorrow she will kick herself for all of this, for not going through proper channels. A small amount of power can be difficult to recognize for what it is, and Gail has enough clout within the industry that she could set up a meeting with Weinrobe on any day in New York, given a bit of planning. She could be sitting with him in his office next week.
But the fierce killer thinks not of next week, only of this moment.
As she stalks him around the convention, she begins to quite like him. He seems like a friendly uncle. He talks to kids and to fans, he smiles a lot. She had initially imagined him approaching Geoff all cloak-and-dagger, in some dark alley in Chicago, like a drug dealer, or Slugworth in Willy Wonka. But watching him, it seems more likely he came up and asked Geoff out for a beer. All very chummy. Very bro-y.
When her opening comes, it is exactly this bro-ness that causes it, and Gail sees it moments before it happens. What is the one place the pack will not go together? The one spot they will leave a single gazelle alone?
Gail takes up a spot next to the men’s room door, hiding her face behind the latest issue of The All New R-Squad. Sure enough, Weinrobe enters the men’s room solo.
The deadly man-eater strikes!
As the door closes, Gail sneaks in, her hip brushing the doorjamb as she does. She surveys the room. It is brightly lit and empty except for her and her prey, standing at the urinal. She considers options for securing the door, then pulls her hardback notebook out of the back pocket of her jeans and wedges it into the handle. It won’t hold for long, but it will hold for long enough.
She stands up stock straight in the middle of the men’s room and clears her throat, an abrasive sound that echoes off the tiles. “Mr. Weinrobe,” she says, “my name’s Gail Pope. I’m a comic book writer. And I have an idea for how we can kill off the Ferret. It’d be a long story, two years from death to return, the way I have it paced out. His death would drive Ferret Lass to the edge. She’d basically be the star of the title for that time. It would reinvent both characters, redefine them in a way that hasn’t been done in years. I know that sounds crazy, but I think you should hear me out.”
The only sounds in the room are the last few drops hitting the urinal. Phil Weinrobe has been facing the wall this whole time. “Well, you’ve got my attention,” he says. With what Gail thinks is an impressive amount of dignity, he packs his dick back into his pants and zips up. “But since I haven’t had my coffee yet, I’m not sure my attention’s worth much.”
He crosses past her to the sink and fastidiously washes his hands, a sign to Gail that he normally doesn’t bother and is putting up a show for her sake. “I don’t have a load of time today, as you can imagine,” he says. “But let’s walk and talk. Somewhere a little less uriney.”
“Okay,” Gail says, but remains standing in the center of the men’s room.
“Do you mind stepping out before me?” he says. “For appearances’ sake?”
Gail hurries out, peeking through the door for a second before darting to a spot ten feet away but highly visible, where she waits. Maybe he’s using this time to escape. She didn’t see any windows in there, but there’s plenty she doesn’t know about men’s rooms. After a couple of seconds, he emerges.
“There’s a stand at the far end,” he says. “Only passable coffee in the place. Took me years of coming to these things to find it.” He gives her an After you gesture and falls in next to her.
“I’ve been reading your run on The Speck,” he says. “People assume I don’t read any of the National stuff, but I do. I read a ton. I haven’t read a book without pictures in it in a decade, but comics I read a ton. That’s a weird book. Good weird. Real good weird. It reminds me of comics when I was a kid. Where OuterMan’s head would turn into a cockroach head for an issue, and then that’d never get mentioned again.”
“I had nightmares about that issue,” says Gail. “It was never my head that changed; it was always my parents’ or my teachers’. When I read The Metamorphosis in college, I thought it was a rip-off. When all the comics you read are Kafkaesque, Kafka doesn’t seem that weird.”
“I hear you’re off the book,” he says.
“Has everyone heard?”
“Why’d they drop you?”
“Creative differences,” says Gail.
“Editorial differences, you mean,” says Weinrobe. “Nothing creative about it. That whole thing they’re teasing, fridging the girl so the Speck goes dark? It’s been done. Change for the sake of change. That should be the motto over there.”
Gail wants a NATIONAL COMICS: CHANGE FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGE T-shirt so bad right now.
“We’ve got the opposite problem,” says Weinrobe. “It’s the movies. It’s a blessing and a curse. Every time a character gets optioned, I say to myself, ‘Well, we won’t be doing anything interesting with him for a few years.’ Like R-Squad. Far and away our most boring book right now. In the eighties, we’d change the team’s roster every six months. Shake things up. Now they’re in the movies every two years, and the team people see in the movies is the one people want to read in the comics.”
Gail has heard this argument before, usually from Geoff. But she doesn’t buy it. More accurately, the moviegoers don’t buy it. If R-Squad 2 did a billion-dollar box office, why isn’t R-Squad the best-selling monthly out there? Comic book readers read comic books. And comic book readers go to movies. But moviegoers don’t read comic books.
“On the other hand,” says Weinrobe, “it brings in money so we can do something interesting somewhere else. The Ferret movie frees my hand to launch three other books that sell below profitability. And we get to let some writer with a good idea turn the applecart over on another character. But until he’s off the big screen—”
“No killing the Ferret,” says Gail.
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nbsp; Weinrobe shakes his head. “I’d love to kill the Ferret. If it were up to me, we’d off everybody every couple years. It’s a dangerous business, being a superhero. I’d install a reasonable mortality rate in the Timely Universe. And characters would get old. I’m fifty-five now, and the Blue Torch is still running around like he’s twenty-two. Aging, endings: they’re what give stories weight. They’re what make a character matter. But to the people I answer to, the people who pay me? These aren’t characters. They’re properties.”
Gail begins to wonder what they’re talking about. She’s pretty sure her pitch has been rejected. Now she’s feeling like Weinrobe’s shrink. “I should let you go,” she says. “You probably get pitched crackpot stories all day.”
“I don’t get pitched near enough crackpot stories,” he says. “You’re friends with Geoff and Ed, right?”
At the moment, Gail is not feeling those strong bonds of friendship, but since there’s been no formal severing of the ties, she admits she is friends with Geoff and Ed.
“I say this with all the love in my heart,” says Weinrobe, “but those guys are hacks. They’re talented hacks, but still. People are going to look back on this era of superhero comics and they’re going to call it the Competent Age. And it’ll be guys like me who get the blame, and we’ll say we were following orders. Because that excuse always works.”
It is the first time Gail has heard anyone willingly compare himself to a Nazi war criminal. It’s surprisingly endearing.
“I’ve read your stuff for years, and I never once thought of hiring you,” he says. “Never thought, She’d be great on Red Emma or R-Squad. You know what I thought?”
“That I’d be a pain in your editorial tuchus?” Gail says.
“That you’d be a pain in my editorial tuchus,” he says. “That on a regular basis, you would be bringing me great ideas that I would have to turn down. And it would break my heart every time. Right now, saying no to this idea you’ve got for the Ferret? It breaks my heart. Because I want to read that book. But as an editor, you would be giving me tuchus pain, I’m sure of it.”