A Hundred Thousand Worlds (10 page)

I
n the morning, she has stopped being mad. He knows this because he asks her, “Have you stopped being mad yet?”

“It’s okay, Rabbit,” she says. “I’m not mad at you.”

“Are you still mad at Brett?” he asks. She doesn’t answer, which means yes, she is still mad at Brett. They pack up the things in their hotel room, and Alex helps, looking around to make sure they got everything. He offers to carry her bags, but she says he can just take care of his.

On their way to check out, they pass the ballroom where Heronomicon was held, but now the ballroom is empty. The city it once contained has moved on and will be waiting for them in Chicago, bigger, better. Now that it’s gone, Alex finds it easier to think about the things he liked about it, which mostly is that it had little pockets of quiet where he could read his book and not be in anyone’s way, and that from anywhere in it he could usually spot his mother. He knows this makes it a little bit worse that he didn’t find her before he went off to the bookstore with Brett, but there was something in him that wanted to keep a secret from her. He knows there’s one she’s keeping from him, too; the longer hugs and the seconds where she goes quiet and looks at him are all part of hiding something, and he wants to ask, but instead he tried to build a little secret for himself. Of course it didn’t work. Secrets never work out the way you want them to.

While his mother stands at the front desk, talking to the same woman who gave Alex the map the day before, he surveys the crowd, hoping he will see Brett before they leave. The lobby is full of people Brett’s age, who look and dress a lot like him, but none of them are him.

In the backseat, Alex arranges his things for the trip. He wedges a pillow against the door, for leaning, not for sleeping. He brings
Adam Anti & Nothing but Flowers
out of his backpack and sets it on the seat, then covers it with his notebook. Last night in the hotel room, after he’d shut off the lights, he could feel it calling to him, pulsating the way a star might. There is a gravity between him and the book, but he’ll wait until they’re on the road, not wanting his mother to see it and get upset all over again. Instead he takes out a couple of comics and opens an issue of
OuterMan
to somewhere in the middle. OuterMan has a car triumphantly hoisted over his head, its passengers staring down at him in amazement.

“How far is it to Chicago?” he asks as his mother straightens mirrors.

“Five hours,” she says. “But we’re going to Babu’s house down in Normal, so that adds a couple hours.”

So seven. Alex figures he reads about a page every two minutes. So thirty pages an hour, times seven. If he starts soon, he should be able to finish half the book by the time they arrive.

His mother starts the car and it lurches, like it’s trying to jump out of itself. It makes a coughing noise and the radio flickers on and off, as if the announcer is stuttering. She tries this a couple of times, and he watches how turning the key, a motion that’s usually carried out by her wrist, becomes a full-body action, leaning her shoulder toward the dashboard like she’s going to push the car to start.

“Stay here, okay, Rabbit?” she says. She reaches under the steering wheel and pulls something that makes the front of the car go
ka-chunk.
Then she gets out of the car and goes around to the hood. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” screams Alex’s mother. He cannot see her, because she’s opened up the hood, but smoke is pouring from the front of the Honda Civic.

“Piece of shit motherfucker!” she screams. Alex gets out of the backseat and comes around the front of the car to watch. Casual profanity is mildly entertaining for him, but this kind of dedicated and emphatic swearing is a real treat. She is shaking out her hands and blowing on them, because the hood must have been hot when she opened it. After a few
more strings of curses, listening to his mom swear stops being fun. Alex wishes he could help.

“Hey, Alex,” someone calls from across the parking lot, and Alex turns to see Brett heading toward them, doing something between running and walking. He looks frumpy, like he’s still in his pajamas. Alex knows that for some grown-ups, their clothes are their pajamas.

“Get away from there!” Brett yells. “What if it hits the gas tank?”

“The gas tank’s in the back,” says Alex calmly. The smoke coming from the engine is starting to taper off, and if there was an emergency, it looks like it’s passed. He’s happy to see Brett again, but he wishes there were still an emergency. Without one, his mom will have nothing to focus on except Brett. Alex waits for the explosion.

“Do you guys need help?” Brett asks, more to Alex than to his mother.

“Not from you,” says his mother. She slams the hood back down. Alex doesn’t know much about cars, but he’s pretty sure that when your car starts smoking, it’s not going anywhere for a while. There is some kind of fluid coming out of the bottom of the car and pooling around his mother’s feet.

“That’s radiator fluid,” says Brett, pointing at the green-black liquid. “It’s . . . better if it’s on the inside.”

“You’re an amateur mechanic now?” his mother asks, stepping out of the puddle. Alex wants there to be a way to make her not so mad.

