King of the Worlds (22 page)

“Stop that!” Dylan said, returning to her side. “Will you just calm down please?”

She didn't.

He did his best to console her: “I'm confused, okay? I need to think.”

“But that's just it,” she shrieked. “You think
too much
. Obey your heart as I obey mine and the rest will take care of itself. Fuck Erin. Erin is dead to you now.”

“Yeah, but see, Erin is
not
dead to me now. We're not exactly seeing eye to eye on that yet.” He reached out a hand. “I'm going. Join me if you want a ride.”

She collapsed into the fetal position on the ground and began to weep, silently at first and then resoundingly. Dylan crouched and patted her head. After many minutes, she regained whatever sanity she had left and looked up at him with a runny nose and twinkling eyes. “You're even cuter when you're angry,” she said.

He didn't want to smile at that, he really didn't, but it had been a very long time since anyone had called him cute.
Shit
.

When they arrived at the teleport, he insisted on accompanying her as far as he was allowed. They did the secret handshake at the security gate and said goodbye. “I love you,” she said.

“I love you too,” he said—and he did, in some way or other. “But I'm confused. I need to think. And for the record, if I see you anywhere near my house, I will have you promptly arrested.”

“The Adversary—” she began.

“Put it this way. I need to have a good long sit-down with the Adversary.”

“Don't underestimate his powers,” she warned.

“I'll bear that in mind,” he said. “Now go. I'll be in touch in a few days. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me alone.”

She pouted.

“Go!” he shouted, shooing her.

She plodded backward through the gate, sulking the whole way, until finally—thank heaven—he was rid of her.

• • •

Dylan thought about nothing else for three straight days. He'd always known that Wendy was a little eccentric in her beliefs, and a little mad in an impulsive, suck-the-marrow-out-of-life kind of way, but he had not realized how completely batshit
insane
she was until he'd seen her tearing at her breasts like that.

That's what you get for stalking your old stalkers, he supposed.

Once he got over the initial disappointment, though, his newfound knowledge that Wendy was essentially unmarriageable actually proved something of a relief. Because what it meant, in effect, was that he was going to stay married to Erin. And while his marriage might occasionally
feel
like a failure, it would not be one in the technical sense. Even in a scenario where both partners ended up being happier after a divorce, the fact remained that they had set out to do one thing and then, faced with hardship, given up and done another, which was precisely the narrative traced by anything one might call a failure. Dylan knew a thing or two about that, and he did not desire to know any more. If he was going to go down with a ship, he was determined that it be this one.

Once at a hotel in Zurich, where he'd been hired to star in a credit card commercial, an old snaggletoothed concierge had insisted on reading Dylan's palm. “You were born under a great star,” he told Dylan. “You will accomplish many wonderful things. Fear death by hubris.” Then he'd shown Dylan his lifeline, beginning at the base of his thumb and swooping toward the edge of his palm. Evidently the length and depth of Dylan's line meant that he would enjoy a longer-than-average lifespan, but one couldn't help but notice a small break in the line mid-swoop on his right hand, and at precisely the same point on his left hand, a bisected freckle.

“What does it mean?” Dylan had asked.

“It means you will experience a rupture midway through life's journey.”

“A rupture? Are we talking literal or symbolic here?”

“Unfortunately,” the old man told him, “palms don't give such details. But if you're interested, I can recommend a marvelous astrologer here in Zurich.”

Dylan wasn't interested, not really. He was merely humoring the old man and didn't believe in any of it for even a second. Still, some uneducable, superstitious part of him had lived in vague fear and anticipation ever since—all the more reason he was relieved not to have crossed the Rubicon where his marriage was concerned. He'd have to keep an eye on his palm; maybe lines could repair themselves, freckles migrate.

Staying married to Erin, of course, also meant that his kids would continue to have a dad. And Wendy could not have been more wrong about his feelings toward them. Granted he'd hesitated, on ethical grounds, before agreeing to bring Junior into being—there was no denying that—but he loved his kids down to their protoplasm, and now that he was beginning to see things clearly again, he was determined that they know it. After work, he curled up with Arthur and Tavi on the sofa and read to them from
The Little Prince
and
Where The Wild Things Are
. He began to recognize flickers of intelligence in Junior too, who was something like a small person now and not merely a person-to-be. Dylan liked to cradle him and inhale his clean pink scalp. And when Erin wasn't looking, he liked to toss the kid in the air, just a few inches—
and
catch him, of course—and this was just what he was doing on Tuesday evening when the kid cracked his first smile. “Did you see that!” Dylan said.

