A Hundred Thousand Worlds (15 page)

•   •   •

Val has followed the Woman’s progress as she’s been shunted from one facility to another like Goldilocks sampling porridges and beds, across four states in the first year. Each facility she ends up in, she refuses anti-psychotic medication. Some facilities insist more strongly than others, Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Oregon even appealing to the Ninth Circuit for the right to compel her to take haloperidol, which, coincidentally, Tim was being treated with at the time of the case. When Coffee Creek lost the appeal, they sent her here to Normal, Illinois, where no one is interested in advancing her treatment. This is a place where you put things no one cares about and forget them.

Should Val feel better that this woman, whose name she has struck from her memory, is now a ruined husk? Does she thrill to think of the woman whose frenetic beauty jittered on the witness stand, promising burn scars, cuts, and abrasions to a tabloid audience that wanted her by the bowlful, and how little this woman, chewing on her split ends, resembles her? Her skeleton threatens to tear the sallow paper of her skin and caper about like a drunken marionette. Does it make Val happy to
know that the Woman must live in this room, a space without windows or time, or that the cell reeks of acrid, panicked sweat? As the Woman babbles, displaying for Val the shards of a mind that was once at least a warped mirror, is there a victory to be claimed?

Tim insisted Val come to see the Woman. As proof that she was locked up. He said he’d been having dreams where she was spirited away. He said he’d seen her on the street in Greenpoint, from out his window, only it wasn’t her. Fantasy stuff, episode fodder. But he insisted and she agreed. She knows how different it is for him. There were times, in the first months after the shooting, that Val had envied him his hospital bed and his catatonia. As if he was taking a vacation from the reality of what had happened and it would all be cleaned up when he came back. But even more than Val, Tim lives in that moment permanently. Part of him will always be there on the sidewalk, screaming.

Val’s navy blue suit is crisply pressed, but she can feel the heat of this place, its dank, wearing the edges off it, threatening to eat through the shield of it and curl itself, wet and somehow cool like a fish, like the tentacle of some mollusk, against her skin, against her belly. The sight of this woman, the little that is left of her, the ugly stain that remains, does not make Val happy, or angry, even though parts of her want these things. It is something worse than hate, because it goes not simply outward, from Val to the woman like a rain of arrows. It snakes and twists and goes in every direction at once, until Val’s life is permanently entwined with the Woman’s and it is impossible to blame her for Rachel’s death and Tim’s shattered psyche and her own ruined marriage, without crediting her for the last six years of raising Alex on her own. Val can’t go back in time to the moment, erase it, and imagine a life for herself as good as the one she’s led. Maybe it’s a failure of imagination on her part, but she can’t picture that version of herself, six years older: still married, still working in television and having dinner at Tim and Rachel’s once a week. It might have been a lovely life the Woman destroyed, but Val doesn’t pine for it, which leaves her in this
terrible place and wondering if she doesn’t owe this woman gratitude, a thank-you for destroying everything Val ever thought she wanted.

•   •   •

“I’m glad I’m being debriefed. Although I’m surprised they called you in, given your personal connection to the case. It’s important the agency get as much information from me as they can. And it gives me time to reflect. It’s funny to think of time as something to give or take. Any day, they’ll be done with me. Not any day: tomorrow. As soon as the today loop stops. As soon as they shut it off.”

•   •   •

The divorce proceedings proceed. There’s nothing Val wants, so there’s nothing to argue about. All assets are neatly divided like a pie neither of them wants to taste.

Regarding Alex, it comes down to the Solomonic slice. She wants sole custody with supervised visitations, but her lawyer wards her off. The State of California does not consider adultery a factor in determining custody, she tells Val. Even the demonstrable craziness of the Woman is a nonfactor. If the relationship was ongoing, it would be, certainly. But the Woman is locked away, and there’s no chance of her doing Alex any harm. If anything, her incarceration is to Andrew’s advantage.

Meeting in her lawyer’s office, Andrew says “I’m still his father” at least a half-dozen times, as if it’s a catchphrase he’s trying out. This seems to be his major justification for joint custody, but it’s a legally valid one. Val tries to write out descriptions of Andrew as a father that make him seem unsuitable, but it’s all absences and omissions. He wasn’t there when Alex rolled over for the first time. He doesn’t know what breakfast cereal Alex likes. Her lawyer says Andrew will never exercise the joint custody agreement even if they give it to him. She says Val will end up with sole custody in fact if not on paper, and that in the end, Andrew will only want a weekend here or there, the trips to the zoo and the beach
rather than the committed work of a parent. Her lawyer has seen all this before; she knows the type.

