I grew up as an only child, so it’s really weird to suddenly have an adult sister who appears to know me—or the me she thinks I am—better than anyone else in the world. All my bullshit seems to drive her nuts and yet she also seems wholly at ease with my bullshit. I’ve never hung out with a woman around my age and not worried in the slightest that something I say might render me unattractive. Even with women I wasn’t interested in, I still wanted them to find me attractive.
But with Greta, yeah, nothing. I know that sounds obvious, but I have no frame of reference for the sibling dynamic. I was an only child. I’ve never felt unconditional affection for anyone who didn’t biologically spawn me.
Sorting through this flood of John’s memories, Greta’s there, my sister, in all of the experiences that made me who I am, who he is, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe my whole life I’ve been kind of sexist.
I mean, rereading some of my earlier chapters, the way I wrote about seeing Penelope naked for the first time and sleeping with my exes after my mother died—I’d feel embarrassed if Greta read that stuff. I’m not trying to dismiss any retrograde blunders in the way I talk about the women in my life . . . it’s just hard to recognize your own blind spots, you know?
Part of the problem is this world is basically a cesspool of misogyny, male entitlement, and deeply demented gender constructs accepted as casual fact by outrageously large swaths of the human population. Where I come from, gender equality is a given. I’m not talking about absurdly fundamental things like pay equality. I mean that there is no essential difference in the way men and women are perceived in terms of politics or economics or culture. Your genitalia are considered no more pertinent to your status than the color of your eyes.
Of course, that also means some stuff that’s considered normal where I come from would be super-weird here. Like, okay, in my world, when you break up with someone, it’s considered gracious to offer the person you dumped a lock of hair so that, if they want, they can get a genetically identical surrogate grown for whatever purposes they need to get over you. It has no consciousness, but it looks exactly like you and can be used for rudimentary physiological functions. Like, you know, sex. The expectation is that when your ex feels ready to move on they’ll have it deconstituted into a biological goop and returned to the manufacturer for disinfection and recycling. Describing it, yes, I realize it sounds bizarre, but it’s a fairly everyday thing.
It’s why my mother’s abject devotion to my father rubbed me the wrong way. It’s not just that I wanted to be the center of her attention—it’s that her self-abnegation was so unnecessary. He didn’t even notice most of what she did until she was gone. There was no reason to live that way except as a deliberate choice. It was actually harder for someone like my mother to do nothing but service my father when there were so many options open to her. To anyone.
Except maybe I’m still being sexist. Her choices are her choices.
I went back to chapter 11 and cut out a few indiscreet comments about my ex-girlfriends’ private lives. With my friends, I knew them for seventeen years and feel okay revealing personal stuff about them, but I can’t honestly say Hester or Megan or Tabitha would’ve given me permission to include details about their lives. And if it seems more disrespectful to their memories to elide them from my story, well, you can’t possibly appreciate just how annoying I was to date. Their privacy was earned.
It’s like with John’s condo. My immediate impression was it’s all a sham to impress women. But the more time I spend in his head, the more I realize—it’s just his style. I thought of it as a cheesy seduction ploy because that’s what I would’ve done if I had any confidence in my own taste. Every accomplishment in my life that meant anything to me involved impressing someone who wasn’t naturally inclined to find me attractive. I make my mother’s death a story about sleeping around. I make the end of my reality a story about my broken heart.
I feel superior to John because I come from a more technologically and socially advanced world. But none of that has anything to do with me. I was just born there. I contributed nothing to it—except my sense of entitlement.
67
I’m doing this all wrong. I shouldn’t be rambling on about my inchoate gender epiphanies, I should be developing the “characters” of my mom and dad and sister instead of just cataloguing the ways they’re not like who they were or, in the case of Greta, who they weren’t.
I had dinner at my parents’ house with Greta, and I found myself slipping effortlessly into conversation along the various narrative strands of the infinitely dense soap opera that is our family life—my mom’s department politics, research projects, interesting and/or inane comments made by colleagues in her meetings, my dad’s department politics, research projects, interesting and/or inane comments made by students in his classes, something a neighbor said, something a neighbor did, something a neighbor plans to do, lunch with an old friend who told an amusing and/or sad anecdote that made them laugh and/or cry, frosted with sarcastic comments by Greta and punctuated with intermittent jokes by me that my mom and dad laugh at way too hard.
It’s comfortable and easy. It’s terrifying how comfortable and easy it is to sit around the dinner table with these strangers, and I have to keep reminding myself it isn’t real. This is not my family. The comfort and ease are a lie. Only the feeling that I don’t belong here is true.
My parents live in the same overheated Victorian row house where Greta and I grew up, in a neighborhood called the Annex, half a dozen blocks from the university campus where they both work. My mom believes there is no better decoration than a shelf of books, and the house is a testament to that. The rooms are organized by category—contemporary novels in the dining room, the kitchen for cookbooks, the bedroom for non-antique editions of Victorian novels, what used to be my bedroom and is now my mom’s office for literary criticism, the bathroom for my dad’s collection of spry pop-science books, my dad’s serious science tomes in his study, the living room colonized by well-preserved early editions of Victorian novels, the rare first prints in a glass case that hangs in an awkward spot on the wall, not quite in balance with the rest of the room, but necessary to keep it both prominently displayed and shaded from natural sunlight. It makes every room feel cramped and still, because the thick wood shelves make the walls feel two feet closer and the volume of paper absorbs most ambient sound.
I’m in my dad’s study, trying to appear casual as I scan for books on time travel, when Greta leans in the doorway.
“You’re acting weird,” she says.
“No, I’m not,” I say.
“You’re making a lot of jokes,” she says.
“They’re not funny?”
“They’re okay. But you never make jokes around Mom and Dad. You’re always so serious around them.”
“Maybe I’m trying to develop, you know, an adult relationship with them.”
“Bullshit.”
“What do you want from me, Greta?”
“You had a major neurological who knows what and told everyone you’re a time traveler,” Greta says.
“And you made fun of me,” I say.
“Because you’re not a time traveler,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“And now you’re being weird, man. You’re all, like, cracking jokes as if you didn’t just have some babbling seizure three days ago. If you and Mom and Dad want to be in denial, fine, pretend nothing happened. But something happened. So I call bullshit. You’re not acting like yourself.”
“Because I made a couple of jokes.”
“Yes. My brother is a lot of things. But funny isn’t one of them.”
“Maybe I save my best material for my friends,” I say.
“What friends?” Greta says. “You don’t have friends. You have work people and you have me.”
She punches me in the shoulder, harder than necessary.
“I have friends,” I say. “You think I don’t have any friends?”
“Do you honestly think you’re from the fucking future?”
“No. I’m not from the future.”
This is, of course, true. I’m not from the future. I’m from an alternate timeline. It’s still today. It’s just a different today.
68