King of the Worlds. M. Thomas Gammarino
Lysander love at this point?”
“Helena,” said Justin confidently.
“Precisely. Now draw that for us, would you, please, Mr. da Vinci?”
Connor squinted.
“Leonardo da Vinci? Genius of the Italian Renaissance?”
Only Josh Song nodded, Josh who wore a bow tie and whose face was perpetually half-hidden by a Kurt Cobain teardrop of hair. He was far and away the most learned, and most melancholic, kid in class. Everyone else just looked confused.
“I guess we’ll have to settle for you doing it as yourself then, Connor. Go on now. Make your immortal strokes.”
“Very lovely. And whom does Helena love?”
“Lysander,” said Tate.
“No. Helena loves Demetrius,” said Sammy.
“Which is it?”
“Demetrius,” intoned the class.
“Sorry, Tate.”
Tate got some pats on the back for being wrong.
“And finally, what about Demetrius? Whom does he love?”
“Hermia,” said Lewis.
“Correct again. Now let’s give Connor a second to complete his masterpiece.”
“Bravo, Connor. Okay, so if at the beginning of this play we had a classic love triangle with one outlying point, what geometric figure do we have now?”
“A square,” sang the chorus.
“Precisely. Everyone wants someone other than the person who wants him or her.”
“That’s sad,” Lia said.
Josh, uncharacteristically, blew a raspberry. “What a waste of energy,” he said.
“How’s that, Josh?”
“There must be other single people in Athens, no?”
“Spoken like a true automaton,” Dylan said. “They’re in love, Josh. Do you really suppose it’s that easy to just give up on love?”
“They’re not being creative enough, is what I think. There has to be a workable solution here.”
“And what would you suggest?” Dylan asked.
“Well, in the first place, what’s to stop that shape from being a circle and not a square? Circles are perfect.”
“Go on.”
“So like what if instead of having love as this petty little directional force between them, they could place it right at the center and let it radiate out in all directions like the sun?”7
7_____________
Technically the star about which New Taiwan made its annual journey was “Lem”—named in honor of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris and The Cyberiad (among other works) and 1996 winner of the prestigious Order of the White Eagle award—but for all intents and purposes Lem was identical to Earth’s “sun,” so English-speaking exopats, and by inheritance their offspring, sometimes called it that.
“And how might that translate into practice, I wonder?” Dylan asked.
“They should get a place together. Maybe build one right there in the forest.”
“And then?”
“And then nothing. They live in it and bask in all the love. At the very least they could finally sit down.”
“I can’t help but inquire about their sleeping arrangements…”
Dylan could see that not every student in the class was going to be comfortable with the turn this discussion was taking. You could never be sure with ninth-graders: in terms of maturity, some were practically ready for college; others might as well still be in middle school. When he’d suggested once that there was a built-in sexual dimension to vampires, one girl, Joy Hoffman, had memorably replied, “I think you just ended my childhood.”
“They all sleep in the same big round bed,” Josh said, “and it’s pitch-dark.”
Dylan nodded. “Congratulations, Josh. With a single blow, you’ve just overturned the entire Western romantic tradition.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re a free thinker. I applaud that.” Indeed, Dylan himself might have been a little like Josh at one time, before an orthodox lifestyle snared him the way it eventually snares anyone who hasn’t made a firm conviction to avoid it.
“Okay, so let’s pick up where we left off. Where are our Lysander and Helena?”
Daniel Young stood up, looking dorky and afraid as ever.
“And Helena?”
“Marie’s not here,” Julia informed him.
“Oh right. Why then, Julia, you can be her understudy. No good deed goes unpunished.”
Dylan expected some rolled eyes, but Julia leapt to her feet; for every three kids who didn’t want to act out Shakespeare, you got one like this who secretly did. Dylan had been that kid once too. In fact, he often wondered if there wasn’t that kid deep in all these kids, if only he could break through all their fear, chop through the already-frozen seas inside of them.
“Okay, Daniel, picking up at line 124.”
“Act 3, scene 2?”
“Right.”
Daniel began:
“Why should you think that I should woo in scorn?
Scorn and derision never come in tears.
Look, when I vow, I weep. And vows so born,
In their nativity all truth appears.
How can these things in me seem scorn to you,
Bearing the badge of faith to prove them true?”
He read with all the passion and nuance of some twentieth-century AI. (To be sure, he wasn’t one—at least not as far as Dylan knew.)
“Okay, Daniel,” Dylan said. “Not bad, not bad, but remember: you love this girl. She doesn’t believe you, but you know that your future happiness depends utterly on convincing her of it. Imagine this is your only chance to persuade her, and if you fail, you die. That’s what it has to feel like.”
“But he doesn’t really love her though, right?”
“Au contraire, he definitely does love her. He’s crying to prove it, and these are no crocodile tears. That what he’s trying to persuade her of.”
“What are crocodile tears?” somebody asked.
“Phony tears. Fake tears.”
Daniel balked some more: “But he only loves her because Puck put the juice on his eye, right?”
“That’s true, Daniel. Good point. That’s why he loves her, and we know that, but the key thing here is that he doesn’t know it. He feels himself overwhelmed by love and that’s that. I can see how it might bother you that the reason he’s so powerfully in love is because for all intents and purposes he’s been drugged, but the truth is, Daniel, if you were to ask a biochemist, they’d tell you that love is always a matter of chemicals. It’s always a drug. It comes on strong and then wears off over time. The only difference here is the chain of causality, but whether the love causes the chemicals