A Hundred Thousand Worlds (26 page)

Upon consideration, caring may be the thing the equation cannot accommodate. You sit in what your son refers to as Dad’s Wondering Chair and allow your mind to examine, again, the Moment. The cone that winnows all of your possible pasts into that moment, excluding any pasts that don’t bring the four of you into that particular jungle on that particular day, that don’t lead to you discovering the artifacts that gifted or cursed each of you with astonishing powers. The limits of your causal pasts constricting finally to a point and then exploding outward to include all of your possible futures, an ever-widening array of them. Your daughter, eleven, flits into the living room, the delicate insectile wings on her back flapping too quickly to be seen. She hovers above the coffee table, drops down to select an issue of
People
,
brushing aside the issues of
National Geographic
and
Discover
you piled on top of it, and whisks back out of the room. On the floor near the couch, your son, four, makes shapes, tiny homunculi, out of nothing at all, shaping the building blocks of matter into playthings and setting them into herky-jerky motion on the hardwood.

You can imagine alternate pasts in which you do not care, in which you are not so insistent that you all undertake these adventures together. You have told your wife you owe it to the children to let them experience everything possible. There is so much that is possible. But it’s not the real reason. It’s that nothing feels real to you without them there. No experience truly happens until you can see it on their faces. Your caring for them is a desperate, hungry thing, a need bigger than the need to go, to see. And it’s that caring that brought you all to the moment, to the incident. If not
for your need, your daughter might have gone on to college, happily anonymous, joyfully normal. Your son, whose abilities may have no upper limit, who may know no boundary between desire and reality, could have played T-ball and not been any good at it. Could have learned that he loved to draw and become an artist, the kind who draws greeting cards or illustrates comic books. Your wife could be up for tenure instead of prepping for another talk show appearance that will dwell on the domestic advantages of her extendable, almost fluid limbs.

The only one worse off would be you. You would be commonplace and dull, the same normalcy you wish for them weighing on you like a curse. Some days you might look at your children and your wife, and wonder if they were the reason you were so ordinary. If they might have held you back from something better.

And then you feel a tug at the cuff of your pant leg. Your son holds up for display a tiny, misshapen man, body like a pear, its arms stretched upward to be lifted. Its little black eyes blink at you, and your son beams proudly at what he’s made. In an upper corner of the room, your daughter has abandoned her celebrity magazine for a science journal whose articles are over even your head. The sun falls in through the window and lights up iridescent veins in her wings. And from the next room, your wife calls out. “Honey, there’s an article here about a temple in the Urals—you’ve got to see it.” Her arm snakes down the hall with impossible grace and places the article in your lap. There’s a photo, taken from the base of a mountain with a telephoto lens. High up the mountain, there’s the barest speck, a black dot on a white field, hardly discernible as a man-made structure. The article describes the attempt to reach it, the unscalable mountain, the treachery of the climb. Impossible, the article concludes. But someone must have reached it. Someone built this impossible temple in its impossible location. And now it sits there, unreachable, unreached, unexplored.

“Kids,” you say, rising from your Wondering Chair, folding the article and tucking it under your arm, “go pack some winter gear.”

I
f she doesn’t move, the day won’t have to start. If she can only manage to stay still, the time on the clock will never change, the light will never ladder its way across the floor, and they can stay held in the amber of this moment forever. But then Alex stirs, not waking but considering it as a possible option, and the moment is broken. Val kisses the top of his head, his hair matted with night sweat, the slight hircine stink of his oncoming adolescence lurking behind the boyish, milky smell of him. Sometimes Val would hold him in such a way that she could serendipitously smell the top of his head like this, an olfactory reminder of feeding him as a baby. But this barnyard scent says more about who Alex will be than who he’s been.

Val extracts herself from him, removing her arm from under his head and lowering it back onto the pillow. He inhales deeply and, like a flower blossoming in reverse, draws every extremity in tight, condensing a tiny bud of self out of the sprawl he was a moment before.

