Читать книгу King of the Worlds - M. Thomas Gammarino - Страница 9

PART ONE

MOST LIKELY

TO BE FAMOUS

Young Daniel Young nodded his dopey head and blinked back tears.

“Remember,” Dylan went on. “All of your longing is focused on this one human being. If you can’t have her, you’d rather not live. You’ve got to make us feel that. Do you have any idea what I’m saying to you?”

Daniel nodded again. It was clear if you looked at his trembling chin and jutting lower lip that he was barely keeping it together. If you looked only at his hair, though, the way it bounced and shone, you could pretend he was enjoying this.

Dylan took a sip of his poxna,1 but his adrenals had dried up hours ago. “You know what, Daniel, I’ll cut you a deal: make us feel anything other than embarrassed for you and I’ll give you an A.”

1_____________

Caffeinated beverage roughly halfway between coffee and tea. Taste-wise, it’s rather more like the former, bitter and earthy, but like the latter it’s extracted from leaves, not beans, specifically the leaves of the deciduous Poxna tree, a.k.a. New-Taiwanese Tentacle Elm.

That was mean, and Dylan knew it, but he had about as much empathy left in him as energy. For Christ’s sake, he was tired. His eyes stung, his ears had been ringing for days, and on top of having three preps this semester, he’d stayed up late last night grading a stack of aggressively uninspired essays on The Catcher in the Rye.

“Daniel, have you ever been in love?”

“I don’t know,” Daniel replied.

“Then you haven’t. If you’d ever been in love, you’d know it.”

One of the cool things about being a high school teacher was getting to drop well-meaning chestnuts like this without having to rack your brains over whether they held up to scrutiny.

Daniel hung his head.

Tiffany Wilson, the redhead who’d months since faded into the curtains, spoke up for what might have been the first time all quarter: “Why are you so mean today?”

She hadn’t even raised her hand. Good—she was alive.

“Look at him,” Tiffany went on, gesturing toward Daniel. “He’s practically in tears.”

Dylan looked, and right on cue a chubby tear slid down the poor kid’s cheek and onto the floor. Dylan softened his approach: “I apologize, Daniel. I want you to get it right is all, to put some feeling into it. Call it tough love.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Green. I’m aware of the fact that I suck.”

“You don’t suck, Daniel. Don’t ever say that again. You’re doing fine. You’re just…young. You’ve barely lived. I have to keep reminding myself of that.”

“We’re only fourteen,” Tiffany put in, belaboring the very legitimate point. Dylan had lived so many lives already, he had to keep reminding himself that his students had lived just this one.

“How old do you think I am?” Dylan asked.

The students perked up. Shakespeare they could do without, but games they liked.

“Forty-seven?” Tiffany guessed.

“He’s not that old,” said Lauren Delay, the blonde milquetoast who sat to Tiffany’s left. If she was trying to curry favor with him, she was doing an outstanding job of it—that is, until she continued: “He’s like…forty-fourish?”

“Anyone else want to venture a guess?” Dylan asked, more desperate than they could possibly know or understand.

“Fifty?” Kai Fitzpatrick chimed in. “Fifty-three?”

“Sixty?” Amanda Cruz hazarded. It was a bit like being pierced with a bullet. Amanda was the prettiest girl Dylan had ever taught. She was so pretty that, as a rule, he tried not to look at her.

“I’m thirty-nine,” Dylan declared at last.

“That’s it?” Amanda said.

Okay then, he’d had enough of this for one day. “You know what? I’m letting you go early. We’ll work on the scene some more tomorrow.”

The young people surged with new energy as they packed up their things and made a beeline for their extra-curricular lives, though not without pausing on their way out to say “Thank you, Mr. Green” or “Have a nice day, Mr. Green.”

It always amazed him how adept these kids were at compartmentalizing, how they thought you could accuse a thirty-nine-year-old of being sixty and then wish him a good day and honestly expect him to have one.

At any rate, he tried, unsuccessfully, to smile. He’d read once—albeit long after such knowledge might have saved his acting career—about some muscle up by the eyes that gives away a counterfeit smile every time. The only way to act a smile convincingly is the Method way, which is to say you’ve got to remember something happy—but Dylan had stopped subjecting himself to that sort of masochism years ago.

• • •

“Daddy!” cried Arthur.

“Da—y!” near-echoed Tavi, who was better with her vowels than her consonants.

“Kids!” Dylan said.

By now they were embracing his legs. It was quite a nice thing to come home to. Of course, at five and three, they weren’t exactly being altruistic. They expected him to run around with them outside, or to read them books, or at the very least—they were groping at his midriff now—to pick them up.

Later this would be fine. Later he could do this. After he’d had a chance to put down his backpack, change into comfortable clothes and savor a few moments of quiet, he’d be happy to pick them up, swing them around, play the good dad, maybe even be it. But he couldn’t very well skip that middle step without feeling some generalized resentment—not against his family per se so much as just the universe. He was tired.

“Hi, honey,” he said. Oh man, he really said that.

Erin was standing in the kitchen, stirring a pot of something. She was still wearing her robe and slippers from this morning, which was just the kind of thing he remembered her explicitly stating in their pre-nuptial days that she would never do. It was hard not to think of his mother, who liked to boast that even while raising three children, she had managed, in that picket-fence world, to doll herself up every single afternoon before his father came home from work. She really did do that. He remembered lying on her bed as a little boy, watching her curl her eyelashes in the vanity mirror with that silver tool he sometimes used as a chair for his Star Wars guys. She’d peer up at the ceiling, apply the mascara, and then turn her gaze on him through the mirror, her eyes twinkling the way so many other female eyes would twinkle for him one day in that other space and time that was as distant from him then as it was now, but in the other direction.

Erin’s eyes were no longer so stellar these days as they were just sort of ocular. To be fair, she was eight months pregnant and in profile looked something like a gigantic elbow.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“I want to make a smoothie,” Arthur said.

“Fairly terrible,” Dylan said.

“Smoo—ie!” Tavi near-echoed.

“We’ll do that later,” he told the kids, making his way toward the sanctuary of the bedroom.

“Any change with your ears?” Erin asked.

“The doctor said it would take ten days. I told you that.”

“Sue me for caring.”

Dylan peeled twenty little fingers off the doorjamb not less than three times before finally managing to manifest the bedroom door. The kids beat on the opaque foglet mesh2 with their little fists, but it was childproof and Dylan did his best to ignore them. He put down his backpack, slipped off his khakis and draped them over his desk chair. Then he plunked himself down on the bed, stared up at the popcorn ceiling and tried to relax. The kids were crying like they meant it now, and he understood exactly how they felt (he was good at projecting himself into other minds—it had once been his job after all). He loved them immensely, but if there was one thing he disliked about fatherhood, it was all the crying; it was almost enough to make him want to lose the rest of his hearing fast. And the only thing worse than the crying itself was the animal guilt he felt at not responding to it, but he knew by now that if he did gratify them with a response, if he made the smoothies, took them bike-riding, read them books, all without giving himself these few minutes to relax first, then the resentment would build to overflowing and as soon as the kids went to bed he’d say all sorts of ugly things to Erin, which he would instantly regret, and then neither of them would get anything like honest sleep before tomorrow night, which was clearly no way to live. Erin might not have believed him, but isolating himself like this really was for the common good.

2_____________

Terrans had imagined this sort of polymorphous material, composed of interlinking nanobots, since the early nineties, but the technology still seemed decades away when it was discovered as the primary building material on Macarena, some 45,047 light years away. New Taiwan—where Dylan and his family lived—had independently come up with its own swarming foglet technology, though its uses of it were more modest, being restricted to certain types of doors, windows, and other passageways. Terrans themselves were still reluctant to roll out the new tech on Earth for fear of an apocalyptic “grey goo” scenario, but they were happy to have these new case studies to observe.

“Erin, could you do something about that wild rumpus, please?”

“I’m making dinner,” she said.

“I know. And I’m just back from a very long day of teaching a moribund art form to human teenagers.”

He could almost hear her roll her eyes through the door. “Kids, come here,” she said, which set them to wailing all the more until she assured them that they could help her cook if they liked. She was a genius at mothering; no one could take that away from her.

Only once they were out of earshot did Dylan remember just how loud peace and quiet were for him now. Ambient noise had competed with the ringing all day at school, masking it to the point where he’d found himself wondering if the pills weren’t already doing their job, but here in the former quiet of his bedroom, those bells in his head sounded nearly as strident as the crying. But “bells” was wrong, seeing as there was really no chiming, jingling, or tolling. It was more like someone was holding down a single very-high key on a synthesizer, an electronic splinter lodged in his brain, and to make matters worse, it was accompanied by the alien sensation of a fullness in the ears, as if he were finally wearing the earplugs he should have been wearing at all those rock concerts throughout his gilded youth. Falling asleep the first night with the ringing had been such torture. He’d been certain he had some terrible disease, and in the theater of his hypnagogic mind the ringing grew so loud he recognized it as his own death knell, and what he felt, far more than the terror or sadness he might have expected, was an unbearable sense of frustration, of being annoyed that it was the end of the line and he couldn’t go back, wipe the slate clean, and try again; that his life, such as it had been, would soon be coterminous with his destiny. Well, Dr. Cohen had relieved him of having to die soon—you couldn’t ask for better news than that. Cochlerin was specifically designed to regenerate hair cells in the inner ear. Still, nine more days seemed almost more than he could bear. He could scarcely imagine how people in the old days, before there was a cure, had endured years and years of this.

Somehow he needed to relax. He and this shrill visitor were going to live together for at least another week; he might as well make the most of it. And anyway, such an exercise would be good mental training for dealing with some other adversity down the line, and if life had taught him anything, it was that there’s some other adversity down the line.

