Time Travel Omnibus, page 1119
Around episode eight or nine you’re also going to need a bottle show to save costs. One or two sets, no guest actors. Some situation that keeps the characters trapped or limited so that you don’t have to spend money on anything. When you first landed in Tinseltown, the bottle show came in two varieties: either the clip show, with lots of flashbacks, or the limbo show, with some character trapped in purgatory. St. Elsewhere did a limbo show after shooting Howie Mandel’s character; Tom Selleck did a similar turn on Magnum, P.I. You don’t like limbo episodes. But at least they’re better than the latest contrivance, Groundhog Day episodes, with the same character repeating a time loop over and over.
In Limbo, at least, you get to meet the people you’ve loved and lost.
“Why am I driving?” your father asks. “You said you needed the practice. You begged for practice. You said, ‘Practice, Dad, I need practice.’ ”
Because you’d be so busy gazing at him that you’d drive off the highway into the trees. Because the Buick is a tank of a car, so big you might as well be driving a bus. Because he died six months after you moved to L.A., but now he’s alive and well—skin flushed with life, thinning brown hair slicked back from the temples, and a long ski-slope of a nose. The upholstery smells like his Pall Malls—regular, no filter—but he doesn’t smoke around you anymore in deference to your asthma. He doesn’t know—neither of you knows—that it’s already too late for his own poor lungs, the tissue blossoming cancerous spots like little spots of mold.
In a time travel episode, you shouldn’t show your hand. In the land of Limbo, the protagonist is required to have emotional revelations.
“This is the last trip we’re ever going to take together,” you tell him, trying to keep your voice from cracking. “You, me, Syracuse, Ithaca, that’s it. Our last road trip.”
He is too busy passing a big rig to look directly at you, but his mouth turns down in a pout. “What, because I farted back at the tollbooth? I told your mother not to make beans last night.”
You touch the wool coat of his sleeve. He’s as solid as the bench seat underneath you and the FM radio playing Olivia Newton-John.
“I know why I’m here, Dad.” Beyond the sleet on the windshield, the forests of Western Massachusetts blur and recede. You wipe your nose with your fingers and wish the heater worked better. More likely, you’re cold with the kind of chill that only rises up from within. “I have to decide.”
“I made you a chart,” he says, because that’s what scientists who work at MIT do. “If you go to Emerson you can live at home, save that dorm money, but Ithaca offered you more of a scholarship and Syracuse has more facilities. Of course, if you picked a sensible major like physics or chemistry or engineering, I’d feel better about your career prospects. Television’s fun, sure, but will it pay the rent?”
“I have to decide,” you repeat. “Life or death.”
“There’s no need to be melodramatic,” he says. “Can you grab my Thermos from the back and pour me some coffee?”
You turn and reach over—in 1986 seatbelts are still optional—and grab the Thermos, which is half-in and half-out of the briefcase he’s been carrying on the train for years. He’s brought a book for the trip—Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Earth.
“I forgot how much you loved Asimov,” you say.
“Love, present tense. Where’s my coffee?” he replies.
“And you hated Star Wars,” you say. “All of them.”
His grip tightens. “No one can make the Kessel run in twelve parsecs.”
He’s been complaining about that since 1977. He was always a hard SF kind of guy: Asimov, Larry Niven, Fred Pohl. You read Star Trek books, and Star Wars books, and those tie-in novels for Space:1999. Your mother chews through Harlequin romances, a dozen each week.
Your father goes on: “A parsec is a distance, not a division of time. If you’re going to tell a science fiction story, you have to get the science right.”
You’ve forgotten what it was like to have a big balloon of affection rising through your lungs, so much damn goodness it hurts. You lean over and kiss the warm dry skin of his cheek. He smiles, pleased.
“Dad, what if I told you that I’m going to spend the rest of my life making science fiction shows that hardly ever get the science right?” you ask.
Sleet comes down harder on the windows and roof. He flicks the wipers to a faster setting. “I would say I’d have to disown you. How about that coffee?”
