King of the Worlds (10 page)

“You've hardly changed,” she said.

“That shows what you know.”

Halter top. Muscular arms. Breasts like overripe fruit.

“You hungry?” she asked.

“A bit, yes.”

“Crab cakes sound okay?”

“Miraculous. I haven't had one of those in twenty years. We don't have crabs where I'm living now. There are various types of shellfish, but the meat is different, more sausagey.”

“Eww.”

“It's not too bad actually. Just different.”

“Speaking of which, where
are
you living now? Omni doesn't list an address for you.”

Obviously. He was a celebrity after all, even if no one had done a double take yet today, let alone stopped to ask for his autograph. It was normal for celebrities to opt out of Omni's registry. Their existence would be noted, but not their address. As it happened, Dylan's address actually
was
listed, but it was under his newer, abridged name. He had told very few people of his whereabouts after his flight from Earth, and though he considered coming clean with Ashley now, he deemed it too much of a risk. He didn't know her yet really, and the line between avid fan and stalker, he'd heard, could be quite thin. Granted, it was he who'd contacted her this time and not the other way around.

“Ask me again later, would you?”

She shrugged.

He let her lead the way in her black leather pants. Beveled thighs. Butt like a heart-mark. Fuck-me shoes. Not that he was thinking about that.

They boarded a water taxi and passed through a flotilla of couples and kids pedaling around the harbor in green, dragon-shaped boats. Ducks quacked. Dylan found himself choked up all of a sudden by the cerulean sky, which was just so unmistakably Earthly (atmospheric plankton on New Taiwan lent the sky an aquamarine tinge). He had at last come home, or nearly—technically, he'd been to Baltimore just once before. His whole family had driven down to visit the National Aquarium when he was a kid, and what he remembered most from that visit, more than the shark walk or the tropical rainforest even, was the Giant Pacific Octopus, with its undulating tentacles and countless suckers, its quicksilver camouflage, its slit eyes that betrayed some calculating but inscrutable intelligence. Despite all the alien worlds that had been discovered in the years since, it struck Dylan now that Earth's Giant Pacific Octopus remained in some archetypal way the most alien creature he'd ever seen.

They debarked at what Ashley told him was the best restaurant in town and got a seat al fresco, right by the water's edge. At her suggestion, they ordered some beers from a local brewery called Flying Dog.

“This is pretty surreal,” Ashley said. “Having lunch with Dylan Greenyears—I never thought I'd see the day.”

“It is pretty uncanny.”

“Actually, I used to fantasize that we'd get married someday, but I guess at some point I gave you up for lost.”

They proceeded to make all sorts of small talk, though it was not so small for her presumably, and really it wasn't so small for him either given what it was doing to his ego. He was also learning quite a lot. As a rule, he paid no attention to Terran affairs anymore, so every topical or pop-culture reference she made was lost on him, and she made enough of them that he had the defamiliarizing pleasure of hearing his own first language in what amounted to a foreign dialect. Still, he managed to glean a good bit of propositional content too. He learned, for instance, that her bedroom as a girl had been bedecked with posters of him that she'd torn out of
Teen Beat
and
Seventeen
, and that she still had every word of
Nocturnal Fears
memorized. He learned that these days she worked as a certified public accountant, that she did triathlons, that she was married to a cop and had three kids.

When she asked what he did with himself these days, he replied, a little ashamedly, “Teaching, mostly.”

“Teaching acting?”

“Among other things.”

“I see.” She nodded as if impressed, though he was quite sure she wasn't.

On the bright side, the beer was good and the crab cakes were spectacular—plump with imperial meat, lightly breaded, and seasoned with Old Bay. The fries were excellent too. The coleslaw was neither here nor there.

“So I hope you don't mind if I ask the million-quid question?” Ashley said.

“Does it have anything to do with a movie about a sinking boat?”

“Yes.”

“I guess I'd prefer if you didn't ask it then.”

“Okay. All right. I get that.”