“I know radiator fluid when I see it,” says Brett. “Something like this happened with my old car. We had to put her down.” He looks sad about this, and for a minute Alex is confused. Then he remembers the movie
Old Yeller
and how they say they’re gonna have to put Yeller down. It looks like they’re going to have to shoot the Civic.

“What’s the car, late nineties?” asks Brett. “If it’s the radiator, it’s not even worth it to get it fixed. You’ll put a thousand dollars in and then wait to see what blows out next.”

Alex’s mom is crying, the worst kind of crying. When she’s sobbing, he knows he can hug her and it’ll get a little better, but this is the kind
where her face is very still and has tears running down it, and if he goes to her now, she’ll push him away.

“We can take you to Chicago,” Brett says. He turns back toward his van, where his friend is standing there waiting for him. “We’ve got room in the van. It smells like boys a little, but there’s room. And it’s only a day’s drive.”

Alex looks at his mom to see if she has heard this, expecting her to say no, or something worse than no. It’s like the moment in a play where the main actress is about to sing her big number. Everyone else on stage is watching, and the stage lights go dim and the spotlight is on his mom, standing all by herself. Smoke wraps around her like arms.

Alex follows his mother up the spiral staircase. He doesn’t need to hold her hand, but he does. He keeps his books tucked under his other arm and lets that hand slide lightly up the railing, which is made of wood so old it no longer feels like wood. It is the color of metal and feels like dried newspaper. Splinters of it try to grab his hand, but they can’t find purchase. Skin is the best thing for keeping the world outside of you.

At the top of the stairs, they come to the Idea Man’s door, a huge slab of dark and polished wood. Alex is a step or two behind his mom, and for a second, as he looks up at her framed by the bulk of the door, she looks small to him. It’s not all right when parents look small—it means something somewhere has come loose. Lately, Alex has seen more and more of these small moments: his mother tiny at the dining room table or sitting shrunken and slouched at the edge of her bed. When he’s asked what’s wrong, the answer is always
Nothing, Rabbit,
and the moment is over; she is mom-sized again. The way she is now.

“You want to open it?” she says, because she knows he does. Alex turns the brass knob with both hands and lays his shoulder into the door, pushing it with his full weight. There is magic in opening doors, and the heavier the door, the greater the possibilities. It creaks open on ancient hinges, its bottom edge scraping against the floor with the fricative sound of wood against wood. A pale quarter-circle has been traced in the varnish by the door’s slow-swinging path.

In the living room, Louis is already rushing to greet them. Alex likes Louis,
but he’s never been sure if Louis likes him. He’s never been sure if Louis likes anything. He seems too busy to have time for opinions about things. When Louis appeared, Alex thought he might be the Idea Man’s boyfriend. Then he thought he might be the Idea Man’s butler. Alex’s mother finally explained that Louis was a Man Who Ends This, which means he writes things down.

Louis lays his hands gently on Alex’s mother’s shoulders, rises onto his toes, and kisses her on both cheeks.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I was clearing duplicates out of the Book and didn’t hear you come in.”

“It’s fine, Louis,” she says, drawing him into a hug that he responds to by patting her lightly on her shoulder blades. “How is he today?”

Louis rolls his eyes and sighs dramatically. Alex remembers his babu used to do the same thing when they went to visit her in Illinois that time Dedulya was sick. If you roll your eyes and sigh, it means
Don’t get me started.
When his babu did it, it meant things were bad, because Dedulya was dying. When Louis did it, it meant more like things were the same as they always were.

“Valerie!” There are four doors into the living room, not counting the one they’ve come through, and the Idea Man’s voice could be coming from behind any of them. Alex makes a guess. He has a one-out-of-four chance of being right, which is twenty-five percent.

“Alex!” says the Idea Man, and Alex almost changes his mind, convinced for a moment that the voice is coming from the kitchen. But then the Idea Man emerges from where Alex thought he would. He is, as usual, half dressed, wearing sweatpants, a T-shirt for a band Alex has never heard of, and one sock. His hair, ghost white as long as Alex can remember, springs like an exclamation point from his forehead.

“Like Athena from the head of Zeus,” Alex declared during the months he and
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
had been inseparable. He’d gone on to describe how the sprout of hair must be bursting from the Idea Man’s head in super slow motion and how one morning it would escape into the kitchen to help Louis make breakfast.

“Did you just get here?” the Idea Man asks. “Has Lawrence offered you anything?”

