There was a barrier between us, me and John, but it was porous. From his earliest moments of awareness, John drew off my earliest moments of awareness. He saw what I saw, but he perceived it as his imagination. His childhood drawings of vast, weird cityscapes—I dug them up from a box in my parents’ basement and they’re eerily accurate depictions of the cities from my world. The cutting-edge ideas he introduced to his designs at the Dutch firm, the bold concepts that marked him as one to watch by his employers and one to envy, loathe, undermine, and imitate by his peers—they’re typical of even the most basic and functional buildings where I come from.
All his supposedly innovative design concepts, the brash structural effects, the sleek but organic interiors and modern but majestic exterior embellishments, the integration of material and environment, the complexity masquerading as simplicity, and of course the whorls, everywhere with the whorls—it’s cribbed wholesale from the architecture of my reality. The designs he’s currently developing, including the condo tower in Toronto that’s creeping its way up to the sky on skeletal steel fingers, they’re rip-offs of buildings from my world, the world we’re supposed to have. The Toronto project looks almost exactly like the building that sits on the same lot in the other world. He re-created what should’ve been there and called it his own.
I’m not a visionary. I’m a plagiarist. Only I’m plagiarizing buildings that never existed, designed by architects who were never born, in a world that never happened.
62
My dad, Victor Barren, is a tenured professor of physics at the University of Toronto with a specialty in photonics—the replacement of conventional electronics with exponentially faster and more capacious photons instead of sad and puny electrons, enabling aspirational projects like quantum computing with the power they need to effectively function. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, he publishes in arcane scientific journals, he spent seven years as his department’s representative on the campus union council, he applied twice and was twice rejected to be department head, and he’s occasionally a talking head on local news when some development in the world of physics is buzzy enough to catch the fleeting attention of the general public, in large part because he has a deep, commanding voice that’s offset by his entertaining tendency to make deadpan comic references to popular science-fiction movies when explaining complex scientific principles.
He is not considered by anyone, including himself, to be a genius. He’s not even all that successful. His one attempt at a mass-audience science book was a flop, a brief, peppy, pun-heavy work called The DeLorean and the Police Box—The Art and Science of Time Travel.
So, yes, my dad retained his fascination with time travel, but not in a professional context. With his colleagues at the university, he sheepishly referred to his book as a lark, an amusing childhood interest buoyed by a scientist’s frustration with the ridiculous technical chicanery of time-travel stories by half-assed writers who’d rather deform hard science to their shaky plot machinations than engage in the tough but rewarding challenge of actually conveying the subject with clarity and precision.
My dad is jovial, long-winded, occasionally scattered, generous with his time and his advice, admired by his students, devoted to my mom, patient and kind with his children, a good, caring, exceedingly pleasant person.
This man is not my father. It is not possible that my father and this man share the same DNA.
63
Despite the widespread political chaos, social dysfunction, technological incompetence, and putrid toxicity of this world, one thing is way better here—the books.
Where I come from, nobody reads novels unless they’re like my mother—fetishizing the artistic media of a bygone era, probably because it was the last time she was happy. But regular people don’t read books there. That quasi-telepathic pact between author and reader held little interest for a general audience. Because the dominant storytelling medium of my world involved the seamless integration of an individual’s subconscious wiring into the narrative, evoking deep personal wonder and terror, familiarity and delight, yearning and fury, and a triggering catharsis so spellbinding and essential that the idea of sitting down to page through a novel that’s not even intended to be about the secret box inside your mind—why would anyone want to do that for, like, fun? Unless, of course, you were constitutionally inclined to sublimate yourself to a stronger personality, in which case reading a book where every word is fixed in place by the deliberate choices of a controlling vision, surrendering agency over your own imagination to a stranger you’ll likely never meet, is some sort of masochistic pleasure.
At least, that’s how I always felt about novels. Except coming here, I have to admit there are a lot of good ones. People in this world consider the novel a moribund art form. But where I’m from it’s a mummified corpse clutching the wisps of its long-gone wealth in desiccated fists, so here the shelves of even a meagerly stocked bookstore are overwhelming in their splendor and variety.
My mother, Rebecca Crittendale-Barren, is a tenured professor of literature with a specialty in the serialized storytelling of the Victorian age—Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and of course Charles Dickens. She was department head for ten years and three years ago became the University of Toronto’s dean of arts and science. She is collegial and open-minded, but firm in intent and sometimes prickly. She has a nimble mind for political calculation and disarming intellectual opponents, up front with her ambitions and never one to shy away from a necessary fight. Philosophically, she considers everyone who disagrees with her to be merely uninformed, assuming that when they have the facts they’ll understand she was right all along.
She has a wry appreciation for tacky gift-shop ornaments that convey homespun but acute insights. On the wall of her office hangs an embroidered cloth in a frame that reads, in looping, folksy letters—WE MUST SUFFER FOOLS GLADLY, OTHERWISE HOW CAN WE HELP THEM TO STOP BEING FOOLS?
This woman is my mother. She’s my mother unshackled from my father’s genius.
64
Maybe right now you’re wondering—if he altered history, how is he even alive? How could he exist? How could so much change, practically everything, but somehow the exact same sperm entered the exact same egg at the exact same moment and created the exact same idiot?
Well, it couldn’t, it can’t, it shouldn’t have. By changing history before I was born, I shouldn’t be able to have been born. But I did, was, am.
Basically, I’m what’s called a temporal anchor. The fact of my existence warped chronology to ensure my existence. Whatever the trajectory of events might have been without me, subsequent events aligned to produce me here, the same as I was there. The technical term—sorry, the theoretical term that I’ve unintentionally proven—is temporal drag.
Whatever happened between July 11, 1965, and October 2, 1983, quantum probability required my father and my mother to be exactly who they were and mate exactly when they did to make me exactly as I am.
Other people, more or less everyone else born after July 11, 1965, weren’t so lucky. The domino effect started slow. Millions of people were born on schedule, unaffected by my warping effect. But by 2016, billions of people have been born who were never meant to live and billions who should be alive were never conceived.
I’ve personally caused not just the death but the nonexistence of billions. That I also caused the lives of billions doesn’t make it feel better. My emotional loyalty is with the ones that never got to be because of me.