by Bob Proehl
“I’d like that a lot,” says Alex. He shakes Brett’s hand, because he’s not sure you’re supposed to hug at the end of a co-mission. It’s a good handshake, though. Then Alex turns and, using his superspeed, runs away at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour.
Contract Negotiation
For some reason, the kiosk in the convention center that sells phones is lined with mirrors. It’s important, Val supposes, to see how it will look held up to your cheek, or how you will look gazing down into it. No less important than with a necklace or a top, and you expect jewelry and clothing stores to be mirrored. But every time she sees her reflection, she’s surprised she doesn’t look as haggard as she feels. As if the coat of makeup the girl studiously applied, chattering the entire time about Val’s cheekbones and the strength of her jawline, is blocking Val’s exhaustion, shielding it from the world.
The phone she settles on is brown, like an extra-shiny chocolate bar. She can picture it against Alex’s cheek, and the way it will resonate with his eyes, making them seem unfathomably dark and deep. She worries he might look brooding, or that when he’s older his eyes will give him a monkish appearance. But it’s only a phone, and by the time he’s old enough to brood, it’ll be at least outdated, or more likely obsolete, and he’ll have replaced it with another. She pays for it and, stepping out of the kiosk, cracks the plastic shell of its packaging like a lobster claw. She hesitates before throwing away the instructions, but kids never need instructions for pieces of technology like this. It’s all built to match some intuition that only appeared in the population a generation after Val’s. With great care, as if a typo would form a permanent disconnect between them, she programs her number into the phone and labels it VALERIE TORREY. She immediately corrects this to MOM.
She tucks the new phone into one pocket and pulls her own phone from the other. For a moment she examines it, noticing for the first time that the color, a fire-truck red, must look like an angry wound against the pale of her skin. When she gets back to New York, she will buy a new phone. One that matches her eyes. When she gets back to New York, she will buy any number of new things, she will become the kind of woman who shops, who treats shopping as a primary or even sole activity for a day. Maybe it won’t stick, but she can try it out. When she gets back to New York, she will buy a new Val. One that matches her eyes.
She programs Alex’s new number into the phone, the 310 area code seeming like an obvious error. When she’s done, she checks the time. Tim is late. Tim is always late, on the rare occasions he leaves the apartment. He never used to be. It was a running joke among the Anomaly crew that turning the lights on in the morning was strictly a union job and Tim was violating contracts coming in as early as he did. But now Tim is unaffiliated with time, the two having little use for each other. Louis tries to keep him on schedule, and Tim is generally obedient. But it’s only that he understands he’s supposed to be somewhere when expected, not that he feels any push to do so. He’s shrugged off the burdens of letting people down and created for himself a world where nothing is expected of him, and anything that’s given is treated as a gift.
Val sits on a bench. She wants to call Alex, but she knows it would only ring to the phone in her other pocket. She thinks of calling Andrew’s phone, but the thought of having to ask to speak to Alex is so hateful it pushes away even the desire to talk to her son. She finds herself hoping Alex will use this phone only to call her, never program in another number, not even his father’s. The phone will be like the hotline between the White House and the Kremlin. Private. Secure. He can keep it under glass, for emergencies, and he’ll never say Hold on, Mom, I’ve got another call. A direct line, flimsy tether.
When Tim arrives, ten minutes late, below his average, he looks dapper. Remarkable, Val thinks, that we’re all bringing not our best selves to this, but selves that are better than us, more polished and better mended. Maybe the panel will be a series of meltdowns, veneers dissolving into crying jags and screaming fits.
“You look terrible,” he says as he sits down next to her. “Not that exactly. But you look like you’re doing terribly. Have you slept?”
“No,” she says, unsurprised that Tim’s clairvoyance has seen right through her. From the moment Andrew made contact again, told her the terms he was exacting, Tim has been her only confidant. Now she’s regretting her choice, unsure how much he remembers of what’s going on, how much of their confidence he’s retained. She doesn’t have it in her now to explain it all to him again, but she needs someone she can talk to who doesn’t need recaps.
“You should,” he says. “Sleep. Most important meal of the day. And the beds at the hotel are very nice.”
“Squishy, Alex said,” she recalls. She’s amazed how quickly she’s switched to the past tense for him, some grammatical demon in her already letting him go.
“Yes,” Tim says brightly. “Squishy. That’s right. He’s good with words, your boy.”
“He’s not my boy anymore,” says Val.
“Well, that’s nonsense,” Tim says. As if he knows sense from nonsense. As if Val hasn’t listened to him babble on at length, or helped Louis prune the leaves of the Book that no one would want, that would make people question why they’d come there at all. You invest ridiculous efforts in raising a child, with some always unspoken hope that he’ll reach a point where he’ll be grateful, but where did her efforts on Tim’s behalf go? Were they thrown into some hole in the past that he can’t bring himself to remember? Or has she spent all these years shoveling clouds into a ditch, hoping to fill it even though her efforts evaporate the moment they leave the spade? And if that’s the case, can she count those efforts wasted?
“They want to do an Anomaly movie,” she says. “Andrew. Some of the writers from the show. A producer somewhere, I don’t know.”
