A Hundred Thousand Worlds (3 page)

“Twenty bucks to talk to me?”

“Just to talk,” Brett says.

She looks at him. Look of a mother, not a lover. She leans over and kisses him on the cheek.

“I’m glad you won your bet,” she says. She makes her way past him. Toward the exit.

“Miss Torrey?” Brett says after she’s passed him. She turns back.

“I liked season six,” he says. She assesses this. Remnant of another conversation. Wreckage from a different ship. She nods and leaves the bar.

T
he screen goes black and the credits appear. Andrew Rhodes is Ted Kammen, they say.

Alex’s dad is Andrew Rhodes, a television actor who lives in Los Angeles and whom Alex hasn’t seen in six years.

Alex’s dad is Ted Kammen, a movie actor who lives in Los Angeles whom Alex has spent the past half hour with.

Alex’s dad is Ian Campbell, an agent for a secret government organization that tracks threats to the timestream, whom Alex has never met but has heard a lot about.

All of these are true, Alex thinks, even though some of them aren’t real. Stories can be true even if they’re not real. When Alex thinks about his dad, which he does, often, it’s as a knot of these three threads. There are memories of him, which are mostly bits of sensory information: a smell, the feeling of being lifted into the air. There is the image of him on-screen, carrying out actions and storylines Alex can barely comprehend and doesn’t feel the need to follow. And there are the stories his mother tells him, which are never about her and his dad directly, but always about the characters they once played on television. None of these on its own is Alex’s dad, but the interaction between them makes an outline in his mind, something dad-shaped and of vital importance to Alex.

Alex jots a few of the actors’ last names in his notebook for later. There’s an actress who plays a Russian maid, and her last name is Gradechenko. It sounds promising, but he doesn’t have time to flip it backwards right now.
The credits are almost over. Alex jumps off the bed and goes to shut off the air-conditioning, which he turned up to full blast the minute his mom left. The air conditioner goes silent, leaving a hole in the room’s sounds, and in that hole Alex can hear a small metal rattling: his mom’s keys in the lock. He never worries. She is always on time.

“Did you meet a prince?” he asks before she is through the door.

“Nope,” she says, kicking off her pretty shoes. “No princes tonight.” She shuts the door gently behind her, but the lock still makes a loud click.

“Oh.”

“It’s freezing in here,” she says, rubbing her bare arms. Alex pretends not to notice, but of course he wants it freezing in here. Freezing in here increases his chances of being cuddled, possibly under blankets. It’s one of the only things he hates about summers in New York. In their apartment with the air conditioner that only cools half of one room, hers, sometimes attempts to cuddle are squirmy and uncomfortable. This hotel has a very good air conditioner.

“How was your father?” she asks him. This reminds him he’s left the TV on, and the next show, which he’s not allowed to watch, is starting. He finds the remote and turns it off.

“It was a good one,” he says. “It was funny and nobody gets sad.”

“That does sound good,” she says, pushing his hair back to kiss him on the forehead. She stands and smiles at him. She’s been doing that a lot lately, and it makes him worried. It’s like she’s making notes of everything about him so she doesn’t forget.

“Tell me a story?” he asks, half because he wants her to stop standing there smiling and half because he wants a story.

“After I get my PJs on?” she says.

“After you get your PJs on,” he agrees.

When she comes back, he convinces her to stay in the bed with him while she tells the story and he cuddles her extra. This involves both arms around her waist and the top of his head nuzzled into the hollow below her shoulder.

“What season do you want?” she asks, once they are settled in and the big lights are off.

“What’s the first one ever,” asks Alex, “storyline or freak of the week?”

His mom thinks about this. Alex has never been allowed to watch
Anomaly,
because his mom says it’s graphic. But from his mom’s interpretations of the episodes, which Alex suspects she waters down a little for him, he understands that every episode falls into one of two categories: storyline or freak of the week. The freak-of-the-week episodes are more or less interchangeable, although they can be kind of affected by what season they’re in, because of the storyline episodes. Like, if it’s season three, Campbell and Frazer are never together, even in the freak-of-the-weeks, because Campbell is lost in the timestream and sometimes Frazer is looking for him and sometimes she is doing her job. The storyline episodes have to be in order, from season one to season six, or at least up to season five. Mostly the stuff in season six doesn’t make any sense.

