King of the Worlds (20 page)

Or see the grand beginning,
Where space did not extend?
Or view the last creation,
Where Gods and matter end?
Methinks the Spirit whispers,
“No man has found ‘pure space,'
Nor seen the outside curtains,
Where nothing has a place.”

But as he sat with her, holding her hand, peering into her opalescent eyes and listening intently to the words, these angelic voices seemed to resonate with some pure and essential part of him that had been trapped away for a very long time—

The works of God continue,
And worlds and lives abound;
Improvement and progression
Have one eternal round.
There is no end to matter;
There is no end to space;
There is no end to spirit;
There is no end to race.

And it seemed to him now that the pinnacle of his life, that pure space to which he was so fatally bent on returning, was not so much his brief stint in the limelight as the pre-rational Eden of childhood, the early morning of his life before the sun got so hot and the dark
so dark—

There is no end to virtue;
There is no end to might;
There is no end to wisdom;
There is no end to light.
There is no end to union;
There is no end to youth;
There is no end to priesthood;
There is no end to truth.

And what incredibly good news this was! Because while the limelight belonged to the past, insofar as that meant anything, the child was apparently still in there, wide-eyed and infinitely happy despite all reason—

There is no end to glory;
There is no end to love;
There is no end to being;
There is no death above.
There is no end to glory;
There is no end to love;
There is no end to being;
There is no death above.

Rea
son was spectacularly overrated anyway, was it not? What fool wouldn't want to hie to Kolob?

And as those heavenly hosts of angels resolved their song with a major chord, Dylan felt compelled to tell Wendy exactly how he felt: “I love you,” he said, and warm, fat tears began plunking down his cheeks.

“I know,” she said. She held his head and stroked his hair, and they embraced for the rest of the drive. Even Cane, in his perch atop Wendy's head, let out a low purr.

When they arrived at the teleport, Dylan swiped away the door and stepped out with her.

“I've had a wonderful time,” she said.

“This week will feel like an eternity.”

“Don't look to me for any sympathy there. I've been waiting two decades for you.”

He smiled. “Goodbye,” he said, and he extended a hand for her to shake.

“That reminds me!” she exclaimed, and she proceeded to teach him a secret handshake which involved clasping hands in the usual way while interlocking pinkies, fingering the other's wrist with the index finger, and rotating the whole bundle back and forth.

“We'll use this to get into the Celestial Kingdom someday,” she said.

“I'm afraid to ask how literally you mean that.”

“Well then you already know my answer. I'm not supposed to share this with anyone, by the way, or my throat will be cut ear to ear, my tongue torn out by its roots, my breasts torn open, my heart and vitals torn out and given to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, and my body cut asunder and all my bowels gush out—but I'm making an exception here.”

“I appreciate that,” he said, not at all sure he did. They practiced the handshake one last time and then went their very separate ways.

• • •

“Where'd
you
go?” Erin asked. She was sitting on the rug beside the sofa, pushing Junior in his rocker with one hand and bunching socks with the other.

“For a stroll.”

“In an androcab?”

Shit. He'd had the driver drop him off a few houses away. He didn't think she'd notice.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I took an androcab to the beach. I wanted to walk by the sea. I had some thinking to do.”

She looked dubious. “What about?”

“About our moving back to Earth.”

That sat her up.

“I'm beginning to think it might not be such a bad idea.”

“Really?” She looked down at Junior, burying her head in her swollen cleavage so as to hide her grin—but Dylan knew her too well.

“I don't want to go back home, mind you. Forget the East Coast. The weather sucks, and the people are cold too. What if we moved someplace warmer?”

“Like where?”

“I don't know. Someplace like…Hawaii?”

“Since when have you been interested in Hawaii?”

“It just seems like a good compromise. It's not New Taiwan, but it's not Philly either.”

She picked the baby up, put his head over her shoulder and gently thumped his back. “Dylan, I hate to say it, but moving to Hawaii would totally defeat the purpose of moving. We can QT almost as cheaply and a lot more quickly than we could travel by air from
Hawaii to Philadelphia
.
32
And anyway, the whole point is we want to be near our parents, right? Think about it. They could babysit for us and we could go out on dates again and stuff. We don't know
anyone
in Hawaii.”

Dylan didn't especially like this being told what “we” wanted.

With nothing to look at but the sofa, Junior began to squirm and fuss. Dylan took him, held him aloft and tapped his head on the ceiling. In three seconds flat, he was laughing. All babies are bipolar.

“We could meet some people though,” Dylan said. “There must be plenty of nice people there.” He lowered the baby again and kissed his scabby belly button.

“There are nice people everywhere,” Erin said.

Dylan surfaced. “Hawaii strikes me as being kind of special though. Like I imagine people there must be
extra
nice.”

Erin screwed up her face. “What's gotten into you? I don't ever remember you
mentioning
Hawaii before. Now suddenly you want to
live
there?”

“I'm just thinking aloud.”

“‘Fantasizing' is more like it.”

“That may be,” he said. “That may very well be.”

