A Hundred Thousand Worlds (11 page)

“The present’s nearest the ceiling,” says the Idea Man, pointing up, “and the past is closer to the floor. Comics in the file cabinets, books and photos on the shelves. It should probably be the other way, so the past is harder to get to, but usually it’s the past I’m in here looking for.”

Alex puts his hand on the handle of one of the file cabinets and gives it a tentative pull, testing its give.

“Go ahead,” says the Idea Man. Alex yanks the drawer open. It makes a metallic scraping noise, very different from the wood-on-wood sound of the Idea Man’s front door. Inside, as promised, are dozens of very old comic books.
The Visigoth. The Blue Torch. The Astounding Family.
The Idea Man has offered him issues at random over the years, but here they are meticulously sorted and cataloged, month by month. The thing that’s strange to Alex is that all of them were once new, when the Idea Man was young. The thought of their newness implies a time before they existed, before they were made, and times before are always troubling to Alex.

“You should take a couple with you,” says the Idea Man. “You’re traveling into a foreign country, and it’s good to have some sense of the language.” Alex isn’t sure what this means. They are going to Cleveland. They are going to Chicago. They are going to Los Angeles. All of them well inside the United States. “Besides,” says the Idea Man, “it’ll be a while before we get to read together again.”

“It’s only three weeks,” says Alex, delicately turning the pages of
Captain Wonder,
one of the Idea Man’s favorite characters. Alex looks up from the
comic to see the Idea Man staring at him as if Alex has fallen and bruised his knee.

“It could be a while longer than that,” says the Idea Man. “California’s a long ways away.”

He’s not sure what the Idea Man means by this, but then sometimes the things the Idea Man says don’t make a lot of sense. Alex has checked and done the math: you can drive from New York to Los Angeles in two days, if you drive all day and all night. But there are so many things to see between here and there, Alex can imagine the trip taking longer, their path back across the country strange and snaking. They can take all the time they need.

“I’m coming back,” he says, surprised how small his voice sounds in the big room.

“You’re
going
back,” says the Idea Man. “California’s where you’re from, after all. But that doesn’t make it your home. Only you can decide where your home is. And every good story is about finding your way there.”

Alex thinks about all the stories that end up with the main character arriving home, and how there’s something disappointing about the story ending where it began, but how there’s something satisfying about it, too.

“Is New York your home?”

“No,” says the Idea Man. “California’s my home at the end of the day.” He has taken a picture off the shelf and is looking at it, wearing that same expression he gets before an idea comes to him, his almost remembering face. Alex can see the picture: in it are the Idea Man, Alex’s mom and dad, and another lady Alex doesn’t recognize. They’re wearing tuxedos and fancy dresses. His mom and the Idea Man are holding up gold statues and they all look very happy. “This is a nice place to hide, but I have the Pacific in my blood. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.”

“Are there mermaids in California?”

“The realest mermaids I know.”

Alex has not until now thought about the Pacific, but he’s heard that it’s the blue color of oceans in picture books. He thinks about the ocean you
can see at Coney Island, which is gray like the railing out in the stairwell, and how his mother took him to the Mermaid Parade there one year, where not many of the mermaids had tails at all, just turquoise skirts and no tops. He wonders what realer mermaids look like, but before he can imagine one, he hears his mom calling from the next room.

“Sounds like they’re done plotting and scheming,” says the Idea Man. He opens another drawer and skims through, extracting a comic. He gets up on a short stepladder and opens a different, more recent drawer to get another. He does this a half-dozen times, flitting about the room, then straightens them into a stack and hands them to Alex. “Basic vocabulary,” he says.
“Dónde está la cabina telefónica?
With great power comes great responsibility. To be continued.”

Alex and the Idea Man go back to the living room, where Alex’s mom and Louis are standing near enough to the doorway to indicate it is time to go. But Alex doesn’t want to go. The Idea Man is the last thing they’ve scheduled to say goodbye to in New York, but what about the Alice in Wonderland statue, or the Whispering Gallery in Grand Central? What about Elizabeth at Peas n’ Pickles, who sneaks him candy while his mom shops for groceries, or the Brooklyn Heights Promenade? There was no last pizza at Frankie’s, no final ride on the Staten Island Ferry to wave goodbye to the statue. Alex wants to mention these things, to list them off to his mother as things they need to do before they can leave. But something about the way she’s been worrying keeps him from sharing his worries with her.

