He suffered waves of guilt sometimes at having moved so far away and thus deprived his mother of precious time with her own grandchildren, whom she loved dearly and had never met except via omni. From time to time he thought about moving his parents out to New Taiwan, at least for the milder winters, but real estate was so damned expensive and he’d just sunk the last of his savings into the new house. They could have the guest room as far as he was concerned—the house was plenty big enough—but Erin would complain. They wouldn’t have wanted to move anyway. Their whole lives had been here in the Philadelphia area, and both of his sisters still lived nearby and had their own families. He’d offered many times to bring his parents out to visit, but QT had induced more than one heart attack in older folks over the years, and while no doubt it had greatly improved, he could hardly blame them for their trepidation. Maybe one of these years he could QT his family down here to Earth for a visit, though it was hard to imagine getting his three kids to sit still long enough for the scan anytime soon.
Dylan sat behind a cherry tree he’d climbed a hundred times and watched his parents eat their dinners (his mother’s famous shrimp scampi—second only to her famous homemade ravioli) and he wept like the baby he knew himself at heart to be, only without the sound.
Darkness descended by degrees, and as the objects of the world left the visual range, the crickets took up their slack and, rather pleasantly, masked Dylan’s tinnitus. His father had disappeared from view and was likely falling asleep in front of the old LCD video wall—no doubt they still had that—but his mother was now square inside the window frame, meditatively doing the dishes. He was looking at her almost head-on. Still beautiful. Could have been an actress. She liked to boast that she wore the same dress size as Marilyn Monroe, and he’d seen enough photos of her as a blonde and bosomy young girl to know she fit that era’s prescription for beauty to a T, though even had she not been saddled with a husband and three children, her total lack of an ass might have proved her Achilles’ heel in that unforgivingly sexist industry. (He noticed this asslessness of hers only because he’d inherited the trait and Erin never let him forget it.)
And while Dylan’s Platonic devotion to the Beautiful undoubtedly came from his father, the hobbyhorse photographer (and lifelong devotee of 35mm film!), any affinity Dylan had for performance came right from Mom, whose way with words and trove of Irish melancholy could, if catalyzed with a couple of drinks, command the attention of any dinner party for hours, after which she’d invariably go home and—tears of a clown—cry herself to sleep.
Shit! She was looking at him. Don’t. Move. She had interrupted what she was doing with the dishes, scrunched up her eyes and moved her face a few inches closer to the glass, and for what must have been a solid minute she stared out at the darkness in stony puzzlement. He so desperately and instinctually wanted to stand up and say, “Mom, it’s me!” and go to her and hug her and kiss her and take her out dancing, but he forced himself to stay put, hugging this thicker-than-he-remembered-it tree, afraid.
By and by his mother shrugged and went back to doing the dishes.
Soon the downstairs lights went off and the upstairs ones went on. He wished his parents a good night under his breath, tiptoed over to the pool, took off his clothes and eased into the shallow end, which was warm as a bath. He floated on his back, ears submerged so that the ringing came back redoubled. He tilted his head, lifted his ears above the water and let the crickets soothe away the sound again. Earth’s moon was a waxing gibbous, crisscrossed here and there by bats, and he willed himself to look up at it with the crazy wisdom of some Japanese poet, or at least the naïve eyes of most Americans, who believed that men had landed there just a few times, and who knew nothing of any VIP parties on the inside, of any goddesses in the surf…
Which reminded him: this was where he and Erin had first, well…Christ, he hadn’t thought of that in a long time. They hadn’t done it on purpose, not really. It was a humid, early-summer night like this, a few months into their relationship, and while they’d been doing incredibly nasty things in his car all that time, they had not yet had full-on intercourse, owing in part to the cautionary tale of Erin’s cousin who had recently gotten herself pregnant at sixteen. But there they were skinny-dipping in the pool, making out in a corner of the shallow end right by the ladder, and his penis, which seemed possessed of a will wholly independent of his own, kept mashing up against her furrow until finally it plunged inside of her, and it was as if they’d just torn spacetime, because all at once they were in some other dimension where they were no longer separate and where they extended forever in all directions with no skin to hem them in and no pronouns to make them other…that is, until he’d panicked, and pulled out, and insisted they go buy a pregnancy test at CVS immediately. Once she’d pissed on the stick and received the minus sign, he’d had to spend the rest of the night trying to convince her that he really did love her.
He climbed out of the pool, drip-dried, dressed, and lay on his back in the cool grass. He searched the heavens for Lem until all the stars blurred into one golden blotch on the inside of his eyelids. Then he fell asleep. He did not surrender his consciousness so completely, however, as to get caught there in the morning. Rather, he woke to the rattle of the first trolley, and then, as unsentimentally as he could manage, bid his childhood home goodbye. He made his way back to the Greyhound Station and—a few hours, a soft pretzel, a coffee, and half-a-dozen pedagogy articles later—BWI Thurgood Marshall Intragalactic Teleport.
