King of the Worlds

by M. Thomas Gammarino

  “Nice name.” New Taiwanese names were all unisex, so Daniel hadn’t inadvertently given anything away.

  “The nicest.”

  “And how did you meet this Kwizok?”

  “Kwizok is my next-door neighbor. We’ve grown up together. We’re less than a month apart in age.”

  “I see. And has Kwizok told his or her parents?”

  “No, Kwizok’s situation is exactly the same as mine. Kwizok’s parents are ultra-conservative. Kwizok’s mom even chairs the Committee on the Prevention of Alien Diseases.”

  “But Kwizok himself or herself knows how you feel?”

  “Oh, it’s absolutely mutual. We’re in love. We’re going to get married someday. We already are in every way that counts. We’ve been having sex in the crawlspace beneath my house since summer.”

  “I see. You’re using some sort of protection, I hope?”

  “I don’t feel comfortable answering that.”

  “Okay, then would you remind me what all this has to do with English class?”

  “I was afraid.”

  “I need more.”

  “You taught us all about Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg, and The Method, and when I was practicing my scene at home, I thought of Kwizok and I know my acting was great, Mr. Green—I know it was. I even started thinking maybe I really could be an actor someday. Maybe this was my destiny. But then the other day when I was acting here, I got nervous. I saw all my classmates out there and how they weren’t taking the assignment seriously and I just wimped out. I got through the whole scene without thinking about Kwizok even once. I was just saying the words. I let my fear crowd out my love and I totally failed you, to say nothing of Kwizok.”

  “This is not just about the grade then?”

  “I think it’s about regret, Mr. Green. I’m not ready to have one this big.”

  “I know a thing or two about that,” Dylan said.

  “Really?”

  “Trust me.”

  “But your life seems so…perfect.”

  Ha! Dylan liked to believe that training students in the close reading of texts ultimately translated into their learning to read the extra-textual world as well—so much for that.

  “Thanks for saying so, Daniel. I assure you we’ve all got our quota of suffering to fill, but it’s nice to hear I don’t always wear mine on my sleeve.”

  Daniel twitched. He was reverting to his usual, anxious self.

  “So about your scene,” Dylan continued. “I can’t change your grade. If I gave you the opportunity to do that, I’d have to offer it to everyone in the class and we haven’t got time for that. I can, however, give you the opportunity to redeem yourself to yourself if you like.”

  Dylan bent down, took a book from the shelf and handed it to Daniel. It was entitled The Ages of Man. A wizened English teacher had given it to him as a high school graduation gift however-many ages ago that was.

  “Instead of redoing the scene you already did, Daniel, why don’t you flip through this book and find a monologue that suits you? That way you won’t need to rely on other actors. You can perform it for the class whenever you’re ready.”

  Daniel paged through the book as if it were in Shakespeare’s own hand. “Thank you so much, Mr. Green. I promise to make you proud.”

  “Again, don’t worry about me, Daniel. Do it for yourself.”

  Daniel mouth-smiled.

  “And for Kwizok, of course,” Dylan added.

  And now Daniel smiled with his whole being. It was good, sometimes, this being a teacher.

  They walked out of the room together.

  “Be safe,” Dylan said.

  “Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Green,” Daniel said. As if time were ever anyone’s.

  Daniel took off down the hall. Dylan was going that way too, but slower. He still had half a bullshit meeting to attend.

  • • •

  And then one Sunday, right on schedule, Dylan turned forty. It was no big deal, a Sunday like any other, if a touch more pleasant by design. He played in the yard with the kids, ate some instant zalcax34 for lunch, and took a nap. At dusk, he went for his first jog in years and had the good sense to keep it short. Then for dinner, as promised, Erin made ravioli, his favorite, with real olive oil and real garlic. It wasn’t as good as his mother’s, of course, but it was the same recipe and pretty darned close. For dessert, they had a simple chocolate cake that the kids had helped bake. They dimmed the lights and sang to him. He silently wished for peace, both inner and outer, and let the kids help him blow the candles out. To be sure, it took a while, and the cake was now iced in spit, but he ate it anyway, and went back for seconds.

