King of the Worlds (28 page)

“I see,” Dylan said, not yet sure how to feel about all of this. For so many years he had wondered how his life would have played out if he'd managed to nail that line at the bow of
Titanic
. Having an answer, even one as surprising as this, felt anticlimactic somehow.

“Shall we visit another?” Omni asked.

Dylan gathered his breath. “Why not?”

And now, after a quick interstellar jaunt, Dylan was sitting at a desk in a shirt and tie, marking up some documents with an old-school highlighter and guzzling coffee from a mug with a quote from Samuel Beckett on it: “When you are up to your neck in shit, there's nothing left to do but sing.”

“So this is the world where I get an office job?” Dylan asked.

“One of infinitely many,” Omni replied. “More precisely, this is a world where Terry Gilliam cast Chad in
Nocturnal Fears
and you became an entertainment lawyer.”

“I won't even bother to ask how happy I'm not.”

“Oh, you might be surprised. You've been crushed by life, it's true, but there's some delight in having surrendered. At least you're making a lot of money, and in this world you are as dogged in your pursuit of
not
getting married as you are in staying married in many others. You have many female friends whom you regularly wine and dine, but you don't let any of them get too close. You do wonder how long you can keep this up, though. The thrill is gone, as it were, and your greatest fear, for some reason, is to die in a hospital alone. Besides, who will you leave all your money to if not your children? You think wistfully of Erin, but she's happily married to Chad, who is still your best friend, though you hate his guts.”

“Let's see another,” Dylan requested.

So they went back out into space, and this time they dive-bombed a black hole, and now Dylan was sitting up in bed with a MacBook Pro on his lap. Kids squealed in the other room, but he was wearing earplugs and staring determinedly at the screen.

“This is the world,” Omni said, “in which you let your love of literature take precedence over your acting, not to mention all pragmatic concerns. In this world, Erin dumped you soon after you began college, and then, by some amazing turn of events, you ended up marrying a girl from Japan, went to graduate school in Hawaii, and had some kids—girl, boy, boy. You landed a good job and teach high school English for a living, though writing remains the central activity of your life, as it has been since you yourself were in high school. Your life is very stressful these days, very full. You have whittled your priorities down to four: 1) your family, 2) your job, 3) your health, and 4) your writing. You enjoy being a husband, father, teacher, and, sometimes, runner. People understand this. On the other hand, relatively few people seem to understand how important #4 is to you, how
sacred
, because writing has brought you so little material gain and is in many ways apparently in tension with your other three priorities. You spend lots of time alone, for instance. Even your own mother thinks your writing ought to take a back seat to the other three. What she doesn't understand, what very few people understand, is that for you to give up your writing would be tantamount to suicide. Your writing is the one area of your life where you feel you have any real control and where you believe, ultimately, that you may have the most to offer humanity. That said, you have to laugh at the old conceit of the writer as god because more often than not you find yourself a slave to the laws of the worlds you make, but if you
were
a god, you would certainly be an all-loving one. And maybe that, in the last analysis, is what your work is all about: creating a more beautiful, more coherent world than the one we are met with, compensating in whatever way you can for the junk heap of broken dreams signified by the word ‘America'.”

“You have a fondness for this version of me, it would seem?”

“Forgive me. Let's visit some other worlds, shall we?”

And visit other worlds they did: worlds in which Dylan Greenyears was named Mark and Brian and Valerie and Mustapha; in which he taught kindergarten, sixth grade, divinity school; in which he was married to a sculptress he'd met at Harvard, a former Saudi princess, Natalie Portman, Winona Rider, Ashley Eisenberg, Stephen Fry; in which he had fathered octuplets; in which he was a gas station attendant, an astronaut, President of the United States of America (which position still existed in that world); in which he'd defected five thousand miles from Hollywood, one light year, thirteen billion light years; in which he was a Buddhist, a Jain, a Mormon; in which he lost his mind and masturbated in the public square; in which he'd become a very famous director; in which he sat on death row for assassinating James Cameron; in which he'd won the lottery; in which he'd exposed the phallocratic pleasure-dome in the moon and now kept one eye perpetually over his shoulder; in which he'd eaten a rocket ship piece by piece for kicks and was listed in the Guinness Book; in which he was dead—by car wreck, pyrotechnics, his own hand; in which an alternate sperm had won the race to his mother's ovum…

Of all the hundreds of worlds they visited that day, however, there did not appear to be a single one in which Dylan was altogether happy.