He gave it his best shot, breathed deep, relaxed his muscles, and surrendered to the sound. At first the fever-pitch ringing was as terrible and anxiety-inducing as ever and gave rise to manic fight-or-flight responses like Oh shit, I’m dying and Oh fuck, I’m dying, but gradually, over the course of perhaps fifteen minutes, he taught himself to abort thoughts at the first sign of negativity and to return his attention to the terrible mantra in his ears, which, true to plan, wasn’t quite so terrible anymore, and then wasn’t terrible at all. It was almost calming if you let it be.

He was lying on his back on top of the covers, legs crossed at the ankles, fingers interlaced in an empty church over his abdomen, and as the fear began to ebb, he discovered himself doing this space-out thing he sometimes did where he’d fix his gaze on something out in the world and let it (for lack of a better word) penetrate him. It wasn’t an intellectual exercise—he wasn’t thinking; it was more like a kind of effortless meditation, and, with the possible exception of Quantum Travel (a.k.a. QT), it was the closest he ever came to understanding what mystics meant when they talked about subject and object merging into one, as per this exhortation from the great poet Matsuo Bashō: “You can learn about the pine only from the pine, or about bamboo only from bamboo. When you see an object, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself, otherwise you impose yourself on the object, and do not learn. The object and yourself must become one, and from that feeling of oneness issues your poetry.”

Currently, Dylan was a rather disgusting fan blade. Dust got into the crannies of the popcorn ceiling too—he’d been that a few blinks ago. Someday they’d get central air-conditioning, if ever they could afford it. Thoughts were objects too, of course, and now Dylan was suddenly his money problems. The last of his savings had gone into the down payment on this house that was really about twice as big as they required, on bucolic and overpriced Yushan Lane no less. He was indentured for the next thirty years, unless something miraculous happened between now and then, the odds of which were vanishingly slim. And with three kids to send to college…

The alarm returned redoubled, urging him to do something—to wake up, fight a fire, call the cops, something. It took several minutes for him to talk his heart rate down and return to his breath. He tried focusing less on his thoughts-as-objects and more on objects-as-objects. He looked at the varicolored spines of the print books he collected, and that calmed him some. He consulted the blank spot on the wall that desperately wanted art, and that induced anxiety again.

Then he looked toward the clothes closet.

The door was still swiped open from this morning and on the shelf at the top was a big white plastic shoebox that had once contained one of the first pairs of Nike “pumps” ever to be worn by a kid in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.3 Dylan had discarded the sneakers several decades ago, but this box had followed him around ever since, even if he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually seen it until now. When was the last time he’d opened it? Ten years ago? Fifteen? It really had been that long, and in many ways it felt like longer. Barring whatever one might find via omni these days, that box held the only remaining evidence that Dylan had ever been anything but a teacher.

3_____________

The sneakers had come with a little handheld pump you had to carry around in a pocket or somewhere. If you fit the pump to the valve built into this weird plastic pyramid at the back of the shoe, you could fill a bladder with air until the innards of the shoe conformed to your foot. Reebok had entered the pump market soon after Nike spearheaded it, but rather than include a separate pump accessory, they had incorporated the pump as a little raised rubber basketball on the tongue of the shoe that you could depress with your thumb, which made a lot of sense since who wants to carry a pump around while playing basketball? Though really it had never been very clear to Dylan what was so great about having your sneakers fit that tight in the first place.

Before fleeing to New Taiwan, they had purged their old house in Santa Monica of virtually everything, and when Dylan watched Erin deposit the shoebox in the dumpster, he almost let her, and then thought better of it: “I think I’m going to keep that one,” he said.

“Why? I thought you were done with all this stuff.”

“I am. I totally am. But it might be nice to have something to show the grandkids.” Much as the humiliating demise of his acting career had served as a prod to change his life, it had also served as a chilling intimation of mortality. Someday, before he knew it, he’d be a blubbering old man, and it wasn’t impossible to think that maybe it would be some comfort to be tangibly reminded that at one time in his life he’d touched a certain sector of humankind (specifically the young female sector) with his art.

“Okay,” Erin said, and that was that. She was pretty cool about it. She could have gotten jealous, could have asked, Why does it have to be this of all things? But she’d made the allowance for his vanity.

Dylan quit his space-out, got up, and approached the closet. He stood on tiptoes and took down the box. Then he placed it on the bed and plopped himself down beside it. He hesitated a moment, took a deep breath, and removed the orange lid. The letters sprang up at him, the years having failed to tamp them down, and several overflowed onto the sheets. He reckoned there had to be at least a hundred in there, and for every one he’d held onto, he must have discarded ten. He’d kept only the crème de la crème: the funny, the touching, the crazy ones.

He picked up one of the spilled letters and took it out of its envelope. This one was a handmade Valentine’s card—all construction paper, glitter, and heart stickers. Down by the loopdidoo signature was the smeared, clay-colored imprint of some very fulsome lips.

He read:

Wendy Sorenson

243 Moana Street

Laie, HI 96762

Dear Mr. Greenyears:4

4_____________

Part of Dylan’s reinvention of himself upon moving to New Taiwan was to drop the “years” from his name.

You don’t know me yet but I am your biggest fan ever. Seriously. I’ve been in love with you ever since one of my friends made me watch ET II: Nocturnal Fears, which is a movie I’m technically not supposed to know about but have on tape and watch at least five times every day. Not the whole movie of course but just the parts with you in them. I’m sure you hear this a lot but my favorite part is the part where you make out with Korelu through the bars of your light cage. I know you’re totally just acting but to tell you the truth you look so hot in that scene that I get so jealous I seriously want to shoot Korelu in the face even though I’m sure she’s really cool. She’s soooo pretty too, for an alien. I know it’s just a movie and you were just acting but I figure there must have been some attraction there because it seems so real the way you do it. I wasn’t going to say this but I’m just going to say it, okay, because I don’t even care. If you ever want an Earthling girl to make out with like that I’ll totally do anything you want. I don’t even care what it is. I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a slut. Honestly I’ve never even done it with anyone. But I would with you though. Honestly I’d marry you right now if you asked me. I’m only sixteen though so we might need to wait a year or something.

Love always,

Wendy

Now how many men ever got a letter like that in their lives? And to think he’d received such insane propositions on a regular basis for a couple of years there. It was absolutely weird the way the silver screen could deify you back in those days. He had no idea whether it was still that way for up-and-coming stars back on Earth, but he doubted it. Were there even stars in the same way there used to be? Before the advent of the Internet and Quantum Travel? In general, he made a point of remaining oblivious to all that.

He read through a few more letters and was curious to note that not a single one had come from a male. He couldn’t say for certain whether this reflected the actual demographics of his fan mail or just his own curatorial bias, but in any case he had no memory of ever getting a letter from a dude.

Not all of his female admirers were so hot and bothered, of course.

Dear Mr. Greenyears,

I am thirteen and I hope to be a professional actress someday. I wanted to express to you in this letter that I think you are a really good actor. I saw E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears at my friend’s house during a sleepover, and even though I was really scared, I thought you did a really great job! Now I can’t wait for Titanic! Congratulations about that! How did you learn to act so great? Do you have any advice for an up-and-coming actress? I hope you win an Oscar. You totally should. Also, can you send me an autographed glossy photo please?

Sincerely,

Theresa

Not every letter was glowing. There’d been more than a few complaints from outraged mothers—as if it made any sense to grouse about the film’s content with the eighteen-year-old lead instead of, say, the writer or director. And anyway, the content wasn’t that bad. Yes, Elliott makes love to an alien, but there’s nothing full-frontal about the scene. Moreover, Korelu is clearly a female alien from a dimorphic species, and while she and Elliott can’t quite communicate yet, it’s clear from the soundtrack that they are madly in love. Some critics found it implausible and disgusting, worse than bestiality, while other, more forward-looking reviewers saw in it a bold bid for sexual equality. In any case, it stimulated discussion, which could only be a good thing considering that before long such questions would cease being theoretical.

Young man,

I hope you’re worried about the state of your soul. I saw the pitiful excuse for a film you were involved in, and I just want you to know that I found it disgusting and sad. When America goes down the tubes once and for all (it began in the sixties), we will have moral reprobates like you to thank. Don’t you know that you’re here in this world for just a brief time? Look to the state of your soul, young man, and consider yourself prayed for.

–Gertrude Winifred Gans

The irony of that penultimate line was thick. Sure enough, Dylan had remained on Earth for only a brief time after receiving that letter, though he was pretty sure Gertrude Winifred Gans was no prophet. Had she written “you’re here on this world for just a brief time,” it might have given him some real pause, but she’d written, “in this world,” and eternity hinged on that single letter of difference. Still, some atavistic, God-fearing part of him was just beginning to look to the state of his soul when Erin, mercifully, called him in to dinner. Like Aeolus bottling the winds, he stuffed the letters back in the box, and closed the lid.

As soon as he swiped away the door, the kids came and hugged his legs.

“Daddy!”

“Da—y!”

Now he was ready. Now it was nice.

• • •

The next day at school, Dylan attempted, again, to stage act 3, scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with his freshman drama class.

“Okay, so let’s review the situation here because it’s a little complicated. Who likes whom5 at this point, do you recall? Let’s start with Hermia. Whom does she like? You know what, Connor, maybe you could draw it on the board for us?”

5_____________

As a lover of language and a product of Catholic school, Dylan had grown up clearly distinguishing between “who” and “whom,” but over the course of his career he’d watched that rare inflection all but go extinct. He still used it, but his students by and large did not, and he was not so puritanical as to want to wage that losing war alone. Things change with time, whether we want them to or not, nothing lasts, and in the words of the immortal Lao Tzu (though they might as well have come from Darwin): “What is malleable is always superior to that which is immovable. This is the principle of controlling things by going along with them, of mastery through adaptation.”

