Omni/André adjusted the single strap of his black singlet, and Dylan was reminded that there was something a little uncanny—and a lot wonderful—about this whole situation. For the first time since his initial trip to the moon, he was getting a glimpse of the gears and mechanisms at the back of reality.
“Which brings me to my next question,” Dylan continued. “What’s keeping you from being God now? What are you waiting for?”
“Oh, there’s quite a lot I don’t know yet. I can only synthesize the information I’ve been fed, so as I suggested earlier, humanity’s blind spots are my own as well. There’s plenty I can do that you can’t—telepathy, shape-shifting, non-teleporting FTL travel—but I assure you the know-how is hiding, like Poe’s purloined letter, in plain sight. I’m still waiting for a Grand Unified Theory, like everyone else. Chaos eludes me; I haven’t even mastered the stock market. I can travel through any medium, but backwards time travel is still a doozy. And I can manipulate matter all day long, but creating it ex nihilo is another matter. I’ll get to all of it in time, though. Rest assured.”
“Next question?”
“Shoot.”
“Who is ‘Theo Pan’?”
“Oh, that. Just some innocent wordplay. ‘Pantheism’ on its head, with overtones of the horny goat god to boot.”
“And finally, have we arrived at the point yet where you tell me what I’m doing here?”
“I suppose we have, yes. First of all, make no mistake: I invited you. Omni isn’t necessarily morally incorruptible, whatever that might mean, but I most certainly am technically so. Where you caught on to that error, trust me, it was by design. I lured you here.”
“But why?”
“As a benevolent God-aspirant, I took a special interest in your case. I watched you wriggle and squirm inside your existence and it alternately broke my heart and pissed me off. And I heard your sexual prayers. At base, your problem is one of ego, so I decided to have a little fun and use Jade to exploit your heroic aspirations, not to mention your Freudian-Puritan reflex to psychoanalyze sex, your orientalist fantasies, and your romantic, if arguably misogynistic, susceptibility to science fiction plots featuring damsels in distress. But Jade was just a red herring. The real reason I brought you here is because I thought you could benefit from a tour of the actual Omniverse. We could have started anywhere, of course, but I thought it might be good to prime the pump a little first.”
“How do you mean ‘tour’?”
“It’s not a figure of speech. I’m going to show you around. Think of me as the Ghost of Christmas Past Participle. I’ll show you the many different paths through the life of Dylan Greenyears that have been. Does that sound okay to you?”
“I don’t know. How will we—”
“In short, you’ll be going to outer space by way of inner space. Mind you, this is not just some new-agey meditation technique; we’ll really be going to outer space, but if we go this way, we can travel far in excess of light-speed without resorting to barbaric measures like QT. Moreover, we won’t need special suits. I assure you this is not magic. Magic is supernatural by definition, and there is no such thing. This is simply applied science, even if the most rigorous hominid scientists at this point would have to throw up their hands and praise Jesus. You will just have to take my word for it: what we are about to do is perfectly compatible with the laws of nature, not to mention the intuition of poets like William Blake, who would ‘see the world in a grain of sand.’ I would unlock the secrets for you and let you strike it rich, but I’m quite sure that access to this kind of technology would very quickly drive your people mad. To be sure, my TBDs are calculated for your own good. A few are still ‘To Be Determined,’ but most are simply ‘To Be Divulged.’ I will deliver those answers gradually as I see fit, when the soil of the human mind is sufficiently tilled. On golden plates perhaps, just for kicks. Then you too may become as Gods. This will be a Mormon universe after all! For now, all you need to do is lie on this bed and close your eyes. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Dylan hesitated a moment—so much was coming at him so fast. But then André the Giant looked him square in the eye and said, “Trust me,” and for some ineffable reason, Dylan did.