“Why would they want to do that?” he asks.
“There’s money in it,” she says, more a question than an answer. “All they’re waiting on is me.”
“Are you keeping them waiting?” he says.
“I didn’t want to do that to you,” says Val, putting her hand on his. She hates the little part of herself that feels proud for saying it, but that little part breaks up when Tim says, “Do what to me?”
She’s turned the thing over and over in her mind and tried to find a way to say yes that isn’t selfish. But so far, she’s been unable. It always boils down to hurting her friend to keep her child, or not even keep him but retain him. Stay with him. She’s tried to take herself out of the equation, weighing only the benefit to Alex against the harm to Tim. Even in that, she has to think of the actual benefit to Alex of having her around and not its reverse. She’s come into this conversation without knowing how she wants it to end, which is always a dangerous thing with Tim, who prefers scripts.
“Take your creation from you,” she says.
“Do you want to do it?” says Tim. “This movie?”
There is nothing in her that wants it, not for herself. It is a means to an end and nothing more. “It’d be a reason to stay in L.A.,” she says.
“It seems to me you already have a reason to stay in L.A.,” says Tim.
“But there’s no work,” she says. “No one here wants Valerie Torrey unless she’s playing Bethany Frazer.”
“That could change,” he says. “You’d have to give it time.”
“I’ve got offers,” she says. “In New York, and in London. Alex would love London.”
“Louis said something about Gertrude,” says Tim.
Val laughs. “I’d be leaving my son to play one of the worst mothers in theater.”
“That could be your gimmick,” says Tim. “Follow this up with Mama Rose and Jocasta. Maybe Psycho: The Musical.”
“Will you write it for me?”
Tim smiles at her, and it’s an old smile. It’s the one he gave her when he cast her, the one he gave her when
she told Tim and Rachel she was pregnant. It’s a smile that affirms everything and forgives everything.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting something for yourself,” he says. “I think parents forget that their children want to see them happy.”
“Their children also want to see them,” says Val. “I don’t think I can give him up and go back to New York to live my life.”
“You also can’t give up your life to stay here,” he says. “If you want my blessing, you’ve got it. I’m just not certain you want it.”
Freedom of the Press
Gail skips the greenroom and heads right off the front of the stage at the National Women in Comics Panel. She doesn’t put her head down and barrel through, although she wants to. She takes her time and takes compliments and shakes hands, until, of course, she gets to Geoff.
“What the fuck was that?” he says, not angry so much as panicked.
“Was I wrong?” she says. She puts her hand on his back and pulls him along with her through the crowd, meaning they’re attracting twice as many fans and moving half as quickly. It also means their conversation has to be carried on in staccato sentences between greeting well-wishers.
“I’m not saying you were wrong,” Geoff says, then stops to answer one quick question about the Astounding Family announcement. “But.” Signs an old issue of OuterMan. “Why now?”
“I had an audience,” says Gail, autographing the first issue of The Diviner she wrote. “They asked.”
“I can fix this for you,” he says. He poses for a quick picture with a fan dressed as the Blue Torch. “I’ll call Breverton.”
“I don’t want it fixed,” says Gail as they step out of the lecture hall and onto the main convention floor. Security has cleared a space to allow this room to empty before the Anomaly panel, which is in a half hour. Twenty feet away, a horde is waiting to get into the room. The staff is going to open up dividers and make the room four times bigger, at least. The math works out.
“Let me call him,” Geoff says, and before Gail can protest, he’s gone, probably to find cell phone reception so he can save the day. Gail runs her hand back through her hair. She’s sweating like Nixon. She wants to drink ten beers and run a lap around the outside of the convention center and curl up in a ball and cry. Preferably in that order.
She sees that Brett has walked around the edges of the line, which snakes back and forth through a maze of velvet rope such that it’s actually a square of people about the size of a basketball court. He seems like he’s looking for someone he knows who will let him cut the line, but panel queues are like breadlines in pre-glasnost Russia. There are no friends here, only stony-faced comrades. He comes over when he sees her, then pauses.
“Are you okay?” he says.
“I’m not sure I am, actually,” says Gail.
He points at the room, which is still emptying out. “This was the women-in-comics panel, right?”
“National Women,” she says.
“Aren’t you pretty much the only woman who writes for them?”
“Not anymore,” she says, raising her eyebrows like Groucho Marx.
“They hired someone new?”
“I think I quit,” she says. Then she says it again, to hear it out loud. “I think I just quit National.” She hasn’t said the words, and Geoff was right: it can probably be fixed. Not by her, mind you, but Geoff can still fix it.
A girl who looked like she was probably an undergrad at one of the UC schools had asked a pretty straightforward question. “As a woman, do you feel like you have creative freedom in your job at National?” And Gail decided she would give a straightforward answer.
“Oh, not at all,” she said. “But it has nothing to do with being a woman. It’s the nature of working as an intellectual-property generator for a multinational corporation. But as a woman, as the only woman writing for National at the moment, I’m pretty well insulated.”
