A Hundred Thousand Worlds (5 page)

They call you names. Crip. Gimp. Crutch. The word for it is
metonymy.
The part comes to stand for the whole. The crown becomes the kingdom. The piece of wood that stands in for your flawed leg becomes all of you. Your brokenness becomes all of you.

You know the word because your entire world is words. You can move through words deftly, you can run and jump and fly through them. You can lift mighty sentences, shoulder paragraphs. In the basement of the Metro City Public Library, you run through a labyrinth of words, through arcane documents detailing the weird occult history of Metro City. You run through it looking for your sister, calling her name into the dust-thick air.

This too is why they hate you: tragedy. It runs like a virus in your blood. None of them have lost their parents in a plane crash. None of them have had a sister simply disappear from the house your parents left to you both, the one even the Metro City Department of Social Services couldn’t tear you away from. You are a carrier of weird misfortune, and to touch you might mean catching it.

When you find the word, it is puzzling. It stands out on the page, glistening under the flickering fluorescents. Maybe that’s why you read it out loud. Maybe that’s why the lightning comes. It courses through you. You are made of its etheric energy, it burns away
crip
and
gimp
and
crutch
until you are no longer a boy but a man. A man made out of lightning.

Now you run and jump and fly through the streets of Metro City. You stop bullets, they thud against your barrel-broad chest. You search for
your sister now not in books but in dark rooms full of killers, in abandoned churches taken over by would-be wizards.

And when you say the word, the lightning goes away. Leaves behind it a boy. A crip. A gimp. A crutch. Until you summon it back.

As the days and the nights pass, you spend more and more of your time as a man made of lightning with a child in his mind. The thought of your original body becomes more repellent. You begin to associate it with the names the other kids call it. You dream of being trapped in it forever and wake up, sweating and shaking, in the body of a man made of lightning.

There are things about this body you don’t understand. The workings of it. Feelings it has that can’t be yours. But whose can they be? In a runic circle out in the Fawcett Flats, you grapple with Cerridwen, an enchantress who may know where your sister is, and there’s something this body wants from her, but you don’t know what it is. It’s a want that lingers after the fight is over, after the police have taken her to a cell she’s sure to escape from. The want floats through your dreams, but you can’t name it. It feels like an enchantment, but it comes from this body. If it’s not your want, whose is it, and what is it for?

You are aware you are sacrificing your childhood. This bothers you less as time goes on.

Alone at night, a little closer to finding your sister than you were the night before, but still she feels so distant, you think of the word that will change you back into a boy, a crip, a gimp, a crutch. You try to forget it. You picture it, hold it in your mind, and then attack it with fists and scrub brushes. But it’s still there. Puzzling. Glistening. And you fall asleep in the bed of a child, in the body of a man made of lightning.

G
ail Pope subjects her spine to a series of stretches and twists, trying to wring out the knots and kinks that have accumulated in the course of a cramped bus ride across New York State and a night’s sleep on a less-than-stellar hotel bed. She makes yawning and creaking noises, cracks knuckles, rotates shoulders, straightens her T-shirt. She plays the theme from
Rocky
in her head. Then she sits down in the metal folding chair in front of the National Comics banner, and her back quickly resumes its normal shape, that of a gooseneck desk lamp. On the table there are back-issue stacks some National intern must have laid out at dawn:
The Speck & Iota,
OuterGirl
ongoings,
The Perfectional
miniseries. She got to meet the interns at the New York office the other day. They are spritely little geek elves. She imagines if she left one of her worn sneakers outside her hotel room tonight, it would be shiny and repaired in the morning.

She scans the room for them, but, true to their elfin heritage, they have vanished now that their work is done. From her duffel bag Gail extracts copies of
Fountain Ethics
and slides them to the front of the table. It’s a creator-owned book she wrote for Black Sheep Comics years ago, before she got her first gig at National. It’s dirty stuff, full of sex and violence, and when she asked the publicity people at National if she should bring copies to the signing, there was a lot of wincing and floor examination that served as her answer. She pages through the first issue, thinking that it reads like a tryout for a career path she never took, one where she worked on sexually fraught characters like ExSanguina rather than the quirky heteronormative scientist
couple that was the Speck and Iota. But it never sold well, and she has boxes of comp copies that clutter her apartment. If she can’t give them away here, she’ll probably be buried with them.

