“Oh come off it. I did it to cushion Wendy’s fall in whatever way I could. You and I both know it’s snake oil.”
“We could get an avatar-droid at least…”
“Dylan, our son is dead. D-E-A-D. And I very much doubt that any new technology is going to change that. Sooner or later we’re going to have to find an old-fashioned, human way forward. I wish I were wrong about that, I really really do, but I’m not, and you know perfectly well that I’m not.”
It was true—some part of him did seem to know that—and for the first time since Junior’s death, hot tears began to form in the corners of his own eyes. His mourning was beginning to begin.
“And unlike you, Dylan, I don’t have the luxury of being able to run away and mourn for five days, let alone the decades I’m going to require—I’ve got Tavi and Arthur to think about.”
She trembled as she spoke, and Dylan was finally beginning to understand what a cold-hearted bastard he’d been in abandoning her the way he had.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Erin went on. “I’ll be mourning for the rest of my life, but unless we want to let our anger tear us apart, we’re going to have to learn how to forgive.” She took a tissue from her pocket and dabbed the blood from his cheek. “We’ve already lost one family member. Let’s not lose another in the bargain, okay?”
A tear plunked down each of his cheeks, and then a hundred did. He took his lawfully wedded wife in his arms. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
“We all are, Dylan.”
And then they hugged there like that for a good long while, watering the newly seeded garden with their tears while their children played the way children are meant to play and Mother Nature went indifferently about her business.
• • •
Back inside, Dylan cornered Wendy in the bedroom and told her to stop packing.
“But I thought—”
“Stay,” he said. “Please. Erin and I have talked it over. We both want you to.”
“You think you can find it in your heart to forgive me?”
“Erin reminded me how much you’re suffering too. I had somehow failed to consider that. It was a failure of empathy and imagination, and as a teacher of literature, I really ought to be better than that.”
Her composure calved, and she rushed into his arms. “I was so afraid I was going to lose you both forever.”
And then Erin did something wholly unexpected: “Girlfriend,” she said from the doorway, “you couldn’t shake us with a vibrator.” And it wasn’t that the joke was so funny or anything, but Erin’s willingness to make it despite the circumstances confirmed for Dylan what he had always known: his wife was the strongest person he had ever met. Life would go on, and, somehow, she was determined to let it.
Laughter broke through the cloud cover of their grief. Erin loped over to join in the embrace, and then all three of them proceeded to kiss and cry and generally make one another wet in their various vectors and ways. Before they could collapse onto the bed, however, a new reflex manifested simultaneously in each of them: they needed to go check on the kids. Happily, Arthur and Tavi were still playing badminton on the lawn. Dylan asked if the adults could join in the game, and the kids grudgingly assented.
• • •
For dinner, they omni’d up a couple of Terran pizzas, one Hawaiian in honor of Wendy, and another heaping with galric and (squidhound) pepperoni. It arrived just as Wendy hit the match-winning overhead.
Dylan set the boxes on the picnic table. “Come get it while it’s hot,” he said.
But there was a palpable reluctance in the room. All eyes were on him.
“What?” he asked.
“Dylan,” Erin said, “Would you mind terribly if Wendy said grace? We sort of made a habit of it this week.”
“I see.” Now what to say? He certainly did mind, though not necessarily terribly. “I guess if it makes you feel better…”
Erin smiled.
“Dear Heavenly Father,” Wendy began, “We thank you for this pizza we are about to share and for all those who helped to prepare it. Please bless them. And please bless the pizza itself so that it will nourish and strengthen our bodies and minds in this time of transition. We thank you for the gift of this family. We thank you for allowing us to find one another in this life and for giving us the courage to forgive and endure even in the face of extreme difficulty and pain. Above all, we think of Dylan Junior, who you have called home, and we thank you for allowing us to have him in our lives for even so short a time. You are a good God, and we are infinitely grateful. We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”
“Amen,” they all echoed, even Dylan, despite himself. To be sure, it was not going to be easy to forgive Wendy—nor, for that matter, to forgive himself for bringing her into their lives in the first place—but Erin was right: the river of time flowed in one direction only, and it was futile to try and swim against it. As soon as his grieving was done, as soon as he’d felt his goodbye to his son, he would turn his sights again on the future. This was what he’d needed to do anyway, even before Junior’s death, but now he would have a clearer point of demarcation. No more slipping into the past, which (old sport) you can’t repeat anyway.
So by all appearances the members of the Green family were now ready to scoop up their divinely blessed slices of pizza and embark on their long journey of healing together.
But first Erin had to introduce one last little wrinkle: “Dylan, honey, I’m just going to say this, okay, because it seems like a good time to clear the air.”
“There’s more?”
“There is. And I’m pretty sure you won’t like it, but it’s something you need to know.”
“Try me.”
She looked at Wendy, gathered her strength, and turned back to him. “We’ve decided to be baptized.”
“Come again?”