Connor nodded and slowly lifted himself up. Friends in baseball caps on either side patted him on the shoulders as if he’d just lost a contest or a loved one. When he got to the front of the room, Dylan handed him a green marker.

“All right, so Connor, please draw a girl on the board for us. You can keep it simple. A bathroom girl will do.”

“A bathroom girl?”

“You know, the restroom girl? The intragalactic sign for girl?”

“There’s an intragalactic sign for girl?”

“Sorry. I misspoke. I mean the international sign for girl, the Terran one.”

Even after the better part of two decades on New Taiwan, Dylan still put his foot in his mouth like this on a regular basis.6

6_____________

The problem here was that while the natives were more than 99.8 percent identical to humans at the genetic level, and while they reproduced sexually in much the manner that humans did—their genitals being homologous to, and very much resembling, the human penis and vagina—their secondary sex characteristics were almost diametrically flipped, such that the vagina-bearing ones, or females, exhibited traits Terrans typically associated with males. Relative to the penis-bearing ones, i.e. the males, the females had bigger frames, deeper voices, and more body hair. They dressed plainly and practically and kept their hair short. And despite their being the ones to carry the babies (the gestation period of the natives, incidentally, was considerably shorter: just over seven months), the females were traditionally cast in the role of the provider. The males, on the other hand, had smaller frames, higher-pitched voices, and less body hair. They grew the hair on their heads long and invested a great deal of time in washing and styling it. They tended to wear makeup, jewelry, and clothing roughly analogous to those worn by Terran females in first-world temperate zones. Humans had hoped to find on other worlds some radically different gender roles and relations than those that obtained on Earth. Should there turn out to be intelligent life, they had hoped to find they came in a single gender, or three, or twenty. They had hoped for fluid genders, androgynes, sequential hermaphrodites. Alas, all of the newly settled worlds had turned up dimorphous hominids at the tops of their respective food chains. There was nothing, sexually, on New Taiwan that one couldn’t find on a walk through Greenwich Village, with one notable exception: the male, penis and all, was the lactating member of the species. Terran biologists still hadn’t puzzled out exactly how the birth of the baby from the female stimulated the hormonal changes in the male that resulted in milk production, but it was theorized that pheromones played a key role just as it did in the equally mystical-seeming Terran phenomenon of women’s menstrual periods synchronizing themselves with those of other women living in close proximity. The point here being that, beyond perhaps + and - , there was no universal sign for male and female. Dylan’s default mode of thinking was not just politically incorrect; it was flat-out wrong.

Connor drew:

“Okay,” Dylan said. “That’s Hermia. Now whom does Hermia love?”

“Lysander,” said Becky.

“Correctamundo. Connor, please draw Terran-restroom Lysander next to Terran-restroom Hermia there. And then maybe you could draw an arrow to show that she loves him.”

“Great. Okay, now whom does Lysander love at this point?”

“Helena,” said Justin confidently.

“Precisely. Now draw that for us, would you, please, Mr. da Vinci?”

Connor squinted.

“Leonardo da Vinci? Genius of the Italian Renaissance?”

Only Josh Song nodded, Josh who wore a bow tie and whose face was perpetually half-hidden by a Kurt Cobain teardrop of hair. He was far and away the most learned, and most melancholic, kid in class. Everyone else just looked confused.

“I guess we’ll have to settle for you doing it as yourself then, Connor. Go on now. Make your immortal strokes.”

“Very lovely. And whom does Helena love?”

“Lysander,” said Tate.

“No. Helena loves Demetrius,” said Sammy.

“Which is it?”

“Demetrius,” intoned the class.

“Sorry, Tate.”

Tate got some pats on the back for being wrong.

“And finally, what about Demetrius? Whom does he love?”

“Hermia,” said Lewis.

“Correct again. Now let’s give Connor a second to complete his masterpiece.”

“Bravo, Connor. Okay, so if at the beginning of this play we had a classic love triangle with one outlying point, what geometric figure do we have now?”

“A square,” sang the chorus.

“Precisely. Everyone wants someone other than the person who wants him or her.”

“That’s sad,” Lia said.

Josh, uncharacteristically, blew a raspberry. “What a waste of energy,” he said.

“How’s that, Josh?”

“There must be other single people in Athens, no?”

“Spoken like a true automaton,” Dylan said. “They’re in love, Josh. Do you really suppose it’s that easy to just give up on love?”

“They’re not being creative enough, is what I think. There has to be a workable solution here.”

“And what would you suggest?” Dylan asked.

“Well, in the first place, what’s to stop that shape from being a circle and not a square? Circles are perfect.”

“Go on.”

“So like what if instead of having love as this petty little directional force between them, they could place it right at the center and let it radiate out in all directions like the sun?”7

7_____________

Technically the star about which New Taiwan made its annual journey was “Lem”—named in honor of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris and The Cyberiad (among other works) and 1996 winner of the prestigious Order of the White Eagle award—but for all intents and purposes Lem was identical to Earth’s “sun,” so English-speaking exopats, and by inheritance their offspring, sometimes called it that.

“And how might that translate into practice, I wonder?” Dylan asked.

“They should get a place together. Maybe build one right there in the forest.”

“And then?”

“And then nothing. They live in it and bask in all the love. At the very least they could finally sit down.”

“I can’t help but inquire about their sleeping arrangements…”

Dylan could see that not every student in the class was going to be comfortable with the turn this discussion was taking. You could never be sure with ninth-graders: in terms of maturity, some were practically ready for college; others might as well still be in middle school. When he’d suggested once that there was a built-in sexual dimension to vampires, one girl, Joy Hoffman, had memorably replied, “I think you just ended my childhood.”

“They all sleep in the same big round bed,” Josh said, “and it’s pitch-dark.”

Dylan nodded. “Congratulations, Josh. With a single blow, you’ve just overturned the entire Western romantic tradition.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. You’re a free thinker. I applaud that.” Indeed, Dylan himself might have been a little like Josh at one time, before an orthodox lifestyle snared him the way it eventually snares anyone who hasn’t made a firm conviction to avoid it.

“Okay, so let’s pick up where we left off. Where are our Lysander and Helena?”

Daniel Young stood up, looking dorky and afraid as ever.

“And Helena?”

“Marie’s not here,” Julia informed him.

“Oh right. Why then, Julia, you can be her understudy. No good deed goes unpunished.”

Dylan expected some rolled eyes, but Julia leapt to her feet; for every three kids who didn’t want to act out Shakespeare, you got one like this who secretly did. Dylan had been that kid once too. In fact, he often wondered if there wasn’t that kid deep in all these kids, if only he could break through all their fear, chop through the already-frozen seas inside of them.

“Okay, Daniel, picking up at line 124.”

“Act 3, scene 2?”

“Right.”

Daniel began:

“Why should you think that I should woo in scorn?

Scorn and derision never come in tears.

Look, when I vow, I weep. And vows so born,

In their nativity all truth appears.

How can these things in me seem scorn to you,

Bearing the badge of faith to prove them true?”

He read with all the passion and nuance of some twentieth-century AI. (To be sure, he wasn’t one—at least not as far as Dylan knew.)

“Okay, Daniel,” Dylan said. “Not bad, not bad, but remember: you love this girl. She doesn’t believe you, but you know that your future happiness depends utterly on convincing her of it. Imagine this is your only chance to persuade her, and if you fail, you die. That’s what it has to feel like.”

“But he doesn’t really love her though, right?”

“Au contraire, he definitely does love her. He’s crying to prove it, and these are no crocodile tears. That what he’s trying to persuade her of.”

“What are crocodile tears?” somebody asked.

“Phony tears. Fake tears.”

Daniel balked some more: “But he only loves her because Puck put the juice on his eye, right?”

“That’s true, Daniel. Good point. That’s why he loves her, and we know that, but the key thing here is that he doesn’t know it. He feels himself overwhelmed by love and that’s that. I can see how it might bother you that the reason he’s so powerfully in love is because for all intents and purposes he’s been drugged, but the truth is, Daniel, if you were to ask a biochemist, they’d tell you that love is always a matter of chemicals. It’s always a drug. It comes on strong and then wears off over time. The only difference here is the chain of causality, but whether the love causes the chemicals or the chemicals cause the love, subjectively speaking I don’t suppose it makes much difference, and as an actor your primary concern is always with subjectivity. Subjectivity is your bread and butter. Do you get what I’m saying to you?”

“Not really,” Daniel admitted.

“Okay, well just try putting some more passion into it, would you, Daniel? See if you can’t work up some tears for us.”

“I’ll try,” Daniel said. His hair vibrated.

“That’s all anyone can reasonably ask of you,” Dylan assured him.

Daniel was just about to begin when Tiffany spoke up from the curtains, “How come you’re so much nicer today, Mr. G?”

“Am I nicer today?”

“About a thousand times.”

“Well, I got a good night’s sleep for one thing. That may have something to do with it.”

It was true. Last night he’d made a point of sleeping on the living room sofa so he could follow Dr. Cohen’s advice and omni up some tinnitus-masking white noise without disturbing Erin. Sure enough, he’d slept like the proverbial baby, and it no longer bothered him so much if Daniel Young wasn’t the greatest Shakespearean actor in the universe; indeed, as Daniel proceeded to act out his scene there in the classroom, it was clear that, despite overwhelming odds, he didn’t have a Shakespearian atom in his body.

Surprises were possible, of course.

• • •

Back when Dylan was fourteen, no one would have guessed that he’d go on to be a famous actor one day. It wasn’t until his senior year, after all, that his father overheard him belting out Pearl Jam’s “Black” in the shower one evening8 and encouraged him to try out for the spring musical, which was Jesus Christ Superstar that year. Dylan would have been content to be in the chorus, so he was rather terror-stricken when he checked the board the morning after callbacks to find he’d gotten the lead.

