King of the Worlds (30 page)
Read King of the Worlds Online
Authors: M. Thomas Gammarino
“What does that have to do with anything?” Dylan asked.
“What is this âCane'?” the doctor asked.
“Cane is the toad I brought from Earth for religious reasons.
Bufo marinus
.”
“Interesting,” the doctor said.
“
What's
interesting?” Erin said. “Why is that interesting?”
“The skin is toxic,” Wendy said. “Under normal circumstances the toxicity is no big deal, but that's why I don't let the kids touch him. If Junior threatened him in some way, though, Cane's glands might have shot fluid into his mouth or eyes. And since Junior puts everything in his mouth these daysâ”
“âPut,'” Dylan said. “Past tense.”
“Yes, of course. Sorry.” A tear welled up in her left eye. She wiped it away with the back of her hand and sniffled. “Anyway, there's a chance he may have licked Cane's skin directly. Many a teenager has died that way because the skin also secretes a mild hallucinogen.”
Erin was shaking her head in disbelief. “Are you telling me my baby might have hallucinated to death?”
“Erin, I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am. Will you pray with me?”
“Fuck you,” Dylan said, suppressing an urge to strangle her outright.
Erin rolled her eyes and took some deep breaths. She was barely keeping it together. “He was crying when I put him to bed last night, but I didn't think there was anything very unusual about that.”
So this was going to be the explanation, was it? Their baby had died for no real reason. Foul play would have been comprehensible at least, but if he had truly died of plain negligence, that was just the worst thing in the worlds. Junior's death could not even be considered a sacrifice. It meant exactly nothing.
“And would you mind telling us,” Dylan said, “why you didn't think to inform us that your toad was toxic?”
“I was afraid you might object to my keeping him.”
“And why ever would we do that?” Dylan asked. “Because it might give one of our children a fucking heart attack?”
Wendy winced. Erin broke down and began to sob. Through the heaves, he heard her say, “You never wanted him anyway.”
That did it. He couldn't stand another minute here. Wherever he went now would be hell, but at least that hell might not be as claustrophobic as this one.
So he left the room and took the elevator down to the first floor. As soon as the doors opened, he began runningâthrough the lobby, out the exit, and onto the street. On a whim, he went left. He had no destination in mind and no thoughts to slow himâhe was just running. To his left, old Lem was on the rise, a purple orb in the tarnished sky. His heart hammered, and his pajamas grew heavy with sweat, but he kept on running until the whole world was awake, Lem golden and streaming and too bright to look at.
When he finally stopped for a breather, he was right in the heart of the Grind. As if on cue, an exceedingly lovely
azalfud
of indeterminate age sidled up to him and asked if he wanted to spend some time. The
azalfud
had warm eyes, a drum-tight belly, and boobs you could take a sabbatical in. His name, he said, was Zimklut.
For the first time in Dylan's life, he conceded that he did indeed want to spend some time.
Zimklut took him to a no-frills room and unceremoniously slipped out of his clothes. His body was as gorgeous as any nebula, but Dylan could not get past theâas it happened, rather enormousâpenis. So he made a request: “Would you mind maybe just holding me and rocking me for a while?” This was no act of mercy. Dylan was no moral crusader, no Holden Caulfield or Travis Bickle; penises, bifurcated or otherwise, just didn't happen to be his thing. The touch of another hominid, though: this he needed more than ever.
“Sure, baby. Whatever you want.”
So Zimklut lay back on the bed like some gender-reassigned Titian nude and Dylan lay beside him with his head tucked in the valley of Zimklut's voluptuous chest. Then, for the better part of a New Taiwanese hour, Zimklut stroked Dylan's thinning hair and hummed native nursery
rhymes.
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Dylan kept expecting to cry, but evidently his body wasn't ready for that yet.
