A Hundred Thousand Worlds

by Bob Proehl

  “When I started writing The Speck,” she says, sounding a little like a seasoned veteran offering advice to the wide-eyed rookie, “I had ten years plotted out. I only got to write three.” She thinks about those dead stories, stories she would have loved to write. Then she files them away, next to ideas about killing the Ferret, or a story where Red Emma learns that her husband faked his own death, arranging the deaths of their children to do it. There’s the one where the whole R-Squad lose their powers and they all leave the R-Estate and take on day jobs. In the end, it’s a trap designed by Labrinthyne, but the book is months and months of Medea trying to get a modeling career going and Computron working a shitty job in middle management. She hates Computron so much. “I don’t believe in long-term plans,” she says. “Ferret Lass, you think she’d mind if I was there and we talked shop for a bit?”

  “Probably not,” says Brett.

  “Well, then,” Gail says, “let’s make some short-term cosmic plans.”

  The Future of Anomaly

  Val stands at the edge of the stage as they begin to let the crowd into Hall H. Tim is late. Andrew is late. As she watches people find their seats, Val imagines that it will be only her on the stage; questioned, scrutinized. From somewhere behind her, she hears the busy noises of Tim arriving, a flurry of questions and corrections. But at the same time, she sees Alex and Andrew enter through the back of the hall, hand in hand. They’re walking together, neither leading the other, and although fans wave and tug at Andrew, he stays leaned over toward Alex, bent like a flower toward the sun. It’s a tropism they never teach you, a way to stay in earshot with someone so little, so low to the ground that his words have trouble rising to adult ears. Val scans Alex’s face for harm, for sadness, but there’s only a bit of worry. Andrew sits him down in the front row and squats down on his haunches to talk to him, eye to eye. She strains forward as if she might be able to hear what he’s saying, but the room is full of buzz and chatter, and Alex’s face is eclipsed by Andrew. Val can see his hand resting on Alex’s shoulder, right where it meets his neck. Something is passing between them that Val is not a part of, and when Andrew stands and Alex’s face is revealed, the worry is gone. She wonders what Andrew might have said, and then wonders what she might have said, if it was her there. What words might change that face? As Andrew makes his way up to the stage, Alex spots her peeking from the edges and waves with a frantic happiness, but stays pinned to his seat.

  The moderator claps his hands. “Oh good, we’re all here,” he says. He pulls Val back from the edge of the stage and arranges them all in a line: Andrew, Val, Tim. “I’ll bring you out one at a time,” he says. Then he steps out onto the stage and buzz and chatter focus into a roar.

  It is hard to remember who you were six years ago, because it involves thinking about who you are right now and carefully subtracting everything that’s happened to you in those six years. As Val sits on the dais between Tim and Andrew, waiting for the panel to start, all she wants is to leap over the table, grab Alex, and hold him until everything else falls away. But something Val knows now that she did not know six years ago is that you keep your promises, one way or another. You keep them willingly or you keep them with blood in your mouth and a pain in your stomach that doesn’t abate, only spreads.

  So she is doing this thing she agreed to. She will be, for a little while, a younger version of Valerie Torrey, one who was inextricably linked with a fictional woman named Bethany Frazer. Val thinks about how much their lives dictated each other’s, how Valerie’s pregnancy caused Frazer’s, how the infidelity of Frazer’s partner and lover, Ian Campbell, equally fictional, bled into the real world and destroyed Valerie’s marriage. How in the end they both chose to run, Frazer disappearing completely into wherever it is a character goes when her story ends. Val disappearing ineptly, only for a time, and then washing up on shore here like something broken.

  She flips a switch in her head and six years disappear and she is thankfully not in this moment anymore. She cannot even see Alex in the audience, only the fans in an undifferentiated mass.

  When the questions begin, it becomes apparent that Tim has found the same switch somewhere in the cluttered maze of his own head. He is charming and funny and fierce. He’s the person he used to be, and for a second she thinks how unfair it is that this is the version of Tim that Andrew gets to see, the one he’ll walk away thinking is real. But the thought fades, and despite herself she is enjoying being here with both of them again.

  “Can you explain how timespace works?” a fan asks.

  “Yes,” says Andrew flatly. This gets laughs.

  “Timespace works however Tim says it works when the cameras roll,” Val says. This gets more laughs.

  “I’m a very powerful man,” Tim says. More laughs. The tone is set: they will all quip their way through this. They will smile and be clever, because clever is safe. They field several questions this way, playful with the audience and with one another.

  “Where do you think Bethany Frazer is right now?” someone asks her. Val tries to come up with a quip, but the question sticks with her. She thinks Frazer may be in her head, that maybe an actress carries all of her characters inside herself like dresses in a suitcase. Or maybe she’s six years ago in a direction Val can’t point to. She thinks about Gail, who must be in the audience somewhere, and that maybe Frazer is in her now, or out in some space of pure idea and story that people go to whenever they need something from it. The answer she gives, of course, is simpler than all that.

  “I’d like to think she’s peacefully raising her child somewhere. But that doesn’t sound like Frazer to me. I imagine she’s fighting. For her past, or her future. Or for her child.”