“He wouldn’t have disowned you,” a voice says, disturbing the gray sleet around your head.
“Huh?” you ask.
“Your dad would not have disowned you.”
You blink at Steven. Who is sitting by the side of your bed. By the side of your hospital bed, how strange is that? Steven, wearing a white shirt and a black tie, looking as fit as ever despite the gray at his temples and the lines around his eyes. Behind him, a window shade filters out sunlight and a TV plays softly up by the ceiling. You’re clad in a beige hospital gown with an IV piercing the back of your hand.
It’s obvious that you and Steven are having some kind of conversation and maybe have been for a while, but you have no idea what you’re talking about.
“I want my dad,” you say. “Where is he?”
Steven leans forward, his eyes soft. “He died a long time ago, remember?”
It’s not fair—it’s too soon! You should be back in his car, watching him drive to the end of Massachusetts with his hands precisely positioned at ten and two on the wheel. He was stolen too early from your life. You never got to show him the first script you got paid for, or the first time your name appeared in the credits, or the set of your own series.
“I want him!” you yell, with strength that surprises even yourself, and now you’re ripping out the IV, you’re trying to sit up, alarms beeping in sudden electronic alarm, and Steven’s trying to catch you before you fall, but it’s too late. A slip, a slide, whiteness—
And you’re gone again, out of the hospital, standing under an ashy gray sky on a warm day, a scraggly palm tree on your right and a small office building on your left. You’re wearing pantyhose and a business suit. Who wears pantyhose in L.A.? College graduates who just moved to the Valley and are desperate for a job and have one suit—just one, navy blue—with which to make a good impression. You know this place. North Fairfax, where all the synagogues and delis used to be before redevelopment moved in with slick steel and glass. Your dad’s not here; no one is. The sidewalks and streets are empty. This is L.A. as a standing set, quiet and still, waiting for the actors and conflict to arrive.
You push open the frosted glass door of the office building and there she is, Rachel Edelstein, with her big blonde wig and rhinestone eyeglasses, seventy years old and a face like an old horse saddle. The Rolodex on her desk is crammed with cards from forty years of working in this town, she and her husband Robert, but all he’s good for is sitting in front of the TV these days, and she’s never going to stop until they shove her in a coffin and nail it shut.
“Shayna!” she exclaims, her gaze locked on the bright blue IBM Selectric typewriter in front of her. She types with two fingers. The machine clicks and hums. “You made it!”
You don’t know why she calls you Shayna, or Shayna Maidel, or sometimes Shayna Sheila—you think it’s a Jewish thing. You grew up Catholic. At least the set decorator has done well here. The typewriter is the same one you took your typing test on. On another desk is a dictaphone, and some sample files to alphabetize. Rachel never sent out a girl without making sure she could type, transcribe, and file. The walls are crammed with autographed photos from TV and movie stars from the dawn of celluloid, and maps of how to get to Paramount, how to get to Radford, how to get to Universal. The ashtray at Rachel’s elbow is filled with Camel butts, and beyond the ashtray is a can of Pepsi Free.
“I’m looking for my dad,” you say.
“Wrong office,” she says. “Besides, you’ve got more important things to worry about. This job, this man, what are you letting him do to you? Did I teach you to let these Hollywood assholes walk all over you? I always said, do what you have to do, but don’t let them break your spine.”
You steady yourself against a battered green filing cabinet and kick off your shoes. In your Limbo, you get to lose the heels. “My spine’s fine.”
Rachel pecks at the keys with her bright fed fingernails. “Your spine connects to your ribs and your ribs protect your heart. But look what you’ve done to your poor, poor heart!”
The frosted door behind you creaks open again. Fairfax Avenue dissolves into Stage 11 and the engine room of the Edge of Infinity: ducts and vents and big pipes made of silver cardboard. Your dad would hate it. Landon Oaks is in his chair, reading gold script pages while the director, Mario Azzopardi, peers through the camera lens. Production assistants hurry around, fixing up the last minute details. Some people find it tedious, all the long minutes spent preparing for a scene, but you grew up doing high school theater and the thrill, the buzz, still makes you smile. A set is an invitation to the imagination. In the distance are the walls and windows of the production offices, but there’s no joy there—only the sounds of arguing, of Trevor yelling.
