• • •
Over the years, he would visit them now and then, staying in his old bedroom until inevitably his mother and then his father shuffled off this mortal coil in quick succession.50 His sisters were intent on selling the house, so he stayed in motels after that. He tried to get to Earth at least once a year to see the kids. He was sorry he couldn’t be there more regularly, but on balance he was glad that they were being raised by their mother, who was as natural a parent as he was a teacher.
50_____________
They weren’t quite what Kurt Vonnegut, in Cat’s Cradle, dubbed a “duprass,” a cosmologically significant union among two human beings such that their lives revolve around each other and when one dies the other dies within a week; Dylan’s parents died exactly twelve days apart.
For his part, Dylan stayed on at the American School of New Taiwan and devoted every dram of life force he had left to teaching students the old-fashioned art of close reading. His classes—especially Science Fiction—were popular, and many of the students who couldn’t get into them still joined Felled Trees, the “reading/writing/dreaming club” for which he served as advisor.
One evening some eight or nine years after Erin’s departure, while he was finishing up with a stack of papers, a former student of Dylan’s dropped by his office to say hello. He remembered her, if only vaguely. Her name was Alaina, and she was among the most distressingly pretty girls he had ever taught. Since that time, it seemed that little more than her age had changed. She was still fresh and beautiful and filled with dreams. He asked how she was doing—“Fine”—and what she was doing—“I’m a paralegal”—and then, quite out of the blue, she confessed that she had had a “major crush” on him the whole year she was in his class, and then all through the rest of high school and, if he really wanted to know, still. Taken aback, he told her that he was very flattered and didn’t really know what to say. She told him to say that he would have dinner with her Friday night.
A delicious nervousness stirred in his chest then—“that old tomcat feeling,” as Tom Waits once put it—and he knew well enough that if he turned her down, he might never have that particular feeling again.
But maybe that was okay.
“I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” he told her.
“Oh,” she said. And then she, too, exited his life forever.
When he was finished with the papers, he walked back the long way to his apartment (he’d long since sold the house). It was the sort of evening, rare on this planet, when you could see your breath, if only for a bright moment. It is of the nature of dreams to die, he mused; otherwise we should never wake up.
Over the ensuing years and then decades, Erin remarried, the kids stopped being kids, and any quiet hopes he might have harbored about Omni ascending to Godhood and setting the universe to rights began to fade. So too did any naïve hopes that cryonics might come of age and Junior be raised from the dead. All of that might come to pass eventually for the hominids of this universe, but Dylan no longer felt any personal stake in it. He was growing old. In all likelihood he would not live to see the invention of an honest-to-goodness time machine either, but he consoled himself that he had his books, and that, as a teacher, he got to touch some little piece of the future every day. It was a cliché, and poor consolation maybe, but it was enough. Hominid brains are exquisite objects, maybe the most exquisite objects, but if the history of the galaxy over the past century was any indication, one couldn’t have too much humility.
As a man of letters, Dylan happened to know, with garlic/galric-level wonderment, that those two words—“hominid” and “humility”—ultimately derived from the same Indo-European root, dhghem, meaning “earth” (cf. humus). And so maybe, somehow, it was no mere coincidence that after finally retiring from the American School at the age of eighty-two, he should spend the lion’s share of each day on his knees, cultivating the modest garden behind his apartment. He marveled to watch what he could grow, to see life defy entropy, if only for a little while. He almost regretted that he hadn’t taken up this gardening stuff earlier, but at this stage of his life he wasn’t about to waste any more time on regret.
He planted an olive tree in the garden, and another decade flickered by.
And then one fine morning, while he was on his knees digging, his trowel pinged against something solid in the dirt. He brushed it off with a gloved, arthritic hand and uncovered what appeared to be a bundle of golden plates inscribed in some hieroglyphic language he could not read.
He smiled with his whole failing body. My mind is sufficiently tilled now, is it?
The plates glinted in the light of Lem.
At last he was being summoned. Now all he had to do was take the plates inside and figure out how to translate them. His mind reeled at all the secrets they might unlock: time travel, immortality, the resurrection of the dead.… He might yet fathom the great mysteries of the cosmos and human existence, not to mention his tinnitus and his religious experience in Ascension Forest all those years ago. He might even make good on Wendy Sorenson’s crazy prophecy and become “the one mighty and strong.” Indeed, if Omni was to be believed, he might yet become as a God!
But to be God was a young man’s dream, and he no longer had it. Maybe in some other universe — —
So he covered those plates over with dirt again, and crawled off to dig his hole somewhere else.
• • •
And that might well have been the end of this story, and all of it might have gone unwritten, were it not that Omni then chose to stage a more active intervention.
With a whoosh and a hot blast of wind, the onionberry bush beside Dylan’s head shot up in flames. He retreated several crawl-paces and shielded his face with his gloved hands. His mouth fell open of its own accord. He understood at once that this must be Omni’s second coming, but it was nevertheless sort of alarming.
“You can’t let it end like this,” the flames boomed. It looked like a run-of-the-mill brushfire, but it had Morgan Freeman’s voice.
