A Hundred Thousand Worlds (4 page)

“H
e. Is so. Cute,” says the Astounding Woman, who sets down her platinum wig on the table so she can hold Alex’s face in her hands, appraising it.

“He’s not cute,” corrects Red Emma, buttoning a crimson trench coat that ends at the upper part of her thigh. “He’s too old to be cute. He’s handsome.”

There commences a fluttering about Alex that takes Valerie by surprise, so accustomed has she become to Alex’s cuteness, the objective fact of it. Her understanding is that children are always attractive to their parents, a preservative quirk of genetics, but there must be parents who know in moments of clarity that their sons and daughters are not the handsomest or prettiest. But here is Alex, who objectively and factually is, and here is the proof: twelve women, each in the revealing costume of a superheroine, each judged attractive enough by someone to carry off said costume, all of them swooning over Alex.

“I’m at a good age,” Alex says, “where I’m both cute and handsome.”

This sends the women into hysterics, like Alex knew it would. Valerie wonders if there isn’t something less dangerous about parenting an unattractive child. Maybe with eyes less deep and dark, lashes less like scimitars, cheekbones less apple-esque, Alex would have a tougher time being liked, would have to work harder at it. How does one build character in a beautiful child, when the world lines up to hand him things? She never worries about him being some pretty little idiot; there has never been a risk of that. She worries he will grow up to be simply charming and nothing
more. The kind of person who coasts on a bare minimum of effort and the airy cushion of his looks. Put concisely and inhospitably, she worries he’ll grow up to be exactly like his father.

When they first arrived in the convention hall, which was only a ballroom filled with folding tables, Val and Alex were greeted by Randall, who immediately informed them that everything was going great. She would not have guessed from looking around that things were going great. At one end of the room, men who looked like they’d served in at least one world war were schlepping long white boxes full of comic books and setting up racks of comics that were as impossibly old as the men selling them, and often in similar states of decay. The other end looked like the morning after at a frat house, scruffy boys in their twenties and thirties high-fiving and slap-assing as they hung drawings of women in contorted poses on displays where they could lure passersby. Val’s signing table, which featured several
Anomaly
posters Randall assured her were vintage, was right in the middle of the room, one in a row of eight. Behind them, clean-cut college kids in brand-new T-shirts strung up big banners that read
TIMELY
and
NATIONAL
, one on either side of her.

Randall’s exact role in the convention was unclear, but he was the person who contacted Val about appearing. “I know we’re still a second-string con,” he said on the phone a few weeks earlier, “but we’ve got some big names.” Val wasn’t sure that category included her. “I think this year is going to put Heronomicon on the map.” She didn’t how he’d gotten her number, but it served as a reminder of how very findable she was, how bad at hiding she’d become. It was Randall’s offer that had given her the idea to travel west this way. Being paid to appear. She’d called her agent and was informed that while she was too late to get on board for the convention in New York, there was one in Chicago a week after Cleveland, and of course the big one in Los Angeles, where Tiger’s Paw Media, who now owned the rights to all the
Anomaly
episodes, would be announcing the release of a remastered box set and was putting together a “major panel” that would feature Andrew Rhodes. Elise made a few calls, and
soon Val had a solid appearance fee in Chicago and a relatively ridiculous appearance fee for Los Angeles.

Randall, it turned out, was lumbering, tall, and broad, with a spastic way of moving that was exaggerated by his size. He regularly knocked things off tables as he passed and stopped to apologize to the jostled objects. From the slickness of his hair, Val judged that Randall had not showered since yesterday, and the live-wire staccato of his speech made her wonder if he had slept.

“I ended your afternoon session for tomorrow at three,” he said, “so you could catch the Levi Loeb panel if you want. I heard Loeb is here somewhere. I’m not even sure I’d recognize him. No one’s taken a picture of him in years. It’s a big deal for the con.” Val didn’t know the name, but she knew there was a lot of excitement around it. It’s something she likes quite a bit about this little world: the capability of those within it to get deeply and sincerely excited about things. She wonders how they fare in the real world, where excitement is poorly valued, and she tries to think of things she has been excited about. There are so few.

