A Hundred Thousand Worlds (20 page)

“I guess so,” says Brett.

“How does that happen?” asks Alex. “How did you get there?” It seems right to Alex that best-friendship would be a place you arrive at, after some time.

Brett shrugs. “He was the only person I could talk to about comics,” he says. “We kind of got stuck together.”

“But now you could talk to anybody about comics,” says Alex. “All these people.”

“I’d have to meet them,” Brett says. “Find out all kinds of stuff about
them. Everything we agree on or disagree on. Things about them that bug me. With Fred, I already know all that, so it’s easier.”

Alex thinks it’s exactly the opposite: meeting people is easy, staying friends with them is hard. You’d have to all stay in one place, you and your friends. It’s so much simpler to make friends as you go along, then say goodbye to them when you leave. Of course, it’s important he believes this now.

O
nce she finds him, Val hangs back, taking this opportunity to observe Alex in the wild. He becomes more adult when she’s not there. His gestures are broader, more sure. He is taller, maybe, or stands up straighter. Part of it is mimicry: he’s taken on some of Brett’s mannerisms since Cleveland, most notably a habit of letting his hair fall over his eyes, only to sweep it back dramatically. He is learning to perform adulthood, albeit the adolescent variety of adulthood he’s encountering at these conventions, which is eerily similar to the type on ready display in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, or in Tim’s, for that matter. Val wonders what adulthood looks like in California and what tics and gestures Alex will pick up in his time there.

But it’s also true that Alex is performing childishness for her sake, responding to a need, a signal she must be broadcasting. The past few days at her mother’s, she’s felt the same pull, the draw of an overacted helplessness as the natural response to her mother’s constant message, spoken or unspoken, of
I’m here to help.

Rather than interrupt, Val seeks out one of the rare places in the convention hall where there is enough cell reception to make a call, and enough distance from the spazzy chatter of the convention-goers. She finds a corner to stand in, surrounded by a miniature tribe of teenagers sitting cross-legged on the floor with their noses buried in comic books, unaware of one another or the thousands of people around them.

Louis picks up on the second ring, consistently. Behind his voice, New York sounds burble in through the open windows of Tim’s apartment.
Brooklyn has a pulse and music in deep summer that almost justifies the humidity and the smell. Hearing it, she wants to pick Alex up and run east again. She wants them to spend their summer picnicking in McCarren Park, or on the steps of the public library, instead of trudging inexorably west. It’s a momentary want. A pointless thing, so she puts it away.

“How did it go at the place?” Louis asks.

“It was awful,” she says. “It was honestly terrible.”

“He shouldn’t have asked you to do that,” says Louis, a rare instance of him taking sides against Tim in anything. “I can’t imagine how hard that was for you.”

“There are worse things,” she says. One of the teenagers grouped around her feet snorts, probably at something he’s reading. “How is he?” she asks Louis, expecting his trademark sigh. Instead there’s a pause.

“I’m not sure,” Louis says, which must be incorrect; Louis knows Tim’s moods better than he knows his own. The oppressed must always study the oppressor, he once told her. “Since yesterday,” he says, “he’s been very . . . positive.”

“You make that sound like a bad thing.”

“
Unreasonably
positive,” Louis says. “You should talk to him.”

“Put him on.”

She’s seen this once before, two years before she found Louis. Tim had become convinced he’d woken up on a particular morning with all his broken parts glued back together. He’d called up Val to tell her about it. He had thought up a new series for her to star in and walked her through three seasons’ worth of storylines and plot beats over the phone. They discussed networks that might be interested in the pilot, and the logistics of shooting in New York. Because it was something she wanted so badly for him, for both of them, she’d let herself believe all of it. That afternoon, she got a call from an MTA security guard to come pick Tim up from Fourteenth Street. He’d made it into Manhattan on his own, no mean feat from Greenpoint, but couldn’t go any further. The MTA guard had found him curled up under a pay phone, shaking uncontrollably. After
that, it was a week before Val could get him out of bed, or even pull back the curtains to let in the light.

