The alarm returned redoubled, urging him to do something—to wake up, fight a fire, call the cops, something. It took several minutes for him to talk his heart rate down and return to his breath. He tried focusing less on his thoughts-as-objects and more on objects-as-objects. He looked at the varicolored spines of the print books he collected, and that calmed him some. He consulted the blank spot on the wall that desperately wanted art, and that induced anxiety again.
Then he looked toward the clothes closet.
The door was still swiped open from this morning and on the shelf at the top was a big white plastic shoebox that had once contained one of the first pairs of Nike “pumps” ever to be worn by a kid in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.3 Dylan had discarded the sneakers several decades ago, but this box had followed him around ever since, even if he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually seen it until now. When was the last time he’d opened it? Ten years ago? Fifteen? It really had been that long, and in many ways it felt like longer. Barring whatever one might find via omni these days, that box held the only remaining evidence that Dylan had ever been anything but a teacher.
3_____________
The sneakers had come with a little handheld pump you had to carry around in a pocket or somewhere. If you fit the pump to the valve built into this weird plastic pyramid at the back of the shoe, you could fill a bladder with air until the innards of the shoe conformed to your foot. Reebok had entered the pump market soon after Nike spearheaded it, but rather than include a separate pump accessory, they had incorporated the pump as a little raised rubber basketball on the tongue of the shoe that you could depress with your thumb, which made a lot of sense since who wants to carry a pump around while playing basketball? Though really it had never been very clear to Dylan what was so great about having your sneakers fit that tight in the first place.
Before fleeing to New Taiwan, they had purged their old house in Santa Monica of virtually everything, and when Dylan watched Erin deposit the shoebox in the dumpster, he almost let her, and then thought better of it: “I think I’m going to keep that one,” he said.
“Why? I thought you were done with all this stuff.”
“I am. I totally am. But it might be nice to have something to show the grandkids.” Much as the humiliating demise of his acting career had served as a prod to change his life, it had also served as a chilling intimation of mortality. Someday, before he knew it, he’d be a blubbering old man, and it wasn’t impossible to think that maybe it would be some comfort to be tangibly reminded that at one time in his life he’d touched a certain sector of humankind (specifically the young female sector) with his art.
“Okay,” Erin said, and that was that. She was pretty cool about it. She could have gotten jealous, could have asked, Why does it have to be this of all things? But she’d made the allowance for his vanity.
Dylan quit his space-out, got up, and approached the closet. He stood on tiptoes and took down the box. Then he placed it on the bed and plopped himself down beside it. He hesitated a moment, took a deep breath, and removed the orange lid. The letters sprang up at him, the years having failed to tamp them down, and several overflowed onto the sheets. He reckoned there had to be at least a hundred in there, and for every one he’d held onto, he must have discarded ten. He’d kept only the crème de la crème: the funny, the touching, the crazy ones.
He picked up one of the spilled letters and took it out of its envelope. This one was a handmade Valentine’s card—all construction paper, glitter, and heart stickers. Down by the loopdidoo signature was the smeared, clay-colored imprint of some very fulsome lips.
He read:
Wendy Sorenson
243 Moana Street
Laie, HI 96762
Dear Mr. Greenyears:4
4_____________
Part of Dylan’s reinvention of himself upon moving to New Taiwan was to drop the “years” from his name.
You don’t know me yet but I am your biggest fan ever. Seriously. I’ve been in love with you ever since one of my friends made me watch ET II: Nocturnal Fears, which is a movie I’m technically not supposed to know about but have on tape and watch at least five times every day. Not the whole movie of course but just the parts with you in them. I’m sure you hear this a lot but my favorite part is the part where you make out with Korelu through the bars of your light cage. I know you’re totally just acting but to tell you the truth you look so hot in that scene that I get so jealous I seriously want to shoot Korelu in the face even though I’m sure she’s really cool. She’s soooo pretty too, for an alien. I know it’s just a movie and you were just acting but I figure there must have been some attraction there because it seems so real the way you do it. I wasn’t going to say this but I’m just going to say it, okay, because I don’t even care. If you ever want an Earthling girl to make out with like that I’ll totally do anything you want. I don’t even care what it is. I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a slut. Honestly I’ve never even done it with anyone. But I would with you though. Honestly I’d marry you right now if you asked me. I’m only sixteen though so we might need to wait a year or something.
Love always,
Wendy
Now how many men ever got a letter like that in their lives? And to think he’d received such insane propositions on a regular basis for a couple of years there. It was absolutely weird the way the silver screen could deify you back in those days. He had no idea whether it was still that way for up-and-coming stars back on Earth, but he doubted it. Were there even stars in the same way there used to be? Before the advent of the Internet and Quantum Travel? In general, he made a point of remaining oblivious to all that.
He read through a few more letters and was curious to note that not a single one had come from a male. He couldn’t say for certain whether this reflected the actual demographics of his fan mail or just his own curatorial bias, but in any case he had no memory of ever getting a letter from a dude.