“What?” asked Erin.

“Junior just smiled at me.”

“It's way too early for that,” she protested.

Dylan chucked the kid up again—

“Dylan!”

—and caught him. Did she really think he was going to let his own baby come to harm?

“Here he goes again,” Dylan said. “Trust your senses.”

And yes, here he went again, all bulbous cheeks and shiny gums.

“See.”

Erin practically fainted with joy. She cooed more than the baby did. “Throw him again!” she begged.

Arthur and Tavi saw it too and laughed and patted Junior's head, and this Christmassy warmth suffused the family then, this eggnog feeling, and for the first time in quite a while, Dylan looked at what he'd made and knew it was good.

And so on Wednesday evening, after three days of careful reflection and baby-tossing, while Erin took her shower, Dylan omni'd Wendy:

Dearest Wendy,

I want you to know that after a three-day dive inside my mind, I have surfaced with a difficult, if unavoidable, truth. To be sure, this is not an easy message for me to write, and already I find myself struggling to do it with some measure of grace.

First, let me acknowledge that the passion I have felt for you over recent weeks has been quite unlike anything I have ever experienced. Before meeting you, I was all hollow and dark inside, but you rekindled the light at my core and it radiates out to my very fingertips even as I write this message. My entire organism thanks you.

And please know this too, Wendy: You are beautiful, exquisitely, translucently so, and nothing in this message should tempt you to think otherwise.

Of course, you are also highly intelligent, and as such you have no doubt been anticipating the impending drop of another shoe since the first sentence of this message, if not before. I wish there were a gentler way of saying this, but surely you have earned the respect of my honesty: in short, darling, despite the ardent feelings you have aroused in me, I am simply not made of the sort of stuff that would permit me to abandon my family for you. I regret that I mis-modeled possible futures in the heat of our mutual passion, and I can only hope that you will trust me when I say that my deception was rooted not in malice but in ignorance. I did not know myself on Sunday even as well as I do today; I was, in a way, as deceived by my feelings as you were.

The passions after all are fickle, and experience teaches us that they are hardly the right kind of soil for the germination of healthy decisions. You might ask, then, acknowledging my lack of belief in any theistic skyhook, what I take to be the foundation of my marriage if not feeling? It's a question I've thought about quite a lot these past few days, a very good question, and one whose answer is itself rooted in feeling and so not easily translatable, though I shall try: Marriage, for me, is a stay against chaos. It is the still point of the widening gyre, the center that must hold lest all semblance of human meaning be lost. It is a poem I recite before the void, the bulwark I erect against total, all-pervading nothingness. It is a tragic project, to be sure, doomed from the start, absurd, but it is nonetheless as central to my life as anything I will ever do, if for no other reason than that I will have done it. Had we met at a different juncture in spacetime, Wendy, you and I might have made this insane leap together, just as we leapt into the moss a short time ago. But for better or worse, it was not to be, and neither you nor I are any more to blame for that than a couple of hydrogen atoms can be blamed for ending up in separate water molecules.

I imagine that all of this may sound quite alien to you, and I wonder if you might not better appreciate my feelings about marriage in the context of your feelings about religion, which I assure you are every bit as alien to me. I intend no criticism, mind you. You are entitled to believe in Jesus, Kolob, the Adversary and all that. They are your precious absurdities, as my marriage is mine, and given that, don't you owe it to yourself to find someone who can buy into them with you? Whatever you might have seen in your visions, I assure you that person can never be me.

Some things, Wendy, are not meant to last forever. I met you at a time in my life when I needed a touch of magic. You gave me that, and words, wonderful though they be, cannot possibly communicate the extent of my gratitude. I do not regret any of it and I hope that you won't either; indeed, I find the memory of our time together already sweetened by the knowledge of its evanescence. We, too, were a kind of poem against the void, Wendy. Please know that I wish you the best in this life and beyond.

