King of the Worlds

by M. Thomas Gammarino

“I spied on you,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “You what?” He yanked his legs out from under her.

  “Remember last week when you dropped me at the teleport?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well I decided I wasn’t quite ready to go yet, so I hailed the androcab directly behind yours and had it follow you.”

  “You came to my house?” His jaw hung slack.

  “It was surprisingly easy really. Isn’t there any crime on this planet? Because you’ve got such a nice house and no security to speak of besides your fancy doors which you don’t even lock. I started out just peering in windows, but then while Erin was in the shower scrubbing her stretch marks and the kids were playing with Legos in the basement, I came in through the laundry door and crawled under the master bed. Do you know that you and Erin didn’t exchange a single word before going to sleep that night? Not a single word! That’s when I knew for certain I wasn’t crazy: Your marriage is a four-dimensional tomb. You need me.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Dylan said. It was all he could think to say.

  “Really?” Wendy said. “Because I think you’re actually pretty impressed. We both know Erin would never do such a thing. I love you more than she ever has. I have been obsessed with you since I was a little girl, and I think that, despite yourself, you rather like that, no?”

  “All the same,” Dylan said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  Dylan began pacing, processing. As maddening as anything she was saying was the nonchalance with which she was saying it.

  “Do you know who I had my cabby be?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Sting. Ask me why.”

  “Why?”

  She began to sing. It was weird.

  Every breath you take

  Every move you make

  Every bond you break

  Every step you take

  I’ll be watching you

  It had to be admitted, though, that, weirdness notwithstanding, she was quite a good singer, with an impeccable sense of melody and an odd Celtic inflection.

  O can’t you see

  You belong to me

  How my poor heart aches

  With every step you take

  “You know that song?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, lots of people think it’s a love song—they play it at weddings and such—and then they’re shocked when they learn it’s about a stalker. But I’ve always found that to be a false dichotomy, don’t you think? If you really love somebody, why wouldn’t you obsess over them?”

  “I’m leaving now,” Dylan said. “I’ll need to think over everything that’s happened here.” He got up, peeled off some creepers and began putting his clothes back on.

  Wendy stood too. “Don’t you even think about backing out on me, Dylan Greenyears.”

  “Are you joking? Of course I’m going to think about backing out on you.”

  “But you promised before God.”

  “I didn’t exactly have all the information then, did I?”

  “We never have all the information, Dylan. Only God has all the information.”

  “Omni’s pretty close,” Dylan said, setting off toward the cab.

  “I gave you my most precious gift!” Wendy cried after him.

  A dagger manifested in his throat. He foisted it: “I’ve had better.” He didn’t even turn around to face her.

  “I forgive you,” she said. “I know that wasn’t you speaking just now.”

  Damn it! Now he’d really have to turn around. “Who was it, pray tell?”

  “The Adversary.”

  “The what?

  Her face was as red as his bloodstained penis now. “Lucifer. Satan. The Devil. Sometimes he goes in the guise of Reason, but make no mistake, it’s the Adversary! Out, Adversary!”

  Then she did something exceedingly strange: she tore at her breasts, really tore at them with her fingernails, so that soon she had drawn blood from her sharp nipples and was smearing it across her ribs.

  “Stop that!” Dylan said, returning to her side. “Will you just calm down please?”

  She didn’t.

  He did his best to console her: “I’m confused, okay? I need to think.”

  “But that’s just it,” she shrieked. “You think too much. Obey your heart as I obey mine and the rest will take care of itself. Fuck Erin. Erin is dead to you now.”

  “Yeah, but see, Erin is not dead to me now. We’re not exactly seeing eye to eye on that yet.” He reached out a hand. “I’m going. Join me if you want a ride.”

  She collapsed into the fetal position on the ground and began to weep, silently at first and then resoundingly. Dylan crouched and patted her head. After many minutes, she regained whatever sanity she had left and looked up at him with a runny nose and twinkling eyes. “You’re even cuter when you’re angry,” she said.

  He didn’t want to smile at that, he really didn’t, but it had been a very long time since anyone had called him cute. Shit.

  When they arrived at the teleport, he insisted on accompanying her as far as he was allowed. They did the secret handshake at the security gate and said goodbye. “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too,” he said—and he did, in some way or other. “But I’m confused. I need to think. And for the record, if I see you anywhere near my house, I will have you promptly arrested.”

  “The Adversary—” she began.

  “Put it this way. I need to have a good long sit-down with the Adversary.”

  “Don’t underestimate his powers,” she warned.

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said. “Now go. I’ll be in touch in a few days. In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave me alone.”

  She pouted.

  “Go!” he shouted, shooing her.

  She plodded backward through the gate, sulking the whole way, until finally—thank heaven—he was rid of her.

  • • •

  Dylan thought about nothing else for three straight days. He’d always known that Wendy was a little eccentric in her beliefs, and a little mad in an impulsive, suck-the-marrow-out-of-life kind of way, but he had not realized how completely batshit insane she was until he’d seen her tearing at her breasts like that.

