King of the Worlds (12 page)

She looked fierce, reptilian.

“And now look how suddenly we've come by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs!”

“What?”

“What would I do on Earth?”

“The same thing you do here.”

“Teach?”

“Why not?”

Now it was his turn to say nothing.

“People don't recognize you anymore, Dylan. You said so yourself. I don't think very many kids are watching
E.T. II
these days, do you? Besides, you're all grown up now. They wouldn't recognize you anyway.”

This pissed him off. How was it that his own wife was always underestimating his legacy, not to mention his good looks? He deserved it, probably: commit yourself to someone when you're too young and they're bound to take you for granted before long; Ashley Eisenberg had told him he'd barely changed.

“And unlike you, I make a point of paying attention to Earthly affairs, Dylan, and it's really not the same world anymore. You just saw it for yourself, right? The world you're so intent on exiling yourself from no longer exists. All of our generation is exiled from it whether we like it or not. It's a question of time passing, Dylan. It has nothing to do with where we live.”

“Erin, have you forgotten just how many people saw
E.T. II
?”

“Don't take this the wrong way, Dylan, but sometimes it seems like you believe the galaxy revolves around you. I just want to reassure you that it doesn't and it never has. It revolves around a supermassive black hole.”

“And how would you like me to not take that the wrong way?”

“You should feel relieved by it. So you had a pretty bad day twenty years ago. So what? Do you really want to let it cast a shadow on the rest of your life?”

He pursed his lips and nodded, agreeing with her. “Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”

“Exactly. Who said that?”

“Aldous Huxley, in the preface to
Brave New World.
”
24
25

“Well there you go. Take it from him if you won't take it from me.”

“I'll think about it,” Dylan said. “In the meantime, I'm gonna take a shower and go to bed. I've got serious QT lag.”

He wasn't lying. Not only did he have the usual time slip to deal with—the New Taiwanese day was just shy of twenty-six hours—but the Olympus Mons Accord stipulated that all waste material and toxins in a teleportee's bloodstream
must
get copied with the organism, and Dylan hadn't gotten all that much
sleep last night.

“Good night,” she said, and she kissed him on the lips. It wasn't wet or hot or tongue-y, but it was nice; there were decades of devotion in it.

• • •

That night, he had the dream. It wasn't even a dream so much as it was a memory, except that in the dream he saw it in the third person, even as he felt it in the first.

Dylan Greenyears, as Jack, stands at the bow of a ship with his new friend Danny Nucci, who's been cast as his sidekick, Fabrizio. A hundred pairs of eyes and several big cameras are watching. “I'm the king of the world,” he says.

“I don't believe you,” James Cameron says. “Roll it again.”

“I'm the king of the world!” Dylan says again. This time he pumps his fists a bit. He knows it's not enough, but something is holding him back.

“God damn it, Greenyears,” Cameron says. “Do you have an ounce of feeling in your whole body?”

“Many ounces,” Dylan says.

“Prove it!” Cameron is getting worked up now, morphing into the asshole of Hollywood legend.

“I'm the king of the world!” Dylan shouts. He's louder this time, but the tone is off. Cameron's belligerence is making Dylan sound frustrated, not exhilarated.

“You've never been in love, have you, Greenyears?”

“I have,” he says. “I am.” He thinks of the splash of freckles on Erin's cheeks.

“Show me,” Cameron commands.

“But Jack hasn't even
met
Rose yet at this point,” Dylan protests.

“So what? He's already in love with his muse. I'm trying to connect that with something in you. If your girlfriend doesn't make you feel exhilarated, then find something that does. You know,
Method stuff.”

“Method stuff?” Dylan doesn't know what that means.

“Tell me you're not familiar with the Method?”

Dylan shrugs. His heart is going like a speed bag.

“Oh, Jesus. What the hell did I cast?” Cameron's eyes are beady, his face pinched, orange. “Try to summon some passion this time.”

“I'm the king—”

“Horrible. Again.”

Again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Cold drops of sweat cascade down Dylan's ribs from his armpits. “I'm the king of the world.”

“You're certainly the king of wasting my time,” Cameron says. He's getting livid, mean. “Do you realize how many qualified actors I turned down so that I could take a risk on you, Greenyears? Last fucking chance.”

Dylan swallows hard, takes a beat to regain his composure. Everything depends upon the next few seconds. “I'm the king of the world,” he says, and he's not even halfway through when he knows it's not what Cameron wants.

“All right. That's it. I'm putting you out of your misery. Somebody get me DiCaprio.”

“But—”

“Read your contract. I can fire you whenever I want. And I want to right now, before I throw any more good money after bad. For the life of me I don't know what I saw in you.”

“But—”

“A word of advice, Greenyears: go back to college. You're finished in this town.”

The following morning, splashed across America: “Cameron fires Greenyears from special effect extravaganza, hires DiCaprio.”

Dylan is the crap of the world, and he's just been flushed.