8_____________

He especially liked to let loose toward the end:

I know someday you’ll

have a beautiful life,

I know you’ll be a star,

in somebody else’s sky,

But why, why, why can’t

it be, can’t it be mine?

Despite feeling in the secret mind at the back of his ordinary mind that he was meant to play this part, he was so off-the-charts nervous during the next couple months of rehearsal that he felt as if he was always on the verge of puking. Mr. Armstrong, the casting director/geometry teacher, was tough on him, always making sure he hit precisely the right pitch and stood in just the right place on stage when he hit it. Dylan’s worst fear was that he would blank during a live performance and forget the words, so in the interest of being over-prepared, he spent so much time and energy at home listening to cast recordings of Superstar, and recording himself singing it, that his eyes went all raccoonish and his grades tanked in every subject except English, which had always been easy for him.

But then, come opening night, his efforts paid such high dividends that he didn’t merely sing the songs so much as he became them. And just as in his audition, he didn’t quite realize what he’d done until it was over and he was taking his curtain call. But whereas a couple of dozen kids had clapped for him after his audition, several hundred adults were now giving him a standing ovation. Dylan Greenyears had found his calling, and everyone in the school knew it.

Overnight, Dylan became as popular as it was possible to be at Cardinal O’Hara High School, and not just among his peers but teachers, parents, custodial staff, alumni, and everyone else who’d come to see the show or read the stellar reviews in the News of Delaware County or The Springfield Press as well. To be sure, there are few ways to inflate a teenager’s ego more than to assign him the role of God in the school musical. One way, though, is to award him “Most Likely to Be Famous” in his senior yearbook, and Dylan had that honor too. It didn’t hurt things either that he had lately begun dating Erin Wheatley, the dance captain, who’d been cast as his temptress in more ways than one. The future had never looked so gorgeous.

Then, a few weeks after graduation, Dylan had his first brush with bona fide celebrity. Chad Powell, who’d played Judas opposite Dylan’s Jesus and was soon to be his roommate at Temple University, found them a gig as extras in 12 Monkeys, a time travel film about a boy who witnesses his own death as an older man. The Convention Center had been made up to look like an airport, and over the course of two days Dylan and Chad played a couple of luggage-toting travelers. The opportunity to work with (i.e. in the same film as) Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt would have been compensation enough; that they were granted access to the same catered spread as the stars was just a bonus. Indeed, for Dylan it would turn out to be something of a bonanza.

He was in the donut line on their second morning on the set when a voice from behind him intoned, “I’ve had my eye on you since yesterday.”

Dylan peered over his shoulder. The dude was big, had long hair and was wearing some sort of cowboy hat. Chad was over in the coffee line, so Dylan was on his own here. “Um…why?”

“You’ve got the sort of look I’m after.”

“I have a girlfriend,” Dylan replied. He knew acting had a reputation for drawing gay dudes, and he had nothing against them; he just didn’t happen to be one himself.

The guy chuckled. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

Dylan looked again. “Should I?”

“Not necessarily. I do happen to be directing this film you’re in, though. Pleased to meet you. Name of Terry.”

The two plain donuts on Dylan’s styrofoam plate leapt off and began rolling in opposite directions. Dylan wasn’t as up on his directors as he’d have liked, but murmurs from other extras had made it clear that Terry Gilliam was a pretty big deal. “I’m so sorry,” Dylan said. “I feel like an idiot.”

“No worries,” Gilliam said, taking two more donuts from the tray and setting them on Dylan’s plate. Once they were steady, he fished around in his wallet, took out a business card and placed that on the plate as well. “I’m quite busy today, for obvious reasons, but I want you to call me this evening. Say around nine or ten? Can you do that?”

“Okay,” Dylan said, oblivious as to what was going on.

“Are you free for lunch tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Dylan said.

“And what, may I ask, is your name?”

“Dylan…uh…Dylan Greenyears.”

“Perfect,” Gilliam said, putting one hand on Dylan’s shoulder and grabbing himself a croissant with the other. “Now back to the wars.” He winked at Dylan and went off to direct Bruce Willis.

Dylan had no idea what he’d just agreed to—why in God’s name did this world-famous director want to have lunch with him? And was his lack of understanding somehow his own fault? Had he missed some subtle cue or signal? Failed to interpret Hollywood-ese?

For some reason, either because he didn’t want to presume or didn’t want to gloat—he himself wasn’t sure—Dylan went the whole day without mentioning to Chad what had happened. Filming ended around seven, and Chad suggested they go get some grub, but Dylan told him he was feeling sick to his stomach, which was true in a way. He dropped off Chad at eight-fifteen, got home at eight twenty-eight, and called Mr. Terry Gilliam one fashionable minute after nine o’clock.

He answered on the first ring. “Hi there, Dylan. I’m glad you called. Look, I know I suggested lunch tomorrow, but it turns out I’ve got a prior engagement.”

“That’s okay,” Dylan said, crestfallen.

“However,” Gilliam went on, “could you meet me for some s’mores at around half three? There’s a café at 4th and Chestnut. It’s spelled ‘X-a-n-d-o,’ though I don’t know whether to call it Zando or X and O.”

“‘Half three’?”

“Right. Sorry. That’s three thirty on this side of the pond.”

“Okay,” Dylan said.

“Till tomorrow then.”

“Yes. See you tomorrow.” Dylan had sworn to himself that he’d find out more about Gilliam’s intentions before agreeing to meet him, but his star-struckedness had gotten the better of him.

So the next day Dylan took a trolley at noon to 69th Street and then the el downtown. He was a couple of hours early, so he wandered the city, wondering at omnipresent graffiti warning him that “Andre the Giant Has a Posse,” and ogling all the exotic city girls. Suburban girls so often put a premium on comfort, but these city girls dressed up. Even Erin was wearing sweats around him lately, and while he loved her, he was at the height of his virility and beginning to feel the tug of wanderlust.

Come half three, he made sure he was at Xando, however it was pronounced. Gilliam showed a couple of minutes later and gave Dylan a firm handshake. “Shall we dine al fresco?”

“Okay,” Dylan said. Now what did ‘al fresco’ mean again?

“So, Dylan, you’ve grown up in this fair city?”

“Near it,” Dylan said.

An androgynous, bald barista came to take their order.

“What’ll you drink, Dylan?” Mr. Gilliam asked. “It’s on me, of course. A cappuccino?”

“Can you do an espresso con panna?” Dylan asked the barista. This was just a fancy way of saying “espresso with whipped cream,” but having spent the past couple of summers working in the café at Borders,9 he had become a bit of a coffee snob.

9_____________

One of the mega-bookstores once ubiquitous throughout the United States. These temples would stand as the high-water mark of American literary culture in Dylan’s mind. No one knew back then how fragile the business model was, how Omni was about to usher in a whole new paradigm. For a heady moment there it was like the Library of Alexandria was up and running again, and everyone had a card.

“Sure,” the barista said.

Mr. Gilliam looked impressed. “I’ll take the same. And some s’mores, too, would be lovely.”

“Will that be all?”

“For now anyway.”

The barista went away.

“All right, Dylan, you’ve been a good sport, but you must be wondering why I brought you out here.”

“I was sort of wondering that, now that you mention it.”

“So let me just cut to the chase. I’d like you to audition for my next project.”

This was precisely what Dylan had hoped Gilliam would say, but it was no less stupefying for his having anticipated it. “Wow,” he managed at length.

“If it came down to appearance alone,” Gilliam went on, “I could tell you already that the part’s yours if you want it. You’ve got just the face I’ve seen in my dreams, handsome and angular, but tender and childlike at the same time. Looks aren’t everything, of course. Not by a long shot. I need to verify that you can act. Mind you, I’ve never done this before, scouted prospective talent like this, but since I spotted you on the set yesterday, my gut’s been telling me not to let you get away.”

Holy crap! Was life really going to be this easy? Was high school really such a reliable predictor of future success? Was he really handsome and angular and tender and childlike?

“I don’t know what to say,” Dylan said. “May I ask what the project is?”

“You’ve seen E.T.?”

“About a million times. It was one of my favorite movies as a kid.”

“Good. Well this is the sequel. E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears. The idea has been kicking around Hollywood for years. There’ve been countless scripts. Spielberg himself wrote the first treatment and then abandoned it, said a sequel would rob the original of its virginity, which immediately struck me as a worthwhile undertaking. When I asked if he’d mind my adopting the project, he said, ‘Be my guest, just make sure my name’s nowhere on it.’ Naturally I went right to Henry Thomas, who played Elliott in the first film, but he read the script and declined, said pretty much what Spielberg had been saying, that it did violence to the spirit of the original, which is of course the point.”

“May I ask how this one’s so different?”

“I dare say you just did. Nocturnal Fears strikes a very different tone from the first E.T. Much darker. It begins the same way, with a spaceship landing in the forest and a silhouetted alien waddling down a ramp, but this alien, it turns out, is no angelic vegetarian like ET. No, this one is Korel, the leader of a race of red-eyed, albino carnivores from the same planet as ET. They intercepted ET’s distress signals when he was phoning home from his umbrella communicator in the first film, and they have come to capture and possibly eat him. ET’s name, by the way, turns out to be Zrek.”

“Who knew?” Dylan said.

“Right. So these evil guys end up trapping Elliott, who’s an adolescent now, in a cage aboard their mothership, and they interrogate him about Zrek’s whereabouts. They don’t speak English, so a good deal of the second act is told through the impromptu drawings they pass back and forth. It makes for some pretty bold cinema, if I may say so myself. Ultimately the albinos resort to out-and-out torture and things get quite brutish before Korel’s wife, Korelu, shows mercy on Elliott. She doesn’t have the wherewithal to set him free, but she mocks Korel through her drawings and she and Elliott laugh together. Before you know it they can be seen, in silhouette, making love through the beams of his light cage.”

