King of the Worlds (33 page)

“Can we play on the jungle gym, then?” Arthur asked.

Erin deferred to Wendy.

“Okay,” Wendy said, “but you have to promise to take it easy so as not to soil your whites, okay?”

“We'll be wearing them in the river anyway,” Arthur said
. “What's the big deal?”

He had a point. At least Dylan thought he did.

As they approached their destination, the five of them held hands and, over the course of a mile, downshifted three lanes—medium, medium-slow, slow—dismounting not a hundred yards from their trailhead. Miraculously, nobody fell this time either.

Dylan led the pilgrims down the trail. It really was a very nice day. Starbugs scattered off the trail like blown leaves before them, arboreal spiders warbled soft as doves, and while there wasn't a breath of wind, the bamboo nevertheless found cause to clack now and then. Arthur and Tavi—who were last here at their respective conceptions—thrilled to race each other down the path and skip crystals across the creek.

As if to welcome them back, a lei of night-blooming rhinodendrons ringed their glade. Dylan warned the kids to stay away from the moss, but he didn't say why—they were saving the peculiar properties of this forest for a post-ordinance surprise.

“Wipe that grin off your face,” Erin told Wendy, who was obviously lost in a reverie of one of her trysts here. But Erin was only teasing; as far as Dylan knew, there wasn't a spot of jealousy between them. Besides, Erin had been here with him many times too, and long before Wendy ever had.

Dylan put down the picnic things and led them over to the banks of the gurgling stream. He took off his sneakers and waded knee-deep in the warmish water, his family following close behind. “Now where to?” he asked.

“Follow me,” Wendy said, taking the lead. “I did some research.”

So they followed her, down the winding brook and around a series of calcite boulders until they arrived at a sort of natural clay dam, on the far side of which lay a pool some three feet deep and looking-glass smooth. It was as close as nature ever came to making a baptismal font.

“Here we are,” Wendy said. “Celestial, yes?”

“Yes!” his family affirmed.

“You sound like you've had lobotomies,” Dylan said.

“Thanks,” Erin said wryly.

“I'm sorry. I assure you I'm being as supportive as I possibly can.”

“Now,” Wendy said, “Is everyone ready to make an everlasting covenant with God?”

“Yes!” they replied again in unison.

“I'll just be right over here,” Dylan said, taking a seat on a nearby rock.

Without further ado, the ordinance began. And it was all very simple and anticlimactic really. First Wendy clasped hands with Erin, then she raised her right arm and intoned, “Erin Wheatley, having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” It struck Dylan as a little odd that she'd used Erin's maiden name, but what did he know or care about the protocol of Mormon baptisms? Erin pinched her nose and Wendy proceeded to dunk her backwards in the water. And that was that. Next.

She repeated the process with Arthur and Tavi.

Then it was Junior's turn, and poor Arthur got dunked again as his little brother's proxy. “Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ,” Wendy said, “I baptize you for and in behalf of Dylan Green Jr., who is dead, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

Dylan winced a little on hearing that word “dead.” What a brutal word to apply to a child, even when it was
le mot juste
.

When Arthur was finished, Erin looked up at Dylan. “You're sure you won't join us?” she implored. “Our marriage would transcend bodily death.”

He shook his head.

“He'll come around,” Wendy said. “In the meantime, let's go celebrate.”

“Yes!” they all said.

Lobotomies.

• • •

Erin instructed the kids to keep their clothes on, and she used twist-ties to seal the openings at their wrists and ankles. By way of setting a wholesome example, the adults remained garbed, so Dylan, being less garbed than the womenfolk, got most of the plants' attention. Arthur and Tavi were understandably terrified, but the vines refused to let them get away and soon had them squealing with crazed delight as the tendrils sucked on their cheeks and tickled their toes. It was a good hour before the trees had had their fill and begun to recede. By now the humans were all so exhausted that they lay stretched out on the moss, awaiting sleep—that is, except for Wendy, who seemed unaccountably adrenalized. “Shall we eat?” she asked. “You guys must be famished.”