As the morning progressed, crowds began to show up, and soon there was a line to meet Val. Alex sat quietly behind her with his book as Val faced her fans for the first time in years. They all smiled. Some of them wouldn’t look her in the eyes, but some of them looked her in the eyes with a scary intensity, as if they were trying to read something written on the inside of her skull. Many of them called her Ms. Torrey, or Mrs. Torrey. Some of them called her Frazer or even Bethany, and then corrected themselves. The ones who called her Val or Valerie, these were the ones who wanted to touch her in some way, a handshake or a photo with their arm around her.

They had pictures of a version of herself she barely remembered. They had pictures from when she’d made herself too skinny, thinking that was the way television stars were expected to look. They had pictures of her from when she was pregnant with Alex, her face full and round and healthy, when Tim and the other writers scrambled to figure out a plot
device that would explain her increasingly apparent pregnancy, until Tim hit upon the perfect one: pregnancy. They had pictures of her with Andrew, her standing in front of him protectively, both of them looking at the camera like it was a threat. For a second she thought,
What a good-looking couple. They should be on television
.

The sameness of it surprised her, the uniformity of interaction. Sometimes one of them would relate a personal anecdote about the show or recount the plot of a favorite episode. Was this how it sounded to Alex when she told him stories at night? By now he knows the plots as well as she ever did. Was he humoring her by listening, the same way she was humoring them?

After an hour or so, when there was a lull in the line, she flagged down Randall and begged for a break. He gave her directions to the women’s dressing room, which, he admitted, was actually a kitchenette off the main ballroom, then darted away, likely to inform someone else how great everything was going.

“Alex,” she said, tapping him until he looked up from his book. “Let’s take a little break.” He nodded, put his book in his backpack, slung it over his shoulder, and plodded after her.

Now, surrounded by women, he’s rooting in his bag to retrieve it.

“Rabbit,” she says, “you want to scope the place out for a bit?”

“Where are you going to be?” he asks.

“I’m going back out to the table to sign autographs,” she says. “It won’t be very exciting.” Alex looks around at the dozen women in the dressing room, and Val senses that in maybe two years there will be no pause: by then nothing will persuade the boy to leave the company of so much exposed female flesh. But now it’s not the tight clothes and cooing that are causing the hesitation, it’s the umbilical tether, which Val is relieved to know still pulls taut now and then. Alex looks back at her, confirming this.

“I guess I’ll walk around a little,” he says. They exchange their litany of limits and assurances. He won’t go far enough to get lost. He knows exactly
where she’ll be. All this established, he wriggles into his backpack and leaves the dressing room. The pang as the door shuts behind him is not new, but she hasn’t felt it in a while, and in its return, it has changed. It’s no longer the pang of a first exit, but the feeling that the number of Alex’s departures from her is finite in a way that is new, that is awful.

“You’re going to have to keep that one on a leash,” says ExSanguina, but she’s put her prosthetic fangs in, and the last word sounds more like
leech
. “Or in a glass case.”
Glasch kaytch
.

“I’m just glad I didn’t bring my daughters,” says the Diviner, who has been ready for longer than any of them, since her costume is a purple sateen robe spattered with silver stars, and a blindfold, see-through, which she won’t put on until the last minute. She is dark-skinned and her eyes are a peculiarly yellow shade, which Val thinks it a shame to cover up. “A wake of broken hearts behind that one, I can see it.”

“You have daughters?” asks Prospera. Her costume can best be described as “sexy magician” or “sexy magician’s assistant,” which is to say a top hat, tight tuxedo jacket, and fishnet stockings.