“Elliott loses his virginity to an alien?”

“Quite right. But wouldn’t you know that in the very height of their passion, who walks in but Korel himself! His eyes glow blood-red and his wife shouts all kinds of protests in their strange, chordal language. Korel, meanwhile, rips some razor-sharp teeth out of the mouth of this winged shark thing in one of the other cages—a specimen from another planet, presumably—then he unlocks Elliott’s light cage with his mind and, using an excretion from the base of his spine, proceeds to glue the teeth to Elliott’s penis. Mind you, none of this is shown directly so much as it is implied—we want the R rating after all. Korel then instructs Elliott, via a drawing, to pick up where he left off with Korelu. Elliott refuses. Korel rips out another tooth, holds it to his wife’s neck, points to the drawing again, and utters his first phrase of English: ‘Fuck you.’ Elliott begins to cry.”

The barista put down their drinks and s’mores. They thanked the barista.

“Well?” Dylan said.

“Well what?”

“What happens next?”

“Excellent. Act three: Zrek, of course, re-arrives from space to kick albino ass and save the day. Zrek turns out to be highly skilled in the celestial martial arts. Certain critics are going to say that I cheated by taking the climax out of the protagonist’s hands and handing it over to Zrek, making him in effect a deus ex machina, so in order to at least acknowledge that I’ve done so consciously, I have Zrek land in a different part of the country, the planet’s having rotated and whatnot, and commandeer a Ferrari Testarosa. Machina, you know, is the Italian word for car, so what you get in effect is a clever pun for the intellectual set. Meanwhile, it also makes for some comic relief and thrilling action sequences.”

“How does it end?”

“Okay, so just as we recapitulated the beginning of the first film, we do so again with the ending. Korelu gives birth to a boy. Looks-wise he’s exactly intermediary between her and Elliott. Elliott’s mother has a talk with Elliott about how her little boy has really grown up and how he needs to step up and assume responsibility. This is clearly a very personal issue for her, her own husband having run off to Mexico before the first film. Elliott hugs her and promises to be a good father. Cut to a wedding ceremony in a church, with Zrek as best man. Everyone throws confetti as Elliot and Korelu walk out of the church, hand in hand, and get in Zrek’s Ferrari. The baby is snug in his car seat in the back. Zrek chauffeurs the newlyweds and their newborn up the gangplank into the spaceship and we see that the car is towing a bunch of cans and the license plate reads ‘JUST MARRIED.’ Elliott breaks the fourth wall, looks directly at the camera and says ‘I’ll be back’ in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice. They go up into the belly of the ship, the doors close, and they embark on their honeymoon to the Outer Rim. Roll credits.”

“Yes, I’d say it definitely strikes a different tone from the first E.T.”

“I’m glad you agree.”

“And you’d want me to play Elliott? I mean maybe?”

“Well, you look enough like Henry Thomas that an audience will be willing to suspend its disbelief. At the same time, you’ve got a look all your own, one I haven’t quite seen before in the movies. Not the boy next door so much as the boy next door to him. Am I interesting you at all?”

“My God,” Dylan said. “I’ve never been so interested in anything in my life.”

“Great. So once we put a wrap on 12 Monkeys, we’ll organize a proper audition. Now let me make sure I’ve got your contact info.”

Dylan wrote down his address and phone number in a little black book, and then they proceeded to eat their s’mores. Dylan wanted to impress Gilliam in conversation but lacked the life experience. Fortunately Gilliam was loquacious, and as long as Dylan kept prodding him with earnest questions about the industry, all he really had to do was listen.

Once again, Dylan told nobody about what had happened. Some part of him was convinced it would all come to naught, that it was far too good to be true. His pessimism was reinforced when summer came to a close without his ever hearing another peep from Gilliam. He and Chad quit their jobs and moved into the “New Res” dorms at Temple. They went to class, read Oedipus and Shakespeare, and auditioned for a play called Balm in Gilead. Chad got a part, Dylan didn’t.

And then one morning, while Dylan was doing his math-for-artists homework at the last minute, he got a call from his mother, who had gotten a call from Terry Gilliam. To Dylan’s surprise, she knew who that was. “Call him right away,” she said.

And Dylan did.

And a week later he was in LA for his audition.

And the rest is a matter of record: despite its modest budget, tight production schedule, and hasty release, E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears was a massive blockbuster, a grand slam for the critic and the casual moviegoer alike. In part the film’s success could be credited to its undeniably slick execution, but it didn’t hurt that first contact had taken place just two weeks before the release (complex hominids with single nostrils on Tarantino, 90,000 light years away); ironically, the film seemed to fulfill the public’s yearning for aliens worthy of the name far better than the headlines were doing, and both Independence Day and Star Trek: First Contact would ride on its coattails later that year.

Whether it was for this reason or a more old-fashioned one, E.T. II also happened to be a grand slam for palpitating young women across the land who were lucky enough to find an adult to accompany them. The fan mail came pouring in, as did the scripts. The first one that Dylan accepted, at his agent’s urging, was James Cameron’s new film, a special effects extravaganza to be called Titanic, with principal photography beginning soon.

• • •

On his way home from the American School, Dylan decided to hover through the Grind. He generally did this a couple of times a month. Owing perhaps to the legal status of prostitution on New Taiwan, the Grind had to be the least seedy red-light district in the Milky Way. The prostitutes, what the natives called azalfuds, were lined up along a narrow, kilometer-long esplanade, females on the north side, flexing their biceps and abs; males on the south, tossing their tawny hair and caressing their breasts. Dylan was slightly troubled by how attracted he felt to the males; they were as feminine as any geisha, but he could not look past the bulges in their bikini bottoms. He knew from the biology textbooks at school that the New Taiwanese penis looked more or less like a human one but with a slightly bifurcated head. For a certain subsection of humanity, of course, these reverse secondary characteristics were a dream come true. Transgender women had always commanded a modest corner of the sex trade on Earth, and here they were normative. By contrast, it was (what American exopats referred to as) “he-males” and “she-girls” who catered to alternative native lifestyles, and, as it happened, heteronormative Terran ones.10 These trans azalfuds, everyone knew, peddled their wares on a block toward the end of the esplanade that had come to resemble an R & R camp for Terran exopats reminiscent of the fleshpots of Saigon circa 1972. Though it had been quietly beckoning for the better part of two decades, Dylan had never once been there. He hovered through for the spectacle and the thought experiments, and that was all. Mike the exobiology teacher would tell him sometimes about his sexual adventures over there: how the she-girls were like the hottest Earthling girls you’d ever seen; how the New Taiwanese vagina was totally compatible with the Earthling penis,11 and “tight as shit;” how they’d do anything you could possibly imagine and dirt cheap to boot. Dylan had gotten really close a couple of times to investigating all of that himself. The thought of sleeping with an alien did strike him as irresistibly exotic for a time. Since first looking up from Earth, human stargazers had projected their hopes and fears onto the heavens, either demonizing extraterrestrials or making angels of them. Caught up in the early excitement of the Great Up-and-Out, Dylan had been as guilty of the latter as anyone—so much so that he’d wondered if he wasn’t making a terrible mistake in sealing himself to Erin just before their departure—but after a couple of years of living and working among the host culture, he’d finally understood, intellectually and viscerally, that life on other planets was just life. Aliens weren’t so alien. Hominids everywhere worked and played, exulted and suffered, loved their families and buried their dead. The universe was largely conscious, it turned out, but that meant what it meant and nothing else besides. We all still had to die.

10_____________

The IEF (International Exodus Federation) was very sensitive to the desires of indigenous populations when settling new worlds. Once they’d established an outpost and their linguist AIs had deciphered the native tongue, which generally took about six weeks (Chomsky’s universal grammar is more universal than even he supposed), they briefed indigenous officials on the particulars of human civilization. As a gesture of goodwill, they practiced full disclosure, and given how notoriously bound up with crime the flesh trade was on Earth, the New Taiwanese could hardly be blamed for not wanting to import any sex workers. In fact, early on, all they had wanted were teachers.

11_____________

The status of intermarriage was still a hot issue in the courts. That said, dozens of Terran-exopat males were now cohabiting with New Taiwanese she-girls, and some had even reared some adorable mongrel offspring. The reverse, i.e. exopat females procreating with New Taiwanese he-males, was comparatively rare, though not unheard of.

Moreover, Dylan was married, and if he believed in anything, it was the sanctity of marriage. He would no sooner sleep with an alien—or anyone else—than he’d have Erin do so. He had watched her make out with another girl at a party once, on a dare. They’d gone at it way too long, and it had made Dylan feel deeply confused, both aroused and jealous at once. After the party, he had asked her not to do that ever again please, and as far as he knew she hadn’t.

Dylan, for his part, had cheated on Erin just once. They hadn’t been married yet, and it probably wouldn’t have happened at all were it not for the immense peer pressure, and the sense of dreamlike impunity that comes with partying inside the moon.12

12_____________

To be sure, the surface of Earth’s moon is every bit as barren as the Apollo astronauts reported it in good faith to be. Conspiracy theorists who hold that the moon landing was a hoax staged at Area 51 are simply misguided. And the moon isn’t hollow either, as other theorists have claimed (not to mention novels by the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, C.S. Lewis, and H.G. Wells). What is true, however, is that the moon’s pocked appearance is due to its regularly being impacted by meteoroids, asteroids and the like, and that some of these impact craters are quite capacious, a possibility that wasn’t lost on the generation of New England Brahmins who came of age after the Second World War, when rocket technology had finally reached the point where it might be able to sling them up there from time to time—to winter perhaps, or summer, or at the very least to throw some all-night, very exclusive shindigs and Earthgaze from a Barcalounger.