• • •

Despite his students having had the full ten school days of Dylan's paternity leave to rehearse, the Shakespeare scenes were still a very mixed bag, nowhere near ready. The girls were better overall; except for one pair of entitled prima donnas, they all appeared to be taking the assignment seriously. The boys, though, had some hang-ups. Dylan had never explicitly told them this assignment was a rite of passage, but they instinctively understood that it demanded an existential choice of them: either they could transcend their egos, take a risk and really try to inhabit their parts, thereby pleasing their teacher and getting a good grade; or they could hide behind their egos, make light of solemnity, and deliberately mispronounce every word they didn't use on a daily basis, thereby pleasing their friends and getting a bad grade. It was a decision, Dylan knew, that might resonate in various ways through the rest of their lives. No doubt there was a way to make a virtue of irreverence and play to both audiences at once, but no one in Intro to Drama had discovered it yet.

Dylan was glad to see that Daniel was among the more earnest ones, albeit painfully self-conscious. The one time he flourished an arm to emphasize his words, it went no higher than about his belly button. After class, he lingered to ask how he was doing.

“Well, Daniel, you could have moved some more, for one thing.”

“Okay.”

The poor kid was taking notes. Dylan stopped himself and zoomed out. “You like acting, Daniel?”

“More than anything. In fact, I'm thinking of pursuing it.”

“Pursuing it?”

“Like, professionally.”

“I see.” Dylan hadn't known it was that bad. “Acting's a cutthroat industry, you know, Daniel. Really tough to break into on Earth, and even tougher, I'm told, around these parts.”

“I know,” Daniel said.

“Isn't there anything else you're interested in?”

“Not the way I'm interested in this.”

Dylan understood. He'd been there once too, though at least he'd had some evidence to suggest he might be talented before taking the plunge; Daniel had no such evidence. What to tell him then? Should Dylan perpetuate the same American myth he himself had been fed in such vomitous helpings and insist that the boy pursue his dreams at all costs and let nothing stand in his way? Or should he do the kid a favor and burst his bubble for him right now before it grew too big?

He reminded himself that, strictly speaking, he was paid to be an English teacher, not a life coach. He'd stick to giving Daniel acting notes, more or less.

“All right, Daniel, I'll shoot straight with you. The first thing you're going to need to do if you want to be an actor is to work on your English pronunciation. The Korean accent might get you typecast once or twice, but you want to be more versatile than that.”

“Okay,” Daniel said, wide-eyed and nodding.

“Next, you're going to have to learn to be more comfortable on stage. Right now you look like you're about to ask the hot girl to the prom.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don't apologize—this isn't that kind of thing. Above all, Daniel, any actor has to be willing to go into the darkest, scariest places inside of himself. Most people lock up that cellar and do everything they can to avoid opening it. That's understandable, probably even healthy. But the actor, Daniel, the
actor
, opens that door every chance he gets. It's a very dangerous profession that way, acting. Many actors have been driven insane by their craft.”

Daniel's eyes looked bigger than ever by half.

“Not that I expect you to go insane for one measly grade, Daniel, but if you're serious about the craft, you're going to have to learn this. The more you invest of your own personal life in a role, the more deeply you're going to convince us, and the more vulnerable you're going to be. It's a sort of paradox really. The best way to embody someone else is to be totally, nakedly yourself. You've got to bare your feelings to the world, show us what scares you, what makes you want to kill in cold blood or cry like a baby. Most important, Daniel, you've got to show us what you
love
. Forget about looking cool. Humans are a mess. We sob and puke and toil and sweat and die like the animals we are for love. Show us that and you'll be well on your way.”

Daniel was taking notes again.

“Somebody once said this, Daniel: ‘Find what you love and let it kill you.' I'm not sure who said it—you could ask
Omni if you're curious
26
—but the point is,
that's
the kind of commitment you've got to have if you're serious about your art. You've got to be willing to die for it. If your commitment falls anywhere short of that, then you'd better find something else to do with your life.”

What Dylan did
not
tell Daniel was that your body didn't necessarily die at the same time as your dreams, but the sweet-faced fool would almost certainly discover that on his own one day.

“Thank you, Mr. Green. I promise to make you proud.”

“Oh, don't do anything on my account, Daniel.”

The boy nodded, squinted in thought.

“And one more piece of advice while I'm at it,” Dylan said, reaching out and stopping Daniel from writing. “Listen to me: no matter where your future should take you, never look back and wonder
what if
—what if I had done this instead of this, what if I had married this girl instead of that girl, what if I had been an engineer instead of an actor. Don't
do
that, and don't compare yourself to other people either. It's irrelevant. You just make the best decision you can at every juncture and forgive yourself in advance for whatever happens next. It's important that you give yourself permission to fail. We're not as free as we think, Daniel, and we're smaller and less perfect than we know when we're in high school. You just take comfort in knowing that whatever indignities life puts you through, you're not the first and you're surely not the last. So go ahead and try to make your life into a comedy, but don't be surprised if you get a not-so-gentle reminder now and then that it's been a tragedy all along. Do you recall how tragedy differs from comedy?”