“Val!” he calls as he takes the phone from Louis. The word jumps out of him before the phone reaches his lips, causing it to zoom at Val from halfway across the country. “I was thinking of you this morning. I had the weirdest feeling you were running some errand for me. Like I’d asked you to go get me bagels or fastnachts from down the block. Then Lawrence reminded me you were in Chicago, which I knew, and isn’t that funny? Thinking you were running an errand for me in Chicago? Pick me up some deep-dish pizzas. Or—Leonard, what do they have in Chicago? . . . No, but what are they famous for? . . . Oh, never mind. Val, how are you?”

All of it spills out of him, manic and breathless. Although she’s worried about him, Val can’t help feeling angry: she went to see the Woman at his insistence, and he doesn’t even remember he asked.

“I’m fine,” she says. “Things here are fine.”

“I’ve been thinking about this thing in Los Angeles,” he continues. “For the anniversary. Of the show.” Tim always avoids speaking the name of the show, just as he never says his wife’s name, or the Woman’s. “It’s a panel? So there’ll be other people there. Maybe some of the writing staff? I haven’t talked to any of them in ages. And you’ll be there. I’d have you there. I think I could handle it. I think I could manage. I’ve asked Louis to get us plane tickets. I’d rather not fly, naturally, but it’s the only reasonable way. Manageable.
Manageable
is my watchword, Val. I am expanding my conception of what I can manage. It’s impressive, I think.”

Val knows there’s no way she can deal with Tim along with everything else in Los Angeles. Shouldn’t being in the same room with Andrew, or with the Woman, win her a reprieve from further troubles? Shouldn’t she be allowed to lose everything and have that be the end of it? She doesn’t want to take this moment away from Tim, this moment in which he thinks he’s unstoppable. But she has to stop him.

“There will be
fans,
Tim,” she says, pronouncing the word as close to
fangs
as she can. “Hundreds, maybe two thousand
fans
. They’ll want
handshakes and autographs. Pictures with their arms around you. They’ll want a little piece of you, each of them. It’s been difficult. Not tensing up when each one approaches me. Not screaming at them to back away. They’re so devoted. To us. To
Anomaly.
” She lets the word hang for a second, cruelly. “But there are times all I can think about is how easily that devotion could turn on me. I’m handling it okay.” She pauses enough that she could have added
and I’m not insane.
“But you need to think, Tim, about if
you
can handle it. About if you can manage.”

It’s a terrible thing to do, and she wishes she had the time or the energy to handle this some other way. But she can’t have the possibility hanging over her. She can’t deal with one more thing. Tim is silent on the other end of the line, except for the smacking sound his tongue makes when it’s gone dry. She can visualize the way he must be opening and closing his mouth as if tasting something unpleasant, metallic.

“You might be right,” he says finally, quietly. “Anyway, the airports are a nightmare in the summer. Packs of harried parents, brats in tow. Lyndon,” he says, holding the phone away from his mouth, “what about a shadow group that controls all the world’s airports? Governs them like a city. Yes, I know the difference between a story and a setting. Val,” he says into the phone, “I have to go. The help is getting uppity. I’ll see you when you get back?”

“Of course,” she says. He hangs up before she does and without saying goodbye, which is strange for Tim, who loves goodbyes.

G
ail racks her brains to think of what she might have done to deserve this. She’s willing to accept that this must be something she brought on herself. Something this bad could not simply happen. But only a major transgression against God or justice or karma could possibly warrant this level of punishment, and to the best of her recollection, Gail has never killed a nun or kicked a puppy or stolen a clown’s wallet.

