King of the Worlds (29 page)

And so, hovering home that afternoon, Dylan was plagued by worries that he'd made a colossal mistake in agreeing to this domestic arrangement. But when he pulled into the driveway and found Erin and Wendy gabbing and sipping iced
poxna
on lawn chairs while the kids ran and slid across the Slip ‘N Slide—which he'd bought for them months ago at the Earth Store and hadn't once brought out yet—he vowed that he would never again bother to read about the potential downsides of plural marriage, which were all so academic as compared to this actual blooming life of his.

And thus did a new age dawn in the Green household. Dylan began going to work with verve and an enlarged sense of purpose while Erin and Wendy split the domestic chores right down the middle. To all appearances there wasn't a note of disharmony between them.
The children exulted in their new family member, who encouraged them to build forts of their beds and to finger-paint on the walls, even if she strictly forbade them from touching her toad.

Indeed, the entire household appeared to be flourishing of late, and nowhere was this better symbolized than in the new garden. Dylan and Erin had never had any patience for New Taiwanese soil, which contained an excess of mica—it was like sticking your hand in a pile of broken glass—but Wendy just bought the appropriate gloves and dug right in. She planted basil, mint, kale, collard greens, and zucchini—all exorbitantly priced since the teleported-crop ban—as well as the native
skarnpok, bun'jala,
42
and
galric
. She planned to harvest all of them for the green smoothies by which she had long made her living and which she now made at least once a day for her new family members between Erin's slow-cooked meals. She insisted that the concoctions would do wonders for their longevity. “At last,” she pronounced, “the Greenyears shall have their green years!”

• • •

Daniel Young, meanwhile, must have been flourishing in his own right, because that Friday he showed up to class a few minutes early to declare that he was ready to deliver his monologue. Already he was exhibiting a kind of nervous energy Dylan hadn't seen in him before. He spoke louder, clearer, and with greater confidence, and there was a spark of something new in his eyes, love maybe, unless—and what a marvelous possibility—Dylan was just projecting it there.

As soon as the rest of the class had taken their seats, Dylan explained that they were going to begin by hearing Daniel's monologue. “Why don't you set us up a little, Daniel? Which monologue did you choose?”

“So I read through that whole book you gave me,” Daniel began, “and I really liked the speeches from
Romeo and Juliet
, and I thought I was going to do one of those, like maybe the ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo' one, because it's all about being in love with someone from a different clan, and as I've already told Mr. Green”—and here he didn't even flinch—“I myself am in love with someone from a different clan.”

The class's attention palpably swelled. For a moment, what was going on in this room trumped anything that might be happening via omni.

“But then when I started practicing it,” Daniel went on, “it just didn't feel right because those aren't words I would ever actually use. But the story reminded me of one of my favorite movies. I don't know if any of you have seen it, but in a way it's a similar kind of story, about two people from different clans who fall in love on a star-crossed boat. It's called
Titanic
. It came out in 1997. It's American.”

The forces that would have made Dylan's head explode exactly counterbalanced the ones that would have made it implode, so it just stayed there, dumb, atop his neck.

“So, Mr. Green, I decided to do a monologue from toward the end of that movie if that's okay. It's really short and it's not Shakespeare, so I know I might fail, but that's fine with me. I just felt like this was something I needed to do.”

Whereas Dylan might have expected to feel sick to his stomach in such a moment, he in fact felt somewhat amused, tickled even. One didn't need to believe in God to ascribe a sense of humor to the universe; chance was clever enough.

“That's fine, Daniel. Let's hear it.”

And so the actor went to the corner and furtively, but not
that
furtively, applied some lipstick. Then, pocketing his lipstick and compact mirror, he turned to the class with ruby-red lips and closed his eyes for a moment—a few students chuckled, but most knew better—and when he opened them again and cast them on the North Atlantic, it was clear that Dylan had not been projecting before; there really was something new indwelling there, a sort of tender power. No doubt he was thinking of Kwizok.

Fifteen hundred people went into the sea, when
Titanic
sank from under us. There were twenty boats floating nearby…and only one came back. One. Six were saved from the water, myself included. Six…out of fifteen hundred. Afterward, the seven hundred people in the boats had nothing to do but wait…wait to die…wait to live…wait for an absolution…that would never come.… And I've never spoken of him until now.… Not to anyone.… Not even your grandfather.… A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets.
 But now you know there was a man named Jack Dawson and that he saved me…in every way that a person can be saved.

Daniel left off there, and as soon as he broke character and said “Thank you,” the class erupted with applause. He smiled, bowed, and went back to his seat.

The truth was that he was not very good—his pacing was unnatural, his pronunciation was as awkward as ever, and the overall performance was melodramatic in a way only an utterly earnest adolescent could manage—but it was not lost on Dylan that something triumphant and deeply humanoid had taken place in his classroom that day. It was, in its way, deeper than mere art could ever be. This awkward boy, this pressure-cooked
teenager
no less, in full knowledge that he was risking the opprobrium of his peers, his school, and his very own parents, had looked fear in the eyes and told it to go fuck itself because he was throwing in with love. It was a beautiful, romantic gesture, a heroic one even, and though it was true he had violated the terms of the assignment a little, Dylan would not count himself among the young lover's persecutors—there would be enough of those without his help. Dylan might never recommend Daniel for acting school, but he would certainly change his grade to an A.

“Bravo, Daniel,” Dylan called. “Bravo.”

