King of the Worlds

by M. Thomas Gammarino

  “Come on in. I’ll make you some lunch. Your father will be so excited to see you.”

  They passed through the old-fashioned screen door. Dylan’s father was right where Dylan had left him that age or so ago: at the kitchen table, doing a cryptogram.

  “Look what I found out by the pool,” his mother said.

  His dad pushed out his chair and sprang to his feet. “That couldn’t be who I think it is?”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Son! What ever are you doing here?” He firmly and vigorously shook Dylan’s hand. “Rest of the family with you?”

  “No, Dad. It’s just me. I had to get away for a bit.”

  His father pursed his lips. “Nothing too serious, I hope?”

  Dylan shook his head. How could he possibly tell them that their newborn grandson, whom they had yet to meet, had predeceased them?

  “Have a seat,” his mother said, indicating the leather sofa in the adjoining living room. “Can I get you something? How about a nice iced tea?”

  “Great,” Dylan said, plopping himself on the sofa.

  His dad took a seat in the armchair across from him. “I wasn’t sure this day would ever come.”

  “It’s great to see you too, Dad.”

  The old man had hardly changed. All of his cells had been replaced many times over, of course, but barring a few new wrinkles across the forehead, the bundle was much the same.

  “You can stay here one night.”

  “What?” This was hardly the warmest of welcomes.

  “We’d love to have you stay longer, of course, but if you’re here as you say because you ‘need to get away for a bit,’ well then that’s no reason to be staying any longer than a night.”

  “I see,” Dylan said. It felt a bit like being kicked in the nuts.

  “Do you want to talk about whatever’s going on?”

  “Not really. Not right now.”

  “Fair enough, I won’t pry, but you’ve got to trust me on this one. I spent enough of my life being afraid to know that it’s about the worst thing you can do. I mean it, son, I’m old enough now that I’ve got some perspective on these matters. I’ve grown wise in my old age, you might say.”

  Dylan’s mother snickered from the kitchen, but Dylan himself was still stuck on the part where his father had been afraid of something in his life. Dylan couldn’t recall him owning up to any sort of vulnerability before. As the quintessential self-made man,46 he tended to ooze grit and optimism; “fear” had never been a part of his vocabulary.

  46_____________

  A high school dropout and graduate of the school of hard knocks, Dylan’s father had gone on to make a killing on his common sense by pioneering the bottled water industry. For decades, he turned a considerable profit, first with his own local concern, Water Works Ltd., and then as a consultant to the Coca Cola Company. Since his son’s exodus, however, he had turned his attention to what environmentalists began referring to in the late nineties as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a chemical sludge spanning an area twice the size of Texas halfway between California and Hawaii, for which petroleum-derived bottles—and therefore he—were largely to blame. By way of making amends, he’d donated a sizable portion of his life savings to Project Pacific, the think tank that eventually succeeded in getting those suspended polymers solidified into a new continent roughly the size of Greenland. These days, that continent, dubbed Polymerica, served as an overcrowded penal colony for industrial polluters from the entire Solar System.

  “Don’t listen to your mother,” the old man went on. “That’s my first pearl of wisdom for you. The second is this: running away from your problems, however big or small, is a mistake. Do you hear me? It’s a mistake. You’ve got to learn to love your problems. This is what separates the successful from the unsuccessful, and boy do I wish someone had told me that when I was your age. You’ve got to man up to whatever challenge is facing you. Lean into difficulty. And I’m not just talking about financially successful people here, mind you. I mean anyone who succeeds at finding meaning in life. These people know that if you fall down, you get up again, period. You don’t bitch and complain. You don’t try to escape into booze or women the way I used to. No, you just stand up and face your fears because you’ve got some goal or value that transcends those fears and you know it.”

  Hold the phone. Was this a confession the old man had just so casually glossed over? Dylan knew absolutely nothing about this sensual side of his father. Oh, he’d known him to have the odd drink now and then, but he certainly had not known him to be any sort of boozehound, and if there had ever been any women in his life besides Dylan’s mother, this was breaking news. And while Dylan realized that he should probably be at least vaguely upset by the idea of his father as philanderer, it actually came as something of a relief. His father too had spent his life storming the ramparts of eternity and being hurled back; he too had raged in his way against the dying of the light. However different the outward forms their lives had taken, it appeared they were made of the same star stuff after all.

  “Do you hear what I’m saying to you, son? I know this may sound old-fashioned to you now, very ‘American’ and what have you, but I swear to you it’ll hold true as long as there is life in this universe. You may remember that Jesus fell three times on his way up to Gethsemane, and each time he got up again despite knowing that if he made it he was only going to get nailed to that cross he was carrying. But he did it anyway, didn’t he? He wasn’t afraid. Or he was probably—he was half human after all—but he didn’t let that fear control him. He didn’t try to run away or drink or kill himself. He didn’t take Zoloft or read a science fiction novel or whatever the kids are doing these days. No, he got back up and did what needed doing. He had a destiny to fulfill, just like we all do. So when I hear you say that you needed to ‘get away for a while,’ what I’m really hearing is that you lacked the balls to deal with something that needed dealing with. So by all means come back and stay for a while once you’ve taken care of whatever it is needs taking care of—we’d love to have you—but in the meantime, you’ve got one night.”

