King of the Worlds (16 page)

He directed his omni to compose a message to one Wendy Sorenson in Hawaii—happily, there appeared to be just one—and to copy verbatim the message that had worked so well on Ashley Eisenberg. Naturally he made sure to alter the particulars:

Hi Wendy. 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 some letters 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 Hawaii if you'd like
to meet up sometime. No pressure at all,
of course.

Sincerely,

Dylan Greenyears

Having sent the message, he lay back on his bed, stared at the ceiling, and had barely begun playing with himself when his omni informed him he had a reply. That was fast.

My dear Dylan, I always knew you would come looking for me someday. When do our worldlines at last converge?

He replied:

Are you still in Hawaii?

Yes

Are you free next Sunday?

Free at last.

Where shall we meet?

I have seen it in my dreams. Pick up a kayak at Kailua Sailboards and Kayaks, Inc. I will reserve one in your name. Then paddle out to the Mokulua Islands. Be warned: it's farther than it looks. There is a cove on the makai (ocean-facing) side of the larger island, Moku Nui. Paddling there will be tough, but it's important that you do it, like symbolically. I will meet you there at 6:45 am. We will almost certainly be alone. I have waited so many years for this.

Great! See you then.

Amen, amen, and amen!

Her lack of inhibition was refreshing. Erin was always so
sane
.

He finished playing with his hardware, the old-fashioned way, sans reality augmentation, and then he lay back on the bed, listened to the banshees wail, and wondered what he'd just gotten himself into. It wasn't long before he fell asleep, though that didn't restrain his unconscious from hammering out the details of his plan.

As soon as Erin walked in the front door, he sprang to his feet and met her in the living room.

“Da—y!” Tavi said.

Dylan picked her up. “Hey, baby. How was swimming?”

“Good,” Tavi said, pronouncing that word almost as if it rhymed with
mood
.

Dylan stared Erin in the shadowy alcoves of her eyes. “I'm sorry I lost my temper earlier.”

She didn't exactly smile, but her frown grew a touch less committal.

“I'll think about moving,” he continued. “I just need a little more time. This is kind of a big deal for me, you realize. I always swore to myself I would never go back there.”

“I know,” she said. “I'm sorry too. I'm just so sleep-deprived lately, it doesn't take much to set me off.”

He leant over to hug her, Tavi giggling there between them, and for a moment all was right with the worlds. He almost regretted that he was about to disturb them again, but as his mother used to remind him whenever he tried to back out of anything as a kid, a commitment is a commitment.

“You know what's going to help me think about it?”

“What?”

“Cindy's insisting that I go to another conference.”

Erin stopped hugging and screwed up her face. “Come again?”

“‘Special Education in a Post-Disability Age.'”

“You're kidding me?”

“No.”

“Earth?”

“Boston.”

“When?”

“This weekend.”

“This is absurd.”

He nodded. It
was
absurd. He'd done his research for the sake of verisimilitude—there really was such a conference—though when it came down to it, he wasn't sure he didn't actually
want
her to cop to his infidelity this time around. Because what was the worst that could happen? He was reasonably sure she wouldn't leave him,
couldn't
leave him, any more than he would or could ever leave her. No, the worst that would happen was that he and Erin would
feel
things together again. These wouldn't be
good
feelings necessarily, but they would be powerful and serve to remind them that they were alive and that it mattered what they did with their time and their bodies. If only for a little while, he'd resume center stage in her life. He realized how pathetic it was for him to see himself as being in any way in competition with his own children, but at the same time he felt how sad it was that he should have to squeeze his sense of self-worth from the distant past like water from a dying succulent. If only he could forego the limelight altogether and embrace his obscurity, but damn it he'd been Jesus and Elliott and Jack, he'd floated on eyeballs and fucked in the moon; how, now, having basked in so much light, could he possibly make peace with the dark?

“Do whatever you need to do,” Erin said, and then she excused herself to go make dinner. It was perfectly clear to Dylan that she'd just made a conscious choice not to engage. It was less clear to him whether this made it the warmest or coldest of responses.

In any event, he would take her at her word.