• • •

For some forty days, the Greens' experiment in communal living was an unequivocal success: the house had never been so clean, the meals so nourishing, the kids so creative and free of tears; Erin herself glowed as she had not since high school; and though Wendy had indeed taken to wearing her temple undergarments whenever she wasn't naked, she kept her promise not to proselytize, unless indirectly through the example of her pious life and opinions and her
lumpy dick.
43
Having a third perspective in the house proved good for Dylan and Erin anyway; it disabused them of false binaries and served as a constant reminder that the world was grander and more interesting than their meager models of it. And the sex, though occasionally confusing, never failed to make the stone stony, as it were.

Inevitably, though, a certain anxiety began to loom over the house, because all the adults knew that, outside of (the outside of) a Grecian urn, nothing this perfect could last. Sooner or later habituation would set in and old Shlovsky be proved right again. In the meantime, though, every felicity—every child's laugh, every green smoothie, every simultaneous triple orgasm—was sweetened with the foretaste of its own absence. A Japanese literary critic in the eighteenth century had coined a term for this gentle sadness:
mono no aware
, literally the “ahh-ness” of things. Virgil had put it another way:
fugit irreparabile tempus
. However you named it, alas, you could not stop it from happening, could not freeze a moment in amber.
Carpe diem
seemed like good advice in the face of all this transience, but how, when it came down to it, did you really “carpe” anything? Wasn't the essence of those tender epiphanies after all that moments are unseizable by their very nature? That, try as you might to hold onto them, they flee like water from your grasp? Still, Dylan seized as best he knew how, lived in the moment insofar as he knew what that meant, with his senses wide open, and, he hoped, his memory recording.

He could not pretend to be surprised, though, when the end did inevitably come. Whereas he had expected a slow dimming of the lights over time, however, what he got instead was more along the lines of a sudden blackout: All at once, the universe went dark.

It was Erin who made the discovery. She had gone to check on Junior in the middle of the night, and the scream that tore out of her when she did was unmistakable.

Dylan and Wendy rushed to her side.

“Please, God, no!” Erin cried. “I'll do anything you want, just please not this!”

But God wasn't there yet.

Wendy flipped the light switch to reveal the garish scene: Dylan Jr.'s small, precious body hung limp and gray from one of Erin's arms while she frantically rubbed his back with the other. The way the head and arms just sort of
dangled
there.
… Dylan reached out to relieve her of her burden, but she flashed him a fierce look he had never quite seen before, and shrieked, “
Do
something!”

“
What?
”

“Omni 911!”
44

Right.

Arthur and Tavi were at the door now, rubbing their eyes and begging to be let in, but Wendy took them to the hall and kept them there while Dylan omni'd 911.

They were not ready for this.
No one
could be ready for a thing like this. As far as Dylan was concerned, it still seemed almost exhilarating, like a disaster movie, or like watching
Challenger
explode on TV in grade school. It wasn't real yet.

“Hello. Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

“Yes, our child, our little baby, he's…not moving.”

Dylan was so high on endorphins or insanity or whatever it was that he couldn't make out the response.
My boy
, he thought,
my beautiful boy
, and now the clichés came thick and heavy, and for once he wanted them, as many as would come—
my little miracle, my bright-eyed boy, my bundle of joy
—because he loved his son more than poetry and his son was not moving and these words were narcotizing and truer-than-true and goddamned Shlovsky himself would think them too about now if he had a heart.

Things happen for a reason.

He's in a better place.

God is love.

The rest of that night was a teary blur. An ambulance came. A neighbor watched the kids while the adults went to the Earthling ER. They drank
poxna
in the waiting room. The handsome Indian-American doctor explained that he'd ordered a bunch of tests and so far it looked like digoxin toxicity and bidirectional ventricular tachycardia leading to—he was so sorry to say—ventricular fibrillation and cardiogenic shock and—it really broke his heart to say—SCD, or sudden cardiac death. Yes, they might have had a chance had they caught it on time. Had they not heard him sooner?

But no, they had not heard him crying in his bed. They'd been too busy muffling their ears with one another's thighs. Indeed, if Wendy's garden had been the symbol of their earlier efflorescence, then the circumstances of that evening would live forever in Dylan's memory as the symbol of their rot: their three heads buried in their three sweaty crotches while their baby's heart gave out just one room over.

They were frozen in various degrees of catatonia.

And then the doctor asked, “Was Dylan Jr. recently exposed to any plants of the genus
Digitalis
?”

“What did you say?” Dylan asked.

“It's otherwise known as the Foxglove. The native name is
Munjala Nim
. Existed on both Earth and New Taiwan with minor variations before first contact.”

“We drink a lot of green smoothies lately,” Erin said.

“None of the plants in the garden are that,” Wendy snapped. “What do you take me for?”

“Besides, we all drink them,” Dylan said, “and the rest of us are okay.”

“May I suggest we test the plants to be sure?” the doctor said.

“Do as you wish,” Wendy said, “but I assure you none of the plants in the garden are that.”

“What, then?” Erin asked, blowing her nose. “My baby is dead. What, then?”

It was a mystery, and there was something not wholly unlike comfort in that, until Wendy took it away: “May I say something?”

All eyes and ears in the room fell on her.

“I'm terrified of telling you this, but I feel I have to.”

“Speak!” Erin said.

“Cane got out of our bedroom last night while I was cleaning his cage. I found him hiding behind the toilet a few minutes later. I didn't think he'd been anywhere near the kids, but maybe I was wrong.”