King of the Worlds

by M. Thomas Gammarino

  Also by M. Thomas Gammarino:

  Big in Japan: A (Hungry) Ghost Story

  Jellyfish Dreams (Kindle Single)

  Copyright 2016

  By M. Thomas Gammarino

  Publisher:

  Chin Music Press

  1501 Pike Place, Suite 329

  Seattle, WA 98101

  www.chinmusicpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gammarino, M. Thomas, 1978- author.

  Title: King of the worlds / M. Thomas Gammarino.

  Description: First edition. | Seattle : Chin Music Press Inc., [2016] | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015045067 (print) | LCCN 2015039291 (ebook) | ISBN 9781634059091 (epub) | ISBN 1634059093 (epub) | ISBN 9781634059084 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 1634059085 (hardcover : acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Life on other planets--Fiction. | Actors--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Science Fiction / General. | GSAFD: Black humor (Literature) | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3607.A438 (print) | LCC PS3607.A438 K56 2016 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045067

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-63405-908-4

  First [1] Edition

  Book design by Dan D Shafer

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Author’s Note on

  Publisher’s Note

  Here we have your boilerplate disclaimer. For the record, I heartily endorse the first sentence. Over the course of several years, I made this story up. It makes no claims on history, except maybe in some of the oblique, figurative, poetic ways that non-documentary art can. Mere facts are beside the point.

  I’m also on board with the first clause of the second sentence. Art abhors a vacuum, so like my more energetic cousin DJ Throdown I dig through heaps of American detritus and reuse and recycle. For me, the detritus comes from both culture and personal experience, but can I just make one thing clear please? I don’t do roman-à-clefs. There is never a one-to-one correspondence between any of my characters and a flesh-and-blood human being, myself emphatically included. If you recognize yourself in one of my grotesques, forgive me and keep on reading; you won’t know yourself for long.

  I’m much less sure what to make of the disclaimer’s final clause. It’s that word “coincidence” that hangs me up. I mean, no, when I write about, say, the film director James Cameron in this novel, it is certainly not a coincidence if the character bears some resemblance to his real-world counterpart, who really did direct a film called Titanic and who really is reputed to have one hell of a temper. Still, it should be clear to any reasonable reader that I have repurposed that bundle of attributes, as I have every other celebrity who gets mention in these pages. To be sure, I don’t know these people except as semiotic bundles, the gods and archetypes the culture throws up daily, and it is those public personae, as much a part of the furniture of American life as Coke or Viagra, that you’ll find transmigrated into the universe in your hands—which universe, I might mention, is explicitly an alternate one.

  Of course, if the multiverse is real and infinite, then, with the possible exception of certain fantasy writers, novelists have been writing non-fiction all along…and all our twitchy disclaimers are void.

  For my family—infinite thanks for sharing this universe with me.

  KING OF THE WORLDS

  THE LOST YEARS OF DYLAN GREEN

  “We are like butterflies who flutter for

  a day and think it’s forever.”

  —Carl Sagan, Cosmos

  PART ONE

  MOST LIKELY

  TO BE FAMOUS

  Young Daniel Young nodded his dopey head and blinked back tears.

  “Remember,” Dylan went on. “All of your longing is focused on this one human being. If you can’t have her, you’d rather not live. You’ve got to make us feel that. Do you have any idea what I’m saying to you?”

  Daniel nodded again. It was clear if you looked at his trembling chin and jutting lower lip that he was barely keeping it together. If you looked only at his hair, though, the way it bounced and shone, you could pretend he was enjoying this.

  Dylan took a sip of his poxna,1 but his adrenals had dried up hours ago. “You know what, Daniel, I’ll cut you a deal: make us feel anything other than embarrassed for you and I’ll give you an A.”

  1_____________

  Caffeinated beverage roughly halfway between coffee and tea. Taste-wise, it’s rather more like the former, bitter and earthy, but like the latter it’s extracted from leaves, not beans, specifically the leaves of the deciduous Poxna tree, a.k.a. New-Taiwanese Tentacle Elm.

  That was mean, and Dylan knew it, but he had about as much empathy left in him as energy. For Christ’s sake, he was tired. His eyes stung, his ears had been ringing for days, and on top of having three preps this semester, he’d stayed up late last night grading a stack of aggressively uninspired essays on The Catcher in the Rye.

  “Daniel, have you ever been in love?”

  “I don’t know,” Daniel replied.

  “Then you haven’t. If you’d ever been in love, you’d know it.”

  One of the cool things about being a high school teacher was getting to drop well-meaning chestnuts like this without having to rack your brains over whether they held up to scrutiny.

  Daniel hung his head.

  Tiffany Wilson, the redhead who’d months since faded into the curtains, spoke up for what might have been the first time all quarter: “Why are you so mean today?”

  She hadn’t even raised her hand. Good—she was alive.

  “Look at him,” Tiffany went on, gesturing toward Daniel. “He’s practically in tears.”