“Louis,” corrects Louis. The Idea Man hasn’t looked at Louis since he made his entrance, and his botching Louis’s name is a funny little routine between them, played out, Alex thinks, largely for Alex’s amusement. He enjoys it, but not as much as he did a year ago, and now his enjoyment is tinged with the tolerance of a child who knows he’s being condescended to, if only a little, and sweetly.

The Idea Man grabs Alex under the armpits and sweeps him up into an embrace with surprisingly easy strength. Alex grips the Idea Man’s neck. He thinks of the Idea Man as being so fragile, but he is perhaps the most physically solid person in Alex’s life. Alex’s mother says that before he became a television director, the Idea Man was a surfer, and even now, when he’s neither, his body retains its old muscles, as if some rogue wave could hit his castle in Greenpoint any day, and better to be ready.

“We’re fine,” Alex’s mother says to Louis, who is standing by, ready to cater to their every desire.

“I’ll have a ginger ale,” says Alex, still in the Idea Man’s hug, which is beginning now to feel too long.

“Lance,” says the Idea Man, holding Alex out at arm’s length and a few feet above the ground as if to appraise him, “a ginger ale.”

“I don’t think we have any ginger ale,” says Louis.

“It’s lucky, then, that we live in the most civilized city in the universe,” says the Idea Man. “Get the boy a ginger ale.” Without another word, Louis leaves. Alex wonders why anyone would be so mean to someone who helps him. Again he thinks of his dedulya barking orders at Babu in his hoarse and whispery shout, and how there was some kind of love in his unkindness and some other kind of love in her enduring it.

“So Alex,” says the Idea Man, settling into the large and very old chair where he likes to sit, the one the windows cast a light across in the afternoon, “tell me about your trip.”

Alex considers this. “I don’t know anything about it yet,” he says, “since we haven’t even left.”

“But you know the plan,” says the Idea Man. “You know where you’ll be going.”

“I was thinking about that,” says Alex, “but I’ve been reading this book where the character thinks he’s going to a regular high school, but it turns out to be a high school for magicians. So maybe it’s not a good idea to think you know where you’re going until after you’ve been there.”

The Idea Man is smiling and nodding at him, but a look of confusion is starting to spread down his face. “A high school for magicians,” he says absently. “Val, is that one of mine?”

“I hope not,” says Alex’s mother. “If it is, you didn’t get paid enough for it. It’s a book series.
Adam Anti
. You must have read at least one of them.”

“I can’t read books anymore,” says the Idea Man. Alex looks around the room, which is lined with bookshelves not full but overfull, stacked two deep in places.

“You and I must be the last people who haven’t read them,” says Alex’s mother. “There are more copies of it on the subway than there are rats. Even some of the rats are reading it.”

For some reason, the popularity of the
Adam Anti
books had convinced Alex’s mother she shouldn’t let him read them. The girl working in the bookstore in Park Slope had to persuade her it was age appropriate. Of all the stories Alex consumes—plays, movies, TV—his mother is most protective when it comes to books. This makes sense to Alex, because books make you create something in your head, which means the bad stuff is even worse. He’s on to the second one now, although he’s a little overwhelmed that there are seven books altogether. It’s almost too much of one story. Like if you ate candy bars all day.

The door creaks open and Louis returns, holding a can of ginger ale out like he’s recovered a treasure.

“That took long enough,” says the Idea Man. Alex walks across the room
and takes the can, and as he turns, he sees his mother giving him the face and turns back.

“Thank you, Louis,” he says, then opens the can, marveling at how much it sounds like saying “kiss,” inviting you to put your lips up to it.

“Louis,” she says, “have you read the
Adam Anti
books?”

“I’m not sure,” says Louis. “Is that something we’re allowed to admit in public yet?”

“You were only out there for five minutes, Lucas,” says the Idea Man. “Did you catch some sort of hipster credibility virus?” As he says this, the Idea Man’s face crumples, not like before, when the confused look started at the top and dribbled down like wax off the sides of a candle, but like a soda can crushed underfoot, like his eyebrows are trying to jump into his mouth. “A serial killer,” says the Idea Man. “A hipster serial killer.”

“Hold on a second,” says Louis, rushing out of the room.

“Hurry,” says the Idea Man. “Fucking hurry.” He’s beginning to twitch, as if an electric current is running through him. In a way, Alex thinks, it is. The Idea Man only gets like this when an idea is coming to him, like a broadcast only he can pick up. Louis rushes back into the room with a notebook exactly like the one Alex brought with him, only this one is black, not green, and this one is the Book, where Louis writes down the Idea Man’s ideas as they come. People from television and the movies pay a lot to come and pick one page out of the Book. Part of Louis’s job is to make sure they only ever use the one idea they’ve paid for. Sometimes when Alex and his mom are watching TV, which isn’t often, she’ll say, “That’s one of Tim’s,” even though the Idea Man’s name never appears anywhere in the credits.