The Diviner nods. “Three of them,” she says. She reaches into her robe and produces a small photo she’s been keeping in her bra, on the left side near her heart. She hands it to OuterGirl. The picture begins to make its way around the room, eliciting
aww
s and other compliments.

“You look so fantastic for someone who’s had three kids,” says Prospera.

“I think what you meant was ‘You look so fantastic,’ right?” says the Diviner, with an eyebrow cocked, getting a laugh that is clearly uncomfortable for half the women in the room. There is a lacuna of about ten years in the women’s ages. The oldest of the younger set, Iota, whose costume consists of normal clothes sized large enough that they provocatively fall off her in a carefully arranged manner, is twenty-five, and the youngest of the older set is ExSanguina, who is thirty-five. Val wonders if there is something about women in those intervening years deemed undesirable by the culture. Something about a thirty-year-old that falls between the cracks of
a high school boy’s dream of a girl and a high school boy’s dream of a woman, she thinks, wondering why high school boys forever call the tune when it comes to the culture’s ideas of attractive women.

“Why don’t you bring your daughters?” asks Flail, who, along with her identical twin sister, Flog, is dressed in bondage gear. In what Val sees as another odd choice, the company that hires the costume girls chose real-life twins, even though their masks obscure most of their faces.

“You have to ask me that?” says the Diviner, tousling the cat-o’-nine-tails hanging from Flog’s belt.

“I don’t think it’s problematic to expose young girls to empowering forms of sexuality,” says Flail defensively.

“You bring that costume from home?” asks Red Emma. Her hair, a dark, curly mass, has been compacted into a topknot that fits neatly into her fedora.

“And if I did?” Flail asks. “Does that make me some kind of sex freak?”

“Studies show,” adds Flog, pulling tight the laces on a black leather boot, “no connection whatsoever between sadomasochistic sexual tendencies and other forms of mental illness.”

“That’s great news for you guys,” says Red Emma.

“I don’t think what we’re doing is about sex,” says Spectacle Girl, whose costume is entirely translucent down to her flesh-colored bodysuit. “It’s about imagination.”

“That outfit,” says OuterGirl, “leaves nothing to the imagination.”

“She’s right, though,” says the Astounding Woman, who might be the oldest of the group. “I used to dream about the Astounding Woman when I was a kid. She was very inspiring. It’s kind of a thrill as an adult to actually be her.”

“You do mean dress up as her, right?” asked Red Emma.

“She was a real role model to me,” the Astounding Woman continues. “She had a family, she was a mother. But she was still her own person, still had adventures, still held her own.”

“I’m fine with the role model thing,” says OuterGirl. “But why do we
have to be busting out of our costumes like this? If I was going to battle aliens or whatever, I’d wear a sports bra rather than a push-up.”

“Comics and film are visual industries,” says Flail. “The visual is always sexual.”

“Male superheroes are no less idealized than female,” says Flog. “You could argue that forcing bodies into hyperrealistic shapes has the effect of desexualizing them. “

“I’m sorry,” says OuterGirl, tracing the low cut of her top with a finger, “this does not feel desexualized to me.”

“What is the male equivalent of cleavage?” asks Ferret Lass, applying heavy black makeup around her eyes.

“I bet in the boys’ dressing room,” says OuterGirl, “they are not adjusting oversized codpieces right now.”

“
That’s
the equivalent?” says Ferret Lass. “Gross.”

“You’re falsely equating sexualization with disempowerment,” says Flail. “Very second wave.”

“You’re falsely equating sexualization with empowerment
,
” says OuterGirl. “Very lipstick feminism.”

“The cleavage is a necessary evil,” says Spectacle Girl. “It’s a fact of life that boys need visual stimulation to be interested in female characters.”

“But the reverse isn’t true,” says Red Emma.

“Women aren’t enough of a force in the market to dictate terms,” says Spectacle Girl.

“In what market aren’t we a force?” asks Red Emma. “Or at least a potential force?”