  This does not get laughs, but solemn nods. Someone asks Andrew the companion question, “Where is Ian Campbell right now?”

  “Assembling an evil army to invade the past,” he says without pause. It cracks them up, partly because of the contrast with her answer. Six years, and one thing has not changed: Valerie is still playing Andrew’s straight man.

  A fan asks what was going to happen in the seventh season, and Val and Andrew both defer to Tim.

  “It was always supposed to end with Ian dropping back into the past, into that cow pasture in Kansas, his mind addled, remembering nothing. It was always going to end where it started. To my mind, there are only two valid endings: death and return. And they’re the same. I like our ending better, though, because all of you have written your own seventh season in your heads. You started from the moment the sixth season ended. In your heads, Campbell and Frazier are having adventures and discovering things I never could have come up with. We stopped when everything was still possible, and I always liked that.”

  “Speaking of death,” says one audience member, “what do you think about the death of Constance Robinette, who hanged herself in her cell early this week?”

  The name drops into the room like an anvil onto a mirror. Andrew looks as if he’s been slapped, and Val moves immediately to put her arms around Tim, as if this could protect him. For six years, the name has not been spoken around him, and she’s scared that hearing it now will break even the pieces of him to pieces.

  She searches through the garbled mess of their conversation in the cell to find some clue that this was coming. She tries to look at that moment through the lens of Constance Robinette’s death. It should be an easy thing to do. She can look at her life, or Tim’s or Andrew’s, through the lens of Rachel’s death. But the time she spent in the cell with the woman who murdered her friend has nothing more to reveal. Only ramblings about time and love and freedom, nothing that means anything.

  She’s stunned when Tim pulls the microphone closer to himself and begins, softly, to speak.

  “Stories infect us,” he says. “They enter through our brains and they cross the blood–brain barrier until they are in every part of us. Generally it’s benign. It’s an
infection that keeps us alive, keeps our hearts beating. Somehow this story that we all loved, that brought all of you here, turned malignant in Constance. It mixed itself with other stories in her blood and changed into something terrible. There must have been so much pain in her. So much hurt and damage. I can’t blame myself anymore for what Constance did. I can’t blame her, either. That’s all in the past, and we’re not. Not anymore. Next question.”

  Val looks at Tim to make sure he’s not too badly shaken. He looks pale, drained. Andrew looks tired as well, but more specifically, he looks careworn. It’s a look she’s seen staring back from many mirrors, after nights awake worrying about some tiny thing with Alex that turns out to be nothing, a stomach bug or a sniffle. Or some vast generality of him, future abstractions that, to stay up fretting about them now is what her mother calls “borrowing trouble.” Val wonders what it was for Andrew, what pea under his mattress kept him tossing and turning. But she also takes a little comfort, knowing now that Andrew must care enough about Alex to lose sleep.

  She wishes they could end the panel right here. They are all so tired. They’ve all come so far to be here.

  Another fan raises his hand. He is about Val’s age and looks familiar.

  “Trevor!” says Tim excitedly. The color comes back into his cheeks. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Trevor Whitly. He was one of the writers on Anomaly.” The audience applauds, and as Val remembers Trevor from back then, one of the few writers Andrew was close with, she realizes what’s going on. He’s a plant. Andrew put him in the audience to ask about the movie. Even with Tim here. There’s some sort of plan here, something Andrew’s worked out. At the very least, it puts Val on the spot. She thought she had more time, but what gave her that idea? Everything is ending right now.

  “How about Anomaly: The Movie?” Trevor asks, as if it’s only now occurring to him.

  “Not for me,” says Tim. “I said goodbye to all that years ago. You could write it, Trevor.” She looks at Andrew, and he’s struggling to contain himself. He couldn’t have asked for a better answer. And then Tim continues. “Of course, I’d rather see you come up with something on your own than comb through our old production notes for salvageable ideas. It seems like the only good of it would be nostalgia. A pull to return. If I could go back, yes, I would love to go back to the set with you, Trevor, and with Val and with Andrew. With everyone. But it wouldn’t be everyone. It wouldn’t even be me—not that me, from back then. And that’s who I want back. Part of that me calls out to this me. That’s what you’re feeling, Trevor, I’d bet on it. But if that pull is strong enough for you, then you’ve got my blessing.” He looks at Val as he says this.

  “I’d be all for it,” says Andrew, jumping in. Val imagines he’s been champing at the bit, wanting to cut Tim off so he can say Yes, yes, I’ll do it, it’s happening.

  Val is aware that everyone’s looking at her now, expectant. Andrew raises his eyebrows at her, encouraging her to affirm it, make it so. Val finds Alex in the audience, pushing the crowd back so they’re only a curtain behind him. He’s making his thinking face, his mouth screwed into a tiny knot and his head tilted to one side. There is no nostalgia for Val about those times; she’s spent years drawing the poison out of the years that came before, like sucking venom out of a leg that, other than being snakebit, is a perfectly good leg. She’s tried to keep that time pristine and unsullied by what came after. If she goes back, she’ll have to bring everything with her. But if there’s no pull backwards, there is a fear that she doesn’t know the way forward from here. She can have a past she doesn’t want or a future she doesn’t know. She looks at Alex, who smiles. She will find a way to be with him, to be there for him. But Bethany Frazer is not his mother, even if in some sense she’s the woman who gave birth to him. His mother is Valerie Torrey, and there’s no place for her here anymore. She can’t go back to being that other woman; it would be as bad for her as it would be for Alex. She’ll find another way. She smiles back as she leans toward the microphone.

