King of the Worlds (8 page)

“Why would we want to be babies again? Isn't education about getting us to stop being babies?”

“In part, yes, but it's also to get you to see things,
really
see them, as if for the first time. We could never hurt one another if only we learned to look with new eyes.”

“But aren't babies like naturally really selfish? Don't you have to
teach
a baby to be nice?”

They were right, of course. He was romanticizing. He had this tendency.

And there was this too: If you checked your omni, you'd find that nearly every combination of five or fewer words that you could think of, however nonsensical, had been documented countless times. The English language itself, one might say, was dying through overuse and becoming one big meta-cliché. Dylan consoled himself with a quote he'd once read from a twentieth-century Earthling scientist: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we
can
suppose.” How the unvanquished youth in him hoped it was so!

This was as close as Dylan ever got to praying anymore, and it ended, as per some prayers, with gratitude: he thanked the Universe, whatever that might mean, for this beautiful, healthy baby boy who had his eyes.

PART TWO

STRANGE-MAKER

Paternity leave wasn't all so wonderful. Dylan was sleeping fitfully—which was to be expected, what with the new infant. And even if there had been no infant, the fact was, despite his best efforts, he was fundamentally bad at vacationing. Forbidding himself to work inevitably resulted in the accumulation of anxiety. He worried about everything he
should
be doing, and that anxiety steadily built up steam until on the tenth day it found sufficient cause to explode: he'd taken the last of the Cochlerin several days ago, and damn it to hell if his ears weren't still ringing loud as ever. He scheduled a visit with Dr. Cohen for that very afternoon.

“To be frank with you,” she told Dylan, eyes squinty with concern, “I've never seen anything like this. There's really been no change at all?”

“None whatsoever.”

“See, that's so strange. Ordinarily the Cochlerin should have done most of its work by the fourth or fifth day. I have teenagers who come in here newly deafened every couple of weeks. Do you know that since hair cell regeneration went live, concerts have gotten up to thirty percent louder?”

“That's interesting,” Dylan replied, though really he was much more interested in how he was going to get this goddamned ringing to stop.

“So what do you say we do that hearing test after all?”

Dylan grudgingly accepted. He already knew what they were going to find: he was growing old.

He went in the sound booth, pressed buttons when he heard beeps, and repeated after Dr. Cohen words like “baseball,” “hot dog,” and “ansible.”

“Okay, you're all done,” she said.

“That's it?”

“That's all she wrote.”

“Well?”

“I hate to tell you this, Mr. Green, but—”

“Give it to me. I'm ready for it.”

“Your hearing is perfectly normal.”

“Come again?”

“You heard me loud and clear. I have an audiogram here to prove it.”

“Really? Normal?”

“Really normal.”

“So what does that mean then with regard to the ringing?”

“It's tough to say exactly, except that the problem seems to be not with your cochlear hair cells as would typically be the case.”

“So where is it then?”

“We'll have to run some tests, but it could be in your auditory nerve or beyond.”

“Beyond?”

“Your brain, Mr. Green.”

“I see. So I don't have any hearing damage, but I might have brain damage?”

“I can't say anything with any certainty at this point, Mr. Green, but I'd like to do a functional MRI if that's okay with you.”

He shrugged his shoulders. She got the fMRI helmet out of its case and fitted it to his head. She read the results from her omni. “Hmm.”

“Is there a problem?”

“None that I can see. None whatsoever. I'm not a specialist, but this is telling me everything's tip-top.”

“So where does that leave us?” he asked. “I assure you I'm not just crying wolf here. My ears are really screaming.”

“I have no cause to doubt that, Mr. Green. The next indication here would be for me to refer you to a psychiatrist. There might be a psychosomatic component to your condition. Do you have an inordinate amount of stress in your life, would you say?”

“Define ‘inordinate.'”

She smiled. “All right then, if it's agreeable to you, I'm going to refer you to Dr. Minus Fudge. MD in psychiatry from Stanford. He's wonderful, and right next door.”