  34_____________

  New Taiwanese dish consisting of native roots and tubers fried in the bittersweet sap of the Elel tree. (Despite its exotic sound, “Elel” was in fact an abbreviation of Lewandosky and Lutz, the physicians who first documented Epidermodysplasia verruciformis, a rare autosomal recessive genetic disease of Earth that sometimes resulted in humans closely resembling trees. The story goes that Joe Snodgras, general physician for the First Expedition, remarked upon seeing his first of these trees that it looked less like a tree than like a man who looked like a tree. Joe took to calling the tree the “Lewandowsky-Lutz tree,” which other members of the expedition soon shortened to “LL,” and which then morphed over time into “Elel.” Most English speakers subsequent to the First Expedition mistakenly assumed that “Elel” was the native word for the tree; in actual fact, the native word for the tree was the simpler, if not dissimilar, lal.)

  Then Thursday, after work, he went to his GP for a check-up. He was at the start of a new decade and his psyche was purged; a clean bill of health would round out his rebirth.

  Fortunately, the fiber-optics-in-the-anus colonoscopy had gone the way of trepanation and the medical leech. These days x-rays and lasers were powerful enough to image you down to the individual quark—you didn’t even have to take your clothes off—so the forty-year-old check-up was no longer the rite of passage it had once been.

  The whole thing took five minutes. The verdict: healthy on all counts, with the sole exception of his tinnitus, which rang on unabated. Omni’s opinion? “TBD.” But the ringing no longer bothered Dylan so much. He had yet to schedule another appointment with Fudge, and he was beginning to think he might not. If silence was determined to sound like the whirring of United Planets Cruiser C57-D in Forbidden Planet, then so be it. The consistency was almost comforting if he let it be: one more precious absurdity to cling to, one more tightrope over the void.

  Just thinking of Fudge, however, reminded Dylan of his unfinished business with Mei-Ling Chen/Jade Astrophil, not to mention the corrupt Omniverse, and it dawned on him that he would not be able to enter fully into this next phase of his life, this new age, until he’d tied up the threads of the last one. Would he were the taskmaster of his own brain and not the other way around.

  And so, that very evening, after the rest of his family had gone to bed, he picked up the trail where he’d left off—namely, Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles.

  • • •

  Jade Astrophil had been discharged from Good Samaritan twice in the past year. Omni would no longer confirm this for him, but he’d seen it with his own eyes, and it was the only lead he had to go on. Now all he had to do was somehow gain access to her medical records. Alas, this was no small “somehow.” He knew nothing about how to hack into such information; from what he understood, that had become all but impossible nowadays anyway. His best bet might be to hire someone to impersonate her, but it was not enough for the impersonator to resemble her and know some basic facts about her life. Even on Earth, no hospital was going to grant access to medical records without first scanning the inquirer’s genome. Moreover, the body site sampled was typically random by design. He didn’t have a D
NA sample anyway. He could find some saliva on her letter perhaps, but even then, what was he going to do? Clone her and wait a couple of decades for the clone to grow up? There had to be a more efficient way.

  There was one obvious way, of course: he could simply report to Earth Government on what had happened and let them track her down, but he saw two problems with this approach: 1) they might not believe him, and he had nothing in the way of evidence to corroborate his story; and 2) even if they did believe him, it would very likely be because they were in cahoots with whatever shadowy authority had conspired to erase Mei-Ling/Jade from existence in the first place. The risks clearly outweighed the benefits.

  Plan B, then, might involve—very lightly—greasing some palms. He didn’t personally know anyone who worked at Good Samaritan Hospital, but having been based out of LA for a couple of years, he did know quite a few people in that city. Maybe one of them would have an inside connection? Certainly one of them would know someone who knew someone. But as soon as he began to flip through his mental rolodex of LA contacts, he realized he couldn’t actually get in touch with any of them since all were connected up in some way with Hollywood and/or the life he’d sworn off years ago—and Wendy Sorenson had already given him a scarifying object lesson in the dangers of revisiting the past.