  “No,” she says, feeling lighter as the word comes out. “I don’t think that’s something I’d be interested in doing.” In the corner of her eye she sees Andrew deflate, and she can feel some power move from him into her, a strength created by negation, the energy released when an idea, unwanted, dies.

  The Magic Words

  The city made up of things is ending. His parents argue about visitation, about him coming to New York for holidays, and how many days, and how many weeks. His father says “agreement” a lot, and his mother says a number of times that she is Alex’s mother, as if this could be what they’re arguing about. Alex thinks that maybe this argument has been saved up, held like air in a balloon with the neck pinched by their separation, and now it’s all rushing out in one long stream. But what he thinks is that all these years, their silence has acted like a shout, one long, deafening shout across an entire country, from one side to the other. One continuous scream of no. No is a powerful word, he thinks, and not always bad. Not always bad and sometimes magic.

  They are walking the streets of the city made up of things, streets that are coming apart, breaking down into space. Vendors who have already dismantled displays of four-colored stories and pixelated dreams fold up tables, and one aisle widens to swallow the next. It feels like Alex and his parents are leaving nothingness in their wake as they stalk through the city this last time, his parents taking strides so long that Alex now and then has to run to keep up.

  His father’s face is red, and his mother’s eyes are red. Angry and sad, Alex thinks. He suspects they think they are determining who will win and who will lose. But that’s because they think they’re telling the story of them, when it’s his story. It has been all along.

  Once there was a boy who was born in Los Angeles. He had a mother and a father, like everybody else. There was a man who was like a grandpa, maybe, or an uncle, who told amazing stories, and a woman who painted, and took care of the boy sometimes. But something bad happened and the woman who painted died, and the boy and his mother had to run away. They ran for years and years, so even when they were standing still they were running. And then it was time to stop running, so they came back.

  This could be Alex’s story. He knows only part of this story, and there are gaps and inconsistencies. If this was going to be his story, it would be one someone would tell to him, and it would be different depending on who told it. He would have to dig for facts, and then maybe that would be his story, a story about a boy who goes searching for clues about where he came from. He thinks about what the Idea Man said: that sometimes the way to end a story is to return, to go back. But even that isn’t as simple as it looks. Where you go back to depends on where you started.

  Once there was a boy who lived in New York with his mother. They went to the park on days it was sunny and ice-skated in the winter or stayed by the heater in their little apartment, telling each other stories. They rode the subways, sometimes not even to go anywhere but because the boy liked moving through the earth like that, and the idea that people a hundred years ago had dug these tunnels and laid these tracks and crisscrossed underneath the whole city without ever breaking the skin. They visited his friend, who lived in a castle because he was hurt. They went to plays and to movies and to bookstores, and they practiced math and did science experiments. One day they decided to take a trip that would take them all the way across the country. They started out in a car, and then they were in a van, and then they were in a train. The boy got lost in the woods and found his way back. He met a friend, and together they figured out a story. They made a story. The boy met his father, and if it wasn’t the first time, it felt like it was, which matters just as much. Then they were all together, everyone, in a city that was dreams and stories everywhere.

  That was another story, and it could be Alex’s, too. Then the ending would take him back to New York, because he’d started the story there. This is part of what Alex
wants. It’s the where of the ending he wants, but there are things that can’t fit into that where, and he still wants them. It’s the trouble with writing stories. Everyone deserves to get everything they want, but it can’t work like that. It should, but even if you’re writing the story, there are rules you can’t change. They’re there before you start, and they have to be there at the end. Even if the story doesn’t end, the rules are still there; they go on as long as the story does.

  Alex and his mother and his father stand together as the city disintegrates. Parts of the city dissolve like a sugar cube in water, becoming gradually less there until they are gone. Others break apart like ice floes, large chunks coming loose and drifting away. Still others are carefully deconstructed and packed in an exact reversal of how they were assembled, so that the process can be repeated somewhere else and later. People take off their masks and are only themselves again; fairies and robots and dozens of alien species vacate the room. Screens that were windows to other planets go dark, and the apparatuses of a thousand dreams and fantasies are loaded into trucks and vans that will disperse them into the larger world, where they are needed. If Alex stands here long enough, it will all be gone, and he and his mother and his father will be in a cave, bare but brightly lit, walls of concrete that would toss back at them anything they said, if they said anything at all.

  This is the first time this has ever happened. Firsts are always powerful, always magic. A story when it starts can go anywhere it wants, and that is a powerful thing. The problem, he’s realized, is that he’s been thinking of this moment as an ending, and endings are inert, spent things. They are stories that have gotten tired of their own telling. So this is the first part of the magic he does: he turns an ending into a beginning. This is not the last time they will all be together; it is the first.