  Dylan’s mother came in with a pitcher of iced tea and some glasses. “How are you getting along on New Taiwan these days?” she asked. “You’re still enjoying it there?”

  This being a family conversation, Dylan was hearing a whole iceberg of subtext, and it was as condescending and hurtful as ever. In short, they blamed him for depriving them of the pleasures of spending their golden years with their youngest grandchildren. They believed, as they had always believed, that Dylan’s relocation to New Taiwan was a cowardly retreat from reality, a desperate attempt to escape his demons rather than confront them head-on. For years he had resented this implicit judgment of him, but now that so much time had passed, and that the existential stakes felt so high, he was forced to consider that the reason his resentment had such an edge to it might just be that, in some measure anyway, they were right. To his credit, escape hadn’t been his only motive for the move—he’d wanted to broaden his horizons, indulge his wander- and wonder-lusts, and serve as an ambassador for Earth culture—but how, on this latter day, could he possibly rationalize spending four days at the bottom of a swimming pool while his wife mourned the death of their baby boy with their absurd concubine? Clearly this was escapism through and through, and he belonged at her side. Tomorrow, then, first thing, he would go home—to his other home, that is. It would be extremely difficult to be there, but that was precisely why he needed to be—because it would be trying, in both senses of that word.

  “It’s fine, Mom. I like the weather there. Can we discuss something else?”

  “There you go,” his father said, “evading difficulty again.”

  “You’re right, Dad. That’s exactly what I’m doing. And I promise I’ll go back to being a responsible adult tomorrow, but would you indulge me just this on
e night please? We can all benefit from a little escape now and then, can’t we?”

  His father frowned. “What would you like to talk about?” he asked.

  “The Phils?”

  The frown lifted.

  Dylan hadn’t followed baseball in years. He could watch via omni if he subscribed, but it was expensive, so outside of a few innings here and there at the Terran sports bar, he’d essentially sacrificed baseball alongside most of the rest of Earth culture when they’d moved (literature excepted, of course, but that had always been a kind of pocket universe anyway).

  When he was a kid, his father used to split season tickets with some of his coworkers, so they’d end up going down to the Vet47 for at least a dozen games each season. The Phillies were their one shared enthusiasm that transcended all their burgeoning philosophical differences. Sitting in those stands, they barely even had to talk; instead, they just cheered and booed, smiled and scowled, high-fived and patted each other on the back; and ate, with relish, way too many hot dogs, with relish. It was a male bonding thing, to be sure, very primal. Once, Dylan remembered, he caught a foul ball tipped off of Mike Schmidt’s bat, and when a bigger kid ripped it out of his hands, Dylan’s dad got up and ripped it right back for him. In a weird way, it was one of Dylan’s proudest memories.

  47_____________

  Veteran’s Stadium (1969-2004)

  So for the remainder of the evening, Dylan’s father agreed to drop the hard-ass routine. His mother made her famous tortellini, which was nearly as good as her famous ravioli and her famous shrimp scampi, and once his father had said grace and poured the Chianti, he began filling Dylan in on the last twenty years of lineups and highlights, victories and upsets, gossip and controversy. Regarding that last, MLB had finally suspended drug tests a few years back, so records were being smashed left and right. His dad thought this breathed new life into the game, while his mother found it unconscionable. “What message are we sending to our young people?” she asked rhetorically. “HGH was one thing, but with all these new genetic therapies and neuro-enhancers, it’s like we’re encouraging our athletes to become post-human.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” his father said.

  “Everything. The Transhumanists already have their own league.”

  “Yeah, on Mars.”

  “So let them go there. Earth for humans. That’s what I say.”

  “You’re right,” his father conceded. “You’re right. I just hate to go back to eight-hundred-foot home runs.”

  To Dylan’s utter surprise, his mother was holding her own in this conversation; apparently she’d stepped into the breach since his departure and become something of a phanatic48 in her own right. She had never told him that. He was glad his father had someone to enthuse with.

  48_____________

  The Phillie Phanatic—a green, bipedal, snout-nosed, googly-eyed, prehensile-tongued, jersey-wearing, Muppet-type creature reputedly hailing from the Galapagos Islands—has been the official mascot of the Philadelphia Phillies since 1978. Any enthusiastic Phillies fan might by extension be called a phanatic.

  That night, Dylan slept soundly in his old bedroom. They had replaced his rocket-ship wallpaper with a classier transit-of-Venus motif, but once the lights were out and the occasional headlight was sliding through the venetian blinds and across the ceiling, he was transported to that Eden of little-boyhood again, where the last couple of decades were just some alt-universe nightmare he’d awoken from, or some lurid comic he’d just finished reading by toy lightsaber in a fort of sheets. He savored every second.

  In the morning, he woke to the smell of banana waffles, scrapple and coffee. He went downstairs—still correctly anticipating every squeak after all these years—bid his parents a good morning, and tried to care about the headlines in the Inquirer while they collaborated on a crossword.