  That’s what you get for stalking your old stalkers, he supposed.

  Once he got over the initial disappointment, though, his newfound knowledge that Wendy was essentially unmarriageable actually proved something of a relief. Because what it meant, in effect, was that he was going to stay married to Erin. And while his marriage might occasionally feel like a failure, it would not be one in the technical sense. Even in a scenario where both partners ended up being happier after a divorce, the fact remained that they had set out to do one thing and then, faced with hardship, given up and done another, which was precisely the narrative traced by anything one might call a failure. Dylan knew a thing or two about that, and he did not desire to know any more. If he was going to go down with a ship, he was determined that it be this one.

  Once at a hotel in Zurich, where he’d been hired to star in a credit card commercial, an old snaggletoothed concierge had insisted on reading Dylan’s palm. “You were born under a great star,” he told Dylan. “You will accomplish many wonderful things. Fear death by hubris.” Then he’d shown Dylan his lifeline, beginning at the base of his thumb and swooping toward the edge of his palm. Evidently the length and depth of Dylan’s line meant that he would enjoy a longer-than-average lifespan, but one couldn’t help but notice a small break in the line mid-swoop on his right hand, and at precisely the same point on his left hand, a bisected freckle.

  “What does it mean?” Dylan had asked.

  “It means you will experience a
rupture midway through life’s journey.”

  “A rupture? Are we talking literal or symbolic here?”

  “Unfortunately,” the old man told him, “palms don’t give such details. But if you’re interested, I can recommend a marvelous astrologer here in Zurich.”

  Dylan wasn’t interested, not really. He was merely humoring the old man and didn’t believe in any of it for even a second. Still, some uneducable, superstitious part of him had lived in vague fear and anticipation ever since—all the more reason he was relieved not to have crossed the Rubicon where his marriage was concerned. He’d have to keep an eye on his palm; maybe lines could repair themselves, freckles migrate.

  Staying married to Erin, of course, also meant that his kids would continue to have a dad. And Wendy could not have been more wrong about his feelings toward them. Granted he’d hesitated, on ethical grounds, before agreeing to bring Junior into being—there was no denying that—but he loved his kids down to their protoplasm, and now that he was beginning to see things clearly again, he was determined that they know it. After work, he curled up with Arthur and Tavi on the sofa and read to them from The Little Prince and Where The Wild Things Are. He began to recognize flickers of intelligence in Junior too, who was something like a small person now and not merely a person-to-be. Dylan liked to cradle him and inhale his clean pink scalp. And when Erin wasn’t looking, he liked to toss the kid in the air, just a few inches—and catch him, of course—and this was just what he was doing on Tuesday evening when the kid cracked his first smile. “Did you see that!” Dylan said.

  “What?” asked Erin.

  “Junior just smiled at me.”

  “It’s way too early for that,” she protested.

  Dylan chucked the kid up again—

  “Dylan!”

  —and caught him. Did she really think he was going to let his own baby come to harm?

  “Here he goes again,” Dylan said. “Trust your senses.”

  And yes, here he went again, all bulbous cheeks and shiny gums.

  “See.”

  Erin practically fainted with joy. She cooed more than the baby did. “Throw him again!” she begged.

  Arthur and Tavi saw it too and laughed and patted Junior’s head, and this Christmassy warmth suffused the family then, this eggnog feeling, and for the first time in quite a while, Dylan looked at what he’d made and knew it was good.

  And so on Wednesday evening, after three days of careful reflection and baby-tossing, while Erin took her shower, Dylan omni’d Wendy:

  Dearest Wendy,

  I want you to know that after a three-day dive inside my mind, I have surfaced with a difficult, if unavoidable, truth. To be sure, this is not an easy message for me to write, and already I find myself struggling to do it with some measure of grace.

  First, let me acknowledge that the passion I have felt for you over recent weeks has been quite unlike anything I have ever experienced. Before meeting you, I was all hollow and dark inside, but you rekindled the light at my core and it radiates out to my very fingertips even as I write this message. My entire organism thanks you.

  And please know this too, Wendy: You are beautiful, exquisitely, translucently so, and nothing in this message should tempt you to think otherwise.

  Of course, you are also highly intelligent, and as such you have no doubt been anticipating the impending drop of another shoe since the first sentence of this message, if not before. I wish there were a gentler way of saying this, but surely you have earned the respect of my honesty: in short, darling, despite the ardent feelings you have aroused in me, I am simply not made of the sort of stuff that would permit me to abandon my family for you. I regret that I mis-modeled possible futures in the heat of our mutual passion, and I can only hope that you will trust me when I say that my deception was rooted not in malice but in ignorance. I did not know myself on Sunday even as well as I do today; I was, in a way, as deceived by my feelings as you were.