Not all of his female admirers were so hot and bothered, of course.
Dear Mr. Greenyears,
I am thirteen and I hope to be a professional actress someday. I wanted to express to you in this letter that I think you are a really good actor. I saw E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears at my friend’s house during a sleepover, and even though I was really scared, I thought you did a really great job! Now I can’t wait for Titanic! Congratulations about that! How did you learn to act so great? Do you have any advice for an up-and-coming actress? I hope you win an Oscar. You totally should. Also, can you send me an autographed glossy photo please?
Sincerely,
Theresa
Not every letter was glowing. There’d been more than a few complaints from outraged mothers—as if it made any sense to grouse about the film’s content with the eighteen-year-old lead instead of, say, the writer or director. And anyway, the content wasn’t that bad. Yes, Elliott makes love to an alien, but there’s nothing full-frontal about the scene. Moreover, Korelu is clearly a female alien from a dimorphic species, and while she and Elliott can’t quite communicate yet, it’s clear from the soundtrack that they are madly in love. Some critics found it implausible and disgusting, worse than bestiality, while other, more forward-looking reviewers saw in it a bold bid for sexual equality. In any case, it stimulated discussion, which could only be a good thing considering that before long such questions would cease being theoretical.
Young man,
I hope you’re worried about the state of your soul. I saw the pitiful excuse for a film you were involved in, and I just want you to know that I found it disgusting and sad. When America goes down the tubes once and for all (it began in the sixties), we will have moral reprobates like you to thank. Don’t you know that you’re here in this world for just a brief time? Look to the state of your soul, young man, and consider yourself prayed for.
–Gertrude Winifred Gans
The irony of that penultimate line was thick. Sure enough, Dylan had remained on Earth for only a brief time after receiving that letter, though he was pretty sure Gertrude Winifred Gans was no prophet. Had she written “you’re here on this world for just a brief time,” it might have given him some real pause, but she’d written, “in this world,” and eternity hinged on that single letter of difference. Still, some atavistic, God-fearing part of him was just beginning to look to the state of his soul when Erin, mercifully, called him in to dinner. Like Aeolus bottling the winds, he stuffed the letters back in the box, and closed the lid.
As soon as he swiped away the door, the kids came and hugged his legs.
“Daddy!”
“Da—y!”
Now he was ready. Now it was nice.
• • •
The next day at school, Dylan attempted, again, to stage act 3, scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with his freshman drama class.
“Okay, so let’s review the situation here because it’s a little complicated. Who likes whom5 at this point, do you recall? Let’s start with Hermia. Whom does she like? You know what, Connor, maybe you could draw it on the board for us?”
5_____________
As a lover of language and a product of Catholic school, Dylan had grown up clearly distinguishing between “who” and “whom,” but over the course of his career he’d watched that rare inflection all but go extinct. He still used it, but his students by and large did not, and he was not so puritanical as to want to wage that losing war alone. Things change with time, whether we want them to or not, nothing lasts, and in the words of the immortal Lao Tzu (though they might as well have come from Darwin): “What is malleable is always superior to that which is immovable. This is the principle of controlling things by going along with them, of mastery through adaptation.”
Connor nodded and slowly lifted himself up. Friends in baseball caps on either side patted him on the shoulders as if he’d just lost a contest or a loved one. When he got to the front of the room, Dylan handed him a green marker.
“All right, so Connor, please draw a girl on the board for us. You can keep it simple. A bathroom girl will do.”
“A bathroom girl?”
“You know, the restroom girl? The intragalactic sign for girl?”
“There’s an intragalactic sign for girl?”
“Sorry. I misspoke. I mean the international sign for girl, the Terran one.”
Even after the better part of two decades on New Taiwan, Dylan still put his foot in his mouth like this on a regular basis.6
6_____________
The problem here was that while the natives were more than 99.8 percent identical to humans at the genetic level, and while they reproduced sexually in much the manner that humans did—their genitals being homologous to, and very much resembling, the human penis and vagina—their secondary sex characteristics were almost diametrically flipped, such that the vagina-bearing ones, or females, exhibited traits Terrans typically associated with males. Relative to the penis-bearing ones, i.e. the males, the females had bigger frames, deeper voices, and more body hair. They dressed plainly and practically and kept their hair short. And despite their being the ones to carry the babies (the gestation period of the natives, incidentally, was considerably shorter: just over seven months), the females were traditionally cast in the role of the provider. The males, on the other hand, had smaller frames, higher-pitched voices, and less body hair. They grew the hair on their heads long and invested a great deal of time in washing and styling it. They tended to wear makeup, jewelry, and clothing roughly analogous to those worn by Terran females in first-world temperate zones. Humans had hoped to find on other worlds some radically different gender roles and relations than those that obtained on Earth. Should there turn out to be intelligent life, they had hoped to find they came in a single gender, or three, or twenty. They had hoped for fluid genders, androgynes, sequential hermaphrodites. Alas, all of the newly settled worlds had turned up dimorphous hominids at the tops of their respective food chains. There was nothing, sexually, on New Taiwan that one couldn’t find on a walk through Greenwich Village, with one notable exception: the male, penis and all, was the lactating member of the species. Terran biologists still hadn’t puzzled out exactly how the birth of the baby from the female stimulated the hormonal changes in the male that resulted in milk production, but it was theorized that pheromones played a key role just as it did in the equally mystical-seeming Terran phenomenon of women’s menstrual periods synchronizing themselves with those of other women living in close proximity. The point here being that, beyond perhaps + and - , there was no universal sign for male and female. Dylan’s default mode of thinking was not just politically incorrect; it was flat-out wrong.