Erin sprang up. “Good idea.”

They broke out the picnic basket and removed the contents piece by piece. Erin had prepared sandwiches and thrown in some apples for good measure. Wendy, per her custom, had made some green smoothies and served them in bioplastic thermoses individually labeled with their names. Together, the two women proceeded to harass Dylan and the kids with tickling until all of them were seated upright and ready to eat.

“May I say grace?” Erin asked.

“Actually I was thinking I should do it,” Wendy said.

“Oh, okay.” Erin did her best to mask her disappointment, but Dylan knew her too well.

“Dear Heavenly Father,” Wendy began, and they all bowed their heads. “It has been my extreme honor and pleasure today to welcome four members of this beautiful family, including Dylan Junior, who is dead”—Dylan flinched again at that horribly accurate word—“into a covenant with you. May the Spirit of the Lord be poured out upon them, and may he grant them eternal life, through the redemption of Christ, whom he has prepared from the foundation of the world. We ask you to bless this food, which will nourish and strengthen our bodies. We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

“Amen,” they all echoed, Dylan included, once again despite himself—it was a sort of atavistic reflex.

Wendy picked up her thermos, held it aloft, and said, “Welcome, brothers and sisters, to eternity.”

“I'll drink to that,” Erin said, picking up her own thermos.

The kids, in turn, giddily followed suit.

And Dylan, too, was about to express his unconditional support for his brainwashed loved ones when all of a sudden his tinnitus seemed to grow louder, sickeningly loud, and a diarrheal chill whipped through his bowels. Without a moment's hesitation, and without quite knowing why, he slapped every thermos clear out of his loved ones' hands. Only Wendy still held hers.

“What are you doing?” Erin asked incredulously.

“It's poison,” he replied. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew.

She curled her lip. “What—?”

“Ask Wendy.”

Erin experimented with ten different faces in half as many seconds. She might have gone on to make many more too had Wendy chosen to keep up the charade, but she knew the jig was up. Instead, she opted to lunge at Erin and seize her in a viselike and thoroughly unironic headlock.

That
, Dylan hadn't seen coming. He leapt to his feet but was too slow: Wendy had found the paring knife with her other hand and was now holding it to Erin's pale, trembling neck and smiling like some insane clown.

Ice water ran through Dylan's veins. What in the nine billion names of God was happening?

“Back off,” Wendy warned.

Dylan instructed the kids to run for help, but they were too young and too scared. They just sat there, stupefied, not even crying.

Erin fought to free herself, but Wendy was too strong.

“Ease up,” Dylan pled, patting the air before him as if to tame some wild beast. “You're going to kill her.”

“It's about time you figured that out,” Wendy said, pressing the tip of the blade into the flesh of Erin's neck, not quite breaking the skin. Not yet, anyway.

Dylan patted the air some more. “Now just
calm down
, Wendy. Let's talk about this, okay? Do you want to explain to me why you suddenly want to kill Erin?”

“It's sudden from your perspective maybe. From mine it's a very long time coming.”

“Okay, but just…Wendy, put down the knife, okay? There's got to be a better way to settle this.”

“I wasn't planning on this way, but you left me no choice. How did you
know
?”

“About the smoothies?”

“Yes.”

“Honestly I'm not sure. I just had this, like, revelation.”

Wendy flinched.

It wasn't until he said it that he realized he'd co-opted her word. Was a revelation indeed what it had been? Or had he merely tapped into some latent detective powers of his own highly evolved primate brain? For the moment, he was capable of being in uncertainties about that, but
why
this lovely lunatic was strangling his wife was a different matter. “I'm not sure what's happening with
you
right now either, if I'm being honest,” he said.