There are stacks of papers to be signed. For days, Val goes to the lawyer’s office and signs until her wrist aches and her hand is cramped into a talon, but finally it is done. Val reaches the last signature without knowing it and spends the first few moments of her divorced life waiting for another piece of paperwork to appear in front of her. She and Andrew shake hands as if there are cameras watching. They choose a time on Friday afternoons for him to pick up Alex and a time on Sunday evenings to drop him off, and Val realizes with a measure of disgust that all this paperwork has not removed Andrew from her life. They are tied together, and Alex is the knot that does it.

It goes on for a month, for two. Val begins to understand that the show will never start up again, that they should have been on set weeks ago. Tim is still in the hospital, and no one from the network has contacted her. The seasonal rhythm that has structured the past six years of her life is broken, the last tether to snap. She wants to mourn Bethany Frazer, but it would be such an insult to Rachel, the kind she would have suffered through with quiet grace if she were alive. Val begins making the adjustments necessary to being a single mother, which center around carving out pockets of Alex-less time to get other things done. Andrew mentions that he is always available to help, but she doesn’t want his help. Once a week is the most she can stand to see him.

It’s during one of these Alex-less hours, while he is being watched by the teenage girl from across the hall and Val is stopping by her lawyer’s office because some little bit of money has been released from escrow, that she is approached by a woman from the district attorney’s office. Val remembers seeing her in the courtroom. She wears her hair the way Val used to, back in season one. Val remembers her because when she first saw the woman, she thought it was Bethany Frazer, haunting the trial. She was worried for that split second that she had cracked, and in the next second she reasoned that it would be okay if she did, and that no one
could blame her. But details asserted themselves: the too-sharpness of the nose, the too-slightness of the body. The woman became someone else, someone who wasn’t Val.

She hands Val a manila envelope. She is shaking her head, and Val isn’t sure what she’s recriminating herself for. There was a picture that was not shown at the trial, the woman from the district attorney’s office explains. She’d held it back, because there had been so much evidence already, and there had been leaks out of their office. Val knew this, of course; on one of the days she’d skipped the trial, she sat in Tim’s hospital room and watched pictures of Andrew and the Woman pop up on Court TV. There on the sidewalk, the woman from the district attorney’s office explains that celebrities open themselves up to this kind of thing, they paint targets on themselves when they step in front of a camera, but the kids, the kids should be off-limits. It’s in the envelope. Val has only to open it and look.

Val goes to a coffee shop near her lawyer’s office. She doesn’t order anything, just sits at a table alone. People type on their laptops and check their phones. There is the general clatter that reaffirms to all of them they are living in a city and it is important they are right here, all of them. Val takes out the photo as if it’s an X-ray or a CAT scan. Good news does not come out of manila envelopes. Good news is never extracted.

The photo is grainy and pixelated, taken by a cell phone. She recognizes the Woman, and from the position of the photo she can tell that Andrew took it, and that the Woman is on top of him, shirtless, head thrown back. Val recognizes their house, their living room. The windows looking out onto the park, the William Eggleston print of a bicycle fallen over on the sidewalk that she’d bought for an unreasonable price without telling Andrew, and that sat now in a bank vault waiting for the last of the papers to be signed.

And over the Woman’s bare shoulder, in the doorway, framed by the darkness of his bedroom, is Alex, in his banana-colored pajamas, his expression lost in the low resolution of the digital image, excluded in the space between yes and no, zero and one.

With no appointment, with a mixture of rage and vindication, Val takes the photo to her lawyer’s office. She demands to see her right away, which, as she says it, she realizes is a ridiculous thing to demand. Instead, she waits. She calls the girl watching Alex and says she’ll be late, another hour or so. It’s three hours before her lawyer returns from court, but it feels like it’s worth it when she takes the picture out of the envelope.

The lawyer looks at her sadly. “It doesn’t change anything,” she says. “We could submit it as evidence of abuse, but we never alleged abuse.”

“It’s endangerment,” says Val, pointing to the picture as if it’s self-evident. “He let that woman near Alex.” And while her lawyer assures her there’s nothing that can be done, Val knows she will never let Alex be hurt, she will never risk handing him over to someone who could so casually let him near something so dangerous, so evil.

•   •   •

“I’ve been thinking about it, though, and I think it’s okay. Because your friend, she was always dead. She always had been dead. Right now she’s dead and even then before it happens, she had been dead now. The training has helped me to see that, which is why I’m ready to go home.”

•   •   •

Hands are shaken, shoulders are slapped. Flashbulbs fire, spark, explode. Tim is giddy, and Rachel, who is a moon to his sun, beams with the light of him. Andrew, the only loser among them, is playing at being sore, muttering “always a bridesmaid,” but it’s a role. When no one is looking, some second in between, he whispers in her ear, “You earned it, Valerie.” Later she will think,
That was the last moment he was . . .
and find there’s no word to finish the sentence.