When Werner Von Braun, the brains behind Hitler’s V-2 rocket, was “sanitized” by the US government after Nuremberg, he was immediately put to work on the elite party set’s new “yacht.” It wasn’t particularly difficult, and they were making regular jaunts to the Sea of Tranquility by 1950. The Apollo project, allegedly culminating in the moon landings of 1969, turns out to have been a case of an artist plagiarizing his own work, though Von Braun was careful to make Apollo bulkier, louder, altogether more majestic and less efficient. For a little while, this first generation of world-hoppers was content to eat the space food, wear the spacesuits, and bounce around on the cold dead surface, but they soon grew restless and commissioned the terraforming of a resort inside one of Luna’s more spectacular caverns. Von Braun looked to it, and by the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the Illuminati had their own psychedelic, pressurized and climate-controlled love grotto inside the moon. Imagine the most luxurious beach you’ve ever seen, with waves like blue gin lapping gently against a snickerdoodle shore. Now put it inside a cave with a glass ceiling and light it with a grove of tiki torches. Then set out some cocktails, rowboats, and individually wrapped contraceptive devices. If you can imagine all of that, congratulate yourself: you think like Hitler’s rocket man.

It wasn’t long, of course, before these lunar getaways became old-hat, so the Illuminati (old, fat, white guys mostly) began cherry-picking entertainers and inviting them up for the weekend to join in the festivities. Naturally these entertainers were sworn to utmost secrecy on penalty of death, but they were happy to oblige, and “the Grotto” quickly became the best-kept secret in Hollywood. Anybody who was anybody had been there.

Gilliam had invited him up for a cast party. You might think Dylan would have been surprised as the limo mounted a steep canyon to a launch pad near the Hollywood sign, but in fact this latest unveiling of the marvelous life that awaited him seemed perfectly in keeping with the series of unveilings that had taken him in the past couple of years from awkward high-school student to star of the silver screen. A week ago he’d been on the cover of Time—was a cast party inside the moon any stranger or less believable than that?

“Can I tell my fiancée?” Dylan asked.

“Now why would you do a thing like that?” Gilliam said. “Tell her I invited you to my house on Catalina for the weekend. We’ll have you back by Monday unscathed. Unless you like it rough, of course.” He winked.

Dylan smiled as if he understood and then called up Erin and told her about Catalina. He felt terrible lying like this, but he had sworn secrecy on penalty of death. Surely she’d understand.

“I’m happy for you,” she told him.

The rocket ship was smaller on the outside than he might have expected, but bigger on the inside. The seats were nicely padded and there was a full bar and a plasma TV (cutting edge, in those days). It was not unlike the inside of the limo he and Erin had once taken to their senior prom, albeit somewhat roomier.

They watched The Right Stuff, for irony’s sake. Out the porthole, the moon grew larger in the sky—nickel, quarter, fifty-cent piece—until it occupied the entire view and took on a third dimension. He could make out the mountain ranges and individual craters and rocks, and everything was so stark and clean and colorless and dead.

Once they made landfall, the captain, a young guy in a blue jacket with yellow wings, ushered them to the front part of the ship. When they were all accounted for, he pressed a button and a door closed with a pneumatic hiss. Then he pressed another button and the whole module they were in separated from the rest of the ship and became a kind of rover thing. The captain steered them across the rugged terrain toward the mouth of a nearby cave and took them straight through an air lock.

Once inside, they stepped down from the rover and found themselves in a sort of cavern. Light flickered on basalt walls, and the air felt humid, even tropical. They wound along a ridge for a couple of minutes and finally emerged at the head of a trail that led straight down to what appeared to be an honest-to-goodness ocean inside the moon. A couple of surfers carved up the waves. Along the beach, a dozen or so men lounged in beach chairs, drinking cocktails or receiving massages from naked, or nearly naked, women. A number of other men gathered by the cabanas beside the beach, drinking and playing cards, buxom women stroking them and giggling. It was to one of these tables that Terry escorted Dylan, and only when they got close did Dylan realize that he recognized most of these faces from the movies, even if he didn’t necessarily know their names. He did, however, know Hugh Hefner’s name, and Hef was there, wearing a burgundy robe. He had a heap of poker chips before him and a nude centerfold on each arm, both of whom smiled absurdly at Dylan. The one on the right even winked. “Welcome, son,” Hef said. “Which one do you want?”

“Want?”

“This is a man’s world up here, son,” Hef said. “Repression is against the rules. What’s your pleasure?”

Dylan indicated the one that had winked at him, and she immediately came over to him and pressed her hard body against his. “I like you too,” she whispered breathily in his ear.

“Why don’t you give him the tour?” Hef suggested.

“I’d love to,” she said. Then she crouched down and took off Dylan’s shoes, lingering at his crotch for effect, having clearly mastered the art of titillation. He was half crazy already when she stood again, took him by the hand, and led him down to the sea.

“This place is something,” Dylan said.

“Isn’t it, though?”

“So do you, like, live up here?”

“You silly,” she said. “Nobody lives up here.”

“So this is your job then?”

“You could say that,” she said.

“You’re well paid, are you?”

She laughed. “Extremely.”

“I’m Dylan.”

“Hi, Dylan. I’m Fantasia.”

Of course she was.

They were down at the water’s edge now, the warm surf licking at their toes. She giggled and turned to him with this dumb puppy-dog look. Then she took his hand and placed it on one of her bulbous breasts, which was so supernaturally perfect it had to be an implant. It was all so much like a dream, who could blame him for surrendering to the wiles of this vapid, well-compensated goddess and making love to her over and over again on the microbead shores of the Selenian sea?

Over the next couple of days, Dylan slept a good deal in his private bungalow, ate seven of the best meals of his life, and drank cult wines like they were orange juice. On the second day, Hef asked if Dylan wouldn’t rather sow his oats in a different girl today, but Dylan said he was perfectly happy with Fantasia. Judging by her body language the rest of the weekend, she was perfectly happy with him too—or just a very talented actress. Either way would do.

He was back in Santa Monica with Erin by Monday. The end of his career, unbeknownst to anyone, was just a few months off, and he would never be invited to the moon again. One might have expected him to retaliate after his firing by publicly outing the Grotto, but he kept his word. For one thing, though he sometimes wanted to die in the aftermath of his shaming, he never wanted to be killed exactly. Moreover, it was fairly certain that even if he did tell someone, he wouldn’t be believed. And anyway, there was something sacred to him about that memory, and he didn’t wish to profane it.

Even all these years later, Dylan still thought of his weekend’s dalliance with Fantasia on a near-daily basis. It wasn’t that there was anything so transcendent about the sex itself—though there kind of was—but his experience in the moon seemed to his psyche both the literal and symbolic high point of his life: he’d been 238,900 miles above the common run of humanity, gained entrance to a secret society, glimpsed the gears and mechanisms at the back of reality. It was difficult not to regard his life since as shrouded in illusion, and he sometimes envied the naiveté of ordinary people. He’d been expelled from Eden, and was condemned to know what he was missing.

He veered off the Grind and went back home.

“Daddy!”

“Da—y!”

Dylan went to the kitchen and gave Erin a kiss on the cheek.

“I made linguine,” she said, holding the steaming bowl to his face. “Real olive oil.”

The sweet, nutty aroma made him feel a touch homesick, though he would never admit that. Still, something was off. “Real garlic?”

She shook her head. “Galric.13 The real stuff would have broken the bank.” Since the ban on teleported crops some years back, Terran crops had become a low-yield, high-price commodity. “It’s always a tough choice. I figure we’ll spring for both on your birthday.”

13_____________

Though beet-colored, cloveless, and in shape rather like a small pear, galric (which had been growing on New Taiwan for perhaps a billion years before the First Expedition began adding it to their spaghetti) tasted as much like garlic as any Terran apple variety tasted like any other. That the two, galric and garlic, were as seemingly cognate linguistically as they were gustatorily couldn’t help but prick one’s sense of wonder, particularly when one considered that New Taiwan, owing to its single landmass and centralized culture going all the way back, had produced but a single language.

He nodded. Her judgment was sound.

He couldn’t help but notice she looked especially sharp in the belly this evening. Given that gravity was a few tenths of a percent lower here than on Earth, human pregnancies tended to go longer rather than shorter, but there were never any guarantees. She looked like she was ready to pop.

After their initial enthusiasm over Daddy’s return, Arthur and Tavi reverted to their worst selves, wailing and fighting over whatever was in the other’s hand. The upshot was that they were in bed by 7:30, and Erin wasn’t far behind, so Dylan had the run of the house for the rest of the evening.

He tried reading for a bit, but couldn’t get traction on the words. His ears were screaming and, louder still, that box of fan mail was calling to him from the other room, siren-singing the way pornography had in his youth, the way Erin herself had back in high school. When he was sure Erin was asleep, he put down his book (Sentimental Education, Flaubert) and crept into the bedroom, lighting up the dark with his omni. As quietly as he could manage, he took down the box and carried it into the living room. He set it on the sofa and sat down beside it. He knew this was no small decision he was on the verge of making, though that hardly stayed his hand. Fate was calling. He reached in blindly and pulled out a letter.

There. He had uncorked the winds.