Connor drew:
“Okay,” Dylan said. “That’s Hermia. Now whom does Hermia love?”
“Lysander,” said Becky.
“Correctamundo. Connor, please draw Terran-restroom Lysander next to Terran-restroom Hermia there. And then maybe you could draw an arrow to show that she loves him.”
“Great. Okay, now whom does Lysander love at this point?”
“Helena,” said Justin confidently.
“Precisely. Now draw that for us, would you, please, Mr. da Vinci?”
Connor squinted.
“Leonardo da Vinci? Genius of the Italian Renaissance?”
Only Josh Song nodded, Josh who wore a bow tie and whose face was perpetually half-hidden by a Kurt Cobain teardrop of hair. He was far and away the most learned, and most melancholic, kid in class. Everyone else just looked confused.
“I guess we’ll have to settle for you doing it as yourself then, Connor. Go on now. Make your immortal strokes.”
“Very lovely. And whom does Helena love?”
“Lysander,” said Tate.
“No. Helena loves Demetrius,” said Sammy.
“Which is it?”
“Demetrius,” intoned the class.
“Sorry, Tate.”
Tate got some pats on the back for being wrong.
“And finally, what about Demetrius? Whom does he love?”
“Hermia,” said Lewis.
“Correct again. Now let’s give Connor a second to complete his masterpiece.”
“Bravo, Connor. Okay, so if at the beginning of this play we had a classic love triangle with one outlying point, what geometric figure do we have now?”
“A square,” sang the chorus.
“Precisely. Everyone wants someone other than the person who wants him or her.”
“That’s sad,” Lia said.
Josh, uncharacteristically, blew a raspberry. “What a waste of energy,” he said.
“How’s that, Josh?”
“There must be other single people in Athens, no?”
“Spoken like a true automaton,” Dylan said. “They’re in love, Josh. Do you really suppose it’s that easy to just give up on love?”
“They’re not being creative enough, is what I think. There has to be a workable solution here.”
“And what would you suggest?” Dylan asked.
“Well, in the first place, what’s to stop that shape from being a circle and not a square? Circles are perfect.”
“Go on.”
“So like what if instead of having love as this petty little directional force between them, they could place it right at the center and let it radiate out in all directions like the sun?”7
7_____________
Technically the star about which New Taiwan made its annual journey was “Lem”—named in honor of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris and The Cyberiad (among other works) and 1996 winner of the prestigious Order of the White Eagle award—but for all intents and purposes Lem was identical to Earth’s “sun,” so English-speaking exopats, and b
y inheritance their offspring, sometimes called it that.
“And how might that translate into practice, I wonder?” Dylan asked.
“They should get a place together. Maybe build one right there in the forest.”
“And then?”
“And then nothing. They live in it and bask in all the love. At the very least they could finally sit down.”
“I can’t help but inquire about their sleeping arrangements…”
Dylan could see that not every student in the class was going to be comfortable with the turn this discussion was taking. You could never be sure with ninth-graders: in terms of maturity, some were practically ready for college; others might as well still be in middle school. When he’d suggested once that there was a built-in sexual dimension to vampires, one girl, Joy Hoffman, had memorably replied, “I think you just ended my childhood.”
“They all sleep in the same big round bed,” Josh said, “and it’s pitch-dark.”
Dylan nodded. “Congratulations, Josh. With a single blow, you’ve just overturned the entire Western romantic tradition.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re a free thinker. I applaud that.” Indeed, Dylan himself might have been a little like Josh at one time, before an orthodox lifestyle snared him the way it eventually snares anyone who hasn’t made a firm conviction to avoid it.
“Okay, so let’s pick up where we left off. Where are our Lysander and Helena?”
Daniel Young stood up, looking dorky and afraid as ever.
“And Helena?”
“Marie’s not here,” Julia informed him.
“Oh right. Why then, Julia, you can be her understudy. No good deed goes unpunished.”
Dylan expected some rolled eyes, but Julia leapt to her feet; for every three kids who didn’t want to act out Shakespeare, you got one like this who secretly did. Dylan had been that kid once too. In fact, he often wondered if there wasn’t that kid deep in all these kids, if only he could break through all their fear, chop through the already-frozen seas inside of them.
King of the Worlds Page 2
