“Forty-seven?” Tiffany guessed.
“He’s not that old,” said Lauren Delay, the blonde milquetoast who sat to Tiffany’s left. If she was trying to curry favor with him, she was doing an outstanding job of it—that is, until she continued: “He’s like…forty-fourish?”
“Anyone else want to venture a guess?” Dylan asked, more desperate than they could possibly know or understand.
“Fifty?” Kai Fitzpatrick chimed in. “Fifty-three?”
“Sixty?” Amanda Cruz hazarded. It was a bit like being pierced with a bullet. Amanda was the prettiest girl Dylan had ever taught. She was so pretty that, as a rule, he tried not to look at her.
“I’m thirty-nine,” Dylan declared at last.
“That’s it?” Amanda said.
Okay then, he’d had enough of this for one day. “You know what? I’m letting you go early. We’ll work on the scene some more tomorrow.”
The young people surged with new energy as they packed up their things and made a beeline for their extra-curricular lives, though not without pausing on their way out to say “Thank you, Mr. Green” or “Have a nice day, Mr. Green.”
It always amazed him how adept these kids were at compartmentalizing, how they thought you could accuse a thirty-nine-year-old of being sixty and then wish him a good day and honestly expect him to have one.
At any rate, he tried, unsuccessfully, to smile. He’d read once—albeit long after such knowledge might have saved his acting career—about some muscle up by the eyes that gives away a counterfeit smile every time. The only way to act a smile convincingly is the Method way, which is to say you’ve got to remember something happy—but Dylan had stopped subjecting himself to that sort of masochism years ago.
• • •
“Daddy!” cried Arthur.
“Da—y!” near-echoed Tavi, who was better with her vowels than her consonants.
“Kids!” Dylan said.
By now they were embracing his legs. It was quite a nice thing to come home to. Of course, at five and three, they weren’t exactly being altruistic. They expected him to run around with them outside, or to read them books, or at the very least—they were groping at his midriff now—to pick them up.
Later this would be fine. Later he could do this. After he’d had a chance to put down his backpack, change into comfortable clothes and savor a few moments of quiet, he’d be happy to pick them up, swing them around, play the good dad, maybe even be it. But he couldn’t very well skip that middle step without feeling some generalized resentment—not against his family per se so much as just the universe. He was tired.
“Hi, honey,” he said. Oh man, he really said that.
Erin was standing in the kitchen, stirring a pot of something. She was still wearing her robe and slippers from this morning, which was just the kind of thing he remembered her explicitly stating in their pre-nuptial days that she would never do. It was hard not to think of his mother, who liked to boast that even while raising three children, she had managed, in that picket-fence world, to doll herself up every single afternoon before his father came home from work. She really did do that. He remembered lying on her bed as a little boy, watching her curl her eyelashes in the vanity mirror with that silver tool he sometimes used as a chair for his Star Wars guys. She’d peer up at the ceiling, apply the mascara, and then turn her gaze on him through the mirror, her eyes twinkling the way so many other female eyes would twinkle for him one day in that other space and time that was as distant from him then as it was now, but in the other direction.
Erin’s eyes were no longer so stellar these days as they were just sort of ocular. To be fair, she was eight months pregnant and in profile looked something like a gigantic elbow.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“I want to make a smoothie,” Arthur said.
“Fairly terrible,” Dylan said.
“Smoo—ie!” Tavi near-echoed.
“We’ll do that later,” he told the kids, making his way toward the sanctuary of the bedroom.
“Any change with your ears?” Erin asked.
“The doctor said it would take ten days. I told you that.”
“Sue me for caring.”
Dylan peeled twenty little fingers off the doorjamb not less than three times before finally managing to manifest the bedroom door. The kids beat on the opaque foglet mesh2 with their little fists, but it was childproof and Dylan did his best to ignore them. He put down his backpack, slipped off his khakis and draped them over his desk chair. Then he plunked himself down on the bed, stared up at the popcorn ceiling and tried to relax. The kids were crying like they meant it now, and he understood exactly how they felt (he was good at projecting himself into other minds—it had once been his job after all). He loved them immensely, but if there was one thing he disliked about fatherhood, it was all the crying; it was almost enough to make him want to lose the rest of his hearing fast. And the only thing worse than the crying itself was the animal guilt he felt at not responding to it, but he knew by now that if he did gratify them with a response, if he made the smoothies, took them bike-riding, read them books, all without giving himself these few minutes to relax first, then the resentment would build to overflowing and as soon as the kids went to bed he’d say all sorts of ugly things to Erin, which he would instantly regret, and then neither of them would get anything like honest sleep before tomorrow night, which was clearly no way to live. Erin might not have believed him, but isolating himself like this really was for the common good.
2_____________
Terrans had imagined this sort of polymorphous material, composed of interlinking nanobots, since the early nineties, but the technology still seemed decades away when it was discovered as the primary building material on Macarena, some 45,047 light years away. New Taiwan—where Dylan and his family lived—had independently come up with its own swarming foglet technology, though its uses of it were more modest, being restricted to certain types of doors, windows, and other passageways. Terrans themselves were still reluctant to roll out the new tech on Earth for fear of an apocalyptic “grey goo” scenario, but they were happy to have these new case studies to observe.
“Erin, could you do something about that wild rumpus, please?”
“I’m making dinner,” she said.
“I know. And I’m just back from a very long day of teaching a moribund art form to human teenagers.”
He could almost hear her roll her eyes through the door. “Kids, come here,” she said, which set them to wailing all the more until she assured them that they could help her cook if they liked. She was a genius at mothering; no one could take that away from her.
Only once they were out of earshot did Dylan remember just how loud peace and quiet were for him now. Ambient noise had competed with the ringing all day at school, masking it to the point where he’d found himself wondering if the pills weren’t already doing their job, but here in the former quiet of his bedroom, those bells in his head sounded nearly as strident as the crying. But “bells” was wrong, seeing as there was really no chiming, jingling, or tolling. It was more like someone was holding down a single very-high key on a synthesizer, an electronic splinter lodged in his brain, and to make matters worse, it was accompanied by the alien sensation of a fullness in the ears, as if he were finally wearing the earplugs he should have been wearing at all those rock concerts throughout his gilded youth. Falling asleep the first night with the ringing had been such torture. He’d been certain he had some terrible disease, and in the theater of his hypnagogic mind the ringing grew so loud he recognized it as his own death knell, and what he felt, far more than the terror or sadness he might have expected, was an unbearable