By sheer coincidence, the letter bore a postmark from Taiwan, the original one.14

14_____________

This really did seem to be just a coincidence. Because the indigenous names of newly discovered worlds frequently turned out to be unpronounceable by Terrans, the IEF, in collaboration with PASA (Planetary Aeronautics and Space Administration), was charged with assigning exonyms where necessary. In the beginning they hewed to tradition and drew on the treasure trove of mythology, but as that quickly became exhausted, they tended toward pop culture instead—there were now planets called Radiohead, Trainspotting, and Infinite Jest, for instance (not to mention, a bit later, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet). Occasionally they drew from the well of geopolitics too: Since national boundaries were rapidly shifting and dissolving amid the emergent paradigm, it seemed fitting to pay homage to vanishing states by enshrining their names on the new celestial maps; and because China’s surprise—and surprising—siege of Taiwan was underway even as the naming committee was meeting to discuss the name of the planet Dylan would eventually move to, all delegates, even the Chinese one, voted in favor of “New Taiwan” (and cognates in other Terran languages). To be sure, outside of its name, New Taiwan was about as Taiwanese as the West Indies were Indian; witness the fact that (owing largely to its highly esteemed American School) some 78 percent of the planet’s Terran exopats were currently of American stock, whatever that might now mean.

The native name of the planet, incidentally, was Ulmarjveul’tankuñbampok’, which was not, strictly speaking, unpronounceable for humans, though it came pretty darned close. Like the English word “earth,” it doubled as a general term for soil.

Dear Mr. Greenyears,

Do you remember me? We met during the premiere of ET II in Taipei. I know you met lots of girls that day, but you may remember that I asked you to sign my arm, where I had scars? I used to cut myself when I was younger. I was very depressed. But when I saw your movie I thought you were so beautiful that you gave me hope for a better life. Have you ever gotten out of a swimming pool at night and stared at a light and it has a rainbow around it? You were like that to me. You had a glow around you. You were not like ordinary people. I just wanted to tell you that I think you saved my life. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Mei-Ling Chen

Now this was just not what he’d expected at all. It was as if he’d come to get some candy and would be leaving with a rack of lamb. He vaguely remembered getting this letter the first time around, maybe even signing a worrying wrist in Taipei. Of course, back then at the height of his fame, all of that must have paled in his young, virile, and already repressed mind against the more full-frontal booty calls. Now, though, he found himself moved almost to tears. It didn’t make a bit of sense to him that he had putatively saved this girl’s life, but if it was true that his acting had made a difference back on Earth, then this was some comfort. He cringed to think he had never written back to her before (as far as he could remember, he had never written back to any of them) and so, better late than never, he omni’d his reply:

Dear Mei-Ling Chen,

My name is Dylan Greenyears. Perhaps you remember me? I was a fairly well known actor in the middle-nineties. Well, I was just looking through some old mail and I came across a letter you once wrote me. I apologize if I never replied before, and I realize it’s a bit strange for me to be replying two decades later, but I just wanted to let you know that your words moved me greatly. I live far away these days, but I would gladly come to wherever you are if you’d let me take you to lunch sometime. In any case, I hope you are doing well, and that you are happy.

Sincerely,

Dylan Greenyears

He hadn’t written that name in a long time.

He read over the message, which struck him as just right, neither withholding nor revealing too much. He recognized, of course, that it was also kind of insane. By now she’d be about, what, thirty-five? Somewhere in there. She might be happily married, with kids and a job. He could ask Omni, but some part of him preferred not to know. He was old-fashioned that way, romantic maybe, and anyway, no computer, however super, could ever really know the richness of her inner life, right? She was acquainted with the dark—that was clear. Maybe she had some of the same well-concealed dissatisfaction in her breast that he had in his? This thirst for something strange and wondrous and new? He was not happy; it had to be admitted. He had been at times, and sometimes he managed to recover the feeling for a spell, but it never lasted long. Maybe they could help each other again. Maybe this time she could save him.

He didn’t have to wait long for a reply:

Your message to “Mei-Ling Chen” has permanently failed.

He sneered. What? He hadn’t seen a message like that in many years, and he’d never seen one on an omni. Omni messages didn’t “fail.” As long as someone was alive, any of their previous addresses would direct you to their current one. And if a person had died, you’d be notified of that too. Even if you opted to have your address unlisted, there’d still be some acknowledgment of your existence. Weird. He asked Omni some questions. The name alone wasn’t much help—there were thousands of Mei-Ling Chens throughout the galaxy—but when he mentioned that this was the Mei-Ling Chen who had cuts on her wrists and who had once written a fan letter to Dylan Greenyears, the omni returned 0 results. He had never seen Omni come up empty-handed on anything before. Normally it would at least redirect you somewhere, but this time there was no trail to speak of. This person, this Mei-Ling Chen who cut her wrists and wrote fan mail, simply did not exist as far as Omni, or his omni at least, was concerned. Omni was greater than the sum of all human knowledge. It made no sense whatsoever that he himself might be aware of a person’s existence while it was not.

For a few minutes, Dylan contemplated the problem and fidgeted with the omni. Eventually, though, for want of any alternative, he gave up, went back in the box, and pulled out another letter.

Dear Mr. Greenyears,

I’m writing on a dare from my friend Melissa. We both think you’re super hot and amazingly talented. We even started a Dylan Greenyears fan club at our high school, and we’d be really honored, and would probably faint, if you’d come to talk to us sometime. Maybe next time you’re in the Baltimore area? We can’t pay you money, but we could all bake cookies or something and show you around.

I can’t believe I’m writing to you!

Ashley Eisenberg

Now that was a little more typical, the sort of ego candy he’d been in the market for. He composed his reply:

Hi Ashley. My name is Dylan Greenyears. You may remember that I was a fairly well known actor in the middle-nineties? Well, I was just looking through some old mail and I came across a letter you wrote me. This may seem odd coming so late, but I wonder if you’d like to get together sometime? I’m living rather far away these days, but I’d be happy to come to wherever you are if you’d like to meet up sometime. Are you still in the Baltimore area? Alternately we could meet at some midpoint. Just let me know what’s easiest. No pressure at all, of course.

Sincerely,

Dylan Greenyears

He stayed awake another two hours, reading through some more of his old fan mail and waiting for a reply that did not come. Mei-Ling’s letter had served him like a cold shower, but his libido had warmed again and before retiring he took out his hardware and stroked it with his hand, remembering Fantasia, until in short order an absurd backlog of star stuff dripped down his fingers. He was reminded of Cinnabons. God, he hadn’t had one of those in years.

What a pathetic fool he was! Clearly he should not have sent that reply. Even if Ashley Eisenberg did get back to him, he decided, he would ignore it. A biologist would tell you that sperm comes from the testes. It was pretty clear to Dylan, however, that it originates in the brain, where it goes about filling your convolutions and making a fog of your thinking. Only when he was void like this could he think clear thoughts, and under ordinary circumstances the fog prevented him from believing even this. It was like when he’d tell Erin her PMS was making her into a bitch. She’d insist the PMS had nothing to do with it, until a day or two later when it was gone and she was her gentle, caring, clear-thinking self again. Then she’d own up to what a hostage she’d been.

He went to the bathroom sink to clean himself up, and then to his bedroom to kiss his great-with-child wife on the forehead and wish her a good night. She purred. He went to sleep with that rare appreciation for one’s blessings that is the upshot of guilt.

When he awoke in the morning, Erin was gone—in the kitchen probably, feeding the kids. He got himself up and went to the bathroom. To his surprise, he found Erin seated on the toilet, her face wan and agonized.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I can’t pee,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I think it’s time.”

“What, baby time?”

She nodded and winced.

“Holy Higgs!”15

15_____________

Given the ascendancy of physics over the past several decades, it was only natural that scientific language should begin to colonize colloquial speech. Even devoutly religious Anglophones could be heard saying “Holy Higgs!” at least as often as “Dear God!” “Sweet Jesus!” “Christ Almighty!” and the like. In fact, they generally preferred it because, though it referred to the all-important, mass-endowing “God particle”—discovered in a child’s home atom-smashing kit in Boise, Idaho in 1987—it did not, strictly speaking, require them to take the Lord’s name in vain.

He called in to the department chair and told her the news. He said it didn’t matter who subbed for him because he/she could just let the kids work on their Shakespeare scenes. Then he began the laborious project of getting the kids ready to go. Once they were buckled into the levicar, he supported Erin on his arm to the passenger seat and manifested the door behind her. Then they were off to the New Taiwan Medical Center Earthling Annex. They decided that Dylan would drop Erin at the ER and then take the kids to daycare and hover right back.

He dropped her off and watched her waddle through the foglet doors, and then hovered along the roundabout and back over the street. He was just in time for rush-hour traffic, but the daycare center wasn’t far away and he was back at the hospital in twenty minutes flat. He let the car self-park and hustled inside. As he rode the elevator on the way up to maternity, he checked his omni to find out what room Erin was in, and was surprised to find a new message waiting for him.

How awesome! Of course I remember you! And yes! Triple yes! I would love to get together. I wonder when would be a good time for you? I am still in the Baltimore area. It’s tough for me to get away. Maybe you can meet me at the Inner Harbor sometime for lunch?

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Ashley

How deeply unsettling to have his spheres cross like this, not to mention being reminded of what a fool he was, how in matters of the heart/balls he was really not much wiser than the adolescents he pontificated to on a daily basis.

He ignored the message, which, some part of him must have realized, was not the same as deleting it.

Erin, his omni informed him, was in room 342, just around the corner from the elevator bank. He found it easily enough and knocked on the door. A native nurse (you could tell natives by their double-jointed elbows and knees16) swiped it away. Over her left shoulder, he could see Erin lying in bed. Inexplicably, she appeared to be holding a baby.

