A Hundred Thousand Worlds

by Bob Proehl

  “Thanks?” says Gail.

  “Here’s the thing. This thing with the Astounding Family. I’m very proud. The books, they’ll be fine. You’ve read those books already, even though those guys haven’t written them. But for me, it’s big. And for my bosses, I’ve brought the horses back into the stable. It puts me in the catbird seat, and it frees my hand to try something interesting.”

  He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a business card.

  “So here’s what I want,” he says. “I want you to come to me in New York. I want you to call me directly”—he hands her the card and points to the number on it—“and set up a meeting. I want you to bring me something entirely new. The craziest thing you can come up with. Cockroach heads. That’s what I want from you, I want cockroach heads.”

  Gail imagines walking into the Timely Comics offices with a shoebox full of cockroach heads. In her imagination, all the staffers have kitten heads, for some reason. There are Geoff and Ed, adorably licking their paws. Here’s Phil Weinrobe, worrying a mouse.

  “Can you do that for me?” he asks, breaking Gail’s reverie. She’s relieved when she looks up from the card and his head is not that of a calico.

  “I can do that,” she says.

  He slaps her on the shoulder, hard. It’s the first time a colleague has done this.

  “You’re no good to me on The Ferret, Ms. Pope,” he says as he walks away. “I’ve got hacks for The Ferret.”

  The Return of Ferret Lass

  She’s the last person he wants to see. So naturally, here she is. Of all the gin joints.

  Ferret Lass is at the bar Brett’s picked, at random, to get shitfaced in. She’s in her civilian clothes. Still wearing dark makeup around her eyes. Surrounded by a chorus of other stunning women and girls. Many of them still in costume. It looks like her natural habitat.

  “Hey, you,” she says. Comes up and kisses him. On the lips, but maybe only friendly. Whatever it means, it makes him feel awful.

  “So here’s the boy,” says the Diviner. “We thought she was hiding you away somewhere.”

  “Her little fuck puppet,” says Flail. Slurs the f.

  “Dick in a box,” says Flog.

  “Ignore them,” says Prospera. “They’re drunk.”

  “Ignore them regardless,” says Red Emma.

  “So you’re crashing our hen party?” asks the Astounding Woman.

  “That term is a patriarchal diminutive,” says Flail.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” says Ferret Lass. Brett gets the feeling he’s here at her request. But it’s her ability to make the best of any situation. To accept givens and work with them. “The perverts at this bar are only buying drinks for the girls in costume.”

  “Get it while you can,” says the Diviner. “If I dress like this next week, they’ll lock me up.”

  “I am so glad to be out of that tail,” says Ferret Lass. “I swear I’m burning that thing tomorrow night.”

  “You’ll lose your deposit,” says the Astounding Woman.

  “What are you both drinking?” asks Iota. “I’d rather buy a round than have another of these guys breathing down my shirt.” Ferret Lass asks for a beer, and he asks for the same.

  “So what’s your trouble, kid?” says the Diviner. “Most guys would be a little cheerier with her on their arm.”

  “I would,” says Red Emma, throwing Ferret Lass a wink.

  “Fred signed with Timely,” he says.

  Ferret Lass looks at him. Sweet. Caring. “I don’t know what that means,” she says.

  And Brett, who came in to drink alone, tells the whole story. To her. To all of them. It does make him feel better. They rub his shoulders. They pat his back. They make sympathetic noises. They say awful things about Fred. He’s been in conversations like this with groups of guys. Commiserating. One or the other of them complaining, usually about a girl. The base attitude of those sessions falls somewhere between competition and annoyance. Yes, your heart got broken. But mine got broken, run over by a bus, and then burned. Life sucks. Wear a helmet. Maybe he imagines it, or has been programmed to think of women as inherently sympathetic. But as his story ends and others chime in with accounts of their own betrayals, there’s no sense of one-upmanship. They are trying to get at something. Find a common thread that can, if pulled painstakingly, unravel the entire thing. Soon he’s had several drinks. Is, for the most part, not talking. Not even planning to talk. Not attending to someone else to glean a jumping-off point or rebuttal. A rein he can seize to steer the conversation back to himself. He listens, and it is an all-consuming thing to do.

