.

      Copyright 2016

      By M. Thomas Gammarino

      Publisher:

      Chin Music Press

      1501 Pike Place, Suite 329

      Seattle, WA 98101

       www.chinmusicpress.com

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Gammarino, M. Thomas, 1978- author.

      Title: King of the worlds / M. Thomas Gammarino.

      Description: First edition. | Seattle : Chin Music Press Inc., [2016] | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2015045067 (print) | LCCN 2015039291 (ebook) | ISBN 9781634059091 (epub) | ISBN 1634059093 (epub) | ISBN 9781634059084 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 1634059085 (hardcover : acid-free paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Life on other planets--Fiction. | Actors--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Science Fiction / General. | GSAFD: Black humor (Literature) | Science fiction.

      Classification: LCC PS3607.A438 (print) | LCC PS3607.A438 K56 2016 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

      LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045067

      All rights reserved.

      ISBN: 978-1-63405-908-4

      First [1] Edition

      Book design by Dan D Shafer

      Publisher’s Note

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

      Author’s Note on

      Publisher’s Note

      Here we have your boilerplate disclaimer. For the record, I heartily endorse the first sentence. Over the course of several years, I made this story up. It makes no claims on history, except maybe in some of the oblique, figurative, poetic ways that non-documentary art can. Mere facts are beside the point.

      I’m also on board with the first clause of the second sentence. Art abhors a vacuum, so like my more energetic cousin DJ Throdown I dig through heaps of American detritus and reuse and recycle. For me, the detritus comes from both culture and personal experience, but can I just make one thing clear please? I don’t do roman-à-clefs. There is never a one-to-one correspondence between any of my characters and a flesh-and-blood human being, myself emphatically included. If you recognize yourself in one of my grotesques, forgive me and keep on reading; you won’t know yourself for long.

      I’m much less sure what to make of the disclaimer’s final clause. It’s that word “coincidence” that hangs me up. I mean, no, when I write about, say, the film director James Cameron in this novel, it is certainly not a coincidence if the character bears some resemblance to his real-world counterpart, who really did direct a film called Titanic and who really is reputed to have one hell of a temper. Still, it should be clear to any reasonable reader that I have repurposed that bundle of attributes, as I have every other celebrity who gets mention in these pages. To be sure, I don’t know these people except as semiotic bundles, the gods and archetypes the culture throws up daily, and it is those public personae, as much a part of the furniture of American life as Coke or Viagra, that you’ll find transmigrated into the universe in your hands—which universe, I might mention, is explicitly an alternate one.

      Of course, if the multiverse is real and infinite, then, with the possible exception of certain fantasy writers, novelists have been writing non-fiction all along…and all our twitchy disclaimers are void.

      For my family—infinite thanks for sharing this universe with me.

      KING OF THE WORLDS

      THE LOST YEARS OF DYLAN GREEN

      “We are like butterflies who flutter for

       a day and think it’s forever.”

      —Carl Sagan, Cosmos

      PART ONE

      MOST LIKELY

      TO BE FAMOUS

      Young Daniel Young nodded his dopey head and blinked back tears.

      “Remember,” Dylan went on. “All of your longing is focused on this one human being. If you can’t have her, you’d rather not live. You’ve got to make us feel that. Do you have any idea what I’m saying to you?”

      Daniel nodded again. It was clear if you looked at his trembling chin and jutting lower lip that he was barely keeping it together. If you looked only at his hair, though, the way it bounced and shone, you could pretend he was enjoying this.

Dylan took a sip of his poxna,1 but his adrenals had dried up hours ago. “You know what, Daniel, I’ll cut you a deal: make us feel anything other than embarrassed for you and I’ll give you an A.”

      1_____________

      Caffeinated beverage roughly halfway between coffee and tea. Taste-wise, it’s rather more like the former, bitter and earthy, but like the latter it’s extracted from leaves, not beans, specifically the leaves of the deciduous Poxna tree, a.k.a. New-Taiwanese Tentacle Elm.

      That was mean, and Dylan knew it, but he had about as much empathy left in him as energy. For Christ’s sake, he was tired. His eyes stung, his ears had been ringing for days, and on top of having three preps this semester, he’d stayed up late last night grading a stack of aggressively uninspired essays on The Catcher in the Rye.

      “Daniel, have you ever been in love?”

      “I don’t know,” Daniel replied.

      “Then you haven’t. If you’d ever been in love, you’d know it.”

      One of the cool things about being a high school teacher was getting to drop well-meaning chestnuts like this without having to rack your brains over whether they held up to scrutiny.

      Daniel hung his head.

      Tiffany Wilson, the redhead who’d months since faded into the curtains, spoke up for what might have been the first time all quarter: “Why are you so mean today?”

      She hadn’t even raised her hand. Good—she was alive.

      “Look at him,” Tiffany went on, gesturing toward Daniel. “He’s practically in tears.”

      Dylan looked, and right on cue a chubby tear slid down the poor kid’s cheek and onto the floor. Dylan softened his approach: “I apologize, Daniel. I want you to get it right is all, to put some feeling into it. Call it tough love.”

      “It’s okay, Mr. Green. I’m aware of the fact that I suck.”

      “You don’t suck, Daniel. Don’t ever say that again. You’re doing fine. You’re just…young. You’ve barely lived. I have to keep reminding myself of that.”

      “We’re only fourteen,” Tiffany put in, belaboring the very legitimate point. Dylan had lived so many lives already, he had to keep reminding himself that his students had lived just this one.