Dylan understood. He’d been there once too, though at least he’d had some evidence to suggest he might be talented before taking the plunge; Daniel had no such evidence. What to tell him then? Should Dylan perpetuate the same American myth he himself had been fed in such vomitous helpings and insist that the boy pursue his dreams at all costs and let nothing stand in his way? Or should he do the kid a favor and burst his bubble for him right now before it grew too big?
He reminded himself that, strictly speaking, he was paid to be an English teacher, not a life coach. He’d stick to giving Daniel acting notes, more or less.
“All right, Daniel, I’ll shoot straight with you. The first thing you’re going to need to do if you want to be an actor is to work on your English pronunciation. The Korean accent might get you typecast once or twice, but you want to be more versatile than that.”
“Okay,” Daniel said, wide-eyed and nodding.
“Next, you’re going to have to learn to be more comfortable on stage. Right now you look like you’re about to ask the hot girl to the prom.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t apologize—this isn’t that kind of thing. Above all, Daniel, any actor has to be willing to go into the darkest, scariest places inside of himself. Most people lock up that cellar and do everything they can to avoid opening it. That’s understandable, probably even healthy. But the actor, Daniel, the actor, opens that door every chance he gets. It’s a very dangerous profession that way, acting. Many actors have been driven insane by their craft.”
Daniel’s eyes looked bigger than ever by half.
“Not that I expect you to go insane for one measly grade, Daniel, but if you’re serious about the craft, you’re going to have to learn this. The more you invest of your own personal life in a role, the more deeply you’re going to convince us, and the more vulnerable you’re going to be. It’s a sort of paradox really. The best way to embody someone else is to be totally, nakedly yourself. You’ve got to bare your feelings to the world, show us what scares you, what makes you want to kill in cold blood or cry like a baby. Most important, Daniel, you’ve got to show us what you love. Forget about looking cool. Humans are a mess. We sob and puke and toil and sweat and die like the animals we are for love. Show us that and you’ll be well on your way.”
Daniel was taking notes again.
“Somebody once said this, Daniel: ‘Find what you love and let it kill you.’ I’m not sure who said it—you could ask Omni if you’re curious26—but the point is, that’s the kind of commitment you’ve got to have if you’re serious about your art. You’ve got to be willing to die for it. If your commitment falls anywhere short of that, then you’d better find something else to do with your life.”
26_____________
Terran country singer Kinky Friedman, though the quote is regularly attributed to Terran writer Charles Bukowski, who did not say it, but who did say, in a poem entitled “Breakfast,” this: “You have to die a few times before you can really live.”
What Dylan did not tell Daniel was that your body didn’t necessarily die at the same time as your dreams, but the sweet-faced fool would almost certainly discover that on his own one day.
“Thank you, Mr. Green. I promise to make you proud.”
“Oh, don’t do anything on my account, Daniel.”
The boy nodded, squinted in thought.
“And one more piece of advice while I’m at it,” Dylan said, reaching out and stopping Daniel from writing. “Listen to me: no matter where your future should take you, never look back and wonder what if—what if I had done this instead of this, what if I had married this girl instead of that girl, what if I had been an engineer instead of an actor. Don’t do that, and don’t compare yourself to other people either. It’s irrelevant. You just make the best decision you can at every juncture and forgive yourself in advance for whatever happens next. It’s important that you give yourself permission to fail. We’re not as free as we think, Daniel, and we’re smaller and less perfect than we know when we’re in high school. You just take comfort in knowing that whatever indignities life puts you through, you’re not the first and you’re surely not the last. So go ahead and try to make your life into a comedy, but don’t be surprised if you get a not-so-gentle reminder now and then that it’s been a tragedy all along. Do you recall how tragedy differs from comedy?”
“The characters die at the end?”
“Precisely.”
Okay, so he’d be a bit of a life coach too.
• • •
Immediately following the last bell, Dylan took the rolling road to his first appointment with Dr. Minus Fudge, who, as it turned out, was a middle-aged, African-Canadian male with a soul patch. His modus operandi consisted, more or less, of getting the patient to lie down on a supremely comfortable sofa and spill his guts for an hour. It was refreshingly anachronistic.
Having already warmed up with Daniel, it didn’t take Dylan long to begin free-associating. After giving Fudge an abridged version of his rise and fall, about which the doctor registered not the least reaction, he launched right into his insecurities about having married the first girl he’d ever made love to and wondered aloud if he hadn’t in a sense enslaved himself to an immature version of himself.
“What do you suppose made you stay with her all these years?” Fudge asked.
“I’ve thought about that a lot. I guess I have this sense that she anchors me to authenticity somehow, that she keeps me real, if you will.”
Fudge gave an angular nod.