  “A few years ago, a friend and I were going to launch a fashion line,” says Ferret Lass. Her turn has come around. “Which, I know, in L.A. is a stupid idea. But we were young.”

  “Not the wizened hag you are now,” says the Diviner.

  Flail, who has been nodding off, looks up. “Fashion is—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” says Red Emma.

  “It feels like a similar thing,” says Ferret Lass. “She took a job with Rodarte. Used designs we’d worked on together for the interview. She never even told me she was going for the job.” She drinks from a fresh beer. A boy with trouble keeping his eyes in his head had timidly approached Red Emma and ended up buying all of them, Brett included, a round. He was then dispatched back to his table.

  “So what’d you do?” asks Brett. What he needs is a plan. A revenge plot. Some hell-hath-no-fury stuff.

  She shrugs. “Got over it, I guess. It ruined the fashion thing for me. I never went back to it. But that might have been for the best. It’s different than with you. With us, she was the talented one anyway. It was a shitty thing to do, but she’s making some nice stuff now. I bought one of her dresses last year.”

  Brett will never buy any of Fred’s comics. May boycott Timely altogether.

  “You can’t let this stop you from drawing,” she says. “Maybe it’s a sign you need to start writing your own stuff. You were practically writing the book anyway.”

  The only advice Debra ever gave him was to get out of the business. Which, probably, was good advice. He wants to kiss Ferret Lass. The whole time Prospera is talking about how her boyfriend slept with her sister while she was away at NYU, Brett wants to kiss her. There are probably blinking lights over his head that say WANTS TO KISS YOU. After another beer, the intensity of it fades. Her arm is around his waist. Hand rests on the edge of his pocket. If he looks at her, he’ll want to kiss her. So he looks the other way.

  A couple of tables from them, he sees Alex’s mother. Obviously upset. A friend is consoling her. Brett recognizes her as Gail Pope, who used to write The Speck. He takes Ferret Lass’s left hand in his own. Removes her arm from his waist. Misses it immediately.

  “There’s a friend of mine over there,” he says. Their faces so close. “I’m going to go check on her.”

  “Okay,” she says. Smiles. Not sure what he’s doing or how he’s managing to do it, Brett walks away.

  Anomaly S05E14

  Alex is so tired. So tired he could stay awake all night. So tired he should never, ever go to bed again. He knows this place. It is where being sleepy and being wakeful, as in literally full of awake, blur into each other, his body’s and his brain’s signals getting so crossed that they’re entangled and inseparable.

  “So goodnight,” his dad says at the bottom of the stairs, Alex halfway up. Alex looks at him, quizzical.

  “Aren’t you going to tuck me in?” he says. He didn’t last night, but last night Alex wouldn’t have asked, and might not have let him.

  “You aren’t too old for that?” says his dad.

  “Maybe,” says Alex. “But I still like it.”

  His dad follows him up the stairs and into his room. He stands in the doorway with his back turned while Alex changes into his pajamas. When Al
ex climbs into bed, his father pulls the covers over him and sits on the very edge, and Alex thinks he must have his butt really clenched to keep himself from falling off.

  “Is this . . . ,” says his dad, gesturing to the whole room. “The bed and everything?” He presses down on the mattress. “It’s fine, right?”

  “It’s fine,” says Alex.

  “Good,” says his dad, standing up. “Okay, then.” He starts to leave.

  “Can you tell me a story?” Alex says.

  His dad looks like he’s been caught by the police. He freezes in the doorway. “You don’t want to read or something?” he says.

  “I might later,” says Alex. “But a story would be good.”

  “I don’t have any kids’ books,” his dad says. He looks around like maybe he’s left some kids’ books somewhere, or they’re in his other pants.