• • •
He was back on New Taiwan in time for dinner; they were having the leftover ravioli. The kids were ecstatic to see him. “What did you get us?” Arthur asked.
Dylan cringed.
“Mommy said you’d get us something.”
“Sorry, guys. I was super busy.”
“Aw,” he whined.
“How was it?” Erin asked. She was feeding the baby at the head of the table and didn’t bother to get up.
“Fine. Uneventful.”
“Anyone recognize you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well that’s good anyway. Did you learn anything?”
“Oh sure. There was a lot of talk about reality augmentation. Some Shakespeare program that subtitles everything in bardic. A study-abroad thing that makes the streets of your home seem like they’re in Tokyo, New Quebec, Alanis, wherever. Changes up the mailboxes, maybe puts a cathedral on the horizon, everybody speaks Arabic, Upper Pleiadic, Heptapod A or whatever. First-hand history apps: drop a kid right in the middle of a world war or a supernova. Seems like you held the fort down okay?”
She sighed. “No horror stories anyway.”
“Mommy, I’m done,” Arthur said. “Can we go play?”
“Sure.”
Arthur dashed off to the playroom, Tavi waddling in tow.
“It’s good to be home,” Dylan said—he meant it too.
She smiled, albeit not very convincingly. “Would you ever consider moving back?”
“What, to Earth?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you seriously asking me this?”
“I am.”
The content of her question was one thing, her audacity in asking it another. She knew his feelings about Earth.
“Out of the question,” he said, trying to keep calm. “Do you want to tell me why you’re asking me this all of a sudden?”
“No, it’s just, I don’t know, now that there are five of us, it would be nice to have a little help from our parents from time to time, wouldn’t it? To take some of the edge off?”
He was losing his cool. “Wonderful!”
“What?”
“Whose idea was it to have this third kid again?”
She didn’t reply.
“And what did you promise me from the outset, do you remember?”
Still nothing.
“Let me refresh your memory: you promised that it wouldn’t change anything. That our lives would go on as usual. Do you remember that?”
She looked fierce, reptilian.
“And now look how suddenly we’ve come by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs!”
“What?”
“What would I do on Earth?”
“The same thing you do here.”
“Teach?”
“Why not?”
Now it was his turn to say nothing.
“People don’t recognize you anymore, Dylan. You said so yourself. I don’t think very many kids are watching E.T. II these days, do you? Besides, you’re all grown up now. They wouldn’t recognize you anyway.”
This pissed him off. How was it that his own wife was always underestimating his legacy, not to mention his good looks? He deserved it, probably: commit yourself to someone when you’re too young and they’re bound to take you for granted before long; Ashley Eisenberg had told him he’d barely changed.
“And unlike you, I make a point of paying attention to Earthly affairs, Dylan, and it’s really not the same world anymore. You just saw it for yourself, right? The world you’re so intent on exiling yourself from no longer exists. All of our generation is exiled from it whether we like it or not. It’s a question of time passing, Dylan. It has nothing to do with where we live.”
“Erin, have you forgotten just how many people saw E.T. II?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Dylan, but sometimes it seems like you believe the galaxy revolves around you. I just want to reassure you that it doesn’t and it never has. It revolves around a supermassive black hole.”
“And how would you like me to not take that the wrong way?”
“You should feel relieved by it. So you had a pretty bad day twenty years ago. So what? Do you really want to let it cast a shadow on the rest of your life?”
He pursed his lips and nodded, agreeing with her. “Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
“Exactly. Who said that?”
“Aldous Huxley, in the preface to Brave New World.”2425
24_____________
Like all avid readers maybe, Dylan tended to flinch at certain passages in his reading, passages that pricked his wounds—and not a few of them had to do with the fugitive nature of time. He’d inadvertently memorized any number of them:
“Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.” — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“How did it get so late so soon?
It’s night before it’s afternoon.
December is here before it’s June.
My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?” — Dr. Seuss
That sort of thing.
25_____________
Despite all the revolutionary scientific advances in recent years, nothing very significant had been discovered in the way of altering the human being’s need to spend a third of its life asleep. In point of fact, all hominids discovered to date seemed to spend one-fifth to one-half of their day (with a day ranging between seventeen and forty-two hours) unconscious.
“Well there you go. Take it from him if you won’t take it from me.”
“I’ll think about it,” Dylan said. “In the meantime, I’m gonna take a shower and go to bed. I’ve got serious QT lag.”