“Look, y’all,” says the Diviner, “I’m saying someday, when I’m playing Lady Macbeth in Central Park, I’ll bring the girls to come watch. But as long as I’m spending my summers as Slutty Tiresias on the con circuit, they’re staying at home with their dad.”

“Lady Macbeth,” says Red Emma. “Now there’s a role model.”

T
he fat man leans over. At any moment, a cold drop of his sweat will drip off him and onto Brett’s very own personal neck. Run a wet, alien trail down his back before evaporating into the convention hall’s dry, conditioned air. Leave a salty trace of the fat man on Brett’s skin.

“You should make her boobs bigger,” he says. His breath reeks of a specific sandwich. Cheesesteak.

“You think so?” Brett asks. He stops and examines the drawing he’s working on. Medea, a Timely Comics character Brett is often asked to draw at conventions like this. A sword-wielding pose half defensive, half come-hither. Suggests to the buyer of the sketch that she is ready to cut him in twain if he approaches, but secretly she hopes he will. “I always think of her as having more a ninja physique.”

“She’s a ninja and a witch,” the man informs him. Brett is unclear what bearing this has on her cup size.

“But, you know,” Brett says, “ninja.” Indicates the taut lines of the drawing. “Lithe.”

“I think her boobs should be bigger,” he says. Brett picks up a lump of eraser from the table. Uncreates most of Medea’s torso. With the man still leering over his shoulder, begins sketching the rounded lines that will indicate anatomically improbable breasts.

“You know she wasn’t always a ninja,” the man explains. “When she was first introduced, she was a witch. But in the early nineties, she was kidnapped by the Finger and Thumb and brainwashed into a ninja.” He says this the way you might tell a stranger about your mother’s Lasik
surgery. Brett nods. Focus on the drawing. On the cash the man will hand him when he’s finished.

It’s around two. Brett has been working on this sketch for twenty minutes. This is the first person who’s talked to him all day. When Brett asked him if he was a fan of his work, the man said he’d never seen any of it before. Describing the plot of
Lady Stardust
to him nearly cost Brett the commission.

“Sounds a little . . . queer,” said the man. But he still pays. He walks away very happy with the augmented drawing of a comic book character far more popular than Brett and Fred’s creation could ever be.

Brett turns to a blank page. Thinks about getting some work done on the final issue. Then he notices there’s a kid, a real kid, paging through his portfolio. Dark hair flopping over dark eyes. Upper teeth resting on lower lip like socked feet on a coffee table. Clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt that says
THE BOOK WAS BE
TTER
.

“How’s it going?” he asks the kid. This seems like an all-ages-appropriate question. Brett has very little experience with kids. Williamsburg, you can avoid them almost entirely. Although less so every year.

“It’s going well,” says the kid. Brett is impressed by the grammatical correctness of the answer. “Who was that guy?” he asks.

“Someone who probably lives with his mother,” says Brett. Quietly, though. There may be several people within earshot who also cohabit with their mothers. Brett can’t afford to lose a potential customer.

“I live with my mother,” says the kid defensively. He taps on a stack of
Lady Stardust
comics. “Did you draw all these? They’re really good.”

“Thanks,” Brett says. It’s possible kids are easily impressed in general. Or this kid in particular. Brett isn’t sure. The kid continues flipping through the portfolio. Doesn’t seem put off or taken aback by any of the nudity or violence, but doesn’t seem pruriently interested, either. Brett expects the kid will see a character he recognizes, maybe the Mister Astounding sketch, then quickly lose interest. But the kid continues through the portfolio as if he wants to see how it all ends.

Turning the last page, the kid looks up at Brett. Eyes wide and so dark the pupils are indistinguishable from the irises.

“Do you ever draw robots?” the kid asks.

“You looking for a commission?” Brett asks, smiling.

“Yes,” says the kid after mulling it over. “We should totally do a co-mission.” Something strange in the way he says it. Like hearing your voice echoing back at you but saying something different. The kid sticks his hand across the table. “My name’s Alex,” he says. Brett takes his hands and shakes it.