  He did, however, have one contact whose friendship ought to transcend Hollywood insofar as it preceded it.

  • • •

  Chad had never really forgiven Dylan for his success. After Dylan eventually told him about his meeting with Terry Gilliam at Xando, he had seemed to share in the excitement, but with each of Dylan’s subsequent triumphs—as he auditioned and made it to call-backs, as he got the part and put school on hiatus, as E.T. II came out to rave reviews—Chad’s responses grew cooler; and after Dylan’s Oscar nomination for best male lead, Chad didn’t even bother to call.

  To be sure, Chad had been doing fine in his own right, earning academic credits and starring in the Temple University productions. Dylan even flew in from LA once just to see him play the professor in Ionesco’s The Lesson. He was brilliant, but when Dylan told him as much at the South Street Diner after the show, Chad just rolled his eyes and said, “Whatever.”

  “No, I’m serious,” Dylan assured him. “You made some really bold choices up there. Like that voice-cracking thing. I’m not sure I’d have had the guts. In front of a live audience, no less. But it really worked. You seemed totally unhinged in just the right way. I hope you realize I have every intention of connecting you up with the right people as soon as I gain a little more clout in the industry.”

  “Do you have any idea how patronizing that sounds?” Chad said.

  “Sorry, dude, but if I’ve learned anything in my brief time in Hollywood, it’s that connections are paramount. No pun intended.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Chad said. “If you’re good enough, people will eventually sit up and take notice.”

  “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

  “It worked for you.”

  “I got extremely lucky is all, Chad. I had the face Gilliam was looking for. No amount of training will ever give you the face a director is looking for.”

  “Oh, come on,” Chad said. “Give yourself some credit. You’re talented as shit. You were going to make it no matter what.”

  “You’ve clearly got more faith in the system than I do,” Dylan said. Some part of him was still in denial about his success; he would learn to enjoy it for a total of about five minutes before it went away for good.

  “I guess I do. And I’ll get there too someday. On my own merits, thank you very much.”

  “I wish you the best of luck, of course,” Dylan said, “But don’t be shy if I can ever do anything for you.”

  Neither of them had any idea that by the time Chad graduated from Temple, moved to Hollywood, and began auditioning, Dylan would be light years away and in no position to do anyone any favors. Nor did they have any idea that this would be the last time they’d meet in the flesh for many years to come.

  After Dylan’s fall from grace, Chad was one of just a handful of Terrans Dylan entrusted with knowing where he was. They kept in touch via omni, if only occasionally. It wasn’t lost on Dylan that Chad took a certain gloating pleasure in consoling him on his tragedy, but at that point Dylan was willing to take any consolation he could get.

  And then Chad proceeded to fall in his own right. For close on six years he made a go of things, auditioning four or five times a week for TV and film. He landed bit parts here and there, and did some commercials to help pay the bills—most of which were paid by bussing tables at a sushi restaurant—but like so many before him, he burned out before ever really breaking through.

  “I’m sick of the poverty and the humiliation,” he wrote Dylan. “I could live with one or the other, but not both. Damn it, D, I really thought acting was what I was put on this Earth to do. I really believed that. I was here to move people. But I guess there’s no God after all, is there? That was just some well-meaning horseshit we were on the receiving end of for twelve formative years? Anyway, I’m thinking about going to law school while there’s still time. At the very least, it’d make my father proud, and that’s a hell of a lot more than I’m doing now.”

  And, impossibly enough, that was just what Chad went on to do. He studied entertainment law at UCLA, passed the California bar exam, and went to work for a large agency. A few years later, he split off and started his own practice, taking several high-profile clients with him.

  By the standards of the normal, wage-earning American, Chad would have to be accounted a huge success, but from Dylan’s vantage point, it was clear just how disappointed he must be inside, how his dreams had been so thoroughly ground into fish meal. Chad had always been the more idealistic of the two, and now he had become, of all things, a lawyer!