He wasn’t lying. Not only did he have the usual time slip to deal with—the New Taiwanese day was just shy of twenty-six hours—but the Olympus Mons Accord stipulated that all waste material and toxins in a teleportee’s bloodstream must get copied with the organism, and Dylan hadn’t gotten all that much sleep last night.
“Good night,” she said, and she kissed him on the lips. It wasn’t wet or hot or tongue-y, but it was nice; there were decades of devotion in it.
• • •
That night, he had the dream. It wasn’t even a dream so much as it was a memory, except that in the dream he saw it in the third person, even as he felt it in the first.
Dylan Greenyears, as Jack, stands at the bow of a ship with his new friend Danny Nucci, who’s been cast as his sidekick, Fabrizio. A hundred pairs of eyes and several big cameras are watching. “I’m the king of the world,” he says.
“I don’t believe you,” James Cameron says. “Roll it again.”
“I’m the king of the world!” Dylan says again. This time he pumps his fists a bit. He knows it’s not enough, but something is holding him back.
“God damn it, Greenyears,” Cameron says. “Do you have an ounce of feeling in your whole body?”
“Many ounces,” Dylan says.
“Prove it!” Cameron is getting worked up now, morphing into the asshole of Hollywood legend.
“I’m the king of the world!” Dylan shouts. He’s louder this time, but the tone is off. Cameron’s belligerence is making Dylan sound frustrated, not exhilarated.
“You’ve never been in love, have you, Greenyears?”
“I have,” he says. “I am.” He thinks of the splash of freckles on Erin’s cheeks.
“Show me,” Cameron commands.
“But Jack hasn’t even met Rose yet at this point,” Dylan protests.
“So what? He’s already in love with his muse. I’m trying to connect that with something in you. If your girlfriend doesn’t make you feel exhilarated, then find something that does. You know,
Method stuff.”
“Method stuff?” Dylan doesn’t know what that means.
“Tell me you’re not familiar with the Method?”
Dylan shrugs. His heart is going like a speed bag.
“Oh, Jesus. What the hell did I cast?” Cameron’s eyes are beady, his face pinched, orange. “Try to summon some passion this time.”
“I’m the king—”
“Horrible. Again.”
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Cold drops of sweat cascade down Dylan’s ribs from his armpits. “I’m the king of the world.”
“You’re certainly the king of wasting my time,” Cameron says. He’s getting livid, mean. “Do you realize how many qualified actors I turned down so that I could take a risk on you, Greenyears? Last fucking chance.”
Dylan swallows hard, takes a beat to regain his composure. Everything depends upon the next few seconds. “I’m the king of the world,” he says, and he’s not even halfway through when he knows it’s not what Cameron wants.
“All right. That’s it. I’m putting you out of your misery. Somebody get me DiCaprio.”
“But—”
“Read your contract. I can fire you whenever I want. And I want to right now, before I throw any more good money after bad. For the life of me I don’t know what I saw in you.”
“But—”
“A word of advice, Greenyears: go back to college. You’re finished in this town.”
The following morning, splashed across America: “Cameron fires Greenyears from special effect extravaganza, hires DiCaprio.”
Dylan is the crap of the world, and he’s just been flushed.
• • •
Despite his students having had the full ten school days of Dylan’s paternity leave to rehearse, the Shakespeare scenes were still a very mixed bag, nowhere near ready. The girls were better overall; except for one pair of entitled prima donnas, they all appeared to be taking the a
ssignment seriously. The boys, though, had some hang-ups. Dylan had never explicitly told them this assignment was a rite of passage, but they instinctively understood that it demanded an existential choice of them: either they could transcend their egos, take a risk and really try to inhabit their parts, thereby pleasing their teacher and getting a good grade; or they could hide behind their egos, make light of solemnity, and deliberately mispronounce every word they didn’t use on a daily basis, thereby pleasing their friends and getting a bad grade. It was a decision, Dylan knew, that might resonate in various ways through the rest of their lives. No doubt there was a way to make a virtue of irreverence and play to both audiences at once, but no one in Intro to Drama had discovered it yet.
Dylan was glad to see that Daniel was among the more earnest ones, albeit painfully self-conscious. The one time he flourished an arm to emphasize his words, it went no higher than about his belly button. After class, he lingered to ask how he was doing.
“Well, Daniel, you could have moved some more, for one thing.”
“Okay.”
The poor kid was taking notes. Dylan stopped himself and zoomed out. “You like acting, Daniel?”
“More than anything. In fact, I’m thinking of pursuing it.”
“Pursuing it?”
“Like, professionally.”
“I see.” Dylan hadn’t known it was that bad. “Acting’s a cutthroat industry, you know, Daniel. Really tough to break into on Earth, and even tougher, I’m told, around these parts.”
“I know,” Daniel said.
“Isn’t there anything else you’re interested in?”
“Not the way I’m interested in this.”
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