Dylan nodded his assent.

“Don't worry,” she assured him. “We'll get to the bottom of this.”

He thanked her for her concern and left the office feeling even shittier than before. She'd been so confident last time in telling him his condition was curable that he had expected another course of Cochlerin at most, a stronger dosage perhaps. He had not expected any talk of brain damage, let alone neurosis. Could that be right? Was he doing this to himself? The ringing certainly seemed to be as objectively real as a fever or a broken bone. When he'd first noticed it, he'd even asked Erin if she didn't hear it too. He'd tried countless times to wish it away, talk it down, reason with it, berate it, cajole it, but it didn't seem to interact with the stuff of thought at all. But maybe that's what it's like to lose one's mind? Surely madmen don't
will
themselves mad. They lose control, become unhinged.
Fuck
. It felt like the beginning of the end, like he had embarked on that downward slope that would lead him through senility and decrepitude to bodily death and the ultimate indignity of oblivion.

He dropped by the drugstore downstairs and got the
diaper batteries Erin had requested.
18
He wasn't ready to go home yet, so he went in the coffee shop next door. Dylan had actually come to prefer
poxna
to coffee, but it was nice to be in an American-style coffee house again. It was not unlike the one in the Borders he'd worked at several lifetimes ago. He ordered an espresso con panna and taught the barista how to make it. It was at once anticlimactic and altogether wonderful to have that particular combination of chemicals on his tongue again. He took a seat. The place was filled with native students mainly. Right next to him a rather lovely native male sat sipping his coffee and crocheting with carbon nanotube bundles. Dylan could hardly stop himself from staring until the creature caught him looking and changed his position. Dylan reminded himself that the thing had a penis anyway. He blinked on his omni, pretended he had something to do, and then realized that maybe he did. “Project a QWERTY keyboard on this table,” he instructed under his breath. It had become trendy of late to use a more ergonomic keyboard configuration like Colemak or Capewell, but Dylan was an old dog.

The keyboard appeared. Dylan began to type.

Dear Ashley,

I'm sorry to be so late in the reply. I wonder if you'd like to have lunch with me at the Inner Harbor this Saturday at noon?

– Dylan Greenyears

He hadn't known he was going to do this until he did it, but then he hadn't known he was losing his mind either. If cum was befogging his thoughts, well then so be it—the fog was life too. And much as he believed in the sanctity of marriage, he did not, it turned out, believe in it at the expense of the sanctity of his life itself, which somehow had a whole new urgency to it.

He chose Saturday for good reason: he happened to know there was some big K-12 conference in Minneapolis this weekend. He wasn't scheduled to go, but a few of his colleagues were. He'd been invited to this sort of thing a few times in his early years at the school, but in the interim he'd earned a well-deserved reputation as a bona fide exile; unlike most of his Terran coworkers, he hadn't returned to Earth even once since they'd come up here (Erin, by contrast, made it home once every two or three years), and until now he'd been thoroughly convinced he didn't want to. He'd been so wounded by his home planet that he'd forsworn it altogether. But then he'd been wounded by
this
planet too, however gradually. Or maybe that was just the ineradicable memory of that other place intruding on this one—you can't escape the fourth dimension by moving along any of the first three. Indeed, if there was anything to the old truism about time healing wounds, those that didn't outright
kill
you anyway, then why was it depicted as an arrow? Why not an unfurling roll of gauze or some such thing? The IV drip of time?

In any event, Dylan didn't get what was so important about
physically
traveling to a conference now that the omni could bring it to you and/or you to it, but his colleagues relished any excuse to take a trip—and now he would too.

• • •

Back at home, he found Erin nursing Junior on the sofa and gave her the bad news: “Get this. Cindy called. She's quote-unquote ‘highly recommending' I go to this conference in Minneapolis this weekend.”

“
The
Minneapolis? On Earth?”

“Do you believe that?”

“At the tail end of your paternity leave? Can I assume you told her no?”