“A hipster serial killer,” the Idea Man repeats. He looks as if he’s trying to remember something. “He targets the inauthentic. Poseurs. Fakers. Liars. Storytellers.” The Idea Man’s head shakes back and forth. “He’s hunting novelists in Brooklyn. He’s hunting anyone who creates fictions.”

The Idea Man’s expression is becoming pained.

“This,” says Alex’s mother, “seems like not a great idea.”

“You’re right,” says the Idea Man, his face opening up again like a bloom. “Did you start a page?” he asks Louis.

“Yes.”

“Tear it out.”

Louis tears out the page, crumples it into a ball, and makes it disappear into a pocket. Alex wonders how many times a day this happens and if at night Louis empties dozens of abandoned ideas out of his pants.

“I’ve read them all,” Louis says, as though the last few minutes never happened. “Most of them twice.”

“So you know how it ends?” Alex asks.

“I do,” says Louis. “You want to know?”

Alex panics for a second; then he realizes Louis has no intention of spoiling the ending of the books for him and is, in fact, messing with him. Louis has never messed with Alex before. He’s not sure he likes it; it feels like being mean. Alex thinks it must have something to do with how the Idea Man is mean to Louis, but he can’t figure out how the two things relate.

“So are you ready for your trip?” Louis asks Alex’s mom. Alex is tempted to answer, because he’s been thinking a lot about the trip and about readiness. This will be the first time he’s left New York since he and his mother moved here six years ago, which he knows but doesn’t remember. And California is about as far away from New York as you can get, even if it is where Alex was born. He remembers nothing about it and feels unprepared for it. He wonders how he could be ready and worries he isn’t, that he doesn’t even know how to start getting ready and wouldn’t know when he’d arrived at readiness, a state that seems nearly as far as California.

His mother answers for him.

“We’re as ready as we’re liable to get, which probably isn’t ready enough.”

This is a good way to put it, so Alex takes another swig of ginger ale.

“I talked to the woman at the correctional facility in Lincoln,” says Louis. “It’s about two hours outside of Chicago.” Louis is apparently more prepared for their trip than they are.

“I know where Lincoln Correctional is,” says Alex’s mother in that sharp tone Alex knows means she doesn’t want to talk about whatever is being discussed. “My mom lives forty minutes from there.”

“The warden’s name is Iris something or other. They’re ready for your visit. She said she’d rather you came to the parole hearing, but—”

“That’s enough,” says the Idea Man. “No talking about the middle before the beginning. In a minute there is time for decisions or revisions which a minute will reverse.”

“You’re quoting ‘Prufrock’ now?” asks Alex’s mother. Alex imagines how a proof rock might work. Either you put your hand on it and it tells if you are telling the truth, or it records evidence somehow: sounds and voices that it can play back.

“I grow old,” says the Idea Man. “I grow old.”

“Don’t be maudlin, Tim,” says Alex’s mother. He grins at her. When he smiles, he doesn’t look old at all.

“I’ve been too much indoors,” he says. “Eliot’s like Whitman’s asthmatic little brother. But lately I find my thoughts drawn to him.”

“Why don’t you and Alex go read for a bit?” says Alex’s mother, addressing both of them like they’re children. “Since you won’t be seeing each other for a while. Give Louis and me a chance to talk some things out.”

The Idea Man springs from the couch and plucks Alex out of the chair with arms like taut cables of wire.

“Let us go then, you and I,” he says in a weird British accent. He tucks Alex under his arm like a giggling briefcase and whisks him away. Once they are in the hallway and Alex is set properly on his feet, Alex heads toward the reading room, a sunny and spacious spot in the back of the apartment where he and the Idea Man have spent hours sharing the adventures of the Ferret, the Astounding Family, OuterGirl, and dozens of other brightly costumed heroes. But this time the Idea Man calls for him to wait, and Alex stops in front of a door halfway down the hall, the only one in the house that is perpetually closed. The Idea Man moves Alex a little off to the side and pulls the keys out of his pocket.

“Have I ever shown you what’s in here?” the Idea Man asks. He hasn’t, but Alex has always wondered.

The Idea Man opens the door. “It’s a time machine,” he says. Alex steps in.

On the inside, it’s bigger than Alex would have predicted, or even thought possible. The ceilings are higher than anywhere else in the apartment, and bookcases and file cabinets climb up all of the walls, so high the bookcases have ladders on runners that slide across them and some of the file cabinets have other ladders propped against them.