• • •

Dylan stepped out of the RiboMate at Honolulu Intragalactic Spaceport at four forty a.m., bought a bottle of champagne (Prosecco, actually) at the duty-free vending machine, and then traveled by light rail to Kailua Sailboards and Kayaks, Inc., where he picked up the plastic yellow kayak that had been reserved under his name from a smiley bodybuilder who summarily talked him into buying a six-hour osmotic Hydropatch for automatic hydration while on the ocean and automatic oxygenation while under it. He helped Dylan peel off the back and affix it to the side of his neck.

Clenching the kayak's grab loop between his middle and ring fingers, Dylan set off for the beach—about two blocks away. The wheels on the little trailer barely seemed to help. He could have paid a bit more for the motorized trailer, but he was determined to do this the old-fashioned way. Romance was a rather antiquated notion, depending as it did on distance, difficulty, and death, all of which had been largely superseded by technology, but for better or worse, Dylan missed it.

Once he'd managed to get through the sand and into the shallows, he found that boarding the kayak was no cakewalk either. He belly-flopped onto it and awkwardly pulled himself into what felt like a rather precarious seated position. He took up the black plastic oar and began to row. For a moment he thought he was home free, but then tepid waves began crashing into his face, turning the kayak parallel to the shoreline and making it all but inevitable that one of them would barrel-roll him. He didn't have to wait long before finding himself faced with the seemingly impossible proposition of belly-flopping onto the kayak again, but in deeper water now, where his feet didn't touch bottom. Unfortunately the oxygenation module of the Hydropatch kicked in only underwater, because by the time he succeeded at crawling into the seat and rowing out past the breakers, his bodily oxygen reserves were pretty well spent. He took a few moments to catch his breath, to watch the dog-walkers watch him from the ludicrously white beach, and to confirm that the champagne bottle hadn't shattered in the hatch.

Now was he home free? He was not. When he set to paddling again, he quickly realized that he didn't know whether the tips of the oars were meant to curve up or down. Did you spoon the water or, like, ladle it? He tried both and settled on the former. Steering was no more obvious at first, requiring as it did a sort of counterintuitive directional logic à la parallel parking. And while he soon fell into a rhythm, paddling was rough on the arms, and those islands, which had been
right there
when he'd first glimpsed them from the shore, now seemed to have migrated a good mile toward the horizon. To make matters worse, the morning sun was now blasting him in the face and he was already sweating bullets. Well, he had wanted romance. Here it was.

Nevertheless, despite the unforeseen difficulty, Dylan couldn't help but notice how insanely beautiful this place was. He had never been to Hawaii before. There were analogues on New Taiwan, but no equivalent, at least not where his human sense organs were concerned. The New Taiwanese atmosphere had a colder cast to it, a quality of tarnished brass, whereas here on Earth, here in Kailua anyway, the heavens shone a warm and radiant blue. And the translucent sea, this aptly-named Pacific, was so pure and gemlike in its blue-green gradations that it seemed to correspond to something elemental in his psyche. The ocean on New Taiwan was rather more like the dark, windswept Atlantic of his youth.

By the time he approached Moku Nui, it was already 7:13 by omni. Despite the inducements of a lovely little crescent of vacant beach on the south side of the island, he paddled against great resistance, inner and outer, to the windier back, where Wendy had instructed him to meet her. The waves were burlier here, liquid muscles expanding and contracting and all but overpowering Dylan's sorely underprepared and acutely burning arms and lungs. It was hard to imagine how all of this could possibly be worth it, but there was no going back now. He pressed on and by and by arrived.

The cove itself was like a grotto, a queer space, almost lunar, with lapping waves and giant quivering cubes of lemon Jell-O projected onto lava-rock walls. There was no beach on which to make landfall, just a drip castle of gnarled escarpments. The lapping stirred up clouds of white inside the blue-green that reminded Dylan of absinthe, which he'd drunk just once, inside the moon, and no sooner had he thought of the green fairy than he found himself immersed in it, floundering amid bubbles, senses deranged. Capsized again! But by what? Shark? Giant Pacific Octopus?

Then the bubbles cleared and he got his first eyeful of her.