“Actually I told her I'd check with you and get back to her.”

“She didn't say you
have
to go, though, did she?”

“No. She implied it, but fuck her. I'll tell her I can't. I'll tell her you need me here. It's just a job after all.”

Erin looked up at the ceiling, face pinched with thinking.

To be sure, it was more than just a job, and Dylan knew she thought so too. It was a symbol, or something. For their first nine years out here, he had taught English to the native population at a cram school, which was the gig he'd been recruited for. He liked the work less and less each year, but it allowed them to stay and paid his tuition while he worked at night toward finishing his BA from Temple via omni, and then his MA in Modernist and Postmodernist Literature from Yale, also via omni. He'd been crazy busy, but he'd wanted it that way; the last thing he needed was time to get sucked into the black hole of what-might-have-been. Erin, meanwhile, picked up a gig teaching human biology full-time at the American School. She made good money and enjoyed working with high school kids so much that she coached cross-country and choreographed the musicals too. When he finished his degree, Erin tapped her connections and got him a job in the English department at the school, and for a handful of years they'd enjoyed living on pretty much identical schedules: they'd wake up at the same time, eat breakfast, and roll to work together; they'd meet up for
poxna
breaks in the teachers' lounge; and they'd roll home together. They were careful, though, to give each other ample space during the workday and made a point of eating lunch together no more than twice a week. Even when they did eat together, they generally stayed on campus, and not only because the cafeteria food was decent and cheap, but because on this alien world so far from home, however bathetically unstrange, there was something especially comforting about the American-high-schoolness of the American School—every bit as distinctive a quality as Irish-pubness or Starbucks-ness. They certainly hadn't
expected
any resemblance to Cardinal O'Hara, the Catholic high school in Springfield, Pennsylvania, where they'd first met all those years ago in
Jesus Christ Superstar
. The American School had a lot more money than O'Hara ever had, so it was no surprise that the infrastructure was all-around swankier, but the effect of all those hopeful student voices—and worlds-weary faculty ones—echoing down the halls, combined with the adolescent reek of PE and cheap perfume, was as good as any
time machine
19
and transported the Greens on a daily basis to that other school on their home planet where'd they'd fallen so blithely and uncynically in love and planned their days around trips to each other's lockers so that they could lock lips for all of twenty-five usually-pretty-halitotic-but-what-did-they-care seconds before they had to rejoin the hallway traffic and race the bell to remote classrooms where they would pass the time by tessellating their notebooks with “I
♥
DG” or “I
♥
EW” and lose themselves in daydreams of last weekend, or next weekend, or some weekend twenty years from now. Earth was the only world then, and they were the only lovers. That Dylan and Erin did indeed find themselves together two decades hence felt like a great triumph. They had weathered so much and now here they were, returned to the apex of some miraculous cycle and stealing kisses at school.

Then they'd started making babies and entered into a whole new stage in their lives together.

“This sucks,” Dylan said, making his final play. “I should just tell her to go screw herself.”

“You know what?” Erin said.

“What?”

“You should go. I can get along without you for a couple of days.”

“But you know how I feel about that planet.”

“Dylan, we can hardly afford for you to jeopardize your career right now. Think of the children.”

“You're not serious?”

“I am, actually. It'll be good for you to see Earth again. Maybe you'll find that it's changed…or that you have.”

He sighed and ran his fingers though his hair. “You really want me to go?”

She nodded. “I do.”

“All right,” he said. “Fine. I'll do it. I'm not happy about it, mind you, but I'll do it.”

If he felt a touch sorry for her, he consoled himself that she no doubt had her own secrets hidden away in her bosom behind the milk ducts. And anyway as far as he could tell she'd basically gotten what she wanted out of life, while he'd lost it all. Okay, he'd gotten
her
, but now she was the self-actualized, essentially happy human being while he was…something else. Could anyone blame him for trying to change his destiny before it grew too late?

“Thank you, honey,” she said, and she kissed him on the cheek and went back to giving suck.