  But they all knew it was time for him to go.

  So he finished eating, gathered up his things, and omni’d Erin to tell her he was coming home (he also found six recent messages from her asking where the hell he was).

  His parents saw him to the threshold.

  Dylan steeled himself for the worlds outside. “Say hi to the rest of the family for me.”

  “We will,” his mother said.

  Again he considered telling them about Junior, but the prospect seemed no more tenable than it had yesterday.

  “I’ll be back,” Dylan said, and no sooner had he said it than he remembered it was one of the lines that had taken him so far away from here in the first place. He repeated it for them with the best Schwarzenegger accent he could muster.

  His mom smiled, wiped away a nascent tear.

  “We’ll be looking forward to it,” his dad assured him. He even winked.

  “Keep it up with the pickleball,” Dylan said. “I want you guys to stick around for a long time yet.”

  “We’ll see what we can do,” his mom said.

  There was a good bit of smiling and nodding then, until finally they leaned into their difficult goodbyes and Dylan made his way back to the teleport to get copied and destroyed yet again. This time, though, as Dylan straddled those light years, he realized for the first time what a handy metaphor QT was for what humans had always done anyway; to wit, we die, over and over and over again.

  But just as often—oh!—we are born.

  Junior though…

  • • •

  The house on Yushan Lane was empty. Dylan had checked every room and was poised to omni Erin when he glanced out the window to find her where she’d never been found before: in the garden, breaking up New Taiwanese earth with a small trowel.

  Dylan waved away the door and went to his kneeling wife. As his shadow fell, she looked up and then immediately back down again.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She plunged the trowel into the silicate dirt—Shpft.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She gave the trowel a twist. It sounded like Fuck you, asshole.

  “I’ve realized that I’ve been avoiding difficulty my whole life,” he went on. “It’s a bad habit. I’m determined to change.”

  Erin sighed. “I can’t do this right now, Dylan. Can you give me a couple more hours to work out my feelings on this dirt please?”

  “Okay,” he said, knowing that there were no words that might help his situation, that not even poetry attained to magic. “But where are the kids?”

  “Out with Wendy.”

  “Doing what?”

  She peered up at him with barbed pupils. He threw up his hands in surrender and retreated to the house. On his way to the bedroom, he paused outside of Junior’s room until he felt like he was going to be sick, and then continued on down the hall to plop himself on his bed and sleep off the QT lag.

  When he came back a few hours later, Erin was still there, planting seeds. And across the manicured, periwinkle lawn, Wendy was playing badminton with his two surviving children.

  “We had a small funeral,” Erin said, by way of acknowledging that she was ready to talk.

  “I did miss it then?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, were we supposed to wait for you?” As if to underline her feelings about that, she hocked a loogie in the dirt—in all their years together, she had never done that before. “Anyway, he’s cryonized. You can go pay your respects whenever you like.”

  In his periphery now, Dylan noticed Wendy noticing him.

  He wouldn’t have turned to her except that he noticed the kids noticing him too. He waved, but they just went back to hitting around their birdie—he could hardly blame them.

  Wendy strode toward him with an uncertain grin. “Welcome home,” she said. She was wearing a yellow sundress and looked—it had to be admitted—bewitching.

  “I presume you took care of the toad?” he said.

  “We
had him quarantined, yes.”

  “Pulverized would have been more like it.”

  Wendy winced. “They’re QT’ing him Earthside. He’s as good as dead to us.”

  “Wonderful. Then all that remains is for you to pack your things and leave.” He felt a little pang of something as he said that, but the bitch had killed his son; it was hardly out of line.

  It took a moment for the news to rise in her face. When it did, it came as a quivering lower lip and a welling of tears, followed in short order by her burying her face in her hands and seeking shelter in the very house she’d just been evicted from.

  Erin promptly stood and slapped Dylan across the face with a gloved hand. Stray mica cut into his cheek. He touched the spot with his middle finger. Blood.

  “How dare you?” she said, her eyes bulging like a couple of pteraduck eggs. “May I remind you that I couldn’t have made it through any of this if Wendy had been as much of a coward as you?”

  “May I remind you,” Dylan countered, “that if it weren’t for Wendy, there would be nothing for you to have to get through in the first place?”

  “Oh, fuck off, Dylan. Do you honestly think this is any easier for her?”

  “Are you joking?”

  “No I’m not joking. Wendy loved Junior as much as either of us did. That’s obvious. God knows she spent more time with him.”

  “But he wasn’t her son. It’s different.”

  “I get that you’re angry, Dylan. I’m goddamned furious. I’m living every mother’s worst nightmare right now, and if I had a time machine, you better believe I’d go back and set things to rights, but unfortunately time machines aren’t real and this—”

  “Actually,” Dylan interrupted, “early experiments in quantum tunneling do suggest that reverse causality might—”

  “Dylan,” Erin interrupted in her turn, “you’re in so much denial it’s a wonder you can even see me right now.”

  “Cryonics, though—”