• • •

In the absence of Wendy's body, Dylan spent the week attempting to get intimate with her mind by reading up on Mormonism whenever he got a spare moment between classes. It was harder than he'd expected. For instance, he failed to suspend enough disbelief to accept that their central prophet and founder, Joseph Smith, an avowed treasure-seeker and scryer, had, at the behest of the angel Moroni, dug up gold plates in Western New York circa the 1820s and translated them with the help of stone-lensed spectacles. The story was weird enough that Dylan almost
wanted
to believe it, but at the very least he'd have to inspect the plates, and conveniently enough Smith claimed to have promptly returned them to the angel upon translating them. Neither did Dylan much respect Mormons' unbelievably racist founding myth. But the crazy,
beautiful
stuff—Kolob, spirit babies, the
multiverse
33
and all the psychedelic rest of it—
this
stuff he could get behind, at least in the spirit of poetry. And however different Mormonism was from Catholicism, it felt good to revisit the rhetoric of people who believed,
truly
believed, in ultimate Meaning and Goodness and Love. It made him feel, for as long as he let it, like a kid again, swinging his legs in a pew, absorbing all those magical words spoken by the adults who knew everything there was to know and then some. It wasn't hard, in retrospect, to see why Jesus liked kids the best:
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

Always game for a pun, Dylan recognized how fitting it was that he should be thinking about suffering little children even as his students went about mounting their Shakespeare scenes. The grading rubric included categories for memorization, voice and articulation, believability, physical movement and blocking, and overall performance. Most students were doing C work; it was as if they were determined to prove that the bard (not to mention poetry and drama in general) was beneath them and their transhuman lives.

Daniel Young, his broken English notwithstanding, gave one of the more heartfelt performances, though it was clear he was playing as much to Dylan as to his beloved Hermia. Dylan gave him a rather generous B. On hearing this after class, Daniel hung his head and shuffled away.

• • •

Come Sunday, Dylan was at the spaceport again. Wendy was more appropriately dressed this time: no scarf, no jacket, no boots, just an orange T-shirt, blue jeans, brown sandals, a small travel bag—and the customary toad on her head. Dylan swiped the door, reached out a hand and abducted her from the curb. “I hope you don't mind my not getting out,” he said. “I thought we should spend as much time as possible out of the public eye. Gather our rosebuds while we may.”

“I missed you too,” she said.

As soon as her succulent buttocks hit the seat, he kissed her sheltering lips and audibly purred.

“To Ascension Forest,” he ordered the driver.

“Who's at the wheel today?” Wendy asked.

“John Coltrane, for the moment. That okay by you?”

“Great. I love jazz.”

“Mr. Coltrane's about to do a live rendition of
A Love Supreme
for us, I believe. Isn't that right, Johnny?”

“One of my all-time favorites,” Wendy said. That was lucky.

“Cool,” Coltrane said. And some invisible bassist launched right into it.

Dylan had done the first leg of the trip singing along with Ted Neeley, the original Jesus of
Jesus Christ Superstar
, at the wheel. He'd been thinking of Wendy when he made the request, but then it dawned on him that this unsubtle Messiah might cramp his style (not to mention make him think of Erin). Coltrane, however—even in this hieratic mode, his searching tenor was an aphrodisiac. By the time they arrived at the forest, Dylan's tongue had licked every exposed cell of Wendy's face, neck, and breasts. Her nipples were so hard, he was afraid he might cut his tongue.

“I hope you enjoy your time in Ascension Forest,” Coltrane said.

“Oh, don't you worry about that,” Dylan said. “We'll see you in a few hours.” Then he swiped the door, and the two lovers hied hand-in-hand to the moss.

“You know,” Dylan said. “I forgot to ask you last time about your religious reasons for keeping a toad.”

“Oh, right. You'll probably find it weird, but Cane serves as a reminder for me.”

“A reminder of what, may I ask?”

“I'm not sure how much you know about Mormonism…”

“A bit.”

“Then you know that our religion was founded when the angel Moroni delivered God's revelation to Joseph Smith on some gold plates in upstate New York?”

“I'd heard something like that, yes.”

“Well, what you don't always hear is that while Joseph was digging up the box that contained those plates, he was greeted by an enormous toad, which, depending on the account, either morphed into a man who proceeded to beat the crap out of him, or a flaming monster with glittering eyes. Either way, it's a manifestation of the angel.”

Dylan squinted skeptically at Cane, who looked like a cow pie with eyes.

“And what is it you want to be reminded of exactly?” Dylan asked.

“That sometimes what seems to us like evil is really just a kind of treasure guardian. That our suffering isn't wasted, in other words. I suffered a lot while I waited for you, you know.”

This answer struck him as both totally crazy and more than a little wise.

“I've had this ache in my chest all week,” Dylan complained.

“I'm familiar with that ache,” she said.

“On the upside,” Dylan said, “I have never felt the power of poetry as deeply as I did this week, and I've been teaching pretty much the same poems for years.”

“Lay one on me.”

“You want to hear a poem?”

“Show me a girl who doesn't want to hear a poem from her lover and I will show you the beginning of the end of our species.”

Dylan was glad to hear her call him her “lover” despite their couple of near misses so far. Moreover, it relieved him of any doubt as to which poem he would recite to her. Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” had been coursing through his head with renewed life since he'd read it aloud in class on Tuesday. In its entirety, it was probably too direct for the occasion, too on-the-nose and almost-raunchy, so he gave her just the final, inspired stanza:

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Wendy's eyes had gone all anime. “You're a romantic,” she said.