King of the Worlds (23 page)

“I guess I do. And I'll get there too someday. On my
own
merits, thank you very much.”

“I wish you the best of luck, of course,” Dylan said, “But don't be shy if I can ever do anything for you.”

Neither of them had any idea that by the time Chad graduated from Temple, moved to Hollywood, and began auditioning, Dylan would be light years away and in no position to do anyone any favors. Nor did they have any idea that this would be the last time they'd meet in the flesh for many years to come.

After Dylan's fall from grace, Chad was one of just a handful of Terrans Dylan entrusted with knowing where he was. They kept in touch via omni, if only occasionally. It wasn't lost on Dylan that Chad took a certain gloating pleasure in consoling him on his tragedy, but at that point Dylan was willing to take any consolation he could get.

And then Chad proceeded to fall in his own right. For close on six years he made a go of things, auditioning four or five times a week for TV and film. He landed bit parts here and there, and did some commercials to help pay the bills—most of which were paid by bussing tables at a sushi restaurant—but like so many before him, he burned out before ever really breaking through.

“I'm sick of the poverty and the humiliation,” he wrote Dylan. “I could live with one or the other, but not both. Damn it, D, I really thought acting was what I was put on this Earth to do. I really believed that. I was here to
move
people. But I guess there's no God after all, is there? That was just some well-meaning horseshit we were on the receiving end of for twelve formative years? Anyway, I'm thinking about going to law school while there's still time. At the very least, it'd make my father proud, and that's a hell of a lot more than I'm doing now.”

And, impossibly enough, that was just what Chad went on to do. He studied entertainment law at UCLA, passed the California bar exam, and went to work for a large agency. A few years later, he split off and started his own practice, taking several high-profile clients with him.

By the standards of the normal, wage-earning American, Chad would have to be accounted a huge success, but from Dylan's vantage point, it was clear just how disappointed he must be inside, how his dreams had been so thoroughly ground into fish meal. Chad had always been the more idealistic of the two, and now he had become, of all things,
a lawyer!

Is it the case that big dreams in youth inevitably result in big disappointments later on? Perhaps not for the select few, but neither Chad nor Dylan had made that final cut. Darwinism was alive and well on Earth, and the human will alone, however heroic, was no match for the teeth and nails of global capitalism. Each of them had learned this lesson the hard way, and each in his own time, and now fate was pulling their paths into alignment again. And that would have been true even if Dylan
didn't
suddenly require a trustworthy contact in Hollywood.

Chad Powell Esquire—

Word up, dude. I hope the world of litigation is treating you well. Things on NT are fine. Erin and I just had our third kid, a boy. It's weird to think you haven't met any of them yet. As always, the invitation's open if you fancy a trip up here. I know you're not real fond of traveling, but I assure you QT is no big deal as long as you don't let yourself get all philosophical about it. Anyway, I need to talk to you about something and I'd prefer to do it in person. Are you free anytime soon? I'll be happy to come to where you are.

Peace,

Dylar
35

When he'd begun writing that message, Dylan had not planned on inviting himself to LA, but as he finished with pleasantries and got into the meat of his message, it occurred to him that by communicating via omni about possible censorship taking place
by
Omni, he might be jeopardizing his security. And Omni, alas, was the only game in town. If he wanted to communicate more discreetly, he would have to do it face-to-face, and quietly at that.

Chad replied almost instantaneously:

Hey dude,

Yeah, come on down whenever suits you. I make my own schedule these days. It'll be good to see you in the flesh after all these years.

—Chad

Dylan didn't dally. He was upfront with Erin about where he was going, and almost about why—he told her Chad had requested his help in the discovery phase of a class-action suit that somehow involved him—and while she didn't completely understand, obviously, she didn't press the issue. “You're a grown-up—you can do what you like,” she said.

“You'll be okay without me?”

“Dylan, I'm pretty sure we'll all be better off when you confront your old demons once and for all. Go to LA. Enjoy yourself. Give my love to Runyon Canyon.”

It was only once she's said it that he realized confronting his old demons was precisely what he'd have to do. After the
Titanic
fiasco, he had sworn never to return to Earth, let alone to Hollywood, that double-crossing den of iniquity, and yet that promise (like all promises?) had turned into a kind of shackles. In the immortal words of Lao Tzu, “The hard and strong will fall / The soft and weak will overcome.”

So QT'ing to LA that same Saturday was already a kind of victory, even if nothing should come of it.

He met Chad at his office downtown. Dylan expected gray hair, crow's-feet, a grotesque gut,
some
outward sign of all the beatings Chad's ego had taken over the years, but really he looked much the same as Dylan remembered him. It was true he'd bulked up a bit since college, but he'd always been sort of on the gawky side anyway.

They hugged,
really
hugged, with no macho posturing, no forearm barriers or thumps on the back, and then they proceeded to the Mexican joint around the corner. Dylan hadn't had Mexican food in twenty years. It was one of a handful of Earthling pleasures he missed.

They made some small talk over nachos and margaritas, but not a whole lot. They both knew being forced to talk about their lives, such as they were, would be exquisite torture. By now they were supposed to be at the height of their glorious careers, collaborating on projects, high-fiving from opposite ends of a supermodel, that sort of thing. Instead, they were just these husks, clinging to life for no other reason than that dying might hurt. Despite Dylan's determination that his self-indulgent period be a part of his past and not his future, it was hard work overwriting the dominant narrative of one's life, and a couple of margaritas was more than enough to temporarily undo much of the progress he'd made in that direction. Fortunately, Chad had the good sense to preempt any elegizing by asking his old friend what the hell had brought him to LA.