45
_____________
More than a few xenomusicologists had commented on the probability-busting resemblance of New Taiwanese music to Western-Terran music: virtually every genreâclassical, jazz, pop, metal, etc.âhad its counterpart; the most pervasive time signature was 4/4 (which Earthlings sometimes refer to as “common time”), and, most remarkably perhaps, the natives had independently developed a system based on an octave of twelve semitones from which they had derived all of the same diatonic scales. Whereas the default scale for Earthling music was the major scale, however, the default for the New Taiwanese ear was what Earthlings call the Lydian mode, i.e. the major scale with a raised fourth degree. When Dylan had first arrived on New Taiwan, most native music sounded to him like sly variations on Danny Elfman's theme for
The Simpsons
. Over time he acquired an ear for it, though, and he'd even hummed some of these very nursery rhymes to his own kids, all three of them, while they were still warm, cooing babies.
When his hour was up, he paid via omni and hailed an androcab to the teleport. Despite his current feelings about Wendy Sorenson, he requested that the driver be Frank Sinatra and that he just go ahead and sing whatever song he felt like singing; he thought there might be some refamiliarizing comfort in that musky American voice. And maybe it was the case that any one of Sinatra's torch songs would have evinced some correspondence with Dylan's tempest-tossed inner life, but the couple of verses he did sing before Dylan cut him off were just painfully on the nose:
Last night when we were young
Love was a star, a song unsung
Life was so new, so real so right
Ages ago last night
Today the world is old
You flew away and time grew cold
Where is that star that seemed so bright
Ages ago last night?
On hearing that, Dylan waved away the window and blew chunks on the street.
“Are you all right?” Old Blue Eyes asked.
“I will be if you'll just go ahead and be yourself again.”
“I'm sorry, Mr. Green, but I have no stable âself' to speak of.”
“I'm not sure I do either, but what I mean is, go back to your default androcabby persona please. No entertainment required.”
“As you wish, sir,” Sinatra said, and then he transformed himself once again on the spot.
Dylan thought how nice it must be to be able to do that.
⢠⢠â¢
While waiting for his scan at the teleport, Dylan queried Omni, “Why me?”
The reply came back, “TBD”âproof enough that Omni wasn't God yet, because if it were, it would know his pain and give a fuck.
⢠⢠â¢
For want of another destination, Dylan QT'd to Earth again, back to his parents' house, back
home
. He arrived in the early afternoon when old Sol was blazing hotter than he remembered it ever having done before. His parents appeared to be out somewhere, maybe playing pickleball, which was a thing Erin had told him they now did. Going in the pool was a no-brainer, but first Dylan walked the mile or so to the pool store and bought a hundred-hour Hydropatch. Along the way, he passed the old Borders where he'd once worked, now an outlet shoe store. By the time he got back, he was rancid with sweat and desperate for the plunge, but the water was so warm that, even as he dove in, his skin barely registered the change. He surfaced, unpeeled the back of the Hydropatch and affixed it to his neck, and submerged himself in the deep end. For a few minutes he floated around like an astronaut out on an EVA. Then he settled on the bottom and gazed up toward the surface where the sky was now an undulating crystal orifice in the pool's turquoise skin.
And he stayed like that for the next four days. He drank the pool water and peed when he needed to. Once, he shat near the drain. Otherwise, he just lay there on the bottom blowing bubbles and listening to the electric buzz inside his head. Sometimes he seemed to be immersed in blue Jell-O, other times in lukewarm coffee. His heart rate slowed so much that it was difficult to say for certain whether or not he did any sleeping. He wasn't doing anything really. He wasn't thinking, wasn't grieving. He was just being at the bottom of a swimming pool for a hundred hoursâsometimes that is all you can do.
And then, on the fifth day, he drew his last breath from the Hydropatch and returned to the surface. He climbed out on the ladder and lay back on one of the recliners, all the skin of his body now gone as pruny as any fingertip. He rediscovered the freckle in his left palm and the line-break in his right, exactly where they'd always been. Then he studied the amorphous clouds, became them, until the screen door squeaked open and slammed shut and he snapped back inside his body again.
“Hello?” his mother called.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Dylan?”
“I'm sorry I didn't tell you I was coming, Mom. I needed to get away for a while.”
“My God!” She rushed to him like Tavi to the tree on Christmas morning. He stood up and hugged her tight. They rocked back and forth. It wasn't clear who was doing the rocking; maybe they both were.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
“Just long enough for a dip. Erin hasn't omni'd?”