She is hesitant to leave him alone, even for a second. The thought that he might wake up and find her gone is terrible. But the day is in motion now, and there’s little point in fighting it. Val is caught in it like a shoelace in an escalator, drawn to the top, to the end, to the metal teeth that are static, sharp, and impossible to bargain with.

In the bathroom, she strips down and examines herself in the wide mirror. The multiple lights above and around the sink dispel any true shadows but cast leering penumbrae across her like dark grins. She searches her body for one hard angle, something to hold on to among the curves, but today there are only slumps and slouches to her. In the shower, she finds
that her skin is buzzing with a painful alertness, and her scalp protests every tug of hair. She turns up the water’s heat so it might scald her, but it only hurts, only burns.

Wrapped in towels, she comes out of the bathroom to find Alex sitting up in bed, rubbing his sleep-puffed eyes with one hand and holding her phone to his ear with the other.

“That’s great,” he says. “That means we’ll get to see you soon.” Her gut clenches, reminding her how long it’s been since she’s eaten anything, and she watches Alex’s face, his genuine brightness, as he hangs up the phone.

“Who’s that, Rabbit?” she asks, sure she already knows.

“Louis,” he says, and the thing in her gut relaxes, only to re-exert its pressure higher, at the base of her throat. “He and the Idea Man will be here this afternoon. They’ll meet us at the convention.”

Val grabs the phone from him too quickly, too violently. He looks at her, afraid he’s done something wrong. She navigates the screens, about to call Louis and tell him, “No, turn back, go back to New York and wait for me there on the other side,” but then all the energy goes out of her arm. There’s no point. No way to stop them when they’ve come this far. She puts the phone on the nightstand.

“That’s great, Rabbit,” she says, aware of how unconvincing she must sound. With both her hands, she tries to fix his hair, patting down cowlicks and attempting to unearth the part somewhere under this mess of dark wire.

“How’d you sleep?” she asks.

“Good,” he says. “This is a better bed than the one in Chicago. Squishier. How about you?”

“Good,” she says, surprised to realize it’s true. She’d been determined to stay awake, to catalog every breath and twitch, but sleep took her minutes after it had claimed him.

“You should take a bath,” she says, then wonders why. There is the curious question of what condition he should be in when she hands him over to Andrew. It won’t prove anything if Alex is presented clean and pressed,
and there is a part of her that wants to send Alex to his father with a trace of her presence still on his skin. But he’s quick to comply, and before she can rescind the suggestion, the bathroom door is closed, the water running. After a few minutes, she knocks lightly on the bathroom door.

“Rabbit, can I come in?”

“Sure,” he says. He has found the complimentary bubble bath, and his body now rests under an iridescent white moonscape. Alex lifts a mountain of it in his cupped hands and blows it away like dandelion seed. Islands of it cling to his shoulders and dot his hair.

“Maybe I should have brought more stuff,” he says, concentrating on shaping the bubbles, building towers out of them, then swatting them away.

“Was there something you wanted?” she asks. She almost adds “from home” but stops herself. He considers her question, making the face like a cartoon of someone thinking: brow furrowed, lips screwed into a knot.

“No,” he says. “It feels like more stuff would be good. If you’re going someplace you don’t know. To take stuff with you.” He drops a handful of bubbles that fall slowly to the surface and join seamlessly with the others, as if they’d never been divided.

“I’m going under,” he says. “Help me rinse after?” And without waiting, he slides down the length of the tub until his head is submerged, his face dipping below the sea of bubbles and disappearing beneath them, floating under their translucent screen but fractured, as if she’s seeing him through the kaleidoscopic eye of an insect: his face pixels and facets that are not him but suggest him, as something not whole but of parts, moments, images.

When he is done, they take the elevator downstairs and walk the two blocks to the convention center. With each step, she becomes a little less herself, a little more her character. It’s such a gift to have a mask you can hide behind. A skin you can slip into when your own feels threadbare and abraded. As she takes her seat in the booth, she is Bethany Frazer, because Bethany Frazer is the only person she can manage to be right now.