Erin was trying to talk, but Wendy was squeezing too hard. Dylan desperately wanted to make a move, but that dull blade was poised to pierce Erin's jugular, and he had no reason to believe Wendy was bluffing. He looked in Erin's watering eyes as if to say,
Don't worry, honey. I'll get us out of this
.

“Why are you doing this?” Dylan asked.

“We're meant to be together, Dylan. You and me. I've said so from the beginning.”

“But we
are
together.”

“Yes, but I'm supposed to be your
first
wife.”

“What, like, chronologically? I thought you didn't believe in words like ‘before' and ‘after?'”

“I mean first in your heart,” she said, scowling.

She had a point: even at the height of his feeling for her, he had never let her dethrone Erin, not really.

He took a step toward her and watched the blade dig correspondingly deeper into Erin's neck. Erin shut her eyes in anticipation. He retreated, but the knife did not. One more step in her direction and there was bound to be blood. He'd have to find another way. “I thought you loved Erin too?” he said.

“I do love her, but not in the way you think. I love her in the same way that I love all of God's children.”

“Then why are you holding a fucking paring knife to her throat as we speak?”

“Better dead clean than alive unclean.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“It means that if I cut off Erin's head and spill her blood on the ground, the smoke thereof will ascend to the Lord and she will be saved and exalted. It's called blood atonement. She should be begging me to do it.”

Holy Higgs
. “You lost me,” Dylan said. “What does Erin have to atone for?”

“I'm supposed to be your first wife, Dylan. I've known it ever since I watched you fuck that alien bitch Korelu and the Lord made my bones to quake. Erin is a hindrance to God's plan. She's an adulterer and a homosexual, and the blood of Christ can never wipe out such sins. Under ordinary circumstances, I would already have spilled her blood and she would be banished to Outer Darkness to join the other sons and daughters of perdition, but I love Erin and want what's best for her. That is why I waited until after her baptism.”

Dylan looked into Wendy's rabid eyes and for the first time understood how
completely
incommensurable their inner lives were. They lived on the same planet, yes, but they certainly did not live in the same world.

“So you're planning on killing Arthur and Tavi too, I guess?”

“To save them in the day of the Lord Jesus, yes. They were never supposed to exist.”

He checked the children over his shoulder. They were still there, cowering at the edge of the woods, luminously existing. Arthur was holding Tavi, doing his best to comfort her. What a good boy. Dylan winked as if to say,
Don't worry, kids. I got this.
Then he turned back to the zealot.

“And needless to say, you
did
poison Junior on purpose?”

“I had no choice, Dylan. I loved the boy, but I love God more.”

He watched the light go out of Erin's eyes. She quit struggling. She hadn't died, but she might as well have.

Dylan took a long blink and swallowed some welling rage. “By that rationale,” he said, “shouldn't you be killing me too? Surely I'm an adulterer if nothing else.”

“I've never told you this, Dylan, but there is a reason I'm supposed to be with you.”

“Oh? And what is that, pray tell?”

“The Lord has informed me that you are to be the ‘one mighty and strong' who will set in order the modern LDS church.”

“Me?”

“Yes. And I am preordained to ensure that you make good on your preordination.”

“The Lord told you this?”

“Yes.”

“Well isn't that dandy?” Dylan said. “Are you really this insane?”

“I've got my eye on eternity, Dylan, not on this blink of a life. What's insane is pretending that this is all there is. Lift the veil of forgetfulness and you will know that this is true.”

And for a moment some veil or other
did
seem to lift, and Dylan saw things the way he fancied she must see them. It wasn't fair to call her crazy. If her first postulates were correct, then her belief system might be the height of rationality. Indeed, why should one get caught up in the things of this world when all eternity hangs in the balance? And while he was dubious about God revealing himself through her quaking bones, most people would probably be dubious if he told them he'd met the future godhead incarnated as a sadistic pervert inside the moon; her theophanies were no crazier. He could not even pretend that he didn't love her essential being, but the fact remained that she wanted to kill his family, and this he could not abide.