She’s sitting next to Russell Maddox, the editor in chief of Black Sheep Comics, who gave her a proper start in comics, in a bar booth at a piano bar called the Zebra Lounge. It is a uniquely awful bar. Gail’s never been to a piano bar before. When Russell proposed meeting up here, Gail figured it could go one of two ways. It could be cool in a Tom Waits kind of way, or lame in a Billy Joel kind of way. It turns out the Zebra Lounge is lame in a Tom Waits kind of way. Every surface is either mirrored, covered in high-lacquer red linoleum, or upholstered in faux zebra hide, giving the entire room a vertiginous array of stripes. The ghosts of old cigars still haunt. At the piano, a kid who probably studies music at UIC growls and grumbles his way through “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” followed by a rendition of “Cabaret” that goes all in on male pathos. Tourists stuff twenties and requests into his tip jar, and Gail can only imagine what horrors are being added to the set list.

Worse than the bar is the company. Not Russell, of course; Russell is great. And the kid across from her, Brett, who works either for or with Russell, and his girlfriend, whose eye makeup makes her look like she’s been cast as Sexy Zombie #3 but whom Gail recognizes as Ferret Lass from the
convention, they both seem all right. Gail’s barely been able to talk to them, though, because sitting dead in the middle of the booth, drinking his fifth glass of straight grain alcohol to preserve his purity of essence, and looking more like an unshaved hobo forced into a fancy outfit than the Dark Wizard of Comic Books, is the Magus himself, Alistair Sangster.

She shouldn’t use the word
hobo,
probably. It could be considered offensive.
Derelict
is better.
Hobo
implies a bindle, and is particularly American. For all the appellations he’s accumulated over his thirty-some-year career, Gail’s always thought his early nickname from the comics press suited Sangster best. She’s always thought of him as the Mad Brit.

“We’re coming to the end of comics,” he says, in answer to a question nobody asked. “About time. It’s all a fucking chrysalis anyway. Comics are the telephone booths of culture. A mild-mannered reporter steps in and flies out a god.” He flutters his hands upward, then slams them down on the table. Ferret Lass jumps. “But once the culture soars off, the booth’s no good anymore. Who needs a telephone when you’ve got telepathy?” He leans back, and Gail is pretty sure he’s grinning somewhere inside that beard, immensely pleased at his little wordplay.

“I’ll be out of a job,” says Russell, who’s being ingratiating. Russell’s got a dog in this fight, of course. If he could get Sangster to publish something with Black Sheep, it’d be a license to print money. And an easy day’s work for Russell, since Sangster reputedly does not allow his scripts to be edited. The only reason Russell would be caught dead in a place like this would be on Sangster’s demand.

“We’ll all be out of jobs,” says Sangster, too loud, too enthusiastic. “We’re better off. Whoever said jobs’d be the be-all end-all anyway? Whoever made adulthood a goal? It’s bullshit thinking the pinnacle of human achievement is steady employment.”

Gail swizzles her gin and tonic, examining the ice cubes. The one small mercy in all this is that when Russell introduced them, Sangster didn’t recognize her name. He grunted politely and presented her with a dead-fish handshake.

When she was younger, Gail mostly liked the Mad Brit’s work. Some of it was a little too deconstructionist, sure. And his whole late-period Kabbalistic phase had a bit more tantric sex–meets–mystic Celtic woodland creatures than she had the stomach for. But the writing was solid throughout, and excellent at times. His characters had a psychological depth to them that was lacking in ninety percent of comics.

But also there was the rape. Before she’d gotten started in comics, Gail ran a fan site called BrainsOverBreasts.com that took pot shots at the comics industry’s retrograde gender politics. When Sangster announced his retirement for about the third time, and every other site fell over themselves to crown him the Greatest Writer in the History of Comics, Gail responded with a thorough rereading of all of Sangster’s work, from his early days on
The Savior
at National Comics through his switch to Timely for his
R-Squad
run, and everything in between. What she found was that in every comic book written by Alistair Sangster that ran for more than a hundred pages, there was a rape scene, or at the very least a scene of attempted rape or sexual assault. Every single one. She cataloged dozens and dozens of rapes in the body of Sangster’s work. She scanned and posted panels and pages. In the end, she made very little comment, except to say, “Apparently, this is the best our industry has to offer.”