He hadn't meant to sound so brusque. He had hoped it wouldn't come up, though he'd been fairly certain it would. At least he'd nipped it in the bud, though an awkward lull followed. They finished their beers and studied the seagulls in silence, not bothering to look at each other until the waiter came to ask if they were interested in dessert.

“I think we'll be leaving actually,” Ashley said.

“The check then?”

“Please.”

Mercifully, a plane was flying by overhead, trailing an advertising banner that read CANCER CELLS HAVE RIGHTS TOO! It gave them something to look at. When the check finally arrived, Dylan took it and rifled through his wallet for cash. He hadn't used Terran money in years, and he'd
never
used the Terran quid, so it took him quite a long time to pay. Leave it to James Cameron to turn
this
into a disaster too. Dylan had come 2,001 light years, allowed a previous copy of himself to be murdered, lied unabashedly to his wife, and all for what?
Crab cakes? What a sentimental fool he'd been to think anything redemptive might come of this.

“Can I leave the tip?” Ashley asked.

“It was generous enough of you to meet me,” Dylan said.

“So let's be honest,” Ashley said. “That was by all accounts a pretty terrible meal. Not the food—the food was good—but you and I just did not hit it off at all, am I right?”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I shouldn't have contacted you.”

“That's not what I'm driving at,” she said. “I'm glad you did.”

This took him by surprise.

“Look,” she went on, “here's my situation, and I'm just going to lay all my cards on the table because I literally don't have time for subtlety. Basically I've got three hours before I have to pick my kids up from gymnastics.” She pulled a tube of Mentos out of her purse and slipped one of them into her mouth.

“I understand,” he said. “I won't waste another minute of your time—”

“And I happen to know an inexpensive little hotel around the way…”

Dylan suffered the psychic equivalent of whiplash. “What? You want to go to a hotel?”

“Well,
I
don't particularly, but my inner teenager would never forgive me if I didn't, and unless my thirty-year study of human nature is totally off base, I'm pretty sure you're on board. Mint?”

“To be honest, I hadn't really thought that far ahead,” he said.

“So think now.”

He took a Mento, popped it in his mouth, and thought. It was strange, but while he was very clearly cheating on Erin in some way already, he had not explicitly conceived of this escapade in sexual terms until now. Not
explicitly
explicitly. Had the accountant turned out to be the better reader of human nature than the master of literature?

His tinnitus keened.

His brain was dying.

Amanda Cruz thought he was sixty.

Okay, he'd thought about it. “Let's go,” he said.

She smiled, took his hand, and led him around the way. They didn't waste another second of each other's lives on conversation.

Ashley was right at that age where the body is shouting
Procreate! One more time! Now or never!
And so she was absolutely ravenous in bed. He had never been on the receiving end of so much—meaningless, pure—aggression before. She dug her nails into his back, moaned, talked dirty, slurped the dripping sweat from his neck, and, intermittently possessed by some demon, locked her legs around his waist and bucked so wild and out of control that he worried his dick would break—and what kind of excuse was he going to give Erin about that? Nonetheless, indeed all the more, it was the best sex he'd ever had in his life. What it was not, however, was transcendent. It didn't make him young again, or hopeful, or free. It didn't take him back to the moon or the silver screen. No, as they rutted around that afternoon, Dylan never once escaped that moderately priced hotel room, the sweaty bag of his skin, the unidirectional arrow of time, and all the accumulated head-weight of history and circumstance. And even as Ashley whispered in his ear, “Fuck me, Dylan Greenyears, like it's the last thing you'll ever do,” he found himself wondering just who she believed she was fucking anyway. Did she really think he was the same person whose glossy photos used to hang on the wall of her bedroom? Who'd acted in those films? He had certain memories in common with that younger man, sure, though his way of thinking about them, his orientation toward them, had changed beyond recognition, as had his wealth and social status. Even without teleportation, every cell in his body would have replaced itself many times over since he'd been a star. What of that star remained then? Only brute biological patterns, the way his DNA instructed his body to assemble proteins so that he still bore some resemblance to the hominid she'd once fantasized about marrying someday—and even those patterns were subject to change over time. All of that was equally true of her too, of course: this athletic thirty-something adulteress presently seated athwart his chin was by no means the same
Teen Beat
subscriber who'd once chaired the Dylan Greenyears fan club at her high school. They were the both of them impostors. Still, it was nice.

