King of the Worlds (15 page)

“Good,” Dylan said. “That was definitely a part of it.”

“Landing on the moon,” put in Jake.

“Just that?”

“I don't know.”

“Okay,” Dylan said. “So maybe something about technology then?”

“I guess.” It was clear Jake had put in his two
zarkaks
for the semester.

“Bear in mind the Soviets had similar ambitions in those years, and they were thought to be about as
un-American as it was possible to be.”
29

“What about the whole white picket fence thing?” asked Anna.

“Okay,” Dylan said. “What about that? Elaborate.”

“Mrs. Crumb told us how when she was a kid growing up in Detroit, that was the, like, ideal. A big house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a garden and some kids and maybe a dog. Football on Saturday, church Sunday morning and then a long drive in the family car. Apple pie. Television. All that.”

“Excellent. Now let's go back to that fence for a second. Tony, what does a fence do?”

“Like, stands there?” Tony said.

“Okay, but what purpose does it serve?”

He thought it over. “Keeps people out.”

“Precisely. It marks off one's property, doesn't it? One's
private
property. Anybody can be on the other side of the fence, but cross that line and you could get in serious trouble, which, in a way, brings us back to Sherman's answer, because what does it take to have property?”

“Money,” Sherman said.

“Right. And who in America had that?” Dylan asked.

“People who work hard,” Sherman said.

“Well, that was certainly the Kool-Aid Americans drank anyway. Free enterprise. Anyone could become anything. It was a revolutionary idea really. Back in Europe there was just no such notion. The rich were the aristocracy. Kings and queens and their friends. Very little mobility. You were either born rich or you were destined to a life of hard work, poverty and rags. So it was by and large these latter who came to form the United States. A bunch of losers, basically, because the old winners were secure at home with no reason to uproot themselves. But the losers—the losers had everything to gain, and they were
hungry
. There was always that jackpot mentality from the very beginning, people trying to strike it rich in the New World, the natives be damned. That's what got Columbus over there in the first place, albeit
accidentally.
30
So the American Dream, as I see it—and I'm sort of improvising here, but that goes to my point—the American Dream was at heart about being able to invent oneself from scratch, to slough off your lowly origins and become whatever you wanted. The self-made man, as it were. America's Achilles heel, though, was that it always rewarded the quick over the patient, the immature over the wise, arrogance and excess over sanity and moderation.
Hubris
, the Greeks called it. They
knew
. Some of them anyway. The tallest towers fall. The unsinkable ship sinks.”

Dylan paused to gather his breath.

“Now is there anything distinctively American about the desire to
make
oneself? Probably not. But the worship of immodesty, of outsize individual ambition and to hell with everyone else, that was
very
American. Wasn't it responsible after all for giving us the Promethean technological capabilities that ultimately allowed us to hoist ourselves with our own petard? Ironic, isn't it? Not that the end of American exceptionalism wasn't in many ways a good thing, of course, but for those generations who were riding the crest of that high and beautiful wave, the end hurt pretty bad.”

The students looked at him like he was speaking some alien language their omnis couldn't translate. Sherman raised his hand.

“Yes?”

“Why do you always talk about America in the past tense?”

“Because it's
over
, Sherman. The wave broke and rolled back. America is now on the order of Greece or Rome.”

“That's not what my dad says.”

“Oh? What does your dad say, pray tell?”

“He says people like you are
dramatic
.”

“Does he? Well, I do teach drama, so I guess the shoe fits. What does your father do, if I may ask?”

“He's a financial accountant.”

Was it too easy to tell Sherman that he thought people like his father were
accountable
?

Probably. It took all he had to hold his tongue.

• • •

When Dylan got home, he was so aroused by the Chen/Astrophil investigation that he rushed right past Erin and the baby to the bedroom. “Don't mind me,” he said.

“Whatever.”

He instructed his omni to lock the foglet door, and then took down the box and placed it on the bed. He hadn't expected to tempt fate again so soon, but it had occurred to him in the car that maybe Mei-Ling—or Jade, or whatever her name was—had written him other letters too and that these might serve as further clues to her whereabouts. In truth, if there weren't any further clues here, then he had no idea where to begin. So he spent the next half hour meticulously inspecting every letter in the box in search of either of the missing person's names, or at least matching penmanship. He turned up none of the above.

He did, however, discover that he had received at least two other letters from Wendy Sorenson, the sixteen-year-old from Hawaii who claimed to be his biggest fan and who had offered to marry him in her first letter. It was possible he'd thrown out even more letters from her when cleaning house; these were just the greatest hits, and they were every bit as provocative as the first:

Wendy Sorenson

243 Moana Street

Laie, HI 96762

Dear Mr. Greenyears:

I am with my parents on a trip in Utah. It is very beautiful here. I have seen snow only a couple of times in my life, and the first time I don't even remember (I was four). Anyway, my parents and I went skiing all day today, then we went to dinner at this really fancy steak place that smelled like blood, and then we came back to this lodge we're renting and my parents went off to bed. Now it's just me out here in the living room by the crackling fire and I'm immersing myself in
Nocturnal Fears
and touching myself. There is a hole in me exactly the shape of you. Someday you will come to fill it. I believe this. I pray for it every single day. I love you, Dylan Greenyears.