  “Not read a story,” say Alex. “Tell a story.”

  “Off the top of my head?” says his dad.

  Alex pats the bed next to him and his dad sits down again, a little closer now. Still not cuddling, but that’s okay. Alex isn’t sure he’s ready to cuddle yet. “Mom tells me about episodes of the show,” he says.

  “How does that work?” asks his dad.

  “I pick a season,” says Alex, “and she tells me one.” None of this is working out right. The light is still on, so Alex won’t fall asleep during the story. And his dad is still sitting up, which means that Alex feels like he should sit up. So he props himself against the headboard.

  “Okay,” says his dad, rubbing his hands together, “pick a season.”

  Alex considers. “Five,” he says.

  “Which episode?” says his dad. Of course, this is not the way the game is played. But his dad is still within the rules as Alex laid them out, so Alex should be the one to adjust.

  “How many are there?” he asks.

  “Twenty-two a season,” says his dad.

  Alex spins a wheel in his head. “Episode seven,” he says.

  “Huh,” says his dad. “That’s funny.”

  “I like the funny episodes,” says Alex.

  “No,” says his dad, “it’s funny because that was my first episode back to shooting after you were born.” Alex feels like he has picked a lucky number between one and twenty-two.

  “What was it about?” he says.

  “They had to write Frazer out for a while,” says his dad. “So Tim had her kidnapped by the Leader and hidden somewhere in time.”

  “He did that a lot,” says Alex. It was never clear to him what the Leader’s plan was, but he carried it out mostly by kidnapping people and hiding them somewhere in time.

  “He did,” says his dad. “For a couple weeks, Campbell—” He checks with Alex. “That was my character, Ian Campbell.”

  “I know,” says Alex.

  “Oh,” his dad says, looking happy to hear it. “Campbell was looking for her all the time. But she was right in the middle of Anomaly headquarters, stuck in a time loop.”

  “What’s a time loop?” says Alex.

  “She was out of sync with everyone else,” his dad says. “Living the same ten minutes or something over and over again.”

  Alex thinks this could be great or terrible, depending on the ten minutes.

  “And no one could see her?” he says.

  “She was out of sync,” says his dad. “She was a half second ahead. Campbell was searching for her all over the past and the future, but she was right there, stuck, like a record skipping. Except he couldn’t hear it.”

  Alex tries to imagine it but can’t. Someone right there next to you whom you can’t talk to or see. Then he thinks about it the other way: being right next to someone and they can’t see you. Waving your arms like you were stranded on an island and a plane was flying overhead, knowing that if they saw you for a second, you’d be saved. Except the plane was right there, so close you could touch it, except you couldn’t.

  “But he found her?” says Alex.

  His dad has to think about this for a second. “On the show he did,” he says finally. He pushes the hair back from Alex’s forehead and kisses him softly above his left eyebrow. He puts his hand on Alex’s chest for the space of one breath, a rise and a fall. Then he gets up and shuts off the light. He pauses in the doorway, a shadow, a shape of a dad. Then he’s gone.

  Our Celebrity Guest

  Between the two of them, they’re not making things any better. In fact, since the kid came over, Val’s stopped talking about Alex altogether, which Gail thinks is probably a bad thing. The conversation has taken on the quality of a talk show interview, with Gail and Brett as the guests and Val as the obliging host. She seems happy all of a sudden, but it’s a Stepford-wife kind of happy, robotic or painted on.

  “What got you started reading comics?” she asks.

  “If you could meet any . . . comics person, real or fake, who would you want to meet?”

  “What’s it like to make someone up?”

  As much as she wants to keep the conversation focused on Val, it’s hard not to be engaged by this dynamic. There’s part of her that’s mentally rehearsed this interview for years. A monstrous little creature inside her that has been privately practicing for when she becomes famous. She imagines everyone has this creature in them, but she’s got no evidence to back that up, just an intuition. Certainly Brett sounds like he’s been prepping. She’s surprised how similar their answers are, particularly when Val asks, “If you could work on any superhero, who would it be?”