“When will you leave?” the Idea Man asks Alex’s mother.

“Tomorrow,” she says, and all Alex can think is that he is not ready. “How long does it take to drive to Cleveland?”

“I should know this?” says the Idea Man. “Who ever has to drive to Cleveland? Leonard. How long does it take to drive to Cleveland?”

“I’ve never driven to Cleveland,” says Louis.

“No one’s ever driven to Cleveland,” replies the Idea Man. “But there must be some way to calculate it or something.”

Alex’s mother intervenes in this argument by pulling the Idea Man away and into a hug. “It’ll take how long it takes,” she tells him. “You’ll take care of him?” she says to Louis, turning her back to the Idea Man.

“As best I can,” Louis says, as if she has asked him to juggle chainsaws while on a unicycle.

“You’re fantastic and he loves you dearly,” she tells Louis. He bows his head. Louis gets embarrassed whenever anyone says something nice to him, probably because it happens so rarely.

“Alex,” the Idea Man says, shaking Alex’s hand up and down sternly, “it was very good to see you.”

“It was nice to see you, too,” says Alex. He pauses. He is deciding something, and after a moment he decides yes. “Can I have one?” he asks.

The Idea Man, who bent over a little to shake Alex’s hand, straightens up and strokes his chin. “Hmm. People usually have to pay.”

“I don’t have any money,” says Alex, although this is not entirely true. His mom makes sure he has ten dollars in his pocket at all times, for emergencies. It’s been the same ten-dollar bill for two years, and Alex has come to think of this money as talismanic rather than spendable.

“Tell you what,” the Idea Man says. “I’ll give you one, but if you make a story out of it, you have to tell it to me when it’s done.”

“I thought you didn’t like stories,” says Alex.

“I like stories very much,” the Idea Man says. “I just can’t come up with them anymore.”

“Okay,” says Alex, putting his hand out to be shaken again, this time on business. “If I make a story out of it, I’ll tell it to you next time I see you.”

“All right,” the Idea Man says, shaking Alex’s hand once, twice, three times, the number of anything magic. He squats down. He lowers his voice until it is not reverse yelling but secret quiet. And he
speaks.

I had to work fast. I would draw three pages a day, maybe more. I would have to vary the panels, balance the page. I took care of everything on that page—the expressions of the characters, the motivation of the characters—it all ran through my mind. I wrote my own stories. Nobody ever wrote a story for me. I told in every story what was really inside my gut, and it came out that way. My stories began to get noticed because the average reader could associate with them.

—JACOB KURTZBERG

What did Doctor Doom really want? He wanted to rule the world. Now, think about this. You could walk across the street against a traffic light and get a summons for jaywalking, but you could walk up to a police officer and say “I want to rule the world,” and there’s nothing he can do about it, that is not a crime. Anybody can want to rule the world. So, even though he was the Fantastic Four’s greatest menace, in my mind, he was never a criminal!

—STANLEY MARTIN LIEBER

“W
e should add more characters,” says Brett. He shovels another handful of corn chips into his mouth. Fred wanted to make the trip without stopping. But Alex spotted a Road Ranger outside of South Bend and they’d stocked up on provisions, none of which Valerie approved of. At Alex’s request, she agreed to sit up front with Fred so Brett and Alex could work. Fred’s been monologuing at her the entire time, on what Brett can’t imagine. He hopes Fred’s not sharing his opinions on the decline of
Anomaly
across the last half of its run. But Brett’s sure it has at least been mentioned. In the backseat of the van, Brett and Alex race to the bottom of the bag of Fritos. Alex leads.

“Iwa finken at,” says Alex, spraying wet crumbs. Rather than elaborate with his mouth full, he gestures for Brett to offer ideas.

Until now, Brett has only confirmed or clarified Alex’s ideas. Drawn them. Made them one degree more real on the page. He hasn’t contributed any new concepts. At best he’s refined some. The story isn’t his. It’s a bauble of thin glass. Now Alex hands it to him to carry.

“They leave the city,” Brett says. He looks at Alex to see if this is correct. Alex nods. “Outside the city, there’s—” He stops. They haven’t discussed what’s outside the abandoned city. There’s the stretch of beach behind them. Past that, the cave. But he can’t move the story backwards. “There’s nothing,” he says.

“Desert,” says Alex. Tears off a piece of beef jerky with his molars. Val had complained that these were basically pure salt. “It’s okay, though,” Alex tells Brett as he chaws away. “The robot knows where to find water.”