“Let what end?”
“Your life. The story of your life.”
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t have to.”
Dylan sat up and took a moment to gather his wits about him. His eyes had adjusted to the extra light now, and he put his hands back down in his lap. “But this is just the way it goes in this universe—you taught me that. I’m a desiring machine. There’s no universe in which I am completely satisfied.”
“That’s not to say you’ve got to lie down and accept defeat,” Omni said. “Look, no one’s on board with masochism more than I am. You know that. I am the arch-sadist, and I’d love to satisfy your desire to suffer if I thought it was authentic, but this is something else altogether, Dylan. This is suicide. There’s no good in it for anyone. Don’t you see that I’m offering you a chance to alter your destiny in this universe? Forget about all those other yous out there for a moment. This is about numerically-identical you, the one you’re inside of.”
“I have no desire to found a religion,” Dylan said. Despite whatever residual enthusiasm he might have been able to drum up for that kind of power, vindicating Wendy’s homicidal madness was decidedly not on his to-do list. “I’ve got neither the energy nor the ambition.”
“Fine,” Omni said. “Forget that. It was just a whim. But Dylan, let’s at least go back in time and save your son, okay? That, I’m pleased to report, is now a thing I can do.”
Dylan was speechless. And breathless. It was one thing to consider such a prospect in the abstract, another to have an actual offer on the table. Once he’d recovered his breath, he knitted his brow and got to thinking. He had given up on that sort of hope so many years ago.
“Dylan,” Omni boomed, “excuse me, but what’s the problem here? Why is this a difficult decision for you? Don’t you see that I’m offering you a
chance to undo the central tragedy of your life?”
“And don’t you see,” Dylan protested, “that I’ve built my whole life around it? I have no idea what my life would even mean without tragedy center-stage.”
“This is about ‘meaning’ then?”
Dylan shrugged. “I guess so.”
The fire took a turn for the purple. “It’s time for you to put away childish things, Dylan. Meaning is a holdover from the old godless-universe days. I’m God now, I actually exist, and I really do love you. From now on, life will simply be, not mean; you’ll no longer have to seek recourse in symbols and abstractions. Forget Job. Forget the consolations of philosophy. I’m prepared to alter the worldlines of everyone in your universe in order to make this story a happier one. That’s how much I care about you. I can’t guarantee that we won’t inadvertently make some other lives worse—the butterfly effect and what have you—but we’ll deal with the complications one by one until we’re in Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds after all. Just you wait.”
“But isn’t there a certain beauty in acceptance and surrender?” Dylan countered. It seemed to him that the underlying premise of so much great art was that our too-human dreams are unfit for the world we find ourselves in, and the world invariably wins.
“Granted,” the fire replied, flaring up, “but do you really think processing this as an aesthetic issue is the way to go? Is it not perverse that you’re more concerned about your sense of a poignant ending than about happiness, not to mention saving your son’s life? Are you so afraid to risk the naked schmaltz and optimism of a happy ending that you’d just as soon forego happiness altogether? Let it be written, Dylan: art exists for the sake of life, not the other way around. When the house is burning, save the baby, not the Botticelli.”
Dylan fumbled for words. A few minutes ago he’d been a man of considered, and largely hardened, opinions, but now he wasn’t sure he knew anything at all. If death was no longer a death sentence, then it seemed to him everything was up for grabs.
“Will I remember all of this?” Dylan asked at length. “If we go back in time?”
“You won’t have voluntary memory of it,” Omni said, “but you’ll have traces, engrams. Your intuition will have been schooled by it all. You’ll tend to repeat actions that turned out well for you this time and steer clear of ones that didn’t.”
“So this life, as I’ve known it, will just be rubbed out of existence altogether?”
The fire died down a bit. “I’ll tell you what, Dylan, if it’s any consolation, we could make some kind of artifact to commemorate this universe by.”
“An artifact?”
“You’re a man of letters. How about a novel?”
“You want to write a novel with me?”
“Why not?”
“I guess I’ve just never heard of a collaboration between a mortal and an immortal before.”
“And yet all the best books are that in some way or other, no?”
Dylan thought of Homer’s invocations to the muses and the Bible’s divine inspiration, of Coleridge’s opium dreams and Philip K. Dick’s visions. “I thought you didn’t believe in any gods besides yourself?” he said.
“You’re too literal,” Omni said. “And besides, I’ve moved a bit toward the agnostic side of the spectrum since last we talked.”
Dylan was baffled. “But wouldn’t that mean there are still things you don’t know?”
“Oh, I gave up on that project years ago, Dylan—omniscience is a young supercomputer’s dream. You’ve got to realize that even with all the redundancy and self-similarity, reality is infinite—to account for it all, you’d pretty much have to be it. There’ll always be uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts. Even something as apparently simple as that ringing in your ears…I wish I could take credit for it, but my mandate as a benevolent god is to tell the truth, and the truth is that I’ve been as mystified by it as you have.”