She nods, puts her finger on her chin, and scrunches up her whole face. This is her “considering the options” face, and it makes him incredibly happy because it always comes before a story. She clears her throat. Her story voice is a little different from her regular; deeper, more deliberate.

“The first episode I’d have to say is storyline,” his mom concludes.

“Good,” says Alex. “That’s what I want then.”

T
im seeded so much in that first episode. Because she was there the whole time and knows how much the plot changed from season to season, sometimes from week to week, she knows it wasn’t a straight line from the beginning to the end. But you could look back from the end and see a straight line to the beginning.

“It all starts with a weird light in the sky above a field in Kansas,” she says. She thinks it’s Kansas. It might have been Nebraska. “The light gets brighter and brighter, and then there’s a flash and a man falls out of the light and lands in the field.”

“How far does he fall?” asks Alex.

“Maybe twenty feet. Not far. He’s safe when he lands. As soon as he lands, he checks his watch and says, ‘Not again!’” She leans in very close to his face to deliver this line with the proper mix of comedy and gravitas. Comedy wins, and he breaks out in giggles. Not one to miss an opportunity, Val yells, “Cue the opening credits,” and begins to mercilessly tickle him. A lack of mercy is essential to any good tickle attack. Alex writhes and wriggles and cries “Quit it!” again and again, but Val does not let up until her work is done. This takes roughly as long as
Anomaly
’s opening credits, which featured Daliesque images of melting clocks and watches whose hands spun backwards, then exploded in a mess of innards: escape wheels, springs, and stop levers. Tim always hated the opening sequence, saying it was too literal.

“Next scene!” she says, adjusting Alex’s position next to her so they are properly fitted together. “A lecture hall at a major university.”

“Harvard?” Alex asks.

“Sure,” Val says. “The same man we saw fall into a field is now lecturing a classful of students about the nature of spacetime.”

“What’s spacetime?” Alex asks, even though he is one of the very few nine-year-olds in the known universe with an understanding of spacetime.

“You should listen to his lecture,” she says. She drops her voice into a lower tenor. “‘The universe is like a garden full of forking paths. Every time you or I or any of us make a decision, the path splits again. When you decided to come to class today instead of stay in bed with your boyfriend’”—here she tickles him a little—“‘you created two possible timelines. One in which you came to class, the timeline we’re in, and one in which you didn’t. These splits happen a billion trillion times a day; each split creates a different timeline, a different universe. If you look backwards, you’ll see one path behind you. The path you’ve been walking the whole time. Your universe. But if you could hover up above the garden, you’d see billions and billions of paths running parallel to one another. The question is, what keeps them parallel to one another, what keeps them from intersecting? And what would happen if they did?’”

“Mom?” he says. “Is that man my dad?”

“No,” she says, “that man is Ian Campbell, a professor of theoretical physics from ten years in our future. But we don’t know that yet.” She can see he is disappointed by this, but she is careful, when telling these stories, to keep Ian Campbell and Bethany Frazer separate from Andrew Rhodes and Valerie Torrey. The former, after all, get a happier ending.

“Right, then,” she says. “Agent Bethany Frazer busts into the lecture hall.” Alex always gets excited when Frazer makes her entrance. “‘Professor Campbell,’ she says, ‘your government would like a word with you.’”

“Do they fall in love right away?” Alex asks.

“How do you know they fall in love?” says Val. Alex rolls his eyes at her. It is tough to know what his rules for any given retelling are going to be. Generally, he will listen to one episode as if he’s never heard any that come after it, but sometimes he will consider them as a whole, inspecting each
episode for possible errors in continuity. “They don’t fall in love right then,” she tells him. “They don’t even like each other at first. He’s arrogant and his head’s so caught up in spacetime and multiverses that sometimes he doesn’t see what’s right in front of him. And she’s stubborn and literal. And sometimes she doesn’t see what’s right in front of her, either.”

“But they fall in love eventually,” he says.

“Don’t get ahead of things,” she says. “Right now, there’s a case she needs to solve. The Statue of Liberty has disappeared, right in front of the eyes of a million New Yorkers. So Agent Frazer is taking Professor Campbell with her to Anomaly Division.”