  Is it the case that big dreams in youth inevitably result in big disappointments later on? Perhaps not for the select few, but neither Chad nor Dylan had made that final cut. Darwinism was alive and well on Earth, and the human will alone, however heroic, was no match for the teeth and nails of global capitalism. Each of them had learned this lesson the hard way, and each in his own time, and now fate was pulling their paths into alignment again. And that would have been true even if Dylan didn’t suddenly require a trustworthy contact in Hollywood.

  Chad Powell Esquire—

  Word up, dude. I hope the world of litigation is treating you well. Things on NT are fine. Erin and I just had our third kid, a boy. It’s weird to think you haven’t met any of them yet. As always, the invitation’s open if you fancy a trip up here. I know you’re not real fond of traveling, but I assure you QT is no big deal as long as you don’t let yourself get all philosophical about it. Anyway, I need to talk to you about something and I’d prefer to do it in person. Are you free anytime soon? I’ll be happy to come to where you are.

  Peace,

  Dylar35

  35_____________

  “Dylar” had become one of Dylan’s nicknames during their first few weeks at Temple together, when they’d read Don DeLillo’s White Noise in their freshman lit survey. In that novel, Dylar is the name given to a drug that helps to assuage the fear of death.

  When he’d begun writing that message, Dylan had not planned on inviting himself to LA, but as he finished with pleasantries and got into the meat of his message, it occurred to him that by communicating via omni about possible censorship taking place by Omni, he might be jeopardizing his security. And Omni, alas, was the only game in town. If he wanted to communicate more discreetly, he would have to do it face-to-face, and quietly at that.

  Chad replied almost instantaneously:

  Hey dude,

  Yeah, come on down whenever suits you. I make my own schedule these days. It’ll be good to see you in the flesh after all these years.

  —Cha
d

  Dylan didn’t dally. He was upfront with Erin about where he was going, and almost about why—he told her Chad had requested his help in the discovery phase of a class-action suit that somehow involved him—and while she didn’t completely understand, obviously, she didn’t press the issue. “You’re a grown-up—you can do what you like,” she said.

  “You’ll be okay without me?”

  “Dylan, I’m pretty sure we’ll all be better off when you confront your old demons once and for all. Go to LA. Enjoy yourself. Give my love to Runyon Canyon.”

  It was only once she’s said it that he realized confronting his old demons was precisely what he’d have to do. After the Titanic fiasco, he had sworn never to return to Earth, let alone to Hollywood, that double-crossing den of iniquity, and yet that promise (like all promises?) had turned into a kind of shackles. In the immortal words of Lao Tzu, “The hard and strong will fall / The soft and weak will overcome.”

  So QT’ing to LA that same Saturday was already a kind of victory, even if nothing should come of it.

  He met Chad at his office downtown. Dylan expected gray hair, crow’s-feet, a grotesque gut, some outward sign of all the beatings Chad’s ego had taken over the years, but really he looked much the same as Dylan remembered him. It was true he’d bulked up a bit since college, but he’d always been sort of on the gawky side anyway.

  They hugged, really hugged, with no macho posturing, no forearm barriers or thumps on the back, and then they proceeded to the Mexican joint around the corner. Dylan hadn’t had Mexican food in twenty years. It was one of a handful of Earthling pleasures he missed.

  They made some small talk over nachos and margaritas, but not a whole lot. They both knew being forced to talk about their lives, such as they were, would be exquisite torture. By now they were supposed to be at the height of their glorious careers, collaborating on projects, high-fiving from opposite ends of a supermodel, that sort of thing. Instead, they were just these husks, clinging to life for no other reason than that dying might hurt. Despite Dylan’s determination that his self-indulgent period be a part of his past and not his future, it was hard work overwriting the dominant narrative of one’s life, and a couple of margaritas was more than enough to temporarily undo much of the progress he’d made in that direction. Fortunately, Chad had the good sense to preempt any elegizing by asking his old friend what the hell had brought him to LA.