“Again,” Omni said, having telepathically heard Dylan's question, “there is no such thing as magic, and a human being, in its current form at least, is not engineered for lasting happiness. You are desiring machines. Everything that is possible must happen somewhere in infinity, but the impossible must never happen. And for a human being, perfect, sustained happiness is literally impossible, so you might as well chill out and try to love the world you're in.”

“Is that why you brought me here? To teach me that?”

“In a nutshell.”
41

“I was pretty much figuring that out on my own, you know?”

“You were trying my patience.”

“One more question?”

“Shoot.”

“Is there no world where I succeed in
Titanic
and end up marrying Erin?”

“Let me search my data banks. I'm fast, but there are an awful lot of worlds.”

Dylan waited.

A minute later, Omni finally spoke up, “I'm afraid that throughout all the multiverse your success in
Titanic
would seem to bear a one-to-one negative correlation with your marrying Erin.”

“I see,” Dylan said.

“So,” Omni said, “I could take you back to Earth's moon if you like and let you finish out your holiday. Or I could simply drop you off at home on New Taiwan—that's a thing I can do. The Loonies will wonder what happened to you, but you can rest assured they won't make it public, so unless you're planning on heading back up there anytime soon, I'd say you might as well just let them scratch their heads. It'll be good for them.”

Dylan mulled it over for a moment and then declared, “Good call. Let's do that.”

And now, after one last jaunt through immensity, Dylan stood at the door of his house on New Taiwan, consciousness square inside his head again. He swiped away the door.

Erin looked up from where she was seated on the sofa. He went to her and kissed her head. “It's good to be home,” he said, feeling more content, more everything-in-its-right-place, than he'd felt in a long time. “Where are the kids? Asleep already?”

At that moment, a toilet flushed in the half-bath, followed by the sound of the running sink. Arthur? Tavi?

A figure appeared in the hall. It had a toad on its head.

“Wait, what world is this?” Dylan asked under his breath. He was asking Omni, but Omni didn't reply.

Wendy Sorenson did: “Why, it's the world you created for yourself, of course.”

“Have a seat,” Erin said. “We need to talk.”

Dylan reached into his pocket and brought out the moon rock. “I brought this,” he said.

But even he could see that it was too little, too late.

PART FOUR

A NEW AND
EVERLASTING
COVENANT

“You realize the most widely accepted theory about the origin of Earth's moon,” Dylan said, handing Erin the rock, “is that it's a hunk of the Earth that got blasted off by an asteroid like four billion years ago? So you shouldn't be too surprised if it happens to look a lot like an Earth rock.” He tended to talk too much when he got nervous.

“Oh Dylan,” Erin said, shaking her head. “Are you really going to insult me by persisting like this when one of your lovers is right here in the room with us?”

Wendy took a seat on the sofa at a right angle to Erin. “Sit,” she instructed him. “You're not on trial here.”

“Aren't I?”

“No, you're not,” Erin said. “I'll admit it stung when Wendy told me you'd been lying about going to those conferences and all, but the truth is, Dylan, I don't really care what you do in your spare time as long as you're a decent father to my kids; and that, for the most part, you have been.”

“You're not…upset?” Dylan asked, taking a seat across from Wendy so that they now made a perfect equilateral triangle.

“To the contrary, I'm actually sort of happy for you. Even as Wendy was telling me the whole story, I knew I was supposed to feel jealous and all that, but mostly I just felt, I don't know,
impressed
I guess, that you managed to bed such a beautiful woman. It's like you and I have been together so long that your conquest felt like mine too in a way. I felt proud of
us
for getting to be with her. It's weird but I think I actually felt more attracted to you than I have in a long time.”

“You're serious?”

“Let's be honest, baby. Marriage is a pretty claustrophobic affair sometimes.”

He nodded warily.

“Well that's true for us both, so knowing that you'd fucked Wendy and that Wendy was now fucking me felt, I don't know,
enlarging
somehow.”

“I'm sorry, but did you just say—”

“Oh, did I not mention that after Wendy told me her story, we proceeded to fuck pretty much whenever the kids were asleep
all weekend?”

“No. You left that out.”

“My bad.”

Wendy winked at him.

“Now when you say ‘fucked'…?”

“Did you think fucking required a penis?” Erin said. “I might have thought so too before this weekend, but I'm happy to tell you that women have tongues and hands and feet. And Wendy brought a strap-on penis that's twice as big as your attached one.”

“So you're suddenly a lesbian now, is what you're saying?” True, there had been that incident in high school when she'd kissed Allison Jenkins for far too long on a dare, but Dylan was nonetheless shocked to learn that she was willing—even happy—to go all the way with another woman.