The skin fits poorly and is stiff from disuse. When fans begin to approach, she discovers an old fear. Reflexively, she shies away from them all. She scans the room for danger, for a potential shooter. As if it had been Frazer who was shot at and not Val. Or maybe it’s Val’s fear and Frazer’s vigilance working together. A team up. The thought came to her once: Frazer would have stopped the shooter. It was alien and nonsensical and true. But there are limits to how we can invoke our fictions to protect us, she thinks, even as she sits behind the gauzy scrim of a woman she once helped invent.

She listens to herself greet them, cheery and warm. Her answers to questions about the show are clever and confident. She thinks how easy it would be, from now on, to simply pilot Frazer around, drive her through days like a vehicle that passes less through space than through time. Days are things to be gotten through, traversed. She could sit silently in this corner of herself, pulling levers and flipping switches as Frazer hurtles through time at sixty minutes per hour.

And thank you, it did change the medium, and yes, they were more like family than co-workers, and no, she didn’t think it was a paradox per se, Tim was always good at avoiding those types of things, and it’s so hard to pick a favorite, and of course she didn’t set out to be a role model for girls, but still that’s very nice, very flattering, to meet you, I’d be happy to, that camera there, and how do you spell her name, but no, no she can’t imagine there’s much chance after all these years and all this time.

She feels a pressure on her arm that can only be Alex’s hand. She’s kept the exact measure of its balancing weight against her, constant even as he’s grown. How can he be a constant and always in flux? Her little paradox.

He’s standing next to her with his book tucked under one arm, his whole body tilted away from her by the weight of his backpack. “I wanted to stay with you for a while,” he says. “If I won’t be in the way.”

She feels her skin tear and rend, the weave of it too weak to hold together through this. And they’ll all see. They’ll see there’s nothing underneath. Like pulling a sheet away from a Halloween ghost to find there’s
no trick-or-treater, just the air and an empty piece of cloth. She stares at Alex, unsure how to answer.

“Look,” says one of the fans from back a bit in the line. “It’s Owen. It’s Owen all grown up.” There are murmurs of agreement, because this is something all of them wanted, all of them needed to know. What happened to Owen? What happened to Frazer and Campbell’s child?

Yes, she thinks. He’s Owen. Frazer’s child. It’s a way to keep her skin intact. There are enough stories, enough fictions to get them both through today.

“Yes,” she says, quiet, absent, looking at Alex but seeing Owen, who was never Alex but sometimes a crew member’s baby and sometimes a doll and sometimes just a weight, something for her body to adjust to.

“Mom,” says Alex. He squeezes her arm and the sheet comes off the ghost, the skin splits, but it is a deft motion, like yanking a tablecloth out without tipping a wineglass or candlestick.

She pulls Alex up onto her lap, the weight of him returning weight to her until she is again a thing of mass and substance in the world. She smiles hard and bites his ear lightly, and as each fan approaches, she introduces him again and again saying, “This is my son, Alex. This is my son.”

H
e enters the convention hall as if everyone’s been waiting for him to appear, but it’s just Alex and his mom, standing in the lobby to greet the Idea Man when he arrives. Still, it’s a good entrance, because the lobby is all windows and they’re all facing east, so it’s like the Idea Man has stepped out of the sun and into the Los Angeles Convention Center. Alex is happy to see him but can’t help wishing he’d come at some other time. Alex expects he’ll be starving for visitors eventually, in bad need of friendly faces. But today he isn’t sure he has enough of himself to share with anyone but his mom.

“There’s something about the Los Angeles air that I missed,” the Idea Man says. “It’s the stink of machines. New York smells like ten million people, but L.A. smells like ten million cars. It’s dizzying.”

“That’s the lack of oxygen to the brain,” Louis says.

Alex tries to assess which incarnation of the Idea Man this is, and he’s pretty sure it’s the one who’s like a ringmaster at the circus. This is his favorite version of the Idea Man, although Alex suspects it’s also the one furthest from whoever the Idea Man really is. This version has no sadness in it; it’s all grins and babbling. It’s a performance, for sure, but it’s a fun one.