“Brett,” he says. Alex nods. He spots the chair next to Brett.

“Do you think I can take that?” he asks.

“My partner might be back in a little bit,” says Brett. “It’s technically his chair.”

“Your partner?”

“My writer,” says Brett.

“Oh,” says Alex. “I’m a writer, too.” He comes around the table and sits next to Brett. “So there’s a boy and a robot in a cave,” he says. He looks at Brett, waiting.

“Okay,” says Brett. Picks up his pages and pencil. “Tell me about the boy.”

“He’s older than me,” Alex says, “but younger than you. Like high school age. And he has blond hair.” He taps the blank page as he says this. It must be important somehow. Brett sketches the skeleton of a figure. Pauses.

“Long or short hair?”

“Long,” he says. On top of the vague boy’s head, a mop of hair appears.

“What’s he wearing?” Brett asks.

Alex nods and chews on his lower lip. “Regular clothes,” he says. Brett eyeballs what Alex is wearing and outfits the boy in a T-shirt and jeans. “They should be dirty, but not raggedy,” says Alex. Brett nods and adds stains to the shirt and pants.

“What about the robot?” Brett asks. While he waits for Alex to answer, he creates a cave behind the boy, darkening in crags and shadows. When it’s done, he looks up. Alex is gnawing on his lip again, his brow creasing. “Is he like R2-D2 or C-3PO?” asks Brett.

“He’s short,” says Alex. Tentative. Finding out, learning it for himself as he talks. “Like R2-D2 height. But he’s shaped like a person. And he’s silver, not gold. But not shiny silver, more like gray and metal.”

“Does he have any buttons or dials?” asks Brett.

“He does,” says Alex, “but they’re on the inside. He has a big panel on his chest and it opens up to show all his buttons and dials.”

Brett nods and draws the robot, which takes less time than drawing the boy. There are fewer lines, less detail. The robot’s body is a cylinder. Brett draws it in three lines, plus more for the panel and lots of little lines for the buttons and dials. Its arms and legs are weird and thin and bendy, but its hands and feet look like people’s hands and feet. Brett pauses before drawing the head.

“How realistic is the face?” he asks. “How much like a person?”

“If you make it too much like a person, there’s no point in it even being a robot,” says Alex, scratching his chin. “But it has to have some kind of face so the boy will know where to look when he’s talking to it.” He looks up at Brett, excited. “That means the robot can talk! I didn’t know that before.” Alex examines the headless robot. “He should have eyes,” he says. “And a mouth. But that’s it.”

Brett obliges, drawing two perfectly round eyes and a rectangular slit of a mouth. He touches up a few details, erasing stray lines here and there, then shows Alex the drawing.

“There you go, Alex,” says Brett. “I’ll tell you what: it’s on the house.” He rips the page out of his sketchbook and hands it to Alex, but Alex is looking at the blank page underneath.

“Are you done?” Alex asks. Brett looks at him, unsure why he seems so disappointed. “I thought we were doing a co-mission,” Alex says.

“I know, but I’m not going to charge you, kid,” says Brett. “This was kind of fun.”

“We have to figure out what happens next,” says Alex, pointing to the blank page.

“Nothing happens next,” says Brett. “It’s a picture.”

Alex glares at him.“It’s a story,” he says. “It’s just starting, so it looks like a picture.”

“Okay, so what happens next?” asks Brett.

Alex looks at the picture again. “Well, no one wants to hear a story about a boy sitting in a cave,” he says.

“That does sound pretty boring,” Brett agrees.

Alex bites his lip, scratches his chin. “I’m going to think about it and I’ll meet you back here tomorrow,” he says. He rolls up the drawing carefully. Then jumps out of the chair and takes off, running a few feet. He skids to a stop, comes back over to Brett, and shakes his hand one more time before turning, dashing, and disappearing into the crowd.