Free A Hundred Thousand Worlds by Bob Proehl Page B

alienating whatever subsect of the fan base that site serviced. The network made itabundantly clear to Val and Andrew that they were to make themselves available to any fan who made any claim to being part of the media—new, old, social, or otherwise.
    The resulting emotional burnout had little effect on Val’s life outside of work; she already spent most of her nights at home, or at Tim and Rachel’s. But for Andrew it was catastrophic. At the end of a day’s work and the interviews that followed, he couldn’t summon up the energy to appear at a restaurant, much less a club or a party. The steady stream of girls who appeared on the set at the end of the day, partly so they could be impressed by a real television set and partly so the crew could be impressed by Andrew’s prowess, slowed to a trickle and then dried up.
    Andrew was not shy about public lamentation, but after a few weeks Val began to see the edges of a real loneliness rising up from under the shiny surface he presented to her and the rest of the crew. He became a regular at Tim and Rachel’s weekly dinner parties, which he’d once begged off with a string of excuses so creative and far-fetched even Tim had to be impressed. The Andrew who showed up at their house in Laurel Canyon (“Manson country,” Rachel would say after a few glasses of zin) wasn’t the blustery star who showed up on set, but a polite young man who’d grown up poor in North Texas and had buried his accent when he ran off forever at seventeen. Who’d been applying to graduate programs in English when a casting agent for
Sands in the Hourglass
either cruised or discovered him at a coffee shop near UCLA. He talked about his good looks as a resource he was slowly squandering and had insightful praise for the talents of every other member of the cast, especially Val. This Andrew was trying less hard to be liked, and as a result was much more likable.
    Against this backdrop, the show told some of the weirdest stories of its entire run. The woman who had July 12, 1982, as a pet, in a birdcage in her living room, and kept it alive by playing nothing but Duran Duran and the Clash on her record player. The widower whose tears stopped time, who’d park his car in front of a bank, sit in the driver’s seat, and stare at a picture of his dead wife until he wept. Then, sobbing, he’d robthe bank while everyone else was suspended like fruit in a Jell-O mold. The historical romance writer with a half dozen pen names whose bodice-ripping heroes and swooning heroines began bleeding into real history, distracting John Wilkes Booth backstage at Ford’s Theatre or seducing Torquemada and ending the Spanish Inquisition.
    “My favorite,” says Val, “was episode seven. A whole neighborhood in Queens—”
    “Which one?” says Alex. He has never been to Queens, and really the episode took place outside Boston, but it seems like a way to give him a sense of context without too much distraction.
    “In Astoria,” she says. “The whole neighborhood turns back to the way it was in the fifties. All the stores, and all the cars.”
    “And the people?”
    “The people are still the same people, but they dress and act like it’s the fifties. The episode starts with a woman from Brooklyn taking the subway to see her sister. She gets off at the Astoria stop and all the men are tipping their fedoras at her. When she arrives at her sister’s apartment,” Val says, “her sister, who as we’ve heard her talking about on the phone has blue hair and nose rings—”
    “She was punk rock?” says Alex.
    “Exactly,” says Val. It’s a kind of catchall term Alex uses to describe the hipsters who hang out near Tim’s place in Greenpoint, scaring the old Polish ladies; the tattooed punkers who loll about Washington Square Park waiting for 1987 to come around again; and, maybe most correctly, the three young black kids who play a beautiful and, to Val, incomprehensible sprawling of instrumental metal out