  Dylan looked, and right on cue a chubby tear slid down the poor kid’s cheek and onto the floor. Dylan softened his approach: “I apologize, Daniel. I want you to get it right is all, to put some feeling into it. Call it tough love.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Green. I’m aware of the fact that I suck.”

  “You don’t suck, Daniel. Don’t ever say that again. You’re doing fine. You’re just…young. You’ve barely lived. I have to keep reminding myself of that.”

  “We’re only fourteen,” Tiffany put in, belaboring the very legitimate point. Dylan had lived so many lives already, he had to keep reminding himself that his students had lived just this one.

  “How old do you think I am?” Dylan asked.

  The students perked up. Shakespeare they could do without, but games they liked.

  “Forty-seven?” Tiffany guessed.

  “He’s not that old,” said Lauren Delay, the blonde milquetoast who sat to Tiffany’s left. If she was trying to curry favor with him, she was doing an outstanding job of it—that is, until she continued: “He’s like…forty-fourish?”

  “Anyone else want to venture a guess?” Dylan asked, more desperate than they could possibly know or understand.

  “Fifty?” Kai Fitzpatrick chimed in. “Fifty-three?”

  “Sixty?” Amanda Cruz hazarded. It was a bit like being pierced with a bullet. Amanda was the prettiest girl Dylan had ever taught. She was so pretty that, as a rule,
he tried not to look at her.

  “I’m thirty-nine,” Dylan declared at last.

  “That’s it?” Amanda said.

  Okay then, he’d had enough of this for one day. “You know what? I’m letting you go early. We’ll work on the scene some more tomorrow.”

  The young people surged with new energy as they packed up their things and made a beeline for their extra-curricular lives, though not without pausing on their way out to say “Thank you, Mr. Green” or “Have a nice day, Mr. Green.”

  It always amazed him how adept these kids were at compartmentalizing, how they thought you could accuse a thirty-nine-year-old of being sixty and then wish him a good day and honestly expect him to have one.

  At any rate, he tried, unsuccessfully, to smile. He’d read once—albeit long after such knowledge might have saved his acting career—about some muscle up by the eyes that gives away a counterfeit smile every time. The only way to act a smile convincingly is the Method way, which is to say you’ve got to remember something happy—but Dylan had stopped subjecting himself to that sort of masochism years ago.

  • • •

  “Daddy!” cried Arthur.

  “Da—y!” near-echoed Tavi, who was better with her vowels than her consonants.

  “Kids!” Dylan said.

  By now they were embracing his legs. It was quite a nice thing to come home to. Of course, at five and three, they weren’t exactly being altruistic. They expected him to run around with them outside, or to read them books, or at the very least—they were groping at his midriff now—to pick them up.

  Later this would be fine. Later he could do this. After he’d had a chance to put down his backpack, change into comfortable clothes and savor a few moments of quiet, he’d be happy to pick them up, swing them around, play the good dad, maybe even be it. But he couldn’t very well skip that middle step without feeling some generalized resentment—not against his family per se so much as just the universe. He was tired.

  “Hi, honey,” he said. Oh man, he really said that.

  Erin was standing in the kitchen, stirring a pot of something. She was still wearing her robe and slippers from this morning, which was just the kind of thing he remembered her explicitly stating in their pre-nuptial days that she would never do. It was hard not to think of his mother, who liked to boast that even while raising three children, she had managed, in that picket-fence world, to doll herself up every single afternoon before his father came home from work. She really did do that. He remembered lying on her bed as a little boy, watching her curl her eyelashes in the vanity mirror with that silver tool he sometimes used as a chair for his Star Wars guys. She’d peer up at the ceiling, apply the mascara, and then turn her gaze on him through the mirror, her eyes twinkling the way so many other female eyes would twinkle for him one day in that other space and time that was as distant from him then as it was now, but in the other direction.

  Erin’s eyes were no longer so stellar these days as they were just sort of ocular. To be fair, she was eight months pregnant and in profile looked something like a gigantic elbow.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  “I want to make a smoothie,” Arthur said.

  “Fairly terrible,” Dylan said.

  “Smoo—ie!” Tavi near-echoed.

  “We’ll do that later,” he told the kids, making his way toward the sanctuary of the bedroom.

  “Any change with your ears?” Erin asked.

  “The doctor said it would take ten days. I told you that.”

  “Sue me for caring.”

  Dylan peeled twenty little fingers off the doorjamb not less than three times before finally managing to manifest the bedroom door. The kids beat on the opaque foglet mesh2 with their little fists, but it was childproof and Dylan did his best to ignore them. He put down his backpack, slipped off his khakis and draped them over his desk chair. Then he plunked himself down on the bed, stared up at the popcorn ceiling and tried to relax. The kids were crying like they meant it now, and he understood exactly how they felt (he was good at projecting himself into other minds—it had once been his job after all). He loved them immensely, but if there was one thing he disliked about fatherhood, it was all the crying; it was almost enough to make him want to lose the rest of his hearing fast. And the only thing worse than the crying itself was the animal guilt he felt at not responding to it, but he knew by now that if he did gratify them with a response, if he made the smoothies, took them bike-riding, read them books, all without giving himself these few minutes to relax first, then the resentment would build to overflowing and as soon as the kids went to bed he’d say all sorts of ugly things to Erin, which he would instantly regret, and then neither of them would get anything like honest sleep before tomorrow night, which was clearly no way to live. Erin might not have believed him, but isolating himself like this really was for the common good.

