King of the Worlds. M. Thomas Gammarino

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СКАЧАТЬ Dylan still thought he looked pretty much like Gollum, he was beginning to see what Erin meant: Junior did take after him in some respects, more obviously than he did his mother anyway. It was mainly the eyes. They were Dylan’s eyes, really, just popped into a smaller skull. He had not quite realized before how a gene is a gene is a gene. It made for quite an affinity, and one night while the other two kids were sleeping, Dylan cradled the baby in his arms and walked him outside to the deck to peer at the stars. He told him, unabashedly, how he loved him and—screw overpopulation, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate in all directions anyway—he was glad to have him join them. Then he waxed philosophical and possibly nutty and asked the kid what it had been like in the womb. What was it like when that first spark of mental life kicked in? What was it like before that? How far back could he go? Was there anything important back there that his old man had forgotten? He looked out at the Milky Way, showed his son the pale evening star their species had once been trapped around. All those worlds, and yet—he spared his son now and kept his thoughts to himself—was there nothing truly strange out there? Nothing so exotic and marvelous that it would stymie our human frames of reference, mock our languages, confound our metaphors?

      Because that was the thing about being young, wasn’t it? Everything was still new? Dylan sometimes briefed his students on one of the more interesting tidbits he’d picked up in graduate school: The Russian formalist poet Viktor Shlovsky identified ostranenie—usually translated as “defamiliarization,” though literally “strange-making”—as the basic function of art. “Habituation,” Shlovsky wrote, “devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.… Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” His students usually gave him blank stares when he recited this, so he’d translate it for them: “Art exists to make you babies again.”

      “Why would we want to be babies again? Isn’t education about getting us to stop being babies?”

      “In part, yes, but it’s also to get you to see things, really see them, as if for the first time. We could never hurt one another if only we learned to look with new eyes.”

      “But aren’t babies like naturally really selfish? Don’t you have to teach a baby to be nice?”

      They were right, of course. He was romanticizing. He had this tendency.

      And there was this too: If you checked your omni, you’d find that nearly every combination of five or fewer words that you could think of, however nonsensical, had been documented countless times. The English language itself, one might say, was dying through overuse and becoming one big meta-cliché. Dylan consoled himself with a quote he’d once read from a twentieth-century Earthling scientist: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” How the unvanquished youth in him hoped it was so!

      This was as close as Dylan ever got to praying anymore, and it ended, as per some prayers, with gratitude: he thanked the Universe, whatever that might mean, for this beautiful, healthy baby boy who had his eyes.

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