It’s strange for Gail to be at a convention as an object of fandom rather than as a fan, but she’s glad she chose to start with Cleveland rather than jumping right into one of the bigger cons. Cleveland is also nice because it’s all comics: no movies or video games or any of the other noisy, flashy things that are ancillary to her job but which she’s not all that into. Of course she likes stories in any form they take, but for her it’s all about twenty-four pages in full color every month. Last year, she hadn’t been one of the writers National tapped to represent the company on the con circuit, but recently Gail has developed a fan base that is, if not as large as those of some of the other writers in the National stable, more vocal. And let’s face facts: it’s good publicity to have a female writer standing out front. It makes National look progressive and obscures the fact that Gail is the only female writer they currently employ full-time. She hits that sweet spot between talent and tokenism that earns one a seat on a Greyhound and a single bed at the Holiday Inn. She can’t complain. Three years ago, she was attending cons as a fan journalist, entirely on her own dime. Crashing on the couches of other fans she barely knew. Missing out on the high-end industry parties to drink Schlitz with the comic book dealers and cosplayers. Not that she’s been to any high-end industry parties. Not that she is going to, or that there even are any. But in the pocket universe of comics, Gail has risen from the bottom to a firmly ensconced place in the upper middle. She is no longer a fangirl; she is a name on the poster. She is a draw.

Valerie Torrey’s line is, of course, double the size of Gail’s. Gail knew she was going to be here, but she had no idea they’d be right next to each other. If Gail had her choice, she’d be in the line rather than sitting ten feet away from her and not talking. She’s waiting for her chance, a moment when their lulls overlap. Except Valerie’s line is lull-less. There is
not a break, nary an opening, and Gail can imagine the two of them like co-workers who sit in adjacent cubicles for years without saying hello or learning each other’s names. It’s unacceptable.

For the moment, there is no one in Gail’s line. No one eyeing her up or getting ready to approach. She reaches into her duffel and grabs a small stack of comics, then walks over and stands over Valerie’s shoulder in a way she hopes isn’t menacing. Valerie is talking to a man in his forties who is well dressed and fidgets with his hands.

“I have a time travel joke,” he says.

“That’s great,” says Valerie. “Let’s hear it.”

“The bartender says, ‘We don’t serve faster-than-light particles here.’ A tachyon walks into a bar.” He pauses. Valerie chuckles. But Gail, for whom knowledge of crazy sciency things is a job requirement, busts out laughing. Valerie turns to look at Gail over her shoulder.

“Hi,” says Gail, giving a little wave.

“Hi,” says Valerie. She doesn’t look too weirded out. Maybe a little.

“I didn’t want to interrupt,” says Gail.

“Do you want to sit?” says Valerie. She pulls out the chair next to her and Gail takes a seat.

“This is so weird,” says Gail. “I am so generally not a fangirl.” She shakes her head. “I mean, obviously, yes, a fangirl. But I don’t usually get nervous. And you have people.” She points to the man with the time travel joke.

“I’ve been waiting in line,” he says.

“And that was the best material you came up with?” says Gail.

“Tachyons can theoretically travel through time,” he says to Valerie.

“No, yeah, I’m sorry,” says Gail.

“I know,” Valerie tells the man. She’s very polite. “I was listening to a
Radiolab
about them on the drive yesterday.”

“Oh,” says the man, seeming a little deflated. It’s unclear to Gail whether he hoped the joke would go over Valerie’s head or not. She signs a glossy photo for him and he runs away.

“You wouldn’t know me, but my name is Gail Pope,” says Gail.

“Val,” says Valerie. Says Val. Gail hands Val the stack of comics like a business card. On the cover of the top one is a drawing of Frazer and Campbell, guns drawn. “I wrote that,” Gail says. She must sound like an elementary schooler showing off her artwork. “It was my first job. A six-issue mini for Black Sheep Comics.”

“I haven’t read them,” Val says.

“It’s not very good,” says Gail. “I never got the voice of Bethany Frazer. I was young and I wrote it like it was me running around with Campbell, solving cases. Nobody liked it. I’m surprised I ever got another job.”