“I fired her!” he’s shouting. “You don’t get to reverse me!”
A door opens and your perimenopausal self emerges, thirty pounds heavier, your hair gone frizzy, good Lord you need a better bra, why did you put on that gray blouse? It makes you look like Jabba the Hutt.
Trevor dogs your steps, waving around his big fat cigar. He knows he’s not supposed to smoke on the set. Fire laws, health ordinances—this is not 1983—and worst of all he knows you have asthma.
“Don’t walk away from me!” he yells, all red-faced fury now, and for such a small, trim, pale guy he really does know how to project his voice into Christian Bale-levels of ape-shitness. “When I fire someone they stay fired! I’m not shitting around!”
Movement at the corner of your eye as Rachel Edelstein shakes her head in dismay. “I should never have sent you on that job,” she says.
The assignment where you met Trevor, she means. You worked for her for five years, off and on, between stints as a production assistant and waitress, every free moment spent typing scripts in your hot little studio apartment. She would phone your Motorola pager and dispatch you to the Writer’s Guild, to Television City, to Disney Studios. Once, for three months, you answered Dustin Hoffman’s phone and walked his dog. Then one day she sent you to a little tiny production office in Burbank, some lunatic producer who liked shows about vampires, and little did you know he was the devil in disguise.
Devil or not, he taught you how to break a script down into beats, how to write arcs and cliffhangers, how to survive crazy actors and insecure writers and lunatic directors.
“I learned more from him in six weeks than I learned in four years of college,” you say to Rachel.
“You taught yourself.” Rachel waves her hand. “But look at the cost!”
Perimenopausal you stops at the craft services table. But you’re not reaching for a snack. You’re groping out for the edge of the table to steady yourself. Your face is as gray as your blouse. Your eyes bulge. Trevor keeps yelling, how dare you unfire someone, and Landon Oaks looks over with his pretty green eyes, and Mario the director says, “Sheila, are you—?” but it’s too late, you’re already collapsing gracelessly, first one knee thwacking into the cement floor, then pitching sideways—
Your younger self turns to Rachel. She is shaking her head sadly. The beauty mark by her mouth jiggles at the edge of her cheek.
And you realize you were wrong again. This never was a limbo story. Rachel Edelstein died two years ago in a nursing home in Reseda. You were in Vancouver and couldn’t make it to the funeral, but you sent flowers.
“I know what you are,” you say.
“Hmmm?” she asks, eyes bright behind her red rhinestone glasses.
“But I don’t believe in fairy godmothers,” you add. “They’re too cliché. No one writes them anymore.”
“Silly Shayna,” she says fondly. “I’m not your fairy godmother. I’m your guardian angel. That’s a different story arc altogether.”
Over on the floor, people are gathered around your body. Someone is yelling for 911. Trevor has gone utterly silent, which is a first in his entire life, and one of the production assistants is taking pictures with his iPhone (you make a note to fire him if you survive).
“And so young,” Rachel says sadly. “Did you know that heart disease kills more women your age than anything else?”
“I’m not ready to die,” you tell her.
“No one ever is, Shayna.”
Stage 11 starts to dissolve. You feel yourself floating upward, rising toward the lights and rafters. There’s a road up there, winding through distant trees, your father at the wheel of a car that never needs fuel. He’s driving with Isaac Asimov now. You reach down for Rachel, try to grab her like an anchor, but she’s gone back to her desk and phone and deals, and there’s only your big limp body, your limbs askew, someone pounding on your chest, and oh, look—Landon Oaks is blowing air into your mouth. He grew up in Tarzana and spent three summers as lifeguard in Malibu before a casting agent found him.
If you survive this, you’ll owe him a big basket of gourmet muffins.
Of course you survive.