I am dead serious,

Wendy Sorenson

The third letter was the briefest, and in some ways the most bizarre:

Wendy Sorenson

243 Moana Street

Laie, HI 96762

Dear Mr. Greenyears:

It dawned on me that I've been coming on strong and that you may not be ready to embrace your destiny yet. That's okay! I will tone it down and wait patiently, but please know that when you do come around, I will be here for you with boundless love and an intact hymen.

Eternally,

Wendy Sorenson

No wonder he had kept these! That he had no memory of their specific content attested to how spoiled he'd been in those days, but as he reread them now, he was overcome with a wistfulness so visceral and acute that, by virtue of the small trove of wisdom he'd acquired in his nearly four decades of life, he instantly recognized what a danger they posed to his long-term well-being. “You can't repeat the past,” Nick tells Gatsby. Dylan had taught that book a hundred times; why could he never internalize that
elementary lesson?
31
Why did popping the lid back on this box, putting it away and returning to the living room, have to feel so damned
despite himself
?

He returned to the living room. Erin was lying on the couch in her pajamas, breastfeeding and watching Earth news on the ceiling. It struck Dylan that Junior spent more time with Erin's tits on a daily basis than he himself had in the past half-decade.

“Hi, hon,” Dylan said. “Sorry. I had some time-sensitive stuff I had to finish up.”

Erin mouth-smiled, close-lipped as if to say
Do you really think I care what you do?

“How was your day?” he asked.

“Exhausting,” she said. “Every time I manage to fall asleep, this one is just waking up.”

…
Ambassador of Culture to Spiral Arm 4 has petitioned the UN on behalf of several local governments to begin making true molecular scans of the Seven Wonders of the World for an Earth-themed amusement park to be located on the third moon of Bradbury…

“So have you given any more thought to moving back home?”
Erin asked.

“Not yet. Christ, give me a little time, would you?”

She held the baby's head up and repositioned herself. Dylan watched it suck.

…the Olympus Mons Accord forbids the true-scanning of certain forms of intellectual property, including sculpture and landscape architecture. It does not, however, explicitly outlaw the copying of natural geographic formations…

“I'm just saying,” she went on. “It's tough looking after three kids by myself every day.”

He was too tired to hold his frustration in check: “It was
your
idea!”

“So?”

“So don't you think maybe you should stop bitching about it now that you got exactly what you wanted in life?”

“
Eww
,” she said, as if she'd just drunk some spoiled landflounder milk. This annoyed him no end, this sound of hers. She'd been doing it since high school whenever she wanted to express that his words or ideas were repulsive to her.

…while others argue that Beauty itself is subject to laws of inflation, and that the existence of two Grand Canyons will automatically devalue each by half…

“I fucking hate it when you do that.”

“What?”

“That sound. It's immature as hell. Can't you find some grown-up words to express yourself with?”

“Fine,” she said.

“What ‘fine'?”

“Just fine,” she said.

“I fucking hate that too.”

“What now?”

“That simper. The self-pity. The whole bit.”

“Well maybe you should have married someone else then.”

So it had devolved to this already. Goddamned entropy.

…some have argued that we should be making copies of our entire planet, life and all, throughout the cosmos on a regular basis so as to increase our potential for long-term survival after the Earth as we know it is inevitably destroyed…

“You know what?” he said, “Maybe you're right. Maybe I should have.”

“Do whatever you want,” she said. “I don't care. I hope you'll be happy someday.”

“Don't patronize me.”

“I want to move back home. I
am
moving back home.”

“Erin, you brought this up like two days ago. Can you at least give me a reasonable amount of time to think about it? Okay? It's not like this is a little move around the block. You're talking about 2,001 light years. It's complicated. At least acknowledge that it's a little fucking complicated, would you?”

“Whatever. I have to pick up Tavi at her swim lesson.” She bundled Junior in her arms, his jaw still locked on her swollen nipple, and fled the room. Dylan was pretty sure she was going off to cry. That annoyed him too.

Dylan's omni asked him if he wanted to continue the Earth news. He told it to shut up and went back to the bedroom, ears wailing like banshees.

By the time he asked himself if this was really such a good idea, the point was moot: the box lay open on the bed, and the old dead world was flooding into the room again. The Chen/Astrophil trail having dried up, he reread all three of Wendy Sorenson's overtures, and if replying to them had seemed like it might be a
bad
idea just a few minutes ago, it now seemed to him about the best idea he'd ever had.