Val hands back the stack of comics, but Gail waves her off.

“They’re for you,” she says. “The story’s set in season three. It’s a lost episode.”

Val thanks her and sets them aside. The woman at the front of the line is doing the International Dance of Impatience, shifting from one foot to the other with her arms folded.

“I wanted to tell you how great it was you were there,” Gail says, staring at her hands. “That you existed. I was a big geek growing up. Big as in geeky and big as in heavy. The girls I read about, or the ones on the covers of the books I was reading, they weren’t anything like me. They were prettier, but they also weren’t smart, and they weren’t badass. They were sexy—or the good ones were plucky. Fucking plucky. And then there was Frazer, and she was smart and badass. She was badass by being smart. It was the first time I saw a woman in any of these worlds I was spending all my time in and thought she was someone I could be, or would want to be. I was twenty-one when the show started and I’d been reading comic books all my life. You were my first hero.”

“Thank you,” says Val. She’s blushing, and now Gail feels bad, having made her blush. The woman in the front of the line clears her throat.

“Your adoring public,” says Gail. She stands up and starts to back away, then pauses. As someone who makes her living manipulating words, she’s always surprised how often they prove inadequate or inappropriate, how
frequently the only way to say something sounds clunky and immature. “Do you,” she says, “want to hang out later?” It is the kind of thing a middle school boy would mutter staring at his shoes. She and Val look at each other for a second, as if they are trying to find the adult translation for
Hey, want to be friends?

“I’d like that,” says Val.

“Great,” Gail says. She turns to go, then realizes her chair is still only ten feet away from Val’s. “Or we could just start now.”

V
al drives a half hour each way to pick up food she considers reasonably healthy from the nearest Whole Foods. That Alex ate Froot Loops for breakfast and God knows what from the hotel restaurant for lunch should make this matter less, but it makes it matter so much more. She wants to know that even when she isn’t with him, her voice will be in his head saying things like
Eat something green with that
or
Do they have it in organic?

At a red light, she discreetly picks up her phone and dials her agent, Elise at Diverse Talent in Los Angeles. She’s always claimed Val is the easiest client she’s ever worked with, since Val came to her as soon as she moved to L.A., contract in hand and three days of shooting already complete. But she more than earned her keep after Val disappeared. For Val’s first year in New York, Elise was the only person on the West Coast who knew how to find her; she wrapped up all of Val’s affairs, including getting Val out of the last year of her second
Anomaly
contract. By then, there was no show to be under contract to, but there were, all the same, legal issues to be put to rest, and it was a relief when Elise called to tell Val that the remainder of the contract had been voided, and any money Val had been paid in advance of the upcoming season that was never to be shot was hers to keep—Tiger’s Paw Media was anxious to forget the whole thing and not about to sweat small change. Since then, Val’s made her work for her money in dribs and drabs, arranging auditions for theater parts in New York, a world Elise claims to know nothing about. But she’s proven
good at it, and doesn’t get upset when Val turns down a more lucrative role for one with a more manageable rehearsal schedule.

“Val,” says Elise, “where the hell are you?”

“Cleveland,” she says.

“Is it terrible? I imagine it’s terrible.”

“It’s fine,” says Val. “I’ve only seen the Holiday Inn and the Whole Foods.”

“So you’ve hit the high points already,” says Elise. “I’ve been meaning to call you. Houston Grant is calling me at least three times a day.
Perestroika
is going into rehearsals in six weeks, and if you’re not going to do it, he needs to recast.”

“Can you put him off a little longer?”

“I can try putting him off till opening night, but I can’t guarantee he’ll hold the part for you,” says Elise. “You want other news?”

“Is it good news?”

“I never know with you,” says Elise. “It’s an offer. For most of my clients, an offer is good news. For you, an offer is like a box full of snakes.”

Val snorts out a little laugh. “What’s the offer?”

“Gertrude,” says Elise.

“
Gertrude
Gertrude?” says Val. “Who the hell is doing
Hamlet
?”

“Royal Shakespeare. In London. Starting in January.”

“Holy shit,” says Val.

