King of the Worlds (11 page)

He disembarked at the Greyhound Station in Philly, that symbolic city, and went for a walk past City Hall, which looked just as it had when he and Chad used to come downtown high on youth and dreams to knock on the door of their sex-drenched futures. Atop the tower, William Penn stood sentinel still, keeping watch over the old capital from what had once been the tallest building in the world.

How many patriots had charted their disillusion by that piss-yellow clock?

Dylan walked, and thought, and maybe cried a little, and soon he was tripping over the cobblestones of Old City, where two and half centuries since, the “Great Experiment” had begun. Oh, the beautiful, childlike hubris of it! His heart tolled and cracked.

He took the el to 69th Street and then a trolley from there to the suburbs, where new colors, shades of green mainly, suffused the windows by degrees. He watched with an ache in his chest as familiar landmarks zipped past in space as they had in time: the baseball diamond where he'd hit his only home run; the apartment building where his father's father had died fat and alone; the park where he'd used to throw stones into the creek, watch the interference patterns of the rings, and think big thoughts about life (he'd been wrong on most every count).

He got off at Brookview station, noted the absence of the pay phone where there had always been one, and then, as he had thousands of times before, walked along the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks for his mother's sake, past the Pattersons', the Wickershams', the Murphys', to the khaki-colored colonial that he still identified in the deepest parts of himself as home. He knew his American literature well enough to know you can't really go there again, and yet...

The ringing in his ears seemed louder than ever because otherwise it was so quiet here, the silence interrupted only by the occasional passing car, the low drone of a lawnmower off in the distance, the gurgling of the skimmers in the swimming pool he was glad to see open. He might have been here yesterday. His feet knew where to expect uneven pavement, his nostrils when to expect honeysuckle. It was dinnertime, the light warm, auburn and pink, the grass a bit shaggy and of a green deeper than he'd remembered being possible. The squirrels bounded adorably across the lawn and up the oaks, and drifting back to the branch there—oh!—a firefly, which, come to think of it, he'd have called a ‘lightning bug' before he'd begun reading so much and losing his regional markers. In any case, on New Taiwan there was no such bug to illuminate the falling dusk like this. He'd learned in school that bioluminescence served as a defense mechanism, an organism's way of advertising to potential predators that it tasted bitter, but if “magic” could still mean anything for adults, surely this was it. He noticed now, as he had not when he was a child, how they seemed to light up in bursts, a cluster at a time, and then none for a spell, and then another cluster. He noticed, too, how they illuminated only on their way
up
. It did something to your consciousness to see that—made it leap. Thirty-five years ago, he and the neighborhood kids—John, Joe, Michelle—would have been out playing now, climbing skyscraping evergreens, building worlds in John's sandbox, and making strange forbidden potions in buckets according to very strict recipes of mud, dirt, grass, sand, gravel, dandelions, earthworms, ants, pinecones, and—if a parent or older sibling had recently taken one of them to the park on the other side of the tracks—skunk cabbage.

Where were all the kids now? Grown and for one reason or other not replaced. On other worlds perhaps.

He slinked from tree to tree and peered in at the windows. His father appeared first, hobbling across the kitchen, carrying a tray of something with his arthritic fingers. And there now was his mother at the table, reading a hard copy of the newspaper. He'd watched them advance in years via omni, but it was different to see them at home like this. They had new lines in their faces, new maps of time. Life expectancy was getting longer every year, but there was still a very good chance they would not
live forever.
23

He suffered waves of guilt sometimes at having moved so far away and thus deprived his mother of precious time with her own grandchildren, whom she loved dearly and had never met except via omni. From time to time he thought about moving his parents out to New Taiwan, at least for the milder winters, but real estate was so damned expensive and he'd just sunk the last of his savings into the new house. They could have the guest room as far as he was concerned—the house was plenty big enough—but Erin would complain. They wouldn't have wanted to move anyway. Their whole lives had been here in the Philadelphia area, and both of his sisters still lived nearby and had their own families. He'd offered many times to bring his parents out to visit, but QT had induced more than one heart attack in older folks over the years, and while no doubt it had greatly improved, he could hardly blame them for their trepidation. Maybe one of these years he could QT his family down here to Earth for a visit, though it was hard to imagine getting his three kids to sit still long enough for the scan anytime soon.

Dylan sat behind a cherry tree he'd climbed a hundred times and watched his parents eat their dinners (his mother's famous shrimp scampi—second only to her famous homemade ravioli) and he wept like the baby he knew himself at heart to be, only without the sound.

Darkness descended by degrees, and as the objects of the world left the visual range, the crickets took up their slack and, rather pleasantly, masked Dylan's tinnitus. His father had disappeared from view and was likely falling asleep in front of the old LCD video wall—no doubt they still had that—but his mother was now square inside the window frame, meditatively doing the dishes. He was looking at her almost head-on. Still beautiful. Could have been an actress. She liked to boast that she wore the same dress size as Marilyn Monroe, and he'd seen enough photos of her as a blonde and bosomy young girl to know she fit that era's prescription for beauty to a T, though even had she not been saddled with a husband and three children, her total lack of an ass might have proved her Achilles' heel in that unforgivingly sexist industry. (He noticed this asslessness of hers only because he'd inherited the trait and Erin never let him forget it.)