Your hospital room fills up with flowers, balloons, chocolate-covered fruit arranged like flowers, get-well cards, and all manner of gifts. Steven takes some to your apartment for you when the counters get too crowded. Best of all are the reviews and ratings for the premiere of Edge of Infinity: glowing words from Entertainment Weekly, number one in your timeslot in the Nielsen overnights.
“I’m quitting,” you tell Steven.
“What?” he demands. “You can’t!”
“She just said she is,” says Claire, Steven’s new wife, as she bustles in with a carryout tray of juice smoothies from that trendy new spot on Ventura near Woodman. Claire used to be Steven’s assistant. She’s not the brightest bulb in the Klieg lights of Hollywood but she makes him happy. Besides, she loves cats, and she’s been feeding yours while you’re hospitalized. “Did you know that Meg Ryan is in the room down the hall? Some kind of allergic reaction to her Botox.”
Steven doesn’t care about Meg Ryan. He cares about his hit new show. “Sheila, you can’t bail now! After all your work—”
“I can’t work with Trevor anymore,” you tell him. “Doctor’s orders.”
Claire hands over your apple-celery juice. “Good for you.”
“What about the cast and crew?” Steven asks, looking as if he might be next in the heart-attack department. “You’re going to abandon them? Leave them all to Trevor? It would be inhumane.”
The juice is lovely. You miss frappuccinos, of course, but the doctor’s been pretty clear about banning caffeine, dairy, and fats in your diet. You’re going to have start going to the gym. You’re going to have to take care of yourself. Step one in the self-help plan? No more Trevor.
“Well,” you say thoughtfully, “I guess the network will have to fire him and make me the showrunner instead.”
Claire slurps from a carrot-apple juice. “They did it to Frank Darabont on The Walking Dead.”
Wrong network, but the principle’s the same.
“I need to go breathe into a paper bag,” Steven says.
Of course nothing is easy. Some slick lawyers will earn hefty fees; Trevor will throw a temper tantrum that gets him kicked off the lot; TMZ will air all the juicy rumors. But in the end you’ll be in charge of Edge of Infinity, which will go on to air for seven years and win three People’s Choice awards, though never an Emmy. Trevor will go back to Vancouver. He’ll make another show about Vikings.
One last scene: they call it the episode tag. On the day you get discharged from the hospital, as a nurse wheels you toward the elevator, you see a visitor heading for Meg Ryan’s room. It takes a minute for you to recognize her. She’s not as slim as she used to be, not as young, but who is? She’s a successful novelist and screenwriter. She still has the same wise look in her eyes, decades of hard-won knowledge that began with a movie about a princess and an empire.
“Aren’t you in charge of Edge of Infinity?” she asks, stopping, her arms full of yellow flowers.
You ask, “Aren’t you Carrie Fisher?”
“I loved the premiere,” she says with a quicksilver smile. “We should do lunch.”
This is Hollywood, after all. Any dream can come true if you dream it hard enough.
TECH SUPPORT
Richard A. Lovett
Bet you’ve never had a call quite like this one!
Early morning was Alec’s favorite time in the lab, especially the day after a major advance. There was something about a breakthrough that hung in the air like a spirit haunting the site of its birth. Not literally, of course. He took no truck with the spiritualists and their silly séances. But places could hold mystiques—auras, if you insisted—almost as though prior outpourings of emotion had been absorbed by the woodwork, only to be slowly re-released.
But the afterglow of discovery was fragile. The moment Watson walked in with his cheery “good morning,” it would be over and a new day’s work would begin. There was still much to do to bring the new invention fully to life. But the discovery—that was always the best part.
He thought again of the words he’d chosen for that glorious moment. Initially, he’d considered something more portentous: “One small step . . .” or some such declaration. But that was too grandiose for a moment shared by only two men.
Even that, however, would have been better than the words Reis used a decade ago in his intriguing but ultimately fruitless efforts. His device had broken sound into a series of electrical pulses like an impossibly rapid telegraph. It had been a wondrously inventive idea that had almost worked. But ultimately, there was no way to generate electrical pulses that switched on and off quickly enough to make it practical.