Dylan's sense of purpose was instantly rekindled; there were more important things than his damaged ego after all. “I think I'm onto something big,” he said. “I don't understand it, mind you, but I'm onto it.”

“How do you mean, ‘big'?”

He looked around cautiously. There were no obvious interlopers, but still he spoke just a hair above the level of his tinnitus: “It's about
Omni
. I think something funny's going on, something…corrupt.”

“Interesting,” Chad said. “In theory Omni is incorruptible.”

“In theory lots of things,” said Dylan. And he proceeded to tell Chad everything he knew about Mei-Ling Chen and Jade Astrophil and those phantom documents from Good Samaritan Hospital.

“Sure, I know that hospital. I don't know anyone who works there, but I could ask around.”

“Great,” Dylan said. “But understand that you've got to be really discreet about it. We have no idea how deep this thing goes. We can't be sure that
anyone
is trustworthy.”

“How can you be sure that
I
am?”

“It's a calculated risk. And you've got to understand too that there's basically nothing I can do from New Taiwan to help you. So what I'm hoping is that you'll take enough of an interest in this to follow the trail on your own, at least for now. I'm passing the baton. For all we know, an innocent girl's life might hang in the balance. Does this sound like something you could do?”

“Don't sweat it, man. I can ask around. No guarantees, of course, but I'll be glad to do what I can.”

The lack of passion in Chad's voice was worrying.

“Realize, dude, that this could be the most important thing we ever do with our lives. It could be the collaboration we were
actually
born for.”

“I get it, man. I'm on it. Don't worry.”

“And remember, we can't explicitly communicate about this via omni, so I'll have to come down again if you find out anything. If we must refer to our missing person in a communiqué, let's use a code name.”

“Sure.”

“Any preference?”

“‘André the Giant'?”

“That'll work.”

They ate the rest of their lunch in courteous silence since anything they could possibly talk about was sure to dredge up regret in its negative spaces. The silence did nothing to undermine the love, of course; if anything, it reinforced it.

They hugged again at the Metro station.

“I miss you, man,” Chad said.

“Fucking A,” Dylan said. And then he made his way to the teleport to get copied and destroyed again.

• • •

A week later, Dylan was rocking the baby on his knee, simulating one of those up-and-down horsey rides that used to be outside the ACME when he was a kid, when Chad omni'd him:

Dylar,

I've finally managed to track down André the Giant. You're not going to fucking believe this. Come on down.

So Dylan took a personal day and was back in LA for an encore lunch at the Mexican place. This time Chad was as shifty-eyed and whispery as Dylan himself.

“You've got some new intelligence?” Dylan asked.

Chad leaned in. “To be totally honest with you, D, after you left last time, I was pretty sure I was going to let you down. I'm a busy man. I haven't got time to be going on wild goose chases. But I kept thinking about it. You know what it was that got its hooks in me?”

Dylan shrugged his shoulders.

“It was that one little detail about the cuts on her wrists. That just
got
me somehow. Anyway, I kept brainstorming different ways of gaining access to those medical records, all the different people I could tap and such, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how right you were to be paranoid—because we have
no
idea who's in on this thing—and finally I decided that the easiest thing would be just to get in there myself. I considered breaking in, burglar-style, but it's impossible to pull that shit off in real life. So finally I decided the safest disguise was probably just the one I was already wearing. I might not be able to sneak my way into Jade Astrophil's medical records, but I was pretty confident I could
lawyer
my way in. I have a degree in acting after all, and those are mutually reinforcing professions.

“So I went right up to the information desk a few days later, having printed up all these phony documents in my most impenetrable legalese. On the top of one of them I had ‘WARRANT' all in caps and bold, and I explained about due cause and the Pirandello Act and how, regrettable though it be, it was going to be necessary for me, in keeping with Beckett v. the State of California, to have a look at Jade Astrophil's medical records.”

“What's the Pirandello Act?”

“No such thing as far as I know. Ditto ‘Beckett v. the State of California.'”

Dylan nodded. “Nice.”

“So this guy at the desk says, ‘May I see your credentials?' and I show him my license and flash the WARRANT again and tell him that if he'd read section 8, clause 4 of the Method Act, he'd find I was well within my rights as an attorney, and he just said, ‘Well, okay then. Miss Secretary Lady, would you please show this man to the records of one Jade Astrophil.'”

“The Method Act?”

“Pure fiction.”

“Well played.”

“So this lady took me into a little windowless room and granted me omni access to Jade's records. I made haste and then got out of there. What did I learn? Just one thing: she'd been admitted two times, fifteen months apart, for the very same complaint:
vesicovaginal fistula.
Now what do you suppose that is?”

“I'm afraid to ask.”

“How about a tear between the vagina and the bladder that is typically accompanied by intense pain, vaginal bleeding, and incontinence?”

Dylan winced. “The cause?”

“I wouldn't want to speculate, though we can probably rule out a happy marriage.”

“What about contact info?”

“There was nothing in the records.”

“Nothing? How could there be nothing?”

“I don't know, but I'm telling you: zilch. It didn't make any sense to me either. So I puzzled over what to do next, and I kept coming up empty-handed until one day I'm meeting with a very famous actor client of mine and I straight up ask him, ‘Did you ever hear of anyone named Jade Astrophil?' And would you know he got all hush-hush and said, ‘Jade? Sure, I know Jade. You one of hers?' So I bluffed and said I was, yeah, and he said, ‘I didn't know they ever admitted attorneys up there,' and I was all like, ‘I guess I'm special that way.' And then he said something like, ‘Jade's a sweetheart. Maybe we'll see her together sometime.' I told him I'd like that and he winked and gave me a high five.