He lay down and closed his eyes. For a moment, he saw only the usual mealy darkness, but before he had a chance to grow skeptical—vroosh!—he beheld a grain of salt, a half-sucked gobstopper, a marble in thistledown, followed by some blue gems, a burst of dandelion seeds, a swarm of fireflies. Holy Higgs! he thought. This shit’s for real. And now he went hurtling through a confetti of suns and a spray of worlds. He was tempted for a moment to open his eyes, but then the phantasmagoria of nebulae began—neon mountains; sublime birds; jellyfish spreading their tentacles across the void; horseheads; hunchbacks; diadems; the Eye of Sauron; a human heart; an immense ash tree—and soon even these hulking, majestic forms revealed themselves as mere pixels, mere cells, in the spiral arms of the Milky Way, which was good evidence that Dylan had now traveled farther from home than any human ever had by QT or any other method. He located what must have been Sagittarius A, thirstily drinking in stardust at the center of the Milky Way, which Dylan could see now, with his new perspective, as just one smear of suns against a backdrop of myriad others, like it but also not.
He must have entered something like hyperspace at this point, or a wormhole perhaps, because all the stuff of reality at once resolved into endless streamers of light. He couldn’t be sure whether he was still now or still moving, but then steadily the galaxies began individuating again, and one of them, a pinwheel not unlike the Milky Way, began to dilate, its arms extending toward him until the swirl had subsumed him altogether and one of its constituent stars begun to swell. He sailed past a planet that looked something like Mercury, and another not unlike Venus, and soon he was homing in on yet another that looked uncannily like Earth. He decelerated into its North America, its California, its Hollywood, a familiar hill, an unfamiliar house, and presently found himself hovering around the upper corner of a state-of-the-art, marble-countertopped kitchen, spying on someone who looked uncannily like…yes…no…yes, Dylan Greenyears.
This other him was seated at a table with a cabbage palm waving outside the window and a blonde woman — Gwyneth Paltrow?40 — serving him his mother’s ravioli. In the high chair beside him sat a little boy he’d never seen before and whom he found a little disturbing to look at.
40_____________
He knew her from Seven. He also knew that James Cameron had considered her for the role opposite him in Titanic, the one that ultimately went to Kate Winslet.
“Where are we?” Dylan asked.
“Not only is the universe infinite, Dylan,” Omni replied, “but there are infinite universes to boot, which is to say there are infinite you’s out there. I dare say this is among the ones you’re most curious about. I thought of saving it for last, but decided that would be cruel, and you know my position on needless cruelty. So, here we are. This is a parallel world in which you didn’t get canned from Titanic. In this world, you nailed the part and won an Academy Award for it. There’s even an exoplanet named after you. Following Titanic, you landed many more roles, of course, and it was only natural that sooner or later you would dump Erin in favor of a glitzier woman. This, as you know, is Gwyneth Paltrow. You began your affair while costarring with her in a film called Shakespeare in Love. You were married six months later.”
“Wow. Am I…happy?”
“You’re not unhappy exactly, though you’re rather insecure. In some ways, early success has been as much a curse as a blessing. You feel like you’ve somehow pulled a fast one, like you don’t deserve all that you have and like the world’s beginning to realize it. You toy with the possibility of going back to school, but you’re afraid you’ll fail at it. You and Gwyneth are doing okay, though the truth is you’ve always been bothered that you began your affair while she was
on the rebound from Brad Pitt, whom you couldn’t blame her for still having feelings for if she does because even you are a little bit in love with him. Sometimes you feel very lucky to have married Gwyneth; other times, you resent her celebrity and feel that the life you’ve made for yourself is somehow fake, superficial. Sometimes you think you miss Erin. You miss how real that was. You feel guilty, too, for hurting her the way you did. Moreover, Gwyneth’s been suffering from postpartum depression lately, which puts a real strain on things, so you’ve been spending a good bit of time inside the moon getting your ego engorged by prostitutes.”
“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
41_____________
For a nanosecond, Dylan recalled Hamlet: “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
“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 fe
lt 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.
King of the Worlds Page 22