Yes, this makes me sound like an unbelievable loser. But my mother was dead, my father was distant, my colleagues were dismissive, my friends were awkward, my exes were even more awkward, and Penelope Weschler was the best part of every day.
She never treated me with disrespect. She was polite but perfunctory. Of course, she was polite but perfunctory with everyone, but compared to the overt derision of the understudies it almost qualified as warmth. I shadowed her as she excelled at everything and she diplomatically ignored me. Until the day we saw each other naked in the decontamination chamber. After that, she still mostly ignored me. But there was something else, hard to pin down exactly, a charge—this magnetic pheromonal buzz that hung between us like a spider’s web, generally invisible, but at a certain angle, flecked with morning dew, it could sparkle for just a moment.
We were never alone together, but I’d catch her glancing at me by the simulators or during one of the daily medical scans or in a workshop on 1960s cultural references. If our eyes met, she’d flush along her collarbones. I didn’t believe someone like Penelope Weschler could be attracted to me. I figured she was just embarrassed by what happened in the decontamination chamber. But then there was the way she’d looked back at me when she was climbing out of the air lock—what did that look mean?
Here I was, finally invited into my father’s inner sanctum, poised to play a minor but not wholly irrelevant role in a groundbreaking scientific experiment while grieving my recently deceased mother, and all I could think about was Penelope.
19
On Sunday, July 10, 2016, the evening before the experiment’s official launch, there was an elegant reception at the sleek, opulent headquarters of one of the conglomerates that funded the project. Everyone put on formal outfits and mingled with the corporate executives, government officials, and scientific advisers my father had assembled to back his initiative.
Before we arrived, my father listed off all the important people who would be in attendance. The implication was clear—this is a list of people you should absolutely not speak to in case you embarrass me.
I applied a pharmaceutical patch to my abdomen, right over my liver, that let me set my preferred blood-alcohol ratio, like cruise control for booze. If I exceed my fixed limit, my liver is flushed with toxin filters. I went with light-headed and garrulous without careening into impaired motor function or loss of social inhibition. That sweet spot between confident and arrogant, loose but not sloppy.
So, I drank a few glasses of champagne and made small talk with people at least two degrees of separation away from anyone on my father’s list and did my best to play the proud but humble son. Eventually I drifted off to look around the building, which wasn’t that interesting because anything interesting was sealed behind locked doors.
That’s how I ended up in an open-air courtyard dotted with sculptures, the life’s work of some artist shoved in an obscure corner to bolster the company’s cultural credibility index. The sculptures were stylized human figures looking up at the sky with polished glass eyes. The moon was bright, and the glass eyes played a nifty visual trick with the moonlight, refracting it through the sculptures’ hollow insides, giving them a pale interior glow.
That’s how I noticed her. She was the only figure that wasn’t lit up from within.
It was Penelope. We were alone together.
20
She stood there, staring up at the black sky in the blue moonlight. I wasn’t sure if I should approach or retreat. At the reception, the other chrononauts were awash in fawning crowds. She’d chosen to have a moment by herself and I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which I’d be welcome. But then, without looking away from the night sky, Penelope spoke to me.
“I still think about it all the time,” she said. “Being up there. Everyone says this is so much more important. I would’ve been the millionth astronaut but I get to be the first chrononaut. So why do I wish I was out there instead?”
I came up next to her, shoulders almost but not quite touching, and mimicked her pose, peering up at the sky. Of course we’d had conversations before, but mostly just about technical matters and training protocols. Not like this—personal, confiding. I knew if I didn’t say something right away I’d lose my nerve.
“Maybe because we already know everything about where you’re going,” I said. “There’s no mystery to the past. It’s all about how you get there. You didn’t want to go to space to test a rocket ship. You wanted to see things no one’s ever seen before.”
I don’t know where any of that came from. I just kind of said it. Penelope didn’t reply, so I worried I’d said the wrong thing and too much of it. But when I looked at her, she was staring at me. Somehow I managed to keep my mouth shut and hold her gaze.
She kissed me.
As many times as I’d imagined it, I wasn’t prepared for this kiss. I don’t mean, like, emotionally. I mean its tactile quality. The emphatic pull of her lips on mine. It may have been the first time our bodies deliberately touched, my mouth pressed to her mouth, surrounded by glowing sculptures, standing on the hard surface of a 200,000,000-square-mile ball of rock and ore and water protected from the endless void by a 300-mile cushion of atmospheric gas.
It was both the greatest kiss of my life and also made me feel like until that moment I’d been kissing all wrong.
Penelope broke the kiss, glanced back up at the sky, and walked away. For a moment, I didn’t think I’d be able to take it, the heartbreak, if I had to spend the rest of my life trying to re-create what that kiss felt like with other people.
But then she looked back at me.
“Come on,” Penelope said.
21
When I was growing up, I used to threaten to run away a lot. There was only the most hackneyed, blunt reason for it—I wanted my parents to pay more attention to me, or a different kind of attention, more expansive and impressed with my meager adolescent achievements. I’m not saying this made me special. I’ve never thought I was special. That’s why I wanted to run away.
But one time, and this is maybe the key moment of my childhood, my father actually responded to my threat. He was stuck on the thorny question of how the unpredictable path of a magnetically charged asteroid might affect a time traveler’s reverse trajectory if they came into near contact, which was enervated by the fact that the asteroid might have long since ceased to exist. So he was looking for something else to focus on and, for what felt like the only time in my life, he chose me.
I told him I was going to run away.
“You should,” he said.
I had no frame of reference for this reply. My father was always too busy to deal with me. But now he looked me in the eye like he’d picked this random moment to take my measure. He noticed I was there and so he wanted to know who his son really was.
What could I do? I packed a bag and ran away from home.
I was twelve years old. I was gone for nineteen days.
22