“Val,” he says, “how are you?”

“I’m good, Tim,” she says, and Alex is reminded that his mother is a performer, too, a professional one. If her acting isn’t as over the top as the Idea Man’s, it’s as convincing in its quiet way.

“Why are we standing in the lobby?” he asks Louis. “All lobbies are
essentially the same room. Alex,” he says, “I want to go among the mad people. Alice had it all wrong.”

He puts out his hand to be led, and Alex takes it. The Idea Man, as a joke, resists, making Alex pull him along, through the gaping entranceway and onto the convention floor. But Alex can still hear his mom talking to Louis behind them.

“I can’t do this today,” she says. “I can’t take care of him. I took the afternoon off from signing so I could spend a last couple hours.”

“I know, Val,” says Louis. “He knows, too. Honestly, I think he wanted to see Alex one last time.”

“Dear God, this place is a nightmare,” the Idea Man says, grinning. “The problem is too much and not enough all at once. It’s making me wish my eardrums would pop. Can we get it a little louder in here?” he yells to no one in particular.

“He’s been like this since we got off the plane,” Louis informs Alex.

“Don’t file your little reports on me, Lawrence. You’re not my nurse; you’re my amanuensis. You should be writing down everything I say.” Louis pulls out a notebook and stands poised.

“Hi, Tim,” says Val, who is behind him by this point.

“Just a second, Val dear, I’m establishing setting.” He walks into the room, leaving Val, Louis, and Alex with no choice but to follow. “Look at all this. It’s fantastic. A hundred thousand worlds. What I love most, because I’m a hideous narcissist, is knowing many of these worlds are mine. You know what all of this is, don’t you? This is the immune system of the human soul. Superheroes, space rangers, time cowboys, they are the T cells of the spirit. They were always here to save us. We made them to save us.”

He stops abruptly. “Lazarus, I need coffee,” he says.

“I’m not sure that’s a great idea.”

“It’s my idea, and is, therefore, a great idea. Take Valerie with you. Alex and I need to talk.”

Alex’s mom looks stricken, and Alex doesn’t want to part from her, even for a second. But Alex knows from experience that when he’s like this, the
Idea Man is a force of nature, and it’d be as easy arguing with a tornado as trying to convince him how important it is that they stay together.

“Come on, Louis,” says Val. “Let’s be quick about it.” The two of them walk away without looking back.

“So what do you think of California so far?” says the Idea Man after they’ve gone.

“I don’t think I like it,” says Alex, knowing he hasn’t seen enough to judge.

“Give it time,” says the Idea Man. “When are you going to your dad’s?”

“Tonight,” says Alex, looking at his shoes. “Someone’s picking me up at six.”

“An hour of last things, then,” the Idea Man says. “The first thing you need to do is have your dad take you to the ocean. No one can love California until they’ve seen the ocean.” Alex remembers, sort of, something the Idea Man said about the mermaids singing. He thinks it will be good for their first day if he and his dad have something they can talk about, and something they can look at together.

“What can you tell me,” the Idea Man asks, “about the boy and the robot?”

“I’ve got lots to tell you,” says Alex. “But it doesn’t have an ending yet.”

“That’s fine. Some of my favorite stories don’t have endings.”

“How do you know if the story’s supposed to have an ending?”

“You ask the story. The story is working with you to figure itself out, to answer its own questions. If it has an ending, it’ll let you know.”

The question Alex wanted to ask was: What happens if the ending isn’t the one you want? What he wants is to be able to step in, before the ending happens, and change it, although he knows the Idea Man would probably say that’s cheating and makes for a bad story. But he’d mean for the readers. And Alex knows it’s important to give the readers a good story. But what he’s wondering is if it’s important to make the characters happy, too, if there’s something they’re owed for coming this far, and for trying so hard. And if both things are important, which is more important? And if he can’t make both happy, whom should he choose?