He tells Rachel that since they’re the only ones with free hands, they should ditch the other two and go dancing. He demonstrates with the little dance from season two. Then he grabs Rachel, spins her around, and dips her in the overcrowded lobby and the cameras fire again.

Val looks at her award. She’s spent so long saying that things like this don’t matter. It’s difficult to admit how badly she was wrong. It does matter. Now that it’s in her hands, it matters very much.

“You two should go first,” says Rachel. “Andrew and I will follow behind you, bowing and scraping.”

Tim links arms with Rachel and gestures for Val and Andrew to do the same. Andrew takes Rachel’s arm: the awards on the outside, like a border, like a guard.

“Off to see the wizard,” says Andrew.

“We all go out together,” says Tim.

T
he trailhead opens like a mouth. Eero, on the leash, hangs back, looking to Alex for courage. Let the woods swallow me, Alex thinks and, giving the leash a tug, plunges in.

“It’s funny I’m going into the woods from Grandma’s house,” Alex had told his grandmother as he put his shoes on.

“That’s the safest way,” she said. “When Little Red Riding Hood headed back home after bringing the basket to her grandmother, the woods were wolf-free.”

“No wolves in these woods?” said Alex. He was not nervous, but like many kids who grow up in cities, he secretly believes all woods are full of wolves and bears and so on.

“Eero’ll be the closest thing to a wolf in there,” she said. At the sound of his name, Eero looked up and gave Alex a decidedly unwolfish grin. “You’ll need to keep him on leash,” his grandmother said. “Otherwise he’ll go running after everything that moves. There’s some deer in these woods, and I’d rather not have them harassed.” She was packing him a little bag with trail mix and apples. It should have been a basket, he thought.

“And stay on the path,” she said. “Your grandfather cut a very nice path through the woods. It’ll be overgrown a bit. No one’s seen to it in years. But you’ll be able to follow it easy enough. It’ll lead you in and around and back here home.”

It was important that a journey like this be preceded by rules and by warnings. Part of the job of adults was to set limits. But the last rule, the unspoken rule of any story or journey, is that all limits are suspect. All
warnings show only the point where the last story stopped, the boundary past which the map is unmapped. The kingdom of
Here There Be Dragons
is the province of explorers, magicians, and kids.

After only a few minutes walking down the throat of the trail, Alex knows he has been gulped. The trail takes a couple of turns right at its start, so the entrance disappears quickly behind him. Eero sniffs at everything and strains at the leash every time there is a noise. There is always noise. Alex hears the arrhythmic woodblock clacking of the upper parts of trees knocking together in the wind, tittering and chirruping of birds, scuttle of small things across leaves.

Alex listens, but there is nothing except the chirrups and titters and scuttles. Sitting behind him, Eero whines, unhappy to be still when everything else in the woods is moving. Alex looks down and sees that the shadow of the tree points away from the trail, down a naturally occurring channel of space running perpendicular to his grandfather’s path.

“Come on, Eero,” he says, and the two of them tromp along the long shadow the tree casts along the bed of leaves.

At some point before being lost becomes terrifying, it is raw and thrilling. When they stayed on the path, Alex and Eero walked slowly, stopping to smell this or examine that. Now they run and bound, leap over hurdleous logs and swing from trapezal branches. The sun comes through the upper leaves in yellow slats that slap Alex playfully across the eyes. He has left his grandparents’ woods and entered his own. If there are bears here, they will be bears that dance and know old Russian songs they’ve overheard Babu singing while she cooks. If there are wolves, they will be the kind that invite you to ride on their backs, burying your hands in the soft white blankets of their fur.

Alex rushes unscathed through bushes and brambles. Ahead is a hill, and because there is no point in breaking only some rules, Alex lets Eero off the leash to race ahead. As Alex pistons his legs to scale the hill, blissfully aware of the hindrance of his own weight, Eero stands at the top, barking encouragement, beckoning Alex to come see what he sees.

Out of breath, Alex crests the hill and immediately turns to look back the way he came. The woods spread out below him and he can see the trail his grandfather carved out, snaking through them like a crooked scar.

Eero barks again to call Alex’s attention forward, so Alex turns to see what they’ve found, what Eero has been waiting to show him. On the other side of the hill is a lea, grassy and free of trees, circled by the woods. Grazing there are deer, dozens maybe, or a dozen at least. They mill about, becoming impossible to count. The deer do not notice Alex and Eero watching them from the top of the hill. Eero runs excited circles around Alex, and Alex wonders if the dog’s impulses are playful or predatory. Eero barks once, louder than before, and all the deer, all dozens or dozen of them, turn their heads as one to regard Eero and Alex. Eero stares back at them, his whole body tensed, coiled, ready to strike.

