A Hundred Thousand Worlds Read online

  “How was your father?” she asks him. This reminds him he’s left the TV on, and the next show, which he’s not allowed to watch, is starting. He finds the remote and turns it off.

  “It was a good one,” he says. “It was funny and nobody gets sad.”

  “That does sound good,” she says, pushing his hair back to kiss him on the forehead. She stands and smiles at him. She’s been doing that a lot lately, and it makes him worried. It’s like she’s making notes of everything about him so she doesn’t forget.

  “Tell me a story?” he asks, half because he wants her to stop standing there smiling and half because he wants a story.

  “After I get my PJs on?” she says.

  “After you get your PJs on,” he agrees.

  When she comes back, he convinces her to stay in the bed with him while she tells the story and he cuddles her extra. This involves both arms around her waist and the top of his head nuzzled into the hollow below her shoulder.

  “What season do you want?” she asks, once they are settled in and the big lights are off.

  “What’s the first one ever,” asks Alex, “storyline or freak of the week?”

  His mom thinks about this. Alex has never been allowed to watch Anomaly, because his mom says it’s graphic. But from his mom’s interpretations of the episodes, which Alex suspects she waters down a little for him, he understands that every episode falls into one of two categories: storyline or freak of the week. The freak-of-the-week episodes are more or less interchangeable, although they can be kind of affected by what season they’re in, because of the storyline episodes. Like, if it’s season three, Campbell and Frazer are never together, even in the freak-of-the-weeks, because Campbell is lost in the timestream and sometimes Frazer is looking for him and sometimes she is doing her job. The storyline episodes have to be in order, from season one to season six, or at least up to season five. Mostly the stuff in season six doesn’t make any sense.

  She nods, puts her finger on her chin, and scrunches up her whole face. This is her “considering the options” face, and it makes him incredibly happy because it always comes before a story. She clears her throat. Her story voice is a little different from her regular; deeper, more deliberate.

  “The first episode I’d have to say is storyline,” his mom concludes.

  “Good,” says Alex. “That’s what I want then.”

  Anomaly Pilot

  Tim seeded so much in that first episode. Because she was there the whole time and knows how much the plot changed from season to season, sometimes from week to week, she knows it wasn’t a straight line from the beginning to the end. But you could look back from the end and see a straight line to the beginning.

  “It all starts with a weird light in the sky above a field in Kansas,” she says. She thinks it’s Kansas. It might have been Nebraska. “The light gets brighter and brighter, and then there’s a flash and a man falls out of the light and lands in the field.”

  “How far does he fall?” asks Alex.

  “Maybe twenty feet. Not far. He’s safe when he lands. As soon as he lands, he checks his watch and says, ‘Not again!’” She leans in very close to his face to deliver this line with the proper mix of comedy and gravitas. Comedy wins, and he breaks out in giggles. Not one to miss an opportunity, Val yells, “Cue the opening credits,” and begins to mercilessly tickle him. A lack of mercy is essential to any good tickle attack. Alex writhes and wriggles and cries “Quit it!” again and again, but Val does not let up until her work is done. This takes roughly as long as Anomaly’s opening credits, which featured Daliesque images of melting clocks and watches whose hands spun backwards, then exploded in a mess of innards: escape wheels, springs, and stop levers. Tim always hated the opening sequence, saying it was too literal.

  “Next scene!” she says, adjusting Alex’s position next to her so they are properly fitted together. “A lecture hall at a major university.”

  “Harvard?” Alex asks.

  “Sure,” Val says. “The same man we saw fall into a field is now lecturing a classful of students about the nature of spacetime.”

  “What’s spacetime?” Alex asks, even though he is one of the very few nine-year-olds in the known universe with an understanding of spacetime.

  “You should listen to his lecture,” she says. She drops her voice into a lower tenor. “‘The universe is like a garden full of forking paths. Every time you or I or any of us make a decision, the path splits again. When you decided to come to class today instead of stay in bed with your boyfriend’”—here she tickles him a little—“‘you created two possible timelines. One in which you came to class, the timeline we’re in, and one in which you didn’t. These splits happen a billion trillion times a day; each split creates a different timeline, a different universe. If you look backwards, you’ll see one path behind you. The path you’ve been walking the whole time. Your universe. But if you could hover up above the garden, you’d see billions and billions of paths running parallel to one another. The question is, what keeps them parallel to one another, what keeps them from intersecting? And what would happen if they did?’”

  “Mom?” he says. “Is that man my dad?”

  “No,” she says, “that man is Ian Campbell, a professor of theoretical physics from ten years in our future. But we don’t know that yet.” She can see he is disappointed by this, but she is careful, when telling these stories, to keep Ian Campbell and Bethany Frazer separate from Andrew Rhodes and Valerie Torrey. The former, after all, get a happier ending.

  “Right, then,” she says. “Agent Bethany Frazer busts into the lecture hall.” Alex always gets excited when Frazer makes her entrance. “‘Professor Campbell,’ she says, ‘your government would like a word with you.’”

  “Do they fall in love right away?” Alex asks.