It had been Val who’d dropped out of the sky and Andrew who brought her in. Val had hardly settled into thinking of herself as a proper New Yorker when she’d gone in for the
Anomaly
audition. She was sharing an apartment she couldn’t afford, in the Lower East Side, with four other aspiring actresses. Of the five of them, Val had experienced the most artistic success with the least financial reward, having landed a number of serious roles in small theater productions.

Val had landed in Los Angeles the day before the first read-through, her belongings creeping across the country in a Penske van. She’d lain awake on a bare mattress in a barren new apartment in Culver City, listening to the air conditioner buzz. Tired and disoriented, she showed up at the studio to find everyone frantic, for reasons she couldn’t determine. She stood in the doorway, afraid that if she stepped into the room she’d be trampled. Andrew strode—there was no other word for it—across the room and extended his hand.

“You’re Valerie, right?” he said. She knew of him, mostly from her former roommates, who had told her about his current role as Herc Bronsnan on
Sands in the Hourglass,
but she’d never been around a television in the afternoon to actually see him. Her first impressions of him were of bigness and stillness. He blocked out the entire room with his height and breadth, but also served as a point of calm amid the bustle. She shook his hand,
amazed at the smallness of her own hand inside it. “You done much television?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Theater mostly.”

“How legitimate,” he said. She examined his face to see if this was meant to be a withering comment, but he retained a wide, good-natured smile. He took her by the arm. “Let me introduce you to the circus,” he said, which became a running joke over the next few weeks as Andrew, along with his then girlfriend, Nico, who costarred with him on
Sands
as a seductress coincidentally named Nico, integrated Val into a world of actors and actresses who, if they were not more successful than Val’s friends in New York, certainly lived as if they were
. Anomaly
had been picked up for thirteen episodes on the basis of the reputation of its creator, Tim Whelan. They shot the first four episodes before the pilot aired, while Val split her free time between tagging along with Andrew and Nico to parties and restaurants and being gently parented by Tim and his wife, Rachel.

She was grateful that Bethany Frazer was such a grounded part: whatever chaos raged around her, she spent her working hours as a precise and efficient agent with little time for distractions. Her friendship with Rachel developed quickly as something separate from her working relationship with Tim. The two of them shared a sense of outsider status, although Rachel had grown up in Los Angeles. Her exclusion was more professional, as the tiny world of L.A. galleries seemed quaint next to the apparatus of cultural production the rest of them toiled away at. She’d spent time in New York in her twenties, when she was the same age as Val, and she’d returned home to L.A. only because she met Tim. By the time Val met her, she’d been back for almost twenty years.

Her work at the time was a thing of large canvases and sprawl, with a sometimes Rothko-level abstraction, but over the years Val knew her, her paintings became smaller and smaller, more intricate and concrete, until by the end her canvases were postcard small and packed with fine detail. Rachel had the strange ability to carry on conversation while she painted,
and Val often thought their friendship grew faster because it was incubated under the light of Rachel’s work.

After Nico left Andrew, she had called Val up late one night, drunk, and said, “Don’t touch him. Keep everything professional or you’ll be sorry.” Val wasn’t sure if it was a warning or a threat. After the call, she never heard from Nico again, and Andrew did indeed keep it professional, now content to say goodnight at the end of a day’s shooting. The flirtatious sparring of their characters colored their off-camera conversations, and without writers to script it for her, Val sometimes caught herself trying in her spare time to come up with things to say to him, jokes and exit lines. When this happened, she’d remind herself that the intimacy between them was not a product of their professional relationship; it was the whole of their professional relationship. She thought of Andrew as a friend, but really they were partners, without the romantic or sexual connotations people sometimes heaped onto that word. If it weren’t for the show, Andrew wasn’t someone whose company she’d ever seek out. He was talented, though not as talented as he imagined, and exasperating, and funny and full of bluster. In another age, when looks and ego weighed in heavier, he might have been not a Grant or a Gable, but a William Holden maybe, a down-at-heel marquee idol, to be dreamed about by women who still dreamed but no longer considered themselves dreamers. Charming, but in a way you couldn’t quite trust. Unless you kept your expectations of him low, which she did. Val learned that she could trust him to be Andrew, consistently, for whatever that was worth.