“That's just a word, Dylan. You seem to have forgotten, but I'm still a sexual being. It felt good to be desired by someone again.”

Funny, but Dylan might have said the exact same thing to her; was there so much parallax between them that she honestly believed
he
was the one whose affections had cooled in recent years? “Okay, but I still don't get what she's doing here in the first place.”

“I'm right here,” Wendy said. “Why don't you ask me?”

“Fine. What were you doing here in the first place? Is this ‘woman scorned' stuff? Are you trying to ruin my marriage or what?”

“Not at all. Didn't you just hear Erin say I brought my strap-on with me? I came here to do exactly what I did. You had nothing to do with it.”

“But you don't even
know
Erin.”

“To the contrary. Don't you remember that I spied on you from under your bed one night?”

“Of course, but that hardly—”

“Well, as it happens, I stayed there much longer than I had to, despite the risk that Cane might have given me away with a croak at any moment.”

“Why?”

“I was pleasuring myself.”

Christ. What was this woman, a man? Sex was so fucked up. From here on out, he wanted nothing to do with it.

“At first I was thinking about you, Dylan, but I was as surprised as you'll be when I tell you I finished by thinking of Erin. She's my type. I never felt attracted to a woman before, but Erin
moves
me. The two of you were up there tossing and snoring, and I was right beneath you, quaking and stifling my moans, and all the while I was staring at Erin's moonlit face in the vanity mirror. Her tawny hair, her ivory skin. After that, I was just using you to get to her.”

“But that doesn't make any sense,” Dylan said. “You were begging me to
leave
her.”

“Because I wanted her to myself and I could feel what a stalwart wife she was. I was trying to divide and conquer. If you'd left her, I would have left you soon and swooped in on my true love. But then you hung me out to dry, so I had to do it this way and just come clean. I swear I had no idea you were going to be out for the weekend, though. That was just a happy coincidence.”

“So, what, you just came up here and knocked on the door and told my wife that you were attracted to her?”

“That about sums it up. And that her husband was cheating on her, of course.”

“Right, so where exactly does that leave us now?”

“We've been talking about that,” Erin said. “Here's what we're thinking. Wendy wants me, I suddenly want you more than I have in forever, and unless we're mistaken, you want us both to varying degrees. Are we correct so far?”

Wendy leered, in the sexy way. Did he still want her? She was a card-carrying lunatic, but he could not deny it. He nodded his assent.

“And are we correct that, unconventional though this all may be, there are no very negative feelings in this room right now?”

Dylan checked each vector of their triangle. “That seems right, as far as I can tell.”

“Great,” Erin went on. “Then what Wendy proposes, and what I endorse, is that she move in with us. We'll become a new sort of family unit. We can sleep together in ways that will feel experimental and invigorating. You won't have to sneak around anymore. And best of all, for me anyway, you should see Wendy with the kids. They love her to pieces.”

“So you're talking about polygamy, basically?”

“Something like that,” Erin said. “Wendy can stay on a tourist visa for three Earth months, but after that, assuming all goes well, she will need some help with her legal status, so we could hire her as an au pair or something, though polygamy is not technically illegal on New Taiwan so…”

Dylan recalled something from all his reading on Mormonism. “This was your idea, Wendy?”

“Genius, isn't it?”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Mormon Church outlaw polygamy around the turn of the last century?”

“That's true,” Wendy said. “The mainstream church did outlaw it. It's also true that that's one of the main reasons my family helped pioneer the
Fundamentalist
LDS church. I myself was raised by my father, my mother, and her four sister wives.”

“You never told me that.”

“You never asked.”

“But didn't you tell me your dad taught at Brigham Young?”

“Still does.”

“And isn't BYU about as mainstream as can be?”

“Exactly. That's why he's there. He's a double agent of sorts.”

“Like father like daughter?”

She pondered that for a moment. “I guess, but my dad's motives are way nobler than mine. He's basically a double agent for God. He pretends to teach LDS theology, but what he's actually doing is introducing brainwashed young people to the true history of their faith.
If you knew anything about that history, you'd know that the doctrine of plural marriage wasn't meant to be just some temporary exception to monogamy the way the mainstream church now likes to claim. It came by way of a direct revelation from God to Joseph Smith himself, in which Christ declared that plural marriage was to be ‘a new and an everlasting covenant,' not just some forty-year aberration.”

“So why'd they outlaw it?”

“Politics. Later church leaders wanted Utah to be recognized as a state so badly that they sold out their own true prophet to satisfy mainstream American mores. And they've been betraying the true faith ever since. Brigham Young himself had fifty-one wives, you know. And Joseph Smith had at least forty.”