Every now and then, Val cranes around from her seat in the front and looks with a kind of horror at what they’re eating. Brett looks up at her, and she takes a breath as if to speak, then bites her lip and turns her attention away, back to the road. Alex seems to enjoy food to an extent inverse to how much his mother disapproves of it. Brett’s mother was less invested in what he ate than Val is. As a result, he probably never attacked a piece of beef jerky with the feral joy Alex demonstrates.

“They walk through the desert all day,” says Brett. “When it’s getting to be night—”

“When night falls,” says Alex. “In stories, night always falls.”

“Have you ever seen night fall?” asks Brett. Scowls with his eyes, then grins. Alex grins back and shakes his head. “When it’s getting to be night, they come to a hut.”

“Shouldn’t it be a tent? I think desert nomads have tents.”

“Are you telling this or am I?” asks Brett.

“No, no, go, with your huts,” Alex says, rummaging in a bag of chips.

“I never said there were nomads,” says Brett.

“It’s a desert; it should maybe have nomads, I’m saying,” Alex says, shrugging and pursing his lips.

“No nomads,” says Brett.

“No-no, nomads!” says Alex. As if he’s chastising some desert tribe for packing up their tents too soon. This cracks him up. His laughter consists of trying not to inhale whatever combination of junk foods currently fills his mouth. “Hut is good,” he concludes.

“There’s a girl who lives in the hut. About the boy’s age.”

This stops Alex cold. For the first time since they’ve started talking about it, he speaks with an empty mouth, crisp and clear.

“Are they going to end up boyfriend/girlfriend?”

Brett hasn’t thought about this. “It’s a girl in a hut,” he says.

“You can’t give him a girlfriend when he doesn’t even have a name,” Alex says. This is what Brett was worried about when he took over. That he’d ruin it somehow.

“I didn’t say she was going to be his girlfriend,” he says.

“She isn’t,” Alex decides. “She’s from the city. The next city.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” says Brett, although he hadn’t been. He pauses to see if Alex is going to take the narrative back. He doesn’t. So, tentatively, Brett continues. “She was thrown out of the city,” he says. “Because of her powers.”

“She has powers,” Alex says. Less a question than a first bite. Chews this idea to see how it tastes.

“She’s a shape-shifter,” says Brett. Alex looks unsure about this.

“Like a mutant?”

“Are there mutants in this story?” Brett asks. He wishes there was a set of rules he could follow to avoid moments like this. Alex considers. Then shakes his head. “So, not a mutant,” Brett says. He is stumped. He decides the best thing to do is ask. “Where does she get her powers from?”

“She doesn’t know,” Alex says. “She wasn’t born with them. At some point she just had them.”

“There’s a lot of things in this story people don’t know,” Brett says. Takes a small piece of jerky and grinds it between his teeth. Val is right: it’s like a piece of leather designed to carry salt. But as he gnaws on it, his mouth floods with the overwhelming salinity of it. It is painfully good. The kind of good that induces discomfort.

“That’s what the story is for,” Alex says. “For finding out.”

“She doesn’t want to go with them,” Brett says. “She doesn’t want to go back to the city that threw her out.”

“The boy and the robot need her help,” says Alex. “There are guards at the city gates. They need her help to get through. But she doesn’t want to help them. Because what you said. The city, it threw her away. So why should she go back?”

Brett makes a first attempt. “Do they have anything they can give her? Can they pay her for her help?” Alex shakes his head. Obviously wrong. Can’t give the boy and the robot pocketfuls of treasure at this point, because it’d be convenient. What good would treasure be to a shape-shifting
girl who lives in a hut in the desert? What could she possibly want that they, or anyone, could offer?

“The boy tells her,” Alex says. “He explains he doesn’t know his name. And the girl, because she’s a shape-shifter, she doesn’t have a name, either. She did, but they took it away from her.”

“That’s good,” says Brett. Draws the girl, listening. Sadness settling over her face. A nameless boy and a nameless girl, explaining themselves to each other. The boy’s hands are out, pleading. Once the figures are rendered, he pauses, wishing they hadn’t set this scene in the desert. Nothing to work with. No background. But then he can see it. A living, moving thing. Octopal arms of sand, drifts that have undulated for a hundred years. Lines come forward, wrap around the boy and the girl, float between them. It obscures them from the viewer and from themselves. They can hardly see each other through the sand.