“I was nobody much when we began seeing each other, just your typical high schooler, and even after I’d begun to make it big, my fame never impressed her particularly. She doesn’t give a crap about fame. On the one hand, I like this about her. It makes me respect her. On the other hand, I think I may unconsciously resent it a little too. Not that I expect her to madly dote in idolatry, but it’s like when I look at my life through my own eyes, I used to see this narrative of progress, like everything was falling into its proper place and I was finally becoming someone important, finally fulfilling my destiny or whatever it is, but then as long as I’ve been with Erin, I’ve always had this kind of double vision, like I see myself from my own heroic perspective, but also from her more sublunary one, and hers always cheapens or profanes mine. I mean, when you become famous the way I did, girls who wouldn’t have looked at you the day before suddenly go all gaga and want to have your babies, but with Erin it’s always been like I’m her little brother or something, like Oh, there goes little Dylan with his big dreams, acting in a movie. I guess she did want to have my babies, but it’s different somehow.”
“It sounds like you wouldn’t mind if Erin went a bit more gaga over you once in a while?”
“It’s not like she never went gaga. God, we used to spend hours sometimes just staring into each other’s eyes as if there was something back there besides vitreous humor. And I don’t want to come off as ungrateful. Erin’s an amazing mom to my kids, and if you think about it, how many girls out there would stick with their famous husband after his career implodes and he decides to exile himself to a far-away planet and teach high school? We don’t exactly have the most glamorous lifestyle anymore, but she’s never complained about that. Not even once.”
“So remind me what the problem is again?”
“I’m not sure what the problem is. I’m not even sure that there is one beyond the fact that I’m condemned like everybody else to get old and die. I can tell you that the thing that makes me the most depressed isn’t so much the demise of my career as this paranoid suspicion I sometimes have that Erin likes the way my career played out.”
“Interesting. Tell me more about that. Why would she like it?”
“Because look at me. What am I? I’m a simple, devoted family man. I’m not off filming for months at a time. I’m not making loads of money and sl
eeping around. I don’t have a planet named after me. I’m basically locked into my roles of husband and father and breadwinner. I have been totally drafted into her vision of life. All other possibilities for me have been steadily winnowed away.”
“Is it fair to say you feel trapped?”
“Not ‘trapped’ exactly. ‘Parasitized’ is too strong. ‘Burdened’? Let’s go with ‘trapped.’ But again it’s not so much that I feel trapped by Erin as by, what, mortality? Finitude? By having to funnel the multitudes inside of me into one wage-earning life. Acting was a good outlet in that way. Actors get to be other selves, at least for a little while. Teachers, not so much.”
“Have you thought about acting here? Community theater perhaps?”
“Not really. I closed that chapter of my life twenty years ago.”
“And yet here you are talking about it with palpable longing.”
“Do you know what I used to feel like, Doc? I used to feel like a god, invincible and immortal. I didn’t think in those terms, of course. I barely had to think at all. I just knew that life was filled with promise and excitement and possibility. It’s only in retrospect that I see how lucky I was there for a couple of years. Most people never have that omnipotent feeling, I guess. My students certainly feel nothing like the way I used to about the future—most of them are vaguely terrified. But when I was their age, I swear I felt like anything was possible, like life was this great adventure or Hollywood film. I told a student of mine today that if he was going to take acting seriously, he should be prepared to die for it, and for a second there I thought I might be a hypocrite, but then it occurred to me that no, in a way I really did die for acting. Everything since just feels like aftermath, like this long tail.”
“Can you elaborate on that?”
“I have a pet theory about it actually.”
“Lay it on me.”
“So for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, life was brutal and short, at least compared to now, and if you were lucky enough to make it to twenty, you’d already experienced all the most vital feelings available to a human—the thrill of mating, the rush of the hunt and war. Nowadays, with our radically extended lives, we spend our final sixty or eighty or a hundred years in what amounts to a kind of existential masturbation. As far as our animal brains are concerned, our lives after our reproductive years are essentially pointless. Life’s just a long dulling of the senses, a gradual retreat into recursion, senility, oblivion.”
“That’s a compelling theory, Mr. Green, though do you think it’s possible you’re generalizing too much from your own experience? What if I told you I feel every bit as alive today as I did when I was seventeen? More alive, in fact.”
“I guess I’d either have to throw away the theory, or suspect you of deceiving yourself, if not outright lying.”
“In any event, Mr. Green, your theory must feel like an accurate description of reality for you at least, or you wouldn’t have come up with it, yes?”
Dylan confirmed with Fudge that they had a doctor-patient confidentiality thing going here, and then he proceeded to tell him about his affair with Ashley Eisenberg this weekend, how she was the first woman he’d slept with besides Erin in all these years, and yet how even in the throes of ecstasy it was not the same as it used to be. He was exquisitely aware of his finitude the entire time. He was no god anymore.
“With your permission, Mr. Green,” Fudge said, “I’d like to offer my take on what I’m hearing.”
Dylan nodded his assent.
“Your particular issues are not at all unusual, and are in fact quite characteristic of what used to be called a midlife crisis, very possibly coupled with what used to be called post-traumatic stress disorder. What I’d like to try to work on with you is an enlargement of your sense of self. The self you conceive of now is rather narrow, if I may say so, and I’m not at all surprised you feel confined by it. We want to begin urging you toward a more open sense of the self as a kind of possibility space. We want to get you thinking in terms of the present and the future instead of being so fixated on the past. And most importantly, we want to get you out in the worlds, beyond the patterns of your own thinking. I wonder if you’re involved in any spiritual disciplines?”