“Next Sunday in Ascension River. First me, then Arthur, Tavi, and finally Junior. You’re welcome to join us, of course. In fact, we hope you will so that our marriage can transcend the death of our bodies. But either way…we’re doing this.”
Dylan was flabbergasted, if not exactly surprised. “Excuse me while I reel,” he said, “but did I not just hear you say you want to baptize Junior?” Who was in denial now?
“Arthur can serve as his proxy,” Wendy said. “I want to give Junior every chance at entering the Celestial Kingdom.”
“And in order to do that, he needs to be baptized?”
“Jesus said, ‘Except that a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.’ In principle Junior is already saved through the mercy of Christ, being below the age of accountability, and actually that’s true of Arthur and Tavi too, but I don’t think it would hurt to give them some celestial insurance, especially on a planet where they will be the first first-generation Mormons. They will need to be leaders someday, so the sooner we start, the better.”
“And you’re qualified to perform these baptisms?”
“Actually no. Only adult males of the Melchizedek priesthood can perform baptisms for the dead, but since I’m the only Mormon on this planet at present, I would seem the likeliest candidate. We’ll have proxies on both sides. I don’t believe our Heavenly Father gets hung up on such details, do you?”
“I think it’s all perfectly insane, frankly, but whatever flies your spaceship.”
Laissez-faire, yes, that would be his tack. He was done trying to make rational beings of them. If this sublime fiction somehow helped them make peace with their sadness, then who was he to judge? There was no law anywhere that said hominids weren’t allowed to be wrong about important things, or even that rational people couldn’t go on loving such people. He did worry about the kids, though; he had long regarded his own religious indoctrination, however mild, as a form of child abuse.
“Art
hur, Tavi,” he asked, “This is something you want to do?”
They nodded their angelic little heads.
And then Dylan remembered something: Omni had puckishly hinted that once it ascended to Godhood, it might choose to retrofit a Mormon universe, which was to say that the rest of his family might have inadvertently backed into the most rational of positions after all. And if he was as rational as he liked to think, shouldn’t he join them?
But no, he’d spent too much of his life scrubbing off the residue of one religion to want to sully himself with another anytime soon. And anyway, it might be a long time yet before Omni ascended to Godhood. In any case, he would let them have their hope. They’d lost enough already.
“Do we have your blessing?” Erin asked.
“Something like that. Just don’t expect me to get dunked too.”
She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed tight. “You’ll at least come along to help us celebrate?”
“How much do you want me to?”
“More than anything in the world.”
“Just this world?”
“All of them combined.”
“Okay then. I’ll be there.”
She beamed.
“Now are there any other bombs you want to drop before I take my first bite of this rapidly cooling Hawaiian pizza?”
“That’s it for me,” Erin said.
“Kids?”
They shook their heads.
“Wendy?”
“No more bombs.”
“Good, then dig in.”
• • •
On Friday afternoon, after two false starts, Dylan finally worked up the nerve to hover to the cryonics facility across town. A native rep ushered him into a private room and went to retrieve Junior. While Dylan waited, he took out of his pocket a paper copy of Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road, which he was considering adopting for his American lit course. He’d read it back in his Borders days and loved every chiseled, bleak, romantic word of it, but he’d left that copy on Earth somewhere, so a few years back he’d ordered a new copy and was dismayed to find on its cover a photo of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Evidently they’d made another movie together, and this was the tie-in edition, which was why it had stayed on his shelf until this morning, when it called to him the way books sometimes did to people of his generation. He read: “The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium.”
He read that sentence over five or six times and had gotten no further when the rep wheeled in Junior’s dewar. “If there’s anything you need, please feel free to omni,” the rep said in English. Then he left father and son alone to commune through the little frosted window.
How perplexing to see the little body in there, those fifteen or twenty pounds that had so deeply touched his family’s life. This baby might as well have been a sentient planet for all the gravity he’d brought with him. Dylan expected to gush emotion, but in fact there was a quiet comfort in sitting here with his namesake again. He spoke as if the boy could not only hear every word, but understand them too, a feat he hadn’t lived long enough to manage in life. Dylan said about what you’d expect a father to say under such circumstances. He was especially apologetic that he hadn’t welcomed Junior into the world with all the pomp and circumstance befitting such an occasion. “I didn’t know,” he said, his face distorting. Then he explained about the posthumous baptism and how, despite what the rest of the family might insist to the contrary, the ritual was for their own salvation, not his, at least until Omni retrofit the universe anyway.
And, sadly, there was a competing comfort in knowing that this frozen carcass wasn’t really his son at all. It was a sort of memorial at best, and the thing about memorials, he realized, is that while ostensibly they’re there to help us remember the dead, they’re also there to help us forget them. They’re the racks on which we hang our grief so that we can be light enough to move on. And sure enough, Dylan was determined to move ahead with all the grace and humility—and atonement—one could pack into the back end of a life. Gone were his days of chasing pipe dreams, mirages, and will-o’-the-wisps. He would never be a great actor; he had long since touched the full meridian of that dream. He would never even be a particularly great lover. No, any glory he might attain to now would be of a quieter sort—a glow, not a blaze—and the fruit of his day-to-day creation. It struck him that he might yet be a very good teacher, for instance, and these days this seemed to him as noble a calling as any other. He was lucky to have heard it.