Her site had a small following before, but the article on Sangster blew up, beyond the little knot of readers who followed both superhero comics and feminist blogs. The piece on the Mad Brit had run on NerdFeast.com, PanelAddict.com, and a number of other major comics sites. Which was about when the rape threats started. An overwhelming number of them—comments, e-mails, posts on social media. She realized that it was one thing to say something controversial in her little corner of the Internet to a small group of people whom, although she hadn’t met most of them in person, she’d come to think of as friends. From the minute the higher-trafficked sites put her words out there, she was attacked with such detailed threats of sexual violence that she began to fear for her safety. Ed and Geoff and a couple of other writers she’d become friends
with in her time as a blogger reached out to her in solidarity and explained that they, too, had gotten death threats, but they couldn’t understand how this was different.

The obvious option would have been to take down the piece and retreat, but Gail decided to go public with the threats she’d received. She cataloged them just as she had the rapes in Sangster’s books. The article ran on almost every site that talked about comics; it got discussed on a couple of morning news shows and NPR. Other women spoke up about harassment at conventions and online. Flummoxed publishers had to field questions about whether or not the comics themselves contributed to this culture of sexual violence. They were asked where the women writers were, or the women artists or editors. And they had no one to point to.

Gail was inundated with interview requests, and the conversations evolved from a critique of what had gone before into a discussion of what should come next. Offhandedly, Gail rattled off possible storylines for dozens of female superheroes, detailing how they would appeal to female readers while not alienating the base—the impossible dream of the marketing departments of every major publisher. A few of her ideas, tweaked and revamped so they were recognizable only to her as her own, made it into the plots of books at National and Timely. But Russell Maddox at Black Sheep was the first one to offer her a job, writing the
Anomaly
miniseries. “Look,” he said when he called her up, “none of these publishers realize you’ve given them a problem and a solution all at once.” The threats continued, although they tapered off after she managed, with Russell’s backing, to press charges against a couple of her more virulent fans. She got a few calls for fill-ins at National, and when she got offered a regular gig writing
The Speck & Iota,
Russell told her to follow the money. He still threw her work every now and then, licensed stuff she could churn out in a week. Adam Anti spin-offs and adult cartoon tie-ins.

The article itself hadn’t led to anyone revoking Sangster’s status as Greatest Writer in Comics, nor did it significantly hurt sales of any of Sangster’s work, although she noticed that his comeback phase was
pleasantly rape-free. It’s possible that rather than writing articles in his own defense, Sangster sacrificed a goat or some other piece of livestock to assure that Gail would never rise above the rank of B-list comic book writer. It’d explain her current limbo status at National, among other things. He could have done it from his magician’s lair in White Castle or wherever you move after you’ve made as much money as one person could ever make in comics and then retire to be a full-time professional magus and cultivate the largest beard in any known artistic medium. Look at that thing; you could house a family of sparrows in there. “So you’d stop writing,” she says, “in this amazing age to come?”

“I write,” Sangster continues, “to bring about that age. To invoke it. Once it’s here, the world won’t need visionary imaginations.” He turns to Ferret Lass. “We’ll all be writers,” he tells her. “We’ll each be epic dreamers of dreams.”

“Sounds nice,” she says, grinding ice with her molars.

“It won’t be a bit nice!” he shouts. “It’ll be terrible. Nothing will be stable, nothing will be static. There’ll be no more staying in to watch telly or nip down to the pub on a Saturday night. There’ll be dragons and ifrits and all sort of mad things about.”

“Why would anyone want that?” says Gail.

“Because we’ll need it,” says Sangster, “to become the heroes we ought to be.” He sets his drink down and rises on unsteady legs. “I’m off to the loo,” he announces.

“His superpower seems to be staring at my tits,” Ferret Lass says to Brett once he’s out of earshot. Gail turns on Russell, scowling.

“You set me up,” she says.

