King of the Worlds Read Free

merging into one, as per this exhortation from the great poet Matsuo Bash ō : “You can learn about the pine only from the pine, or about bamboo only from bamboo. When you see an object, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself, otherwise you impose yourself on the object, and do not learn. The object and yourself must become one, and from that feeling of oneness issues your poetry.”
    Currently, Dylan was a rather disgusting fan blade. Dust got into the crannies of the popcorn ceiling too—he’d been that a few blinks ago. Someday they’d get central air-conditioning, if ever they could afford it. Thoughts were objects too, of course, and now Dylan was suddenly his money problems. The last of his savings had gone into the down payment on this house that was really about twice as big as they required, on bucolic and overpriced Yushan Lane no less. He was indentured for the next thirty years, unless something miraculous happened between now and then, the odds of which were vanishingly slim. And with three kids to send to college…
    The alarm returned redoubled, urging him to do something—to wake up, fight a fire, call the cops, something. It took several minutes for him to talk his heart rate down and return to his breath. He tried focusing less on his thoughts-as-objects and more on objects-as-objects. He looked at the varicolored spines of the print books he collected, and that calmed him some. He consulted the blank spot on the wall that desperately wanted art, and that induced anxiety again.
    Then he looked toward the clothes closet.
    The door was still swiped open from this morning and on the shelf at the top was a big white plastic shoebox that had once contained one of the first pairs of Nike “pumps” ever to be worn by a kid in Delaware County, Pennsylvania . 3 Dylan had discarded the sneakers several decades ago, but this box had followed him around ever since, even if he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually seen it until now. When was the last time he’d opened it? Ten years ago? Fifteen? It really had been that long, and in many ways it felt like longer. Barring whatever one might find via omni these days, that box held the only remaining evidence that Dylan had ever been anything but a teacher.
    3 _____________
    The sneakers had come with a little handheld pump you had to carry around in a pocket or somewhere. If you fit the pump to the valve built into this weird plastic pyramid at the back of the shoe, you could fill a bladder with air until the innards of the shoe conformed to your foot. Reebok had entered the pump market soon after Nike spearheaded it, but rather than include a separate pump accessory, they had incorporated the pump as a little raised rubber basketball on the tongue of the shoe that you could depress with your thumb, which made a lot of sense since who wants to carry a pump around while playing basketball? Though really it had never been very clear to Dylan what was so great about having your sneakers fit that tight in the first place.
    Before fleeing to New Taiwan, they had purged their old house in Santa Monica of virtually everything, and when Dylan watched Erin deposit the shoebox in the dumpster, he almost let her, and then thought better of it: “I think I’m going to keep that one,” he said.
    â€œWhy? I thought you were done with all this stuff.”
    â€œI am. I totally am. But it might be nice to have something to show the grandkids.” Much as the humiliating demise of his acting career had served as a prod to change his life, it had also served as a chilling intimation of mortality. Someday, before he knew it, he’d be a blubbering old man, and it wasn’t impossible to think that maybe it would be some comfort to be tangibly reminded that at one time in his life he’d touched a certain sector of humankind (specifically the young female sector) with his art.
    â€œOkay,” Erin said,