  2_____________

  Terrans had imagined this sort of polymorphous material, composed of interlinking nanobots, since the early nineties, but the technology still seemed decades away when it was discovered as the primary building material on Macarena, some 45,047 light years away. New Taiwan—where Dylan and his family lived—had independently come up with its own swarming foglet technology, though its uses of it were more modest, being restricted to certain types of doors, windows, and other passageways. Terrans themselves were still reluctant to roll out the new tech on Earth for fear of an apocalyptic “grey goo” scenario, but they were happy to have these new case studies to observe.

  “Erin, could you do something about that wild rumpus, please?”

  “I’m making dinner,” she said.

  “I know. And I’m just back from a very long day of teaching a moribund art form to human teenagers.”

  He could almost hear her roll her eyes through the door. “Kids, come here,” she said, which set them to wailing all the more until she assured them that they could help her cook if they liked. She was a genius at mothering; no one could take that away from her.

  Only once they were out of earshot did Dylan remember just how loud peace and quiet were for him now. Ambient noise had competed with the ringing all day at school, masking it to the point where he’d found himself wondering if the pills weren’t already doing their job, but here in the former quiet of his bedroom, those bells in his head sounded nearly as strident as the crying. But “bells” was wrong, seeing as there was really no chiming, jingling, or tolling. It was more like someone was holding down a single very-high key on a synthesizer, an electronic splinter lodged in his brain, and to make matters worse, it was accompanied by the alien sensation of a fullness in the ears, as if he were finally wearing the earplugs he should have been wearing at all those rock concerts throughout his gilded youth. Falling asleep the first night with the ringing had been such torture. He’d been certain he had some terrible disease, and in the theater of his hypnagogic mind the ringing grew so loud he recognized it as his own death knell, and what he felt, far more than the terror or sadness he might have expected, was an unbearable sense of frustration, of being annoyed that it was the end of the line and he couldn’t go back, wipe the slate clean, and try again; that his life, such as it had been, would soon be coterminous with his destiny. Well, Dr. Cohen had relieved him of having to die soon—you couldn’t ask for better news than that. Cochlerin was specifically designed to regenerate hair cells in the inner ear. Still, nine more days seemed almost more than he could bear. He could scarcely imagine how people in the old days, before there was a cure, had endured years and years of this.

  Somehow he needed to relax. He and this shrill visitor were going to live together for at least another week; he might as well make the most of it. And anyway, such an exercise would be good mental training for dealing with some other adversity down the line, and if life had taught him anything, it was that there’s some other adversity down th
e line.

  He gave it his best shot, breathed deep, relaxed his muscles, and surrendered to the sound. At first the fever-pitch ringing was as terrible and anxiety-inducing as ever and gave rise to manic fight-or-flight responses like Oh shit, I’m dying and Oh fuck, I’m dying, but gradually, over the course of perhaps fifteen minutes, he taught himself to abort thoughts at the first sign of negativity and to return his attention to the terrible mantra in his ears, which, true to plan, wasn’t quite so terrible anymore, and then wasn’t terrible at all. It was almost calming if you let it be.

  He was lying on his back on top of the covers, legs crossed at the ankles, fingers interlaced in an empty church over his abdomen, and as the fear began to ebb, he discovered himself doing this space-out thing he sometimes did where he’d fix his gaze on something out in the world and let it (for lack of a better word) penetrate him. It wasn’t an intellectual exercise—he wasn’t thinking; it was more like a kind of effortless meditation, and, with the possible exception of Quantum Travel (a.k.a. QT), it was the closest he ever came to understanding what mystics meant when they talked about subject and object merging into one, as per this exhortation from the great poet Matsuo Bashō: “You can learn about the pine only from the pine, or about bamboo only from bamboo. When you see an object, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself, otherwise you impose yourself on the object, and do not learn. The object and yourself must become one, and from that feeling of oneness issues your poetry.”

  Currently, Dylan was a rather disgusting fan blade. Dust got into the crannies of the popcorn ceiling too—he’d been that a few blinks ago. Someday they’d get central air-conditioning, if ever they could afford it. Thoughts were objects too, of course, and now Dylan was suddenly his money problems. The last of his savings had gone into the down payment on this house that was really about twice as big as they required, on bucolic and overpriced Yushan Lane no less. He was indentured for the next thirty years, unless something miraculous happened between now and then, the odds of which were vanishingly slim. And with three kids to send to college…