  The passions after all are fickle, and experience teaches us that they are hardly the right kind of soil for the germination of healthy decisions. You might ask, then, acknowledging my lack of belief in any theistic skyhook, what I take to be the foundation of my marriage if not feeling? It’s a question I’ve thought about quite a lot these past few days, a very good question, and one whose answer is itself rooted in feeling and so not easily translatable, though I shall try: Marriage, for me, is a stay against chaos. It is the still point of the widening gyre, the center that must hold lest all semblance of human meaning be lost. It is a poem I recite before the void, the bulwark I erect against total, all-pervading nothingness. It is a tragic project, to be sure, doomed from the start, absurd, but it is nonetheless as central to my life as anything I will ever do, if for no other reason than that I will have done it. Had we met at a different juncture in spacetime, Wendy, you and I might have made this insane leap together, just as we leapt into the moss a short time ago. But for better or worse, it was not to be, and neither you nor I are any more to blame for that than a couple of hydrogen atoms can be blamed for ending up in separate water molecules.

  I imagine that all of this may sound quite alien to you, and I wonder if you might not better appreciate my feelings about marriage in the context of your feelings about religion, which I assure you are every bit as alien to me. I intend no criticism, mind you. You are entitled to believe in Jesus, Kolob, the Adversary and all that. They are your precious absurdities, as my marriage is mine, and given that, don’t you owe it to yourself to find someone who can buy into them with you? Whatever you might have seen in your visions, I assure you that person can never be me.

  Some things, Wendy, are not meant to last forever. I met you at a time in my life when I needed a touch of magic. You gave me that, and words, wonderful though they be, cannot possibly communicate the extent of my gratitude. I do not regret any of it and I hope that you won’t either; indeed, I find the memory of our time together already sweetened by the knowledge of its evanescence. We, too, were a kind of poem against the void, Wendy. Please know that I wish you the best in this life and beyond.

  I will remember you always.

  Aloha,

  Dylan Greenyears

  There. He’d done it, the difficult thing.

  He stared at his omni, the pitch in his ears modulating around the thudding in his chest. How would she take it? What would she say? Any second now he’d know.

  But then the seconds swelled into minutes, dozens of them, and he still didn’t know. He got up and left the room and tried to go about the rest of his day without obsessing over her imminent response, which, second by second, was turning out not to be so imminent after all. An hour passed, and then a Terran day, a New Taiwanese day, and by and by Dylan was forced to conclude that this radio silence must be Wendy’s way of expressing her fury at being scorned. He was not without compassion, naturally, but in a way her passive-aggressiveness actually made the whole disentanglement that much easier on him.

  And besides, she was bound to learn something from the ordeal, was she not? He had certainly learned something; contemplating the existential meaning of his marriage and forcing his conclusions through the sieve of language had proven a hugely clarifying exercise. No doubt she’d be about the business of clarifying something equally important in her own life. Struggle is good for us after all: isn’t that what literature teaches? Okay, some literature? Okay, just comedies (but there were a lot of those)?

  So that was it then. This dark chapter of his life, this midlife crisis or whatever it had been, was over. He’d indulged his nostalgia and sown some latent oats and he would content himself now to leave the past in the past and youth to the young. Going forward, he would be a family man, rich in meaning if not always happiness, appreciative of all he had, with a job he didn’t hate and chronic ringing in his ears—nothing, in short, that he could not bear. He might even find some joy i
n it.

  PART THREE

  STARFUCKER

  Class was a good two minutes over and Daniel Young was still shuffling his feet by Dylan’s desk. He had never done that before.

  “What can I do you for, Daniel?”

  “I was wondering if there was any chance I might be able to redo my Shakespeare scene?”

  “And why would you want to subject yourself to such a thing?”

  “Because I got a B.”

  “It’s about the grade, is it? Well I wouldn’t let that bother you too much, Daniel. Your writing has been stellar so far, and you’ll still have two papers due before the end of the semester. Why not turn your attention to them?”

  Dylan began gathering up his things—he had a bullshit meeting to attend—but Daniel didn’t seem satisfied yet, and since turning over a new leaf the day before, Dylan was determined to be a more compassionate teacher.

  “Is something the matter, Daniel?”

  “Actually, yes,” Daniel said. He blinked hard, like he was praying or summoning strength. “Do you remember when you asked me if I’d ever been in love?”

  “Vaguely,” Dylan replied.

  “You insinuated that I couldn’t possibly have been.”

  “‘Insinuated’: good word. My unconscious just gave you a bonus point.”

  “Do you remember?”

  “Look, I’m sorry if I offended you, Daniel. I was making a point is all. Rest assured, most kids your age haven’t been in love yet. It’s perfectly normal.”

  “But I have been in love,” Daniel said. “I am in love.”

  Now this was a genuine surprise. “That’s wonderful, Daniel. I’m happy for you. I myself didn’t fall in love until I was a couple of years—”

  “With a native.”

  “I see.” Daniel was turning out to be far more interesting than Dylan had ever given him credit for. “Male or female, may I ask?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I suppose not. Though either way I can’t help but wonder what your parents think.”

  “That’s just it. I can’t tell them. My father would be repulsed if he knew. He might even kill me. He insists that I’m to marry a Korean Earthling female someday, but the problem is I’m not attracted to Korean Earthling females. I’m attracted to Kwizok.”