Alex lays his hand on the back of Eero’s neck, feeling the taut muscles beneath his wiry fur. He can’t see his grandmother’s house, and certainly he can’t see New York. New York is becoming harder to think about, and sometimes he has to check his notebook to remember the specifics of things. But there’s nothing wrong with here, and this moment of not knowing where he’s been or where he’s going.

Tomorrow they’ll leave for Chicago and another hotel and another convention. Everything, the whole trip, has seemed like a ceremony, like a long way to say goodbye. Alex thinks about what could be in California that could change things so radically, but the only thing he knows about California is that his father lives there. And in that moment, he knows that his father is waiting for him in Los Angeles. His mother is taking him to his father, to stay. His first thought, figuring this out, is a bright blue thing:
I’m going to see my dad.
His heart leaps up at the thought, in that second before it’s pulled back into his chest with missing New York, and then into his stomach by wondering where his mom will be in all of this, why she hasn’t told him before now what’s going to happen, and what it means, to stay. For how long? Forever?

The dog gives out a little huff, followed by a low growl. “Stay, Eero,” he
says. “Let them be, Eero.” With a resigned whimper, the dog’s body goes slack and he sits, then lies down in the grass. Alex sits, then lies down too, in the grass, at the top of the hill, in the summer sun. The deer lose interest in them and return to grazing. Alex eats some trail mix and feeds a treat or two to Eero, who accepts them as a consolation prize. After a while, by mutual decision, they all head back into the woods.

After a dinner that makes Alex feel heavy and woozy, he and his grandmother play checkers at the kitchen table. The first couple games she very obviously lets him win, but then he manages to goad her into playing for serious and she wins the next four. He likes watching her win: she lights up like she’s a kid herself. She talks trash, says things like “Bet you didn’t see
that
coming!” as she double-jumps his men. The sky behind the trees goes fiery orange and his attention begins to drift away from the game. He is thinking about the robot. When they left off, the boy and the girl from the desert and the robot had gone into the city. They were standing outside the gates of the factory, watching the other robots going in to work. He is wondering where his mother is, and decides it’s worth trying to ask.

“She had grown-up stuff to do, Shura,” she says. He can tell from her tone that he won’t get any more information out of her, so he begins to act tired, yawning and stretching. His mother told him once that yawning is contagious, and as evidence of this, Eliel begins to yawn and stretch along with him.

“Babu?” he says. “Is it all right if I go to bed?”

She smiles at him. “This is what good country air does for you. It keeps you awake when you should be awake, then knocks you right out when it’s time to sleep.” She offers to tuck him in, but he declines, so she kisses him on both cheeks and his forehead, says, “Goodnight, Shura,” and pats him on the butt to send him on his way. Eliel trods along after him, while Eero lets out one last mournful whine. Alex stops, goes back into the kitchen, and gives the younger dog a vigorous rub behind the ears.

“You were a good dog today,” Alex whispers. He presses his forehead
against Eero’s forehead and thinks those same words at him:
You were a good dog.

They reach the room Alex is staying in, and Alex has to help Eliel up onto the bed. The old dog is asleep in moments, snoring loudly and occasionally releasing farts that are audible but seem to drift away from Alex, mercifully.

He tries reading some of
Adam Anti & Nothing but Flowers,
but he keeps thinking about what he knows now. Turning the fact over in his mind to find a crack in it, some way for it not to be true. He returns the book to his backpack and takes out an issue of
The Astounding Family
that the Idea Man gave him. The pages are yellowed and crispy. The colors, which must have jumped off the page once, are badly faded, printed so that if you bring the comic closer to your face, they stop being colors and become a collection of little dots pressed together between the thick black lines. When Alex’s mother comes in, he is not so much reading the comic as examining it, as if it were an object from an archaeological dig, a journal of one family’s strange adventures.

“Hey, Rabbit,” she says, “I thought you’d be asleep. Babu said she’d tuckered you out.”

“I waited for you,” he says. She looks like she’s lost a hundred games of checkers in a row. She’s doing that thing where she puts her fingers on her eyes and presses, like she’s pushing them back into her brain.

Tomorrow he will ask her. They will talk about California and what’s going to happen, like they should have already. It will be easier if they can share it. It’s getting harder for her, carrying the secret of it. He should have known what it was sooner. But right now she is tired, and he scoots over so she can lie down on the bed. He holds on to her and presses his head against her shoulder.

He can feel, through his forehead, through her shoulder, that she’s in California already, that maybe she’s been in California since before they left New York. She’s in a place they’re not together anymore. He doesn’t
know how to bring her back here, to this room where she used to sleep as a kid, where there’s a dog and him and California is still in the future and not now, not here. Since he doesn’t know how to bring her here, all he can do is ask her to meet him somewhere else. “Tell me a story?” he asks quietly.

“Not tonight, Rabbit,” she says, her voice barely there.