“I did no such thing,” he says, grinning to indicate she’s completely correct.

“For kicks,” she says. “You set me up for your own sick amusement.”

“I thought maybe there’d be spirited discussion,” Russell says earnestly. She does feel bad for him a little. Russell is one of those people no one in the industry has anything bad to say about, which he claims is
because he’s everyone’s token black friend. But it’s the fact that he’s a stand-up guy who’s fun to be around.

“Some of what he said was interesting,” says Brett, who, again, is probably a nice kid and is trying to be charitable. “About stories being transmitted instead of created? I feel like that sometimes.”

“He just wants you to think he’s divinely inspired,” says Gail.

“He made it sound like a lightning bolt,” says Brett. “But it’s not like that. It’s like tuning an old radio.”

Finally, someone at this table other than her has said something intelligent. Because it’s like that for her, too, like she’s finding her ideas coming though faintly in a vast spectrum of noise. The hard work is in twiddling the knobs exactly right, and translating the little bursts that rise out of the static. For the first time since she sat down, it feels like a conversation is about to start, but before it can get going, a hatchet-faced boy stumbles over to their table, obviously drunk.

“Where is he?” he asks Brett. “Did I miss him already?” He looks around frantically. By his black-suit-with-black-shirt attire, Gail pegs him as an Alistair Sangster fan.

“He’s off to the
loo,
” says Gail, emphasizing the last word, crooning it.

“But he’s coming back,” Brett says.

“Loo, loo, skip to my loo,” she sings.

“Hey, Fred,” says Russell, “you’re late. You want a drink?”

“A whiskey,” says Fred, sounding as if he’s talking to a waiter. “Please,” he adds. Russell points around the table. Gail signals him for another; Brett and Ferret Lass take a pass.

“Where’ve you been?” Brett asks his drunken friend.

“I was having drinks, Mother,” Fred says, grinning acidly as he squeezes in next to Ferret Lass.

“I’ve returned,” announces Sangster, standing in front of the table. He takes a head count and after a second realizes the number’s right but the parts are wrong. “Who’s this?” he asks the rest of the group.

“Your evil beardless twin,” mutters Gail.

“Fred Marin, Mr. Sangster,” says Fred, standing up and putting out his hand. Sangster looks at it like it might be covered in herpes. “You’ve been a huge influence on my work.”

“Another writer, eh?” he says, scooting past Gail to resume his place at the center of the table. “Writers should be like blue jays: we should each have a patch of territory to ourselves, and we should squawk loud if another writer comes close.”

Gail is about to caw in his ear when Russell returns with the drinks.

“You know,” says Russell, who must realize he’s gotten all the fireworks he’s going to out of this, “we’d love to have you do some work at Black Sheep.”

“Definitely a possibility,” says Sangster. “I wouldn’t go back to Timely if Phil Weinrobe sucked my cock while handing me the Hope Diamond.”

Gail winces.

“He seems like a nice guy,” says Fred.

“He’s a figment of your imagination,” Sangster informs the young man. “Timely hired him because he’s too good to be true. And he’s not true. He’s just a thing in the dream of a corporation.”

“Bad blood?” asks Russell.

“No blood at all. No soul,” says Sangster. “I would be thrilled to work with you, Russell. I grew up with mostly blacks,” he says proudly. Gail thinks maybe in England that kind of thing gets said all the time. But still, gross. “Not to claim to be part of the struggle,” he adds. “The thing is, most of my time now is spent on my magic. Harsh mistress, the dark arts.”

“Yeah, magic’s a bitch,” says Gail.

“I should say, Miss Pope, that I’ve never actually read your work,” Sangster says, turning to Gail for the first time. All of his other responses have been directed to the ether, or posterity or something. Now he glares at her and sips his drink, deftly piloting it to his mouth through the nebula of his beard. “Certainly not with the censorious eye you’ve taken to mine.”

This, she thinks, is where it’s going to happen. Alistair Sangster is going to turn her into a newt.