“Goodbye, my son,” he said, laying a hand on the glass. “Omni willing, we’ll be together again someday.”
• • •
Come Sunday morning, Dylan’s family members dressed themselves all in white, and at Wendy’s insistence (“to insure purity”) skipped breakfast. Dylan, for his part, wore board shorts and an old PASA T-shirt and washed down five strips of synthetic bacon with a cup of steaming poxna.
After laser-brushing their teeth, they walked over three blocks and mounted the rolling road toward Ascension Forest. They all held hands, and, with those six adult arms acting as suspension for the four kid ones, managed to make it all the way to the medium-fast lane without any of them falling down—no small accomplishment, that.
They could hardly have asked for a finer day to travel. Oh, it was a bit on the warm side perhaps, but perfectly comfortable once they were rolling under the forest’s vast canopy of dragon bloods.49 Normally they’d have bought something to eat from the roadtop food court or ice cream truck, but Wendy insisted that they be absolutely pure in body and spirit for the ordinance.
49_____________
Dracaena cinnabari, a close cousin to the variety native to the Yemeni island of Socotra, on Earth. The New Taiwanese name, unn’jongluzpaña, translated as “female (mutatis mutandis) with six million outstretched arms.”
“Can we play on the jungle gym, then?” Arthur asked.
Erin deferred to Wendy.
“Okay,” Wendy said, “but you have to promise to take it easy so as not to soil your whites, okay?”
“We’ll be wearing them in the river anyway,” Arthur said . “What’s the big deal?”
He had a point. At least Dylan thought he did.
As they approached their destination, the five of them held hands and, over the course of a mile, downshifted three lanes—medium, medium-slow, slow—dismounting not a hundred yards from their trailhead. Miraculously, nobody fell this time either.
Dylan led the pilgrims down the trail. It really was a very nice day. Starbugs scattered off the trail like blown leaves before them, arboreal spiders warbled soft as doves, and while there wasn’t a breath of wind, the bamboo nevertheless found cause to clack now and then. Arthur and Tavi—who were last here at their respective conceptions—thrilled to race each other down the path and skip crystals across the creek.
As if to welcome them back, a lei of night-blooming rhinodendrons ringed their glade. Dylan warned the kids to stay away from the moss, but he didn’t say why—they were saving the peculiar properties of this forest for a post-ordinance surprise.
“Wipe that grin off your face,” Erin told Wendy, who was obviously lost in a reverie of one of her trysts here. But Erin was only teasing; as far as Dylan knew, there wasn’t a spot of jealousy between them. Besides, Erin had been here with him many times too, and long before Wendy ever had.
Dylan put down the picnic things and led them over to the banks of the gurgling stream. He took off his sneakers and waded knee-deep in the warmish water, his family following close behind. “Now where to?” he asked.
“Follow me,” Wendy said, taking the lead. “I did some research.”
So they followed her, down the winding brook and around a series of c
alcite boulders until they arrived at a sort of natural clay dam, on the far side of which lay a pool some three feet deep and looking-glass smooth. It was as close as nature ever came to making a baptismal font.
“Here we are,” Wendy said. “Celestial, yes?”
“Yes!” his family affirmed.
“You sound like you’ve had lobotomies,” Dylan said.
“Thanks,” Erin said wryly.
“I’m sorry. I assure you I’m being as supportive as I possibly can.”
“Now,” Wendy said, “Is everyone ready to make an everlasting covenant with God?”
“Yes!” they replied again in unison.
“I’ll just be right over here,” Dylan said, taking a seat on a nearby rock.
Without further ado, the ordinance began. And it was all very simple and anticlimactic really. First Wendy clasped hands with Erin, then she raised her right arm and intoned, “Erin Wheatley, having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” It struck Dylan as a little odd that she’d used Erin’s maiden name, but what did he know or care about the protocol of Mormon baptisms? Erin pinched her nose and Wendy proceeded to dunk her backwards in the water. And that was that. Next.
She repeated the process with Arthur and Tavi.
Then it was Junior’s turn, and poor Arthur got dunked again as his little brother’s proxy. “Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ,” Wendy said, “I baptize you for and in behalf of Dylan Green Jr., who is dead, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
Dylan winced a little on hearing that word “dead.” What a brutal word to apply to a child, even when it was le mot juste.
When Arthur was finished, Erin looked up at Dylan. “You’re sure you won’t join us?” she implored. “Our marriage would transcend bodily death.”
He shook his head.
“He’ll come around,” Wendy said. “In the meantime, let’s go celebrate.”
“Yes!” they all said.
Lobotomies.
• • •
King of the Worlds Page 26