And while Dylan's Platonic devotion to the Beautiful undoubtedly came from his father, the hobbyhorse photographer (and lifelong devotee of 35mm film!), any affinity Dylan had for performance came right from Mom, whose way with words and trove of Irish melancholy could, if catalyzed with a couple of drinks, command the attention of any dinner party for hours, after which she'd invariably go home and—tears of a clown—cry herself to sleep.

Shit!
She was looking at him.
Don't. Move.
She had interrupted what she was doing with the dishes, scrunched up her eyes and moved her face a few inches closer to the glass, and for what must have been a solid minute she stared out at the darkness in stony puzzlement. He so desperately and instinctually wanted to stand up and say, “Mom, it's me!” and go to her and hug her and kiss her and take her out dancing, but he forced himself to stay put, hugging this thicker-than-he-remembered-it tree, afraid.

By and by his mother shrugged and went back to doing the dishes.

Soon the downstairs lights went off and the upstairs ones went on. He wished his parents a good night under his breath, tiptoed over to the pool, took off his clothes and eased into the shallow end, which was warm as a bath. He floated on his back, ears submerged so that the ringing came back redoubled. He tilted his head, lifted his ears above the water and let the crickets soothe away the sound again. Earth's moon was a waxing gibbous, crisscrossed here and there by bats, and he willed himself to look up at it with the crazy wisdom of some Japanese poet, or at least the naïve eyes of most Americans, who believed that men had landed there just a few times, and who knew nothing of any VIP parties on the inside, of any goddesses in the surf…

Which reminded him: this was where he and Erin had first, well…Christ, he hadn't thought of that in a long time. They hadn't done it on purpose, not really. It was a humid, early-summer night like this, a few months into their relationship, and while they'd been doing incredibly nasty things in his car all that time, they had not yet had full-on intercourse, owing in part to the cautionary tale of Erin's cousin who had recently gotten herself pregnant at sixteen. But there they were skinny-dipping in the pool, making out in a corner of the shallow end right by the ladder, and his penis, which seemed possessed of a will wholly independent of his own, kept mashing up against her furrow until finally it plunged inside of her, and it was as if they'd just torn spacetime, because all at once they were in some other dimension where they were no longer separate and where they extended forever in all directions with no skin to hem them in and no pronouns to make them other…that is, until he'd panicked, and pulled out, and insisted they go buy a pregnancy test at CVS immediately. Once she'd pissed on the stick and received the minus sign, he'd had to spend the rest of the night trying to convince her that he really did love her.

He climbed out of the pool, drip-dried, dressed, and lay on his back in the cool grass. He searched the heavens for Lem until all the stars blurred into one golden blotch on the inside of his eyelids. Then he fell asleep. He did not surrender his consciousness so completely, however, as to get caught there in the morning. Rather, he woke to the rattle of the first trolley, and then, as unsentimentally as he could manage, bid his childhood home goodbye. He made his way back to the Greyhound Station and—a few hours, a soft pretzel, a coffee, and half-a-dozen pedagogy articles later—BWI Thurgood Marshall Intragalactic Teleport.

• • •

He was back on New Taiwan in time for dinner; they were having the leftover ravioli. The kids were ecstatic to see him. “What did you get us?” Arthur asked.

Dylan cringed.

“Mommy said you'd get
us something.”

“Sorry, guys. I was super busy.”

“Aw,” he whined.

“How was it?” Erin asked. She was feeding the baby at the head of the table and didn't bother to get up.

“Fine. Uneventful.”

“Anyone recognize you?”

“I don't think so.”

“Well that's good anyway. Did you learn anything?”

“Oh sure. There was a lot of talk about reality augmentation. Some Shakespeare program that subtitles everything in bardic. A study-abroad thing that makes the streets of your home seem like they're in Tokyo, New Quebec, Alanis, wherever. Changes up the mailboxes, maybe puts a cathedral on the horizon, everybody speaks Arabic, Upper Pleiadic, Heptapod A or whatever. First-hand history apps: drop a kid right in the middle of a world war or a supernova. Seems like you held the fort down okay?”

She sighed. “No horror stories anyway.”

“Mommy, I'm done,” Arthur said. “Can we go play?”

“Sure.”

Arthur dashed off to the playroom, Tavi waddling in tow.

“It's good to be home,” Dylan said—he meant it too.

She smiled, albeit not very convincingly. “Would you ever consider moving back?”

“What, to Earth?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you seriously asking me this?”

“I am.”

The content of her question was one thing, her audacity in asking it another. She
knew
his feelings about Earth.

“Out of the question,” he said, trying to keep calm. “Do you want to tell me why you're asking me this all of a sudden?”

“No, it's just, I don't know, now that there are five of us, it would be nice to have a little help from our parents from time to time, wouldn't it? To take some of the edge off?”

He was losing his cool. “Wonderful!”

“What?”

“Whose idea was it to have this third kid again?”

She didn't reply.

“And what did you promise me from the outset, do you remember?”

Still nothing.

“Let me refresh your memory: you promised that it wouldn't
change
anything. That our lives would go on as usual. Do you remember that?”