I will remember you always.

Aloha,

Dylan Greenyears

There. He'd done it, the difficult thing.

He stared at his omni, the pitch in his ears modulating around the thudding in his chest. How would she take it? What would she say? Any second now he'd know.

But then the seconds swelled into minutes, dozens of them, and he still didn't know. He got up and left the room and tried to go about the rest of his day without obsessing over her imminent response, which, second by second, was turning out not to be so imminent after all. An hour passed, and then a Terran day, a New Taiwanese day, and by and by Dylan was forced to conclude that this radio silence must be Wendy's way of expressing her fury at being scorned. He was not without compassion, naturally, but in a way her passive-aggressiveness actually made the whole disentanglement that much easier on him.

And besides, she was bound to learn something from the ordeal, was she not? He had certainly learned something; contemplating the existential meaning of his marriage and forcing his conclusions through the sieve of language had proven a hugely clarifying exercise. No doubt she'd be about the business of clarifying something equally important in her own life. Struggle is good for us after all: isn't that what literature teaches? Okay,
some
literature? Okay, just comedies (but there were a lot of those)?

So that was it then. This dark chapter of his life, this midlife crisis or whatever it had been, was over. He'd indulged his nostalgia and sown some latent oats and he would content himself now to leave the past in the past and youth to the young. Going forward, he would be a family man, rich in meaning if not always happiness, appreciative of all he had, with a job he didn't hate and chronic ringing in his ears—nothing, in short, that he could not bear. He might even find some joy in it.

PART THREE

STARFUCKER

Class was a good two minutes over and Daniel Young was still shuffling his feet by Dylan's desk. He had never done that before.

“What can I do you for, Daniel?”

“I was wondering if there was any chance I might be able to redo my Shakespeare scene?”

“And why would you want to subject yourself to such a thing?”

“Because I got a B.”

“It's about the grade, is it? Well I wouldn't let that bother you too much, Daniel. Your writing has been stellar so far, and you'll still have two papers due before the end of the semester. Why not turn your attention to them?”

Dylan began gathering up his things—he had a bullshit meeting to attend—but Daniel didn't seem satisfied yet, and since turning over a new leaf the day before, Dylan was determined to be a more compassionate teacher.

“Is something the matter, Daniel?”

“Actually, yes,” Daniel said. He blinked hard, like he was praying or summoning strength. “Do you remember when you asked me if I'd ever been in love?”

“Vaguely,” Dylan replied.

“You insinuated that I couldn't possibly have been.”

“‘Insinuated': good word. My unconscious just gave you a bonus point.”

“Do you remember?”

“Look, I'm sorry if I offended you, Daniel. I was making a point is all. Rest assured, most kids your age haven't been in love yet. It's perfectly normal.”

“But I
have
been in love,” Daniel said. “I
am
in love.”

Now this was a genuine surprise. “That's wonderful, Daniel. I'm happy for you. I myself didn't fall in love until I was a couple of years—”

“With a native.”

“I see.” Daniel was turning out to be far more interesting than Dylan had ever given him credit for. “Male or female, may I ask?”

“Does it matter?”

“I suppose not. Though either way I can't help but wonder what your parents think.”

“That's just it. I can't tell them. My father would be repulsed if he knew. He might even kill me. He insists that I'm to marry a Korean Earthling female someday, but the problem is I'm not attracted to Korean Earthling females. I'm attracted to Kwizok.”

“Nice name.” New Taiwanese names were all unisex, so Daniel hadn't inadvertently given anything away.

“The nicest.”

“And how did you meet this Kwizok?”

“Kwizok is my next-door neighbor. We've grown up together. We're less than a month apart in age.”

“I see. And has Kwizok told his or her parents?”

“No, Kwizok's situation is exactly the same as mine. Kwizok's parents are ultra-conservative. Kwizok's mom even chairs the Committee on the Prevention of Alien Diseases.”

“But Kwizok himself or herself knows how you feel?”

“Oh, it's absolutely mutual. We're in love. We're going to get married someday. We already are in every way that counts. We've been having sex in the crawlspace beneath my house since summer.”