16_____________

The discovery that complex life was so similar throughout the galaxy had served as a real buzzkill for those Terrans given to a sense of cosmic exhilaration. Yes, there were now hundreds of new cultures to discover, and no doubt each had its fascinating quirks and eccentricities, but there were no bug-eyed monsters or Wellsian juggernauts, no parasites or dream beasts, angels or telepaths. Tentacles remained a water thing. Eating, drinking, breathing and sleeping were practiced by hominids everywhere. Bicameral eyes appeared to be universal, as were mouths, anuses, and dimorphic sex. No civilization had yet been found that did not rely to a large degree on spoken language. In fact, most of these newly discovered life forms were more than 99.4 percent identical to Earth humans at the genetic level. Virtually no one had expected this, and there was a whole new cottage industry devoted to finding out how indeed it had happened. Some scientists adopted a determinist view, arguing in essence that the real surprise would have been if things had turned out otherwise—if, for instance, there were natural life forms out there on Earth-like planets that were not carbon-based. They created simulation after simulation on their omnis, inputting all the variables—chemical elements born of the big bang and the furnaces of sun-like stars; mass, gravity, rotation, orbital period, composition, magnetism, atmosphere, geology, topography, and climate of each respective planet—and time and again they showed remarkably little deviation. As long as life had at least 3.8 billion years to evolve on one of these planets, it invariably produced something an awful lot like a human being—”convergent evolution,” they called this—and once a certain threshold of intelligence was reached, selection pressures eased and adaptation leveled off. New Taiwanese scientists, for instance, claimed that life had existed on their planet for upwards of 6 billion years, and carbon dating conducted by Terran scientists so far supported that hypothesis. The bone of contention between the Determinists and the (unfortunately named) Panspermists was that the former believed it plausible that life had come about independently on each of these planets and then evolved, whereas the Panspermists, despite the Determinists’ simulations—which they dismissed as being reverse-engineered in some way or other—held that chance, if it were truly chance, could not possibly have behaved so uniformly. In the face of the demonstrable fact that intelligent life on Super Earths throughout the Milky Way was indeed so humanlike that some races could not even be usefully classed as other species, they were left to conclude that life had originated in one place and one place only and then made its colonial voyage around the galaxy inside of comets, thereby seeding hospitable planets where they would then take their own slightly divergent evolutionary paths until meeting up again some billions of years in the future. For the Panspermists, the race was on to see who could identify the one and only place in the galaxy, or indeed in the wider universe, where a host of elements first pooled their resources, developed membranes and learned to reproduce. In addition to these two camps inside the scientific community, there was of course one further possibility—namely, the religious hypothesis. God had made intelligent life in his own image and therefore, unless he was a shape-shifter, the standard deviation could not be large by definition. One Catholic bishop had even undertaken the project of compiling photos of every humanoid face in the galaxy inside his omni and “averaging” them out into a single image, which he believed would reveal the face of God at last. As it turned out, God looked uncannily like Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors—so much so, in fact, that a certain fundamentalist contingent began watching that movie on repeat in search of eschatological clues. In general these spiritualists made no attempt at addressing the materialist claims of the Determinists and the Panspermists. They did not purport to know where or how many times life had originated, only that the mechanism behind whatever had happened was God, whom they had been calling “The Creator” for a pretty long time now after all.

“You must be the father?” the nurse said in flawless English.

“I am.”

“Congratulations! Erin did beautifully.”

“What, you mean it’s done?”

“Come meet your son.”

“But I was only gone twenty minutes.”

“Your wife’s a pro at this. A real trooper.”

“I guess so.”

He walked over to Erin’s bedside.

“It’s really over already?”

“It really is.”

She looked happy. She held up the bundle of swaddling clothes, and there it was, the bruised fruit of a human infant. They’d put a little blue snowcap on him.

“I want to call him Dylan Jr.,” Erin said.

“I thought you wanted to call him Earth?”

“I did until I saw him. He looks just like you, don’t you think?”

“Like me? I’d say he looks more like Gollum.”

“Here, take him.”

Dylan took the bundle in his arms. Feelings competed inside of him. He felt happy, of course. He’d begotten a son. A clean, pink, anatomically correct son.

And yet he felt guilty too. Having grown up bombarded with cautionary tales and harrowing facts about Earth’s imminent overpopulation,17 he couldn’t help but notice, knee-jerkily—or maybe just jerkily—that what he’d begotten was another son; and did you need two sons really? And then there were all the practical concerns. How many insipid papers would he have to grade to fund this kid’s education? Those little fingers, though: they were pretty sweet. Already Dylan Jr. was holding out one pinky like some tea-drinking aristocrat. Maybe this kid could be a better version of him someday? Dylan’s father had never given him much advice or dispensed much wisdom. He seemed to think words were just words and you had to learn through trials. The Buddha said something like that too, as Dylan recalled. Dylan, however, thought words could be pretty important—he taught literature after all—and he intended to give his children millions of the best ones he could come up with. His own life had not gone as he had hoped, but he would do everything in his power to ensure that theirs would.

17_____________

Indeed, it was by and large the threat of food shortages, peak oil, and other depleted resources, coupled with the sense of wonder engendered in all but the most hard-hearted Americans by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series on PBS in 1980, that had led to the terraforming projects on Mars and Io that began in the early eighties—still very much works in progress—and, more successfully, to the search for habitable exoplanets, of which, at last count, some 4,696 had been identified, and, thanks to the refinement of QT in the mid-90s, 78 successfully settled. Overpopulation, it turned out, was not a major concern throughout the galaxy. Thousands of Super Earths had been probed and found to house at least some form of life. Most, like New Taiwan, were found to have given rise to life forms remarkably like Homo sapiens, but unlike humans, none had been subjected to so ruthless a process of natural selection that their reproductive instincts trumped their ecological ones. They had DNA, but for whatever reason—as yet undiscovered—it just didn’t seem to be as mean or shortsighted as the Terran variety. They were adept, in other words, at striking an equilibrium with their environment—humans, not so much. It probably didn’t hurt that, while many of these civilizations had some form of religion, most seemed to recognize their systems of belief for the psychocosmological metaphors they perforce were.

• • •

Dylan began his two weeks of paternity leave. Erin stayed at the hospital for a couple of days, and he and the kids went to stay with her and the new baby much of the time. Arthur was great with his new brother. Already he enjoyed holding him and petting his bald head. Poor Tavi, though, had a new distance in her eyes. She seemed to understand, with peculiar clarity, that she’d been usurped, that she was no longer the baby in the family but destined to be lost in that gray middle between her two siblings. At least she was the only girl, special in that sense, but it was clear she resented Mommy for holding this new baby and giving it suck, so instead of going to her, she cleaved, rather touchingly, to Daddy, who for lack of other viable candidates became her new best friend. Barely three years old and her paradise was already lost. Join the club.

Back at home, Dylan bathed the kids, put them to bed, and then set to work on Junior’s sleeping quarters in what would no longer be his office. He and Erin had been so busy that they’d hardly done any nesting in advance; fortunately the shed was filled with hand-me-downs. Dylan even let Arthur and Tavi decorate the walls with markers. Arthur drew spaceships and dinosaurs. Tavi worked in a rather more abstract mode, rendering varicolored plasmoids and blobules.

For the first week or so after Erin and Junior’s return, Dylan felt quite happy. He forbade himself to do, or even think about, anything related to work, and focused on enjoying the company of his kin. He and the kids prepared meals for Mommy. They played vintage Terran board games, painted one another’s faces, and watched all the Toy Story films, the third of which choked Dylan up beyond all reason. They played hopscotch and flew a kite in the New Taiwanese wind. And they got to know their new family member. Dylan Junior’s face seemed to change by the minute, and while Dylan still thought he looked pretty much like Gollum, he was beginning to see what Erin meant: Junior did take after him in some respects, more obviously than he did his mother anyway. It was mainly the eyes. They were Dylan’s eyes, really, just popped into a smaller skull. He had not quite realized before how a gene is a gene is a gene. It made for quite an affinity, and one night while the other two kids were sleeping, Dylan cradled the baby in his arms and walked him outside to the deck to peer at the stars. He told him, unabashedly, how he loved him and—screw overpopulation, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate in all directions anyway—he was glad to have him join them. Then he waxed philosophical and possibly nutty and asked the kid what it had been like in the womb. What was it like when that first spark of mental life kicked in? What was it like before that? How far back could he go? Was there anything important back there that his old man had forgotten? He looked out at the Milky Way, showed his son the pale evening star their species had once been trapped around. All those worlds, and yet—he spared his son now and kept his thoughts to himself—was there nothing truly strange out there? Nothing so exotic and marvelous that it would stymie our human frames of reference, mock our languages, confound our metaphors?

Because that was the thing about being young, wasn’t it? Everything was still new? Dylan sometimes briefed his students on one of the more interesting tidbits he’d picked up in graduate school: The Russian formalist poet Viktor Shlovsky identified ostranenie—usually translated as “defamiliarization,” though literally “strange-making”—as the basic function of art. “Habituation,” Shlovsky wrote, “devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.… Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” His students usually gave him blank stares when he recited this, so he’d translate it for them: “Art exists to make you babies again.”

“Why would we want to be babies again? Isn’t education about getting us to stop being babies?”

“In part, yes, but it’s also to get you to see things, really see them, as if for the first time. We could never hurt one another if only we learned to look with new eyes.”

“But aren’t babies like naturally really selfish? Don’t you have to teach a baby to be nice?”

They were right, of course. He was romanticizing. He had this tendency.

And there was this too: If you checked your omni, you’d find that nearly every combination of five or fewer words that you could think of, however nonsensical, had been documented countless times. The English language itself, one might say, was dying through overuse and becoming one big meta-cliché. Dylan consoled himself with a quote he’d once read from a twentieth-century Earthling scientist: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” How the unvanquished youth in him hoped it was so!

This was as close as Dylan ever got to praying anymore, and it ended, as per some prayers, with gratitude: he thanked the Universe, whatever that might mean, for this beautiful, healthy baby boy who had his eyes.