“I don't believe so. Should she have?”
Dylan had holo-chatted with his mother via omni at least a couple of times a month for the past twenty yearsâand the holograms were no longer faint and washed-out the way they used to be, so seeing her in the flesh was nothing newâbut
feeling
her, reaching out to find she was made of solid matter; and even
smelling
her again, nosing those pheromones that had identified her as his mother before he'd ever so much as opened his eyesâthese experiences were achingly wonderful.
“Come on in. I'll make you some lunch. Your father will be so excited to see you.”
They passed through the old-fashioned screen door. Dylan's father was right where Dylan had left him that age or so ago: at the kitchen table, doing a cryptogram.
“Look what I found out by the pool,” his mother said.
His dad pushed out his chair and sprang to his feet. “That couldn't be who I think it is?”
“Hi, Dad.”
“Son! What ever are you doing here?” He firmly and vigorously shook Dylan's hand. “Rest of the family with you?”
“No, Dad. It's just me. I had to get away for a bit.”
His father pursed his lips. “Nothing too serious, I hope?”
Dylan shook his head. How could he possibly tell them that their newborn grandson, whom they had yet to meet, had predeceased them?
“Have a seat,” his mother said, indicating the leather sofa in the adjoining living room. “Can I get you something? How about a nice iced tea?”
“Great,” Dylan said, plopping himself on the sofa.
His dad took a seat in the armchair across from him. “I wasn't sure this day would ever come.”
“It's great to see you too, Dad.”
The old man had hardly changed. All of his cells had been replaced many times over, of course, but barring a few new wrinkles across the forehead, the bundle was much the same.
“You can stay here one night.”
“What?” This was hardly the warmest of welcomes.
“We'd love to have you stay longer, of course, but if you're here as you say because you âneed to get away for a bit,' well then that's no reason to be staying any longer than a night.”
“I see,” Dylan said. It felt a bit like being kicked in the nuts.
“Do you want to talk about whatever's going on?”
“Not really. Not right now.”
“Fair enough, I won't pry, but you've got to trust me on this one. I spent enough of my life being afraid to know that it's about the worst thing you can do. I mean it, son, I'm old enough now that I've got some perspective on these matters. I've grown wise in my old age, you might say.”
Dylan's mother snickered from the kitchen, but Dylan himself was still stuck on the part where his father had been afraid of something in his life. Dylan couldn't recall him owning up to
any
sort of vulnerability before. As the quintessential
self-made man,
46
he tended to ooze grit and optimism; “fear” had never been a part of his vocabulary.
46
_____________
A high school dropout and graduate of the school of hard knocks, Dylan's father had gone on to make a killing on his common sense by pioneering the bottled water industry. For decades, he turned a considerable profit, first with his own local concern, Water Works Ltd., and then as a consultant to the Coca Cola Company. Since his son's exodus, however, he had turned his attention to what environmentalists began referring to in the late nineties as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a chemical sludge spanning an area twice the size of Texas halfway between California and Hawaii, for which petroleum-derived bottles
â
and therefore
he
â
were largely to blame. By way of making amends, he'd donated a sizable portion of his life savings to Project Pacific, the think tank that eventually succeeded in getting those suspended polymers solidified into a new continent roughly the size of Greenland. These days, that continent, dubbed Polymerica, served as an overcrowded penal colony for industrial polluters from the entire Solar System.
“Don't listen to your mother,” the old man went on. “That's my first pearl of wisdom for you. The second is this: running away from your problems, however big or small, is a mistake. Do you hear me? It's a
mistake
. You've got to learn to love your problems. This is what separates the successful from the unsuccessful, and boy do I wish someone had told me that when I was your age. You've got to man up to whatever challenge is facing you.
Lean into difficulty
. And I'm not just talking about financially successful people here, mind you. I mean anyone who succeeds at finding meaning in life. These people know that if you fall down, you get up again, period. You don't bitch and complain. You don't try to escape into booze or women the way I used to. No, you just stand up and face your fears because you've got some goal or value that transcends those fears and you know it.”