“Another thing,” Dylan said. “And I admit I'm way out of my depths here, but I'd wager that your church is dead set against homosexuality, no?”

“They're against QT too, which is why this planet isn't crawling with missionaries yet, but obviously that didn't stop me from coming. As I've told you before, Dylan, sometimes I'm a Mormon, other times I'm just me. And if love this pure be a sin, call me a sinner.”

This was easily the most freethinking thing he'd ever heard her say; he felt almost proud of her. “All right, so if the three of us get sealed or whatever it is, can you promise that you're not going to try to make converts of us? Because we're not interested in any of that.”

“Speak for yourself,” Erin said. “I'm actually quite intrigued.”

Dylan rolled his eyes. “Erin, are you seriously telling me that you're going to take it at face value that the freaking Garden of Eden is in Missouri when you won't even consider that maybe I really have been in the moon despite my having brought you a rock to prove it? That's just fucked up.”

“It's the fastest-growing religion in the Milky Way, Dylan. With mostly holograms for missionaries! That's got to count for something, no?”

“No! That's what we call the
ad populum
fallacy, Erin. Lots of people used to think that the sun went around the Earth too. That didn't make it so.”

“How do you know? Maybe—”

“Mormonism is Christian fan fiction, Erin. That's all it is.”

“Look,” Wendy interrupted. “I'm not here to sow discord. My religion is a fundamental part of who I am, so I can't promise I'll keep quiet about it, and I do intend to start wearing my temple undergarments again, but I
can
promise that I won't force my faith on you. I believe in my heart that you will each find God in your own time, and then and only then can we be properly sealed in the new and everlasting covenant. For now, let's just focus on this love we feel for one another. We are so blessed. And if you find that my presence has a negative effect on your relationship, then all you have to do is say the word and I will pack my bags. Though I'm quite confident that day will not come.”

“What about the children?” Dylan asked. “You don't think this will have a negative effect on them?”

“How could love ever have a negative effect? I'll basically be like a live-in nanny. I will look after them as if they were my own. I already do.”

Erin nodded. “I might even be able to go back to work part-time. I'd really love to do that.”

Four human female eyes and two male amphibian ones looked up at him imploringly. This was not a situation he could ever have anticipated, and his only guide was his feelings, which were still dominated by something like relief that, though he'd been caught with his pants down, his wife was not furious at him. “I won't pretend I'm not nervous about all this,” he said, “but I guess I'm willing to try anything.”

“Sweet,” Wendy said. “Now what do you say we go celebrate in the bedroom?”

Erin smiled kittenishly, first at Wendy and then at him. He hadn't seen that look in a long time.

So much for his wanting nothing to do with sex. They began with a kind of mouth-to-genital daisy chain in their California King—Wendy to Erin, Erin to Dylan, Dylan to Wendy—and though they were three in number and not four, Dylan couldn't help but think of Josh Song's comment a while back about
A Midsummer Night's Dream
: “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?”

• • •

Dylan woke up enmeshed in the limbs of his complementary loves: Erin, the queen bee, the locus of familiarity, history, and stability; and Wendy, the novum, the blast of fresh air, the loose screw. They weren't
quite
the Madonna and the whore, but close, and while this might have made him an asshole if he had sought out the arrangement himself, he had no major qualms about enjoying what had simply fallen into his lap.

At the breakfast table, while Erin fried up some pteraduck eggs and Wendy changed the batteries in Junior's diaper, Dylan announced to Arthur and Tavi that Auntie Wendy and her toad were going to be moving in. He expected them to ask why, as they did so many times a day, and he was prepared to explain that Auntie Wendy was a good friend who wanted to help Mommy out with the housework, which was more or less true. But on hearing the news, all they did was to clap their hands together and exclaim “Yay!” Apparently Erin had been telling the truth: they really did like Wendy. Maybe because she was in so many ways like a kid herself.

During his lunch break, Dylan read up a bit on polygamy via omni since the territory was so uncharted to him. He learned, unsurprisingly, that polygyny, i.e., group marriage involving one husband with multiple wives, was historically associated with all manner of problems in human societies. On the domestic front—leaving aside the host of larger social ills associated with exacerbated gender and power inequities—there tended to be considerable disharmony between wives, each of whom was acutely aware of her place in the marital pecking order and was therefore beset with varying degrees of jealousy and low self-esteem. Children likewise tended to suffer from neglect as the patriarch spread himself thin and invested his energies less in the family than in acquiring newer and younger—often
much
younger—brides.