“I told them you were too young,” says Elise.

“You didn’t.”

“I didn’t.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them I’d talk you into it,” says Elise.

“Wouldn’t take much talking into,” says Val.

“With you, everything’s an argument,” Elise says. “You think you could move that kid of yours to London for six months?”

Val winces. “Let me worry about that,” she says.

“So what should I tell them?”

“Put them off a little while.”

“Val,” says Elise, “you know I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to the theater stuff, but it seems to me, the Royal Shakespeare Company is not something you put off for a little while.”

“Can we talk about it when I get to L.A.?” says Val. “I’d like to talk about it in person.”

“Your wish is my et cetera, et cetera,” says Elise. “So how is your road trip going? How’s Alex?”

“He’s fine. Everything’s good here.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m driving, Elise,” says Val. “I’ll call you when I’m in L.A.” Never taking her eyes off the road, she fumbles around on the passenger seat until she finds the phone and hangs it up.

She’s made it to the hallway on their floor with dinner in one paper grocery bag, the old kind, without handles, when her phone begins to buzz in her pocket. She shifts the bag onto her hip to grab it. The number is unfamiliar, but it’s got a California area code; Andrew changes phones so often these days. What if he’s doing it to avoid a dangerous stalker, she thinks, someone who might hurt Alex? But she dismisses this as too obvious. In real life there are no reruns.

“How’s it going?” he asks. There is the sound of wind in the background; he’s driving with the windows open. Val thinks of smog, traffic fatalities.

“We’re fine,” she says. “We’re in Cleveland.”

“I thought you were going to call me when you guys got on the road,” he says.

“I couldn’t,” she says. “I was driving.” A second passes and the wind noise stops. He hasn’t stopped the car, she knows, but he has rolled up the windows.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, which has always been the precursor to him going back on his word. “Maybe I should meet up with you guys in Chicago. If you’re doing a signing anyway, I could be at the signing and then we could all come to Los Angeles together. Fly right out of Chicago
to Los Angeles, maybe spend a few days together before the convention. What do you think?”

“You promised me Chicago,” she says. “We agreed.”

“It’s funny,” he says. “You talking about agreements as if they’re binding.” She can’t decide if he sounds hostile or if he’s musing on it. “It’s funny.”

“When you say something’s funny twice, it makes you sound like an idiot,” she says. “It’s like saying ‘It is what it is.’”

“That’s my character’s tagline,” he says. “On the show.”

“I haven’t seen the show,” she says, which is technically true, but it doesn’t mean she hasn’t done a little Web surfing. She’s told Alex on a number of occasions, “Only idiots say ‘It is what it is.’ Not that that makes your father an idiot.” Anyway, what kind of person does taglines?

“Valerie,” he says, “I’m trying to make this easier on everyone. On Alex.”

She hates the sound of Alex’s name coming from him, because it forces her to remember that Andrew is the one who named him, when she was blissed out on whatever weird concoction of hormones her body cooked up to apologize for the pain she’d been through. “You could make it easier by staying the fuck out of our lives,” she says.

“I wish you wouldn’t think of it like that,” he says. She’s breathing fast now. She worries he can hear it on the other end of the phone. She sets her groceries down and leans hard against the wall. She has to remind herself that this toxicity is only between them, that it has nothing to do with Alex. That he was a bad husband will not make him a bad father. People change, and it has been a long time. She has to remind herself not to hate him. She fails.

“If you show up in Chicago,” she says, “I will take him and run. I will run to someplace where no one has ever heard of you, or me. I will start from scratch and I will wait tables in a diner and you will never see Alex or me ever again.”

There is a silence, and in the silence she can hear her heart beating and she can hear his car running. She knows his taste in cars and knows
he must be going very fast for his car to make any noise at all. Valerie thinks again of traffic fatalities.

“Fine,” he says. This is such an important word between them because it can sound like approval and wellness and so many other things when it’s only shorthand for
final
. He hangs up the phone and Val holds her breath, thinking it will ring again and he will say
I’ve been thinking
and she and Alex will have to disappear. The phone doesn’t ring, so she picks up the bags of microgreens and whole wheat pasta and the organic rotisserie chicken and walks down the hall to feed her child.