“I read a lot, if that counts.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of meditation.”
“I lie in bed and stare at the popcorn ceiling for minutes at a time.”
“Okay, what about service activities? Do you do anything like that?”
“How do you mean ‘service’?”
“Volunteering your time, cleaning up roadsides, tutoring underprivileged natives, that sort of thing.”
“I’m a teacher,” Dylan said. “And I’ve been meaning to spend more time with my kids.”
“Okay, not service exactly, but it’s a start. Anything to get you out of your head and into the worlds.”
This sounded to Dylan like reasonable advice. Any way you came at it, his problems were very definitely to do with the inside of his head.
“Well,” Fudge said, “it looks like our time is about up for today.”
“Thanks, Doc. This has been way more helpful than I expected.”
“And we didn’t even mention your tinnitus.”
“That’s right!” His reason for being here had escaped his mind entirely. On the other hand, if Cohen was right about the etiology of Dylan’s condition, they might in fact have just spent a whole hour talking about it. To be sure, the ringing was still very much there if he chose to listen to it, but this recent ability to tune it out was a mark of tremendous progress.
They scheduled another appointment for next week.
On his way out the door, Dylan felt a prick of anxiety. “Quick question, Doc?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think I ought to throw the box of fan mail away? To remove the temptation? As is, it’s a bit like having a time machine in the house.”
“It seems to me, Mr. Green, that the real mark of your success will be when you can read through those letters without feeling the pangs of nostalgia and remorse—what I like to call chronderlust—that you feel now. Taking the box away would be like taking the drugs away from an addict. It’s a quick fix, but ultimately the addict needs to reach a point where he doesn’t want the drugs, even when they’re right there in front of him.”
Dylan smiled and made his exit. What a relief that piece of advice was. Had Fudge instructed him to jettison the letters from his life, he’d almost certainly have done so, though it wouldn’t have been easy—as with QT, there’d have been a hint of suicide in it.
• • •
As promised, Dylan consecrated every minute of his free time that week to playing with the kids. He came home as soon as possible after school and joined them in elaborate games of make-believe. They were waiters, firefighters, ninjas, superheroes, robots, and bug-eyed aliens of the sort that were looking less and less likely to exist outside of fiction. They climbed the octopines in the yard, planted rhodolions with trowels and tended to them with watering cans. They played hide-and-seek and any number of ball-centered sports with extemporary rules Dylan was never quite able to discern. They rode their bikes. When it rained, they read The Giving Tree and The Phantom Tollbooth, slowly gave up on a 500-piece puzzle of the Grand Canyon, and cheated at Uno. When inevitably they cried, he hugged them, kissed their boo-boos and tickled their sides and thighs until they were rolling around the ferngrass in hysterics. Junior, being so small, couldn’t actively participate in any of this yet, but he looked on eagerly from his baby chair, cooing and kicking his legs, and Dylan made sure to pick him up every few minutes, lift him to the sky, cradle him in the crook of his arm, kiss his soft, symmetrical head, stare into those brand new ancient eyes and smile with his whole face, thinking My God, I’m happy—who knew? Had he been forced to do all of this, he’d have been
miserable, but having chosen to do it seemed to make all the difference.
What’s more, spending all this time with the kids heightened his empathy for what Erin dealt with week in and week out. Her life was so devoted to childcare these days that she typically had no time left over for any of the shared enthusiasms that had nourished their marriage for all those years before they’d become parents; and while intellectually he understood that this too would pass, that they’d likely be best friends again someday in more than just the abstract way they were now, his workaday soul thirsted for companionship.
Now that he was freeing up some of her time, however, she managed to keep up with the news, to read a book27 and watch a film (Casablanca—neither of them had ever seen it), so that when they lay in bed together at night, they both had a small surplus of energy to burn and something to talk about besides the kids, which was as rejuvenating as poxna. She even kissed him goodnight a few times, albeit somewhat dutifully. Unless it was he who’d kissed her? It was impossible to tell. Anyway, he almost ruined the whole thing on Wednesday when he remarked in passing that Erin had developed quite a paunch since Junior was born, but she did him one better by pointing out that he had developed quite a paunch himself since his dream of being an actor had died. Fair enough. Without actually saying as much, they declared it a draw.
27_____________
Strange Elbows, a recent Supermassive-Award-winning alternate history omni novel by a native author about species-on-species violence of the sort that, thank heavens, had never actually occurred on New Taiwan—though reviewers had been quick to add that the very existence, not to mention popularity, of the novel suggested that such violence might exist in potentia.
• • •
When Dylan told Fudge all of this at their next session together, Fudge’s response was not all Dylan had hoped. He agreed that Dylan’s spending more time with his kids might indeed represent a kind of progress, but he intimated also that parenting could hardly be considered a form of “service,” given its basis in what amounts to genetic narcissism, not to mention its being par for the course for a married human man of American stock. If they really wanted to get him beyond his own ego and the ingrained habits of his involuted mind, then he should probably go out and do something for someone he had no obvious interest in helping beyond the promise of expanding his own moral and creative compass.
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