As soon as she'd swallowed his cum, Dylan asked, “Hadn't you better get going?”

She looked at the clock—”Six minutes ago!” Then she sprang up and began getting dressed.

“Any chance you're free again tomorrow?” he asked. “Or this evening for that matter?”

“Oh,” she said, and she cut the pace of getting into her shirt by half.

“What?”

“I thought we might be on the same page about this.”

“What page is that?” Dylan asked.

“The one where this is a one-time deal. The one where I don't think we should see each other again.”

“I see. I was definitely on a really different page.”

“Dylan, look, I enjoyed being with you this afternoon. Once we stopped attempting to communicate, it was really wonderful. I got to live out a fantasy. This'll sound weird, but I felt like I was surfing on the back of a dolphin.”

“Come again?”

“Surfing on a dolphin. I've wanted to do that ever since I saw some guy do it at the aquarium when I was a little girl. It seems so
magical
, and yet I have no doubt in my mind that those people who get to do that for a living curse the fact that they have to surf on dolphins day in and day out. It's the law of diminishing returns. I see it all the time in my job. You should see someone bank a million quid for the hundredth time. It's like they barely notice. They grunt. I don't want to be like that. Besides, Dylan, I have a family, and while you've told me practically nothing about you, I'd say there's a pretty good chance you do too, no? Doing this once was innocent enough, but repeat it and we start hurting people, do we not? Not least of all ourselves?”

Dylan nodded. She was right, of course.

“Okay then.”

She was dressed now. He was still naked, and now he felt it. He covered his soggy genitals with the sheet. She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Thank you, Dylan Greenyears.”

“For what?”

“For giving an awkward teenaged girl an outlet for her feelings. For being my first crush and, in a way, my first broken heart.”

“That was all in your head,” he said.

“Just like I was in yours,” she parried. She had a point.

She slipped into her heels, leant over the bed and kissed him gently on the lips one last time. Then she went off to pick up her kids.

Fantastic. Now he had a weekend to hang out in Baltimore. Just what he'd never wanted.

• • •

Within the hour, Dylan was at the Greyhound station boarding another bus, this time to Philadelphia. Since leaving Earth, he'd kept in touch with his parents on a regular basis via omni, but he hadn't returned in the flesh even once, and while he couldn't very well visit them now either since word would sooner or later get back to Erin (who talked to his mother more than he did), he figured he could at least spy on them a bit and make sure they were doing okay.

For the duration of the nauseating bus ride, Dylan stared out the tinted window and reacquainted himself with his homeworld. If he squinted a little, I-95 was every bit the wide, soulless highway it had always been, but upon closer inspection, it was clear the world had changed. Countless bumper stickers shrieked “EARTH: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT,” and the infrastructure, accordingly, looked surprisingly
good
: no bumps or potholes marred the road, and bridges and overpasses appeared secure where not altogether new. Holographic signboards every few miles reminded drivers to carpool because, though CO
2
emissions were no longer an issue, natural gas was itself a nonrenewable resource, an automotive stopgap while the industry perfected the solar fuel cell. Still, where Earthlings might have taken pride in finally being responsible stewards of their planet, there was instead a sense of defeat in the air, as if the discovery of other advanced civilizations in the galaxy had served as yet another indignity in a long line of them since Galileo informed humans that the cosmos didn't revolve around them, and Darwin that they were less angels than apes. Society appeared to be functioning better than ever, but there was a palpable lack of ambition and creativity in the air. In its place was a whiff of surrender and pragmatism that Dylan found at once tragic and impressive; America was at last becoming life-sized. Even the religious, the ones with the fish or crescents or stars on their bumpers, appeared defeated, underzealous, with the possible exception of a pair of shirt-and-tie-wearing Mormons who biked by on a pedestrian bridge looking jaunty as ever.