Not to be monstrously glib, but there isn’t even a name for my crime. Chronocide? Cooking up a fancy sci-fi term for it only obscures its immensity. There are some acts beyond label or measure.
Four billion human beings were born between 1965 and 2016. Actually, where I come from the number was more like three billion because we had more effective birth control, less religion, and better entertainment. Still, that’s a lot of lives to swap in and out of existence, particularly since the extra billion are stuck on this dank blister of a world. And it’s been a goddamn catastrophe for the ecosystem. It’s like the planet can only sustain a specific tonnage of life, so for every human born something else has to die, another species ground into sewage.
I didn’t mean to do any of this, but there’s no one else to blame. Not even my father. And clearly I’ve lost the plot because I’ve always been able to blame my father for whatever went wrong in my life—blaming my father is basically my superpower.
But I can’t pin this on him, not the horror of what I did, not the guilt I feel for my inability to really process it. Whatever the karmic weight or moral consequence that is my due, I’ll have to accept it when it comes, as it must. Existence is not a thing with which to muck around.
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By the way, there’s no novel, okay? John never wrote down anything that formal. But there are notes, pages and pages of handwritten notes in a moleskin sketchbook, which frankly I find kind of pretentious. Although maybe I just feel defensive because my handwriting is garbage. Nobody where I come from handwrites anything. It’s not considered an essential skill to teach in school. I mean, I’m capable of it, but I never need to do it.
This led to a total disaster at the hospital. The doctors ran a standard cognitive test, asking me to handwrite certain words and comparing the results to examples of my past handwriting. Which of course didn’t look remotely similar. My erratic scrawl was so different from John’s steady architect’s line that they were convinced I’d had a stroke.
I had to submit to a battery of cognitive tests and medical scans, but nothing turned up, which led to another battery of tests and scans, but still nothing turned up, which led to a lot of hushed conversations and medical jargon and worried looks, until finally I came up with an excellent solution, which was to take a day to teach myself how to handwrite like John. The next time they tested me, my mimicry was good enough that they dropped the whole thing.
Something I’ve realized about doctors here—they mostly have no idea what’s going on in your body unless it precisely lines up with standard presentation. Anything just a little bit off course and they’re clueless. Obviously they’d never admit it. They must teach a med school class on carrying yourself with absolute conviction when you have zero idea what’s really happening. The clinical lingo helps maintain the fog of expertise, as does the ambient panic of the patients and their families. Once I could imitate my own handwriting, they were so relieved they didn’t have to keep searching for an answer that was clearly beyond their medieval capacities that they were quick to announce me cured.
After I get discharged and we visit the building site, my parents drive me to my condo. In a car that rolls on pneumatic tires along roads made of bitumen and stone, propelled by an internal combustion engine fueled by refined petroleum. My condo is in a spindly tower with a cramped view of Lake Ontario between the dozen or so other spindly towers squeezed around mine, high enough up that the elevated expressway swooping past our cluster of buildings doesn’t seem grotesquely intrusive.
The place has a lot of glass windows—you know, melted sand instead of a polymorphic resin—and they don’t do anything cool other than let in light and let you see outside. There’s a device that looks like a Victorian steam engine but is apparently an espresso maker. The whole place is done up in gray hues and dark-toned wood, sharp-lined furniture slung low to the floor to emphasize the ceiling height. I guess the decor is supposed to impress women but it seems cheesy to me. I’m becoming increasingly concerned that John Barren is kind of a douchebag, which is upsetting.
On one wall is a massive frame around a hundred or so old magazines mounted in symmetrical rows and columns—they’re all 1950s pulp science-fiction anthologies, lurid painted covers with square-jawed adventurers and bosomy scientists, robots and ray guns, spaceships and jet packs. I stare at this wry shrine to my lost world and it makes me want to punch John in the face. Except it’s my face.
I don’t really care about exploring my supposed home, I just need to find this “novel” Greta mentioned and, if it’s real, see what it says. The confounding swirl of impulses that comprises John’s memory sends me to the moleskin sketchbook on his bedside table and it’s exactly what I’m looking for.
Here’s my sense of it—for his whole life, John has been dreaming about my life. When he was a kid, it was chalked up as his imagination, encouraged by his supportive parents and amused teachers, expressed in drawings and scenes played out with action figures for an audience of one, his little sister, Greta, her own private sci-fi soap opera. The visions of my life seemed to come to him simultaneous with when I actually lived them—I’d experience something and he’d dream about it. There’s a raft of drawings stuffed in a box on a closet shelf, moments of my life rendered in crayon and construction paper. There’s a whole series, like a comic book, with panels and dialogue bubbles, about the time I ran away from home at age twelve. Kissing Robin Swelter. Getting punched by her brother. My mother’s grim face.
As he grew up, John continued to have the dreams but rarely mentioned them to anyone. From time to time he’d tell Greta, but she was busy being a teenager and not giving a shit about her family. Greta abides by the reasonable philosophy that there is nothing in the universe more boring than someone else’s dreams.
The dreams never stopped, but John didn’t think much about them as he moved from adolescence to adulthood. The extent to which the cityscape of his recurring dreams inspired him to pursue architecture and fixed his design aesthetic is obvious—a lot. But John didn’t know he was ripping off my world. He just thought he was a genius.
Four months ago something changed—John had a terrible nightmare that his mom had died in an accident, hit by a flying car. He woke up in a panic, called her, disoriented, upset. Of course she was still alive. But the memory, so vivid, stuck inside him, aching, unreachable.
He started writing down his dreams in the sketchbook. He kept it next to his bed so, when he woke up, he could get down whatever he’d dreamed about before it faded from conscious grasp. There are pages and pages of semi-lucid scribbles, details, observations, insights, things I said and things said to me, thoughts I had but never spoke. It’s all true.
John decided his subconscious was telling him a story he needed to write. This was his “novel”—my life in the months since my mother died.
He didn’t actually start writing it. But he did compose a summary of the “story” on his laptop. In fact, he was working on it during a coffee break at the building site, moments before he collapsed in a fit of curse words and frenetic seizing.
You’ve already read what he wrote: I included it as chapters 43 and 55.
So.
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