“Insulated how?” asked Joy, one of Gail’s editors, who was moderating the panel. But Gail couldn’t tell if Joy was offering her an out or egging her on to tell the whole truth. There could have been a mischievous glint in Joy’s eye, or it might have been a reflection of Gail’s own.
“If National fired me,” she said, “they’d have to hire another female writer within, I’m going to say, three months. As long as I’m the token woman writer on staff, I’ll be okay. Like right now, they’re replacing me on The Speck & Iota with Ryder Starlin. Who, shockingly, is still alive. They told me this at the same time they asked me to come out and wave the diversity flag for National all summer. Which I thought was a little tactless. But, wait, what was your question?”
Everyone laughed, maybe a little uncomfortably. Gail tried to read Joy’s expression, but Joy avoided eye contact for the rest of the panel. Which was probably all the information Gail needed to determine the steaming pile of shit she’d stepped in.
“I probably didn’t quit altogether,” Gail says. “I just don’t have an immediate job right now.”
“Me neither,” says Brett.
Gail punches him lightly on the shoulder. “You have your drag-queens-in-space thing,” she says. She picked up the first three issues from Fred yesterday, and they were good. They were more fun than most of what she’s read recently. They didn’t have the same feeling of being written while wearing mental handcuffs.
Brett shakes his head. “Just submitted the last issue,” he says.
Gail wants to congratulate him, but his face says he’s not up for congrats. “So now what?” she asks.
“No fucking idea,” says Brett.
“Me neither,” she says. She checks the time on her phone. The panel starts in twenty minutes. “You know that thing you were talking about last night,” she says, “with the Visigoth?” He shrugs. “That was a good idea.”
“It’s like an idea for an idea,” says Brett, as if that’s a bad thing. As if that’s not where things start.
“You and what’s-his-name should work on it,” Gail says. “Pitch it to Timely. He’s got an in there now.”
“Fuck him,” says Brett.
It’s a hard-sounding statement, anger tempered by resignation. Not the kind of thing you get over. “I was wondering if that was a Fuck him situation,” she says.
“I should quit,” says Brett. “I should go back to New York and get a real job and make up with my girlfriend back home.”
Gail laughs. “What the hell’s a real job?”
“I don’t know,” says Brett. “One where you wear a suit.”
“Sounds awful.”
“It does.”
They both contemplate a job where you have to wear a suit. One that you have to go to every day. One that doesn’t follow you around and live in your head.
“It wouldn’t have to be the Visigoth,” she says, almost to herself.
“Huh?”
“I mean, why play with someone else’s toys?” she says. Something is picking up speed, coming together. “We could write an epic space-opera-type thing and not have it be a Timely character or a National character. We could make something up.”
“We?” says Brett.
Gail scratches her nose and shrugs. “You got a job?” she says.
“No.”
“Me neither.” It’s not quite an idea, but it’s an idea for an idea. There would be a lot of logistics to work out. It would be a collaboration, which is not Gail’s thing. She hates to admit it about herself, but she likes having an artist she can treat a little like an employee. This would be more like a partner. Still, she’s seen the kid’s work. He sure can generate intellectual property.
“You going to Val’s thing?” she asks.
“I was thinking about it,” says Brett. “But the line looks nuts.”
“I’m on the list,” says Gail. It’s one of the coolest things you can say. She
thinks about polishing her nails on her shoulder after saying it.
“There’s a list?” says Brett. Gail turns to the woman with the clipboard, who is about fifty and works for the convention center. She clearly doesn’t give a single fuck about what’s going on. At Chicago and Cleveland, all the staffers were also rabid fans. This woman looks like she can’t wait until these geeks clear out and make room for the boat show.
“Gail Pope,” says Gail. “I’m on the list, right?”
“Yep,” says the woman, who does not think “I’m on the list” sounds as cool as Gail thinks it does.
“Do I get a plus one?” says Gail.
The woman gives her a long, withering stare. Gail prays that when she is fifty, she has a stare like that in her arsenal of stares. “Honey,” the woman says, “I couldn’t give a fuck.”
“Perfect!” says Gail, clapping her hands excitedly that she guessed the number of fucks the woman would be willing to give. “We’ll go to this,” she says to Brett, “and then we’ll grab a drink after and discuss.”
The woman lets them both into the hall, where dividing walls are being beaten back into their holding pens. The room is vast now, as if it wants to remind them both that the most popular comic book on the market is read by a fraction of the number of people who watch the worst-rated network television show.
“I’m supposed to go to this other thing with . . .” Brett trails off.
“Ferret Lass?” says Gail.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Can’t say I blame you,” says Gail. “She seems like a good egg.” Gail’s not sure exactly what she means by this, having never used the term “good egg” before. What she’d like to communicate is that the girl is cute and seems smarter than she lets on. But to the best of her knowledge, there’s no word for that. “What about the make-up-with-your-girlfriend-back-home part of the plan?” she asks.
“That was more of a long-term plan,” says Brett as they take their seats in the front row. What he means is that it was more of an admitting-defeat-and-becoming-someone-else’s-idea-of-a-grown-up plan. She wonders if, like herself, Brett measures himself against some imaginary parental scale according to whose measurements he is permanently unfinished, immature.