She wasn't ugly, was decidedly gorgeous in fact in a Eurasian sort of way that one might have called “otherworldly” before learning that other worlds were themselves disappointingly worldly. What Dylan noticed first, and what would thereafter be coupled with her name in his mind, was the smile. Impish. Childlike. Her lips were big, clownish even, but whereas these might have proven a defect on a more somber face, on Wendy Sorenson they had the effect of accentuating that radiant and crazy joy of hers.

What Dylan noticed second was stranger: a frog swimming right alongside her, which, as they surfaced, leapt onto her shoulder and plopped itself square atop her head.

“Hello, darling,” she said in a voice that managed to be both husky and squeaky at the same time.

“You capsized me,” Dylan said.

“I wanted to make a strong impression.”

“Can I safely assume you're Wendy Sorenson?”

“That's my name until you change it.”

“And can I safely assume you realize there's a frog on your head?”

“Wha?” She fumbled with her hair. “Just kidding. This is Cane. I hope you don't mind. I don't go anywhere without him. He's kept me company all these years while I waited for you.”

“Can I touch him?”

“You'd better not,” she said. “He's very particular.” Then, without the slightest hesitation, she pressed her body against his, wrapped her arms around his neck, and said, “So are you going to kiss me or what?”

“Already?”

“Dylan, I've been waiting twenty years for this. From my perspective there's nothing ‘already' about it.”

Well then—she was no less forward in person than in her letters. She was also irresistibly attractive, toad and all. He held the small of her back and fixed his thin lips to her fatter ones. Per Shlovsky, she was helping him to recover the sensation of life.

Then the upside-down kayak banged into a stony stone wall and she pulled back and said, “We'd better drop the anchor.”

“Okay.”

“You don't know where that is, do you?”

“I don't suppose I do.”

“Well at least help me flip the kayak, would you?”

“Sure thing.”

So they did that, and before he thought to stop her, she'd opened the front hatch and discovered the bottle of bubbly he'd meant to surprise her with. “Nice,” she said. “I don't drink alcohol, but I won't keep you from it.”

Oops
. “Sorry. I should have checked.”

“No biggie. There's lots you don't know about me yet.”

She pulled a small anchor out of the rear hatch and wrapped it around the very crag the kayak had crashed into. She gave the line a tug to make sure it would hold.

“That a six-hour patch?” she asked, indicating his neck.

“Uh-huh.”

“Awesome. I've got a good two hours left on mine. You still a decent swimmer?”

“How do you know I was ever a decent swimmer?”

“You grew up with a pool in your backyard. It would seem to follow.”

“And how do you know I grew up with a pool in my backyard?”

“Research.”

“I see,” he said, not seeing.

She held out her hand to him. He was trying to decide whether, or how much, he ought to be bothered by her apparent invasion of his family's privacy, but he opted not to pursue it. He grabbed ahold of her hand, and together the three of them—Dylan, Wendy, Cane—submerged.

“Where are we going?” he asked her with his eyes. She shrugged, and then, true to plan, they went nowhere in particular for the next couple of hours; rather, they simply swam and frolicked like brand new animals in the sea. Dylan had never used one of these patches before, but there was nothing to it; you never felt the need to breathe—the patch was doing that for you—so you didn't have to surface unless you wanted to, and neither of them wanted to. Wendy pointed out the corals like Mandelbulbs, great pink brains, tropical fruits, monster fingers, the pubes of gorgons. Cane was never more than a few feet from Wendy's head, kicking its rear legs out like a wine opener. They'd been swimming for perhaps twenty minutes when she stopped, removed her bathing suit, and tied it to an outcropping of coral. Dylan followed her lead and was surprised to find that, onlooking amphibian notwithstanding, it came as naturally as not needing to breathe. More nude than naked then, Dylan and Wendy held hands and swam some more, passed through schools of synchronized fish, tropical and bright; rays like kites on the currents; turtles more ancient than their two combined lives. Mostly, though, he studied Wendy's body, which seemed of a piece with all of this, a natural thing with curves and orifices and lips and lips. He embraced her, and she let him, but when he made to kiss her again, she pulled away and went kicking through the absinthe some more. He stalked her until they surfaced by the kayak and pulled themselves up on a little bed of rock. Cane resumed his position atop her head.