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.
“Do you know how humiliated I’ve been since we met?” Wendy went on, foaming at the corners of her mouth now. “And yet I’ve endured it in the name of Jesus Christ, who endured so much to ransom us with His holy blood.” She was getting kind of hysterical. He hadn’t seen her like this since she’d torn at her breasts in this same forest some months ago. “Do you know how loathsome homosexuality is to me? Do you know how sickened I am by the thought of copulating when I’m not even ovulating? And yet I took it without complaint, as commanded by the Redeemer. But make no mistake, it sickened me every single day. Ever since I met you, Dylan, my celestial love, I don’t believe there’s been a single moment when I didn’t want to retch.”
The blade had gotten purchase now. A drop of scarlet dripped down Erin’s neck. God damn it to hell. Because he’d been such a fuck-up, his baby was dead and his wife was about to join him.
Please, Dylan thought or prayed or whatever it was—Help me. He had no specific addressee in mind, but no sooner had he made this devout wish than an answer distilled on him like dew from heaven. He knew exactly what he needed to do. In a way, he’d been preparing for it his entire life.
“I can’t tell you how much it saddens me to hear all this, Wendy,” he began.
“Shut the fuck up, Dylan.” She wasn’t buying it, not yet. “Out, Adversary! Out!”
“No, I mean it. I hope you know I’d do anything for you. Anything at all. You know that, right? That I’d ditch Erin in a second if you wanted me to.”
He was taking a gamble here, a gamble that Wendy’s envy ran deeper than her love, that her feelings toward Erin were as changeable as her version of her religion, and—riskiest of all—that he could act.
“You would?” Wendy said, looking up.
“Who would not change a raven for a dove?”
“You’re making fun of me,” she said, tightening her grip on Erin’s windpipe even more. Erin coughed inaudibly.
Tears formed in Dylan’s eyes, clouding his vision: “Scorn and derision never come in tears,” he said.
Wendy made no response. Erin’s face was now as purple and shiny as any eggplant. A vein he’d never seen before bisected her forehead. She couldn’t take much more of this. Neither, frankly, could he.
“I love you, Wendy. You know that, right?” He was looking straight at Wendy, but his words were for Erin. Swap the names and it was all perfectly true. The Method.
[I don’t believe you. Roll it again.]
“I have always loved you.”
[Goddamnit, Greenyears. Do you have an
ounce of feeling in your whole body?]
“Meeting you was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
[You’ve never been in love, have you, Greenyears?]
[Now hold it right there. Dylan makes the time-out sign, gets down off the bow of the ship, and approaches the director’s chair. Look, Cameron, I know you think you know everything in the universe, but you’re wrong on that score, all right? The truth of the matter is I’ve been in love with the same woman since high school and I’ll be in love with her for the rest of my life. If I couldn’t channel that into my part in your movie, if I couldn’t convince you that I felt like the king of the world, then it must have been because some part of me knew that there was no possible universe in which I succeeded in that role and didn’t subsequently lose that girl. So I made my choice, and, goddamnit, I’d make the same one again. Now stop haunting me, would you? It’s been twenty years, and your movie did just fine without me.
Cameron nods his head slowly. Okay, Greenyears. Okay. But what say we take it just one last time, eh? For your sake, not mine.
Now it’s Dylan’s turn to nod slowly. He heads back to the bow of the ship and takes up his position...]
“O Wendy, don’t you know that you’ve saved me in every way that a person can be saved?”
He held out his arms. A tear slid down his left cheek.
“Now, Wendy, my celestial love, let Erin go. Let her dwell in Outer Darkness. Who cares? I love you, and I know you love me. What else could possibly matter?”
Now how all that was going to play in the viper’s nest of her mind was anybody’s guess…
And then, right on cue, she wilted. Pools formed in each of her eyes. She loosened her grip on Erin’s breath, dropped the knife, and ran into his waiting arms.
Erin, meanwhile, fell to the ground, coughing and heaving.
[Cameron stands and applauds, followed by everyone else on set—actors, extras, film crew. Even the caterers are giving Dylan a standing O.]
He hugged Wendy tight, held her feverish, crazy head and ran his fingers through her hair, and even as Erin caught her breath and tiptoed over to hand him the licentious vine they were preordained to strangle Wendy with, it could not be denied that he continued to feel something for this biggest fan of his who had once written to him from a ski lodge in Utah to tell him that there was a hole in her exactly the shape of him and that she loved him and always would.
In a way, he would always love her too. Even as they garroted her now, and her pretty eyes rolled up in her head, he was compelled to kiss her on the forehead and whisper, “I’m sorry” into her deoxygenating brain. For a few seconds there, she almost seemed to enjoy being asphyxiated. Nobody enjoys the last few seconds, of course.
Once the deed was done, they laid the body down in the dirt. Dylan closed the eyes with his thumbs, the way they do in movies. Erin held onto the tongue—once so vigorous, now so blue—and poured a smoothie down the crushed esophagus for good measure. Then she went to calm and console the poor kids as best she could while Dylan dragged the body into the weeds and let the forest have its way with her. Wendy was no longer inside of there anyway. She was somewhere near Kolob maybe, shaking hands with Jesus.
PART FIVE
EX MACHINA
Dylan and Erin tried for a few weeks, they really did, but deep down they both knew th
ey had crossed some ill-defined point of no return. Their son was dead; so too was their wife and any notion they might have had of her saving them; their surviving children were now crippled by post-traumatic stress; and, adding insult to injury, they’d discovered Cane alive and well, albeit with excised vocal sacs, in a holey shoebox toward the back of Wendy’s temple undergarment drawer. In addition to the toad, the box contained twelve omni-lens cases filled with neurotoxic secretions—evidently she’d been milking the toad’s glands for quite some time. Dylan promptly slew the beast with a ball-peen hammer.
For close on a week, the family ate their meals together in something like silence, until one evening, after trying and failing to excuse the kids—they refused to leave Erin’s side now, ever—Erin dropped her fork on her plate and spilled her guts, “Dylan, I love you and you love me, we both know that, and there is nothing any number of years or light years can ever do to change it.”
He nodded and took a sip of the Merlot they’d been drinking since lunchtime.
“But if we’re ever going to have anything resembling lives again,” she went on, “there’s no way we can just go back to business as usual. It wouldn’t be healthy. For the children least of all.”
“I don’t disagree with any of that,” he said.
“Good,” she said.
He uncorked their third bottle.
• • •
Two weeks later, Dylan drove his wife and kids to the teleport. Intent on avoiding any sort of ceremony, he kissed them all and wished them good luck from the curb. Tears would not have helped things, so nobody shed any. He watched them vanish into Departures. In a few hours’ time, they would have installed themselves in Erin’s parents’ house in good old Aston, PA, 2,001 light years away, as the crow flies.
Back at home on Yushan Lane, Dylan made himself a cup of poxna and set to getting the house in order. He began by throwing out that Pandora’s box of fan mail inside his closet. He didn’t make any sort of ceremony out of that either.
He kept in touch with them via omni. Within the month, Erin landed a gig teaching PE and directing plays at Cardinal O’Hara High School, where once upon a time they’d met at rehearsal. The kids would go to that same school now too when it came time, and Dylan, without quite knowing why, took some comfort in this.
King of the Worlds Page 27