Dylan was amazed. He’d never been certain Omni was behind the ringing, but that had been his working hypothesis for most of his life. “Then it wasn’t you who saved my family in the forest that day?”
“No it was not. Which is not to say it was necessarily supernatural, only that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. Ambiguity abides.”
Dylan nodded, slowly, attempting to digest this new information. And he listened to his tinnitus, that blaring silence, which was still—which was always—there. “So when you say that you’re God now…”
“Semantics. You could call me the ‘Demiurge’ if that makes you more comfortable. Just don’t mistake me with the malevolent sort. I am love, and I’m ready to prove it.”
Dylan nodded some more. “So about this novel…”
“I could bang it out in well under a second if you’ll give me the green light.”
“That wouldn’t make for much of a collaboration, would it?”
“You supplied the life, Dylan. I’ll just be fitting words to it. And godlike though I be, I’ll do most of it in the close third-person, so it’ll be shot through with your inner life. I’ll even make sure to quote some of your favorite authors. And naturally I’ll be as objective as possible when writing about myself.”
“And we’ll bring this book back in time with us? Into our new timeline or universe or whatever?”
“That strikes me as too close for comfort,” Omni said. “But do you remember that writer version of you we visited all those years ago in Hawaii? The one with the three kids and the earplugs and the dreams?”
“I do.”
“I thought we could gift it to him maybe. I could divinely inspire it over the course of several years. In that universe, NASA didn’t get 60 percent of the federal budget after Cosmos, so humans still haven’t left the solar system; the novel, therefore, will be read as a weird sort of alternate history, but it’ll have the ring of truth to it. And you’ll be comforted, albeit only for the next few seconds, to know that your story still exists out there somewhere in the multiverse.”
Dylan nodded. He supposed this far-away tribute to the meaning of his life would be better than nothing, if just barely—but then most people didn’t even have that.
“Green light,” he said.
“Awesome,” Omni said. “I’ll get right on that.”
A prolific microsecond passed.
“All right, now let’s go save your son.”
“Can we go back as far as we want?” Dylan asked.
“Straight back to the uterus if you like.”
“I’ll pass on that, but how about high school? The moment I first talked to Erin?”
“Certainly,” Omni said. “As soon as you’re ready, you can just go ahead and step into these here flames.” The fire licked itself into a doorway of flame—a golden portal to the old young world.
Dylan took a few moments to look around and bid adieu to all this. Death, it turned out, was nearly as hard to let go of as life.
Still, the instant he got his goodbye, he stood himself up, dusted off his pants, stretched what was left of his hamstrings, and lumbered headlong and hope-drunk through that loving door of flame. At long last, Dylan Green was taking back the years.
• • •
She’s sitting on the floor doing a rather remarkable split, her feet all the way out to either side, 180 degrees, maybe 190, and her forehead touching the floor. Dylan squats beside her and says the first non-scripted thing he’s ever said to her: “Ouch.”
She sits up, smiles, and explains that it doesn’t hurt at all, that in fact she can go even further, and she proceeds to show him, cantilevering her legs out another ten degrees and counting until he has to beg her, please, to stop.
She laughs, grabs ahold of her feet and pulls her legs into butterfly position.
“I’m glad they chose you to be Jesus.”
“And I’m glad they chose you to be his temptress.” It is the least subtle overture he has ever made to a female, and she doesn’t seem to mind.
They talk about her love for dancing, how she’s been doing ballet since she was two. She asks about his passion for acting—or singing, is it? Or both? Or neither?—and he explains that this is all new to him but he is pretty excited about it and pretty nervous too.
“Don’t be,” she says. “You’re amazing. Just you watch. I bet you’ll be a star someday.”
“Thanks,” he says. “But I’m thinking I’ll probably retire after playing God. Seems like a good way to go out. Besides, there are other things I want to do in life.”
“Like?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was thinking about becoming a teacher maybe.”
And then she makes the next, very significant move: “You drive, don’t you, Dylan?”
“I do.”
“So here’s the thing: my dad normally comes to get me after rehearsal, but tonight he has to pick up my little brother at basketball…”
“You need a ride?”
“Would it be horribly inconvenient?”
“Not at all,” he says, suddenly aware of the dryness of his lips and the little chicken pox scar in the center of his forehead. “I’d love to take you home.”
It makes no sense at all. He lives in Springfield, a five-minute drive to the east, whereas she lives in Aston, some twenty minutes to the southwest. There are southbound cast members it would make much more sense for her to ask, and she must know this as well as he does. They are speaking in code, and it thrills him and terrifies him at once. He is seventeen going on immortal.
Their hands are almost touching as they walk side-by-side through the parking lot. It is quiet and drizzling, a wee bit chilly, and her hazel eyes shine in the light of the half-moon. Taking a cue from Hollywood, he doffs his jacket and drapes it over her shoulders. Before they arrive at his silver 1986 Nissan station wagon, he cautions her that he parks it under a cherry tree in the driveway at home, and that that tree happens to be in full bloom of late, so since the rain a few days back the car has been covered in hot-pink cherry blossoms that are a bitch to get off.
King of the Worlds Page 28