  “The Visigoth,” they both say at once.

  “Are you serious?” says Gail. “Timely hasn’t published a decent Visigoth since before we were born.”

  “How old are you?” Brett asks.

  “A lady never tells.”

  “Levi Loeb’s stuff on The Visigoth, right before he got fired, is some of the most amazing stuff,” Brett says to Val. “Space gods that can straddle planets. Sentient stars. But it’s all told from the point of view of a third-century barbarian.”

  “Except in the eighties, Ryder Starlin brought him back to earth,” says Gail, well aware that they’re nerding out on Val. But a positive feedback loop has been created, and the nerdier Brett gets, the nerdier Gail has to respond. It’s an infinite nerd cycle. “So he was just this big shirtless lunk who said thou instead of you. Why anyone ever let that man write dialogue is beyond me.”

  “I always thought he should go into space looking for a time portal back to when he came from,” says Brett casually. “Do a sort of Odysseus thing.”

  “But he’s pissed off some space god, who’s trying to keep him from getting home,” says Gail, musing. She notices that Brett has started to sketch on his bar napkin. She can detect a long tunic and one of those helmets that’ve always looked to her like metal breasts. Underneath the helmet, the face begins to take shape, a prominent brow and square jaw. Eyes that look like they’re drilled right through the napkin.

  “But Timely doesn’t do cosmic stuff anymore,” says Brett. “It’s too bad. They’ve got a lot of crazy toys lying around out in space.”

  Gail excuses herself to use the ladies’ room, half hoping that, in stereotypical female behavior, Val will follow. But she has no such luck and spends her time in the restroom tallying a list of the crazy toys Timely Comics has lying around in space. It would be years’ worth of stories, easily. With an overarching narrative structure like the Odyssey, it’d practically write itself. All she’d need is the right artist. Someone who could visualize that level of crazy.

  Coming out of the ladies’ room, she runs into Red Emma, who’s wandered away from the flock.

  “Hey,” says Red Emma. “The writer lady.”

  “Yes,” says Gail, and then sort of waits to come up with something to add. Again, no such luck.

  “Do you smoke?” says Red
Emma.

  Gail smokes, occasionally, but she is not a smoker. Just as she dances, on occasion, but is not in fact a dancer.

  “I smoke,” she says, which seems somehow not to answer the question, even as it directly answers the question.

  “You want to step out and have a cigarette?” says Red Emma. “Not a single one of these girls smokes. For all the terrible life decisions they’re making, their lungs are pink and fresh.”

  “Sure,” says Gail, who finds that she wants a cigarette very much. She follows Red Emma out the front and around the corner of the bar to a narrow alley. Red Emma leans her back against the brick wall of the building, props one foot against it. She draws a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the inner pocket of her trench coat, places two cigarettes in her mouth, and lights them. Then she hands one, lipstick-stained, to Gail. It’s the coolest thing Gail has ever seen.

  “You live in New York?” Red Emma asks.

  “Queens,” says Gail.

  “Appropriate.”

  “You?”

  “Manhattan,” says Red Emma. “My girlfriend works for Goldman Sachs. When people talk about how the rich are ruining New York? That’s us they’re talking about.”

  Gail has not been big on the dating scene, and her skills are a little rusty. But she suspects the mention of a live-in girlfriend this early in the conversation doesn’t bode well. “That’s the way of our people,” she says. “Always finding new ways to ruin the neighborhood.” Red Emma smiles at her, smoke seeping from one crooked corner.

  “You know not one of those girls in there is gay?” she says.

  “Not even Flail and/or Flog?”

  “Oh, God, those two are the straightest of the bunch,” says Red Emma. “Watch out for the ones who talk a big game.”

  “What about their gimp suits?”

  “Underneath that leather is pure white cotton, I guarantee it,” says Red Emma.

  “So what are you doing here?” Gail asks, meaning in equal parts here in Los Angeles and here in this alley.