I wake up stiff and groggy and annoyed that my virtual environment projector has malfunctioned, until I remember I’m in John’s condo bedroom. I assume the searing headache must be another neurological spasm, like the one I had at the construction site four days ago, but then a single word pierces the mental fog—coffee. I manage to manipulate the steam engine until it squirts out an oily jet of espresso. Headache cured.
Finally, something in this crappy world that actually does what it’s supposed to.
I wish I had more of a sense of humor about all the, like, fish-out-of-water hilarity as I try to fit into this backward mess you call a civilization. Of course, there’s something absurd about an adult human who doesn’t know how to open a jar of peanut butter or work an elevator or use a credit card. To an outside observer, I probably look like I’m suffering from some debilitating cognitive trauma.
Conscious decisions are hard. It takes forever to choose an outfit and I end up in a pair of suspiciously tight denim pants and what I later learn is a pajama top.
Calling up something from John’s memory works only when I stop trying to think about it, like how to use his laptop or his cell, which are both beeping with insistent messages from his architecture firm that I’m definitely not going to answer.
I recognize the kitchen appliances from elementary school history classes and get excited when I find a food synthesizer, until I realize it’s a microwave. John eats out a lot, so the refrigerator is empty except for a tub of yogurt and an avocado. I know, it’s so poetic. You probably think I’ll cut into the avocado because it looks ripe but inside it’s all brown and mushy, like a metaphor. Except I do cut into it and it is brown and mushy, but I don’t care about poetry because I’m hungry so I eat it anyway. It tastes thin and watery. I swallow a few spoonfuls of the yogurt before I realize it expired two weeks ago. Not knowing what an expiration date is doesn’t feel like fish-out-of-water hilarity when I’m vomiting into the sink because I just ate bad yogurt.
It’s the little things that get to me, like not knowing how to work a shower, because to me