  “How do you know they fall in love?” says Val. Alex rolls his eyes at her. It is tough to know what his rules for any given retelling are going to be. Generally, he will listen to one episode as if he’s never heard any that come after it, but sometimes he will consider them as a whole, inspecting each episode for possible errors in continuity. “They don’t fall in love right then,” she tells him. “They don’t even like each other at first. He’s arrogant and his head’s so caught up in spacetime and multiverses that sometimes he doesn’t see what’s right in front of him. And she’s stubborn and literal. And sometimes she doesn’t see what’s right in front of her, either.”

  “But they fall in love eventually,” he says.

  “Don’t get ahead of things,” she says. “Right now, there’s a case she needs to solve. The Statue of Liberty has disappeared, right in front of the eyes of a million New Yorkers. So Agent Frazer is taking Professor Campbell with her to Anomaly Division.”

  It had been Val who’d dropped out of the sky and Andrew who brought her in. Val had hardly settled into thinking of herself as a proper New Yorker when she’d gone in for the Anomaly audition. She was sharing an apartment she couldn’t afford, in the Lower East Side, with four other aspiring actresses. Of the five of them, Val had experienced the most artistic success with the least financial reward, having landed a number of serious roles in small theater productions.

  Val had landed in Los Angeles the day before the first read-through, her belongings creeping across the country in a Penske van. She’d lain awake on a bare mattress in a barren new apartment in Culver City, listening to the air conditioner buzz. Tired and disoriented, she showed up at the studio to find everyone frantic, for reasons she couldn’t determine. She stood in the doorway, afraid that if she stepped into the room she’d be trampled. Andrew strode—there was no other word for it—across the room and extended his hand.

  “You’re Valerie, right?” he said. She knew of him, mostly from her former roommates, who had told her about his current role as Herc Bronsnan on Sands in the Hourglass, but she’d never been a
round a television in the afternoon to actually see him. Her first impressions of him were of bigness and stillness. He blocked out the entire room with his height and breadth, but also served as a point of calm amid the bustle. She shook his hand, amazed at the smallness of her own hand inside it. “You done much television?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Theater mostly.”

  “How legitimate,” he said. She examined his face to see if this was meant to be a withering comment, but he retained a wide, good-natured smile. He took her by the arm. “Let me introduce you to the circus,” he said, which became a running joke over the next few weeks as Andrew, along with his then girlfriend, Nico, who costarred with him on Sands as a seductress coincidentally named Nico, integrated Val into a world of actors and actresses who, if they were not more successful than Val’s friends in New York, certainly lived as if they were. Anomaly had been picked up for thirteen episodes on the basis of the reputation of its creator, Tim Whelan. They shot the first four episodes before the pilot aired, while Val split her free time between tagging along with Andrew and Nico to parties and restaurants and being gently parented by Tim and his wife, Rachel.

  She was grateful that Bethany Frazer was such a grounded part: whatever chaos raged around her, she spent her working hours as a precise and efficient agent with little time for distractions. Her friendship with Rachel developed quickly as something separate from her working relationship with Tim. The two of them shared a sense of outsider status, although Rachel had grown up in Los Angeles. Her exclusion was more professional, as the tiny world of L.A. galleries seemed quaint next to the apparatus of cultural production the rest of them toiled away at. She’d spent time in New York in her twenties, when she was the same age as Val, and she’d returned home to L.A. only because she met Tim. By the time Val met her, she’d been back for almost twenty years.

  Her work at the time was a thing of large canvases and sprawl, with a sometimes Rothko-level abstraction, but over the years Val knew her, her paintings became smaller and smaller, more intricate and concrete, until by the end her canvases were postcard small and packed with fine detail. Rachel had the strange ability to carry on conversation while she painted, and Val often thought their friendship grew faster because it was incubated under the light of Rachel’s work.

  After Nico left Andrew, she had called Val up late one night, drunk, and said, “Don’t touch him. Keep everything professional or you’ll be sorry.” Val wasn’t sure if it was a warning or a threat. After the call, she never heard from Nico again, and Andrew did indeed keep it professional, now content to say goodnight at the end of a day’s shooting. The flirtatious sparring of their characters colored their off-camera conversations, and without writers to script it for her, Val sometimes caught herself trying in her spare time to come up with things to say to him, jokes and exit lines. When this happened, she’d remind herself that the intimacy between them was not a product of their professional relationship; it was the whole of their professional relationship. She thought of Andrew as a friend, but really they were partners, without the romantic or sexual connotations people sometimes heaped onto that word. If it weren’t for the show, Andrew wasn’t someone whose company she’d ever seek out. He was talented, though not as talented as he imagined, and exasperating, and funny and full of bluster. In another age, when looks and ego weighed in heavier, he might have been not a Grant or a Gable, but a William Holden maybe, a down-at-heel marquee idol, to be dreamed about by women who still dreamed but no longer considered themselves dreamers. Charming, but in a way you couldn’t quite trust. Unless you kept your expectations of him low, which she did. Val learned that she could trust him to be Andrew, consistently, for whatever that was worth.

  Secret Identities

  “He. 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 r
ecognize 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.