“I see. You're using some sort of protection, I hope?”

“I don't feel comfortable answering that.”

“Okay, then would you remind me what all this has to do with English class?”

“I was afraid.”

“I need more.”

“You taught us all about Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg, and The Method, and when I was practicing my scene at home, I thought of Kwizok and I know my acting was great, Mr. Green—I
know
it was. I even started thinking maybe I really could be an actor someday. Maybe this was my destiny. But then the other day when I was acting here, I got nervous. I saw all my classmates out there and how they weren't taking the assignment seriously and I just wimped out. I got through the whole scene without thinking about Kwizok even once. I was just saying the words. I let my fear crowd out my love and I totally failed you, to say nothing of Kwizok.”

“This is
not
just about the grade then?”

“I think it's about regret, Mr. Green. I'm not ready to have one this big.”

“I know a thing or two about that,” Dylan said.

“Really?”

“Trust me.”

“But your life seems so…perfect.”

Ha! Dylan liked to believe that training students in the close reading of texts ultimately translated into their learning to read the extra-textual world as well—so much for that.

“Thanks for saying so, Daniel. I assure you we've all got our quota of suffering to fill, but it's nice to hear I don't always wear mine on my sleeve.”

Daniel twitched. He was reverting to his usual, anxious self.

“So about your scene,” Dylan continued. “I can't change your grade. If I gave you the opportunity to do that, I'd have to offer it to everyone in the class and we haven't got time for that. I can, however, give you the opportunity to redeem yourself to yourself if you like.”

Dylan bent down, took a book from the shelf and handed it to Daniel. It was entitled
The Ages of Man
. A wizened English teacher had given it to him as a high school graduation gift however-many ages ago that was.

“Instead of redoing the scene you already did, Daniel, why don't you flip through this book and find a monologue that suits you? That way you won't need to rely on other actors. You can perform it for the class whenever you're ready.”

Daniel paged through the book as if it were in Shakespeare's own hand. “Thank you so much, Mr. Green. I promise to make you proud.”

“Again, don't worry about me, Daniel. Do it for yourself.”

Daniel mouth-smiled.

“And for Kwizok, of course,” Dylan added.

And now Daniel smiled with his whole being. It was good, sometimes, this being a teacher.

They walked out of the room together.

“Be safe,” Dylan said.

“Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Green,” Daniel said. As if time were ever anyone's.

Daniel took off down the hall. Dylan was going that way too, but slower. He still had half a bullshit meeting to attend.

• • •

And then one Sunday, right on schedule, Dylan turned forty. It was no big deal, a Sunday like any other, if a touch more pleasant by design. He played in the yard with the kids, ate some instant
zalcax
34
for lunch, and took a nap. At dusk, he went for his first jog in years and had the good sense to keep it short. Then for dinner, as promised, Erin made ravioli, his favorite, with real olive oil and real garlic. It wasn't as good as his mother's, of course, but it was the same recipe and pretty darned close. For dessert, they had a simple chocolate cake that the kids had helped bake. They dimmed the lights and sang to him. He silently wished for peace, both inner and outer, and let the kids help him blow the candles out. To be sure, it took a while, and the cake was now iced in spit, but he ate it anyway, and went back for seconds.

Then Thursday, after work, he went to his GP for a check-up. He was at the start of a new decade and his psyche was purged; a clean bill of health would round out his rebirth.

Fortunately, the fiber-optics-in-the-anus colonoscopy had gone the way of trepanation and the medical leech. These days x-rays and lasers were powerful enough to image you down to the individual quark—you didn't even have to take your clothes off—so the forty-year-old check-up was no longer the rite of passage it had once been.

The whole thing took five minutes. The verdict: healthy on all counts, with the sole exception of his tinnitus, which rang on unabated. Omni's opinion? “TBD.” But the ringing no longer bothered Dylan so much. He had yet to schedule another appointment with Fudge, and he was beginning to think he might not. If silence was determined to sound like the whirring of United Planets Cruiser C57-D in
Forbidden Planet
, then so be it. The consistency was almost comforting if he let it be: one more precious absurdity to cling to, one more tightrope over the void.

Just thinking of Fudge, however, reminded Dylan of his unfinished business with Mei-Ling Chen/Jade Astrophil, not to mention the corrupt Omniverse, and it dawned on him that he would not be able to enter fully into this next phase of his life, this new
age
, until he'd tied up the threads of the last one. Would he were the taskmaster of his own brain and not the other way around.

And so, that very evening, after the rest of his family had gone to bed, he picked up the trail where he'd left off—namely, Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles.

• • •

Jade Astrophil had been discharged from Good Samaritan twice in the past year. Omni would no longer confirm this for him, but he'd seen it with his own eyes, and it was the only lead he had to go on. Now all he had to do was somehow gain access to her medical records. Alas, this was no small “somehow.” He knew nothing about how to hack into such information; from what he understood, that had become all but impossible nowadays anyway. His best bet might be to hire someone to impersonate her, but it was not enough for the impersonator to resemble her and know some basic facts about her life. Even on Earth, no hospital was going to grant access to medical records without first scanning the inquirer's genome. Moreover, the body site sampled was typically random by design. He didn't have a DNA sample anyway. He could find some saliva on her letter perhaps, but even then, what was he going to do? Clone her and wait a couple of decades for the clone to grow up? There had to be a more efficient way.

There
was
one obvious way, of course: he could simply report to Earth Government on what had happened and let
them
track her down, but he saw two problems with this approach: 1) they might not believe him, and he had nothing in the way of evidence to corroborate his story; and 2) even if they did believe him, it would very likely be because they were in cahoots with whatever shadowy authority had conspired to erase Mei-Ling/Jade from existence in the first place. The risks clearly outweighed the benefits.

Plan B, then, might involve—very lightly—greasing some palms. He didn't personally know anyone who worked at Good Samaritan Hospital, but having been based out of LA for a couple of years, he did know quite a few people in that city. Maybe one of them would have an inside connection? Certainly one of them would know someone who knew someone. But as soon as he began to flip through his mental rolodex of LA contacts, he realized he couldn't actually get in touch with any of them since all were connected up in some way with Hollywood and/or the life he'd sworn off years ago—and Wendy Sorenson had already given him a scarifying object lesson in the dangers of revisiting the past.

He did, however, have one contact whose friendship ought to transcend Hollywood insofar as it preceded it.

• • •

Chad had never really forgiven Dylan for his success. After Dylan eventually told him about his meeting with Terry Gilliam at Xando, he had seemed to share in the excitement, but with each of Dylan's subsequent triumphs—as he auditioned and made it to call-backs, as he got the part and put school on hiatus, as
E.T. II
came out to rave reviews—Chad's responses grew cooler; and after Dylan's Oscar nomination for best male lead, Chad didn't even bother to call.

To be sure, Chad had been doing fine in his own right, earning academic credits and starring in the Temple University productions. Dylan even flew in from LA once just to see him play the professor in Ionesco's
The Lesson
. He was brilliant, but when Dylan told him as much at the South Street Diner after the show, Chad just rolled his eyes and said, “Whatever.”

“No, I'm serious,” Dylan assured him. “You made some really bold choices up there. Like that voice-cracking thing. I'm not sure I'd have had the guts. In front of a live audience, no less. But it really worked. You seemed totally unhinged in just the right way. I hope you realize I have every intention of connecting you up with the right people as soon as I gain a little more clout in the industry.”

“Do you have any idea how patronizing that sounds?” Chad said.

“Sorry, dude, but if I've learned anything in my brief time in Hollywood, it's that connections are paramount. No pun intended.”

“I don't believe that,” Chad said. “If you're good enough, people will eventually sit up and take notice.”

“Isn't it pretty to think so?”

“It worked for you.”

“I got extremely lucky is all, Chad. I had the face Gilliam was looking for. No amount of training will ever give you the face a director is looking for.”

“Oh, come on,” Chad said. “Give yourself some credit. You're talented as shit. You were going to make it no matter what.”

“You've clearly got more faith in the system than I do,” Dylan said. Some part of him was still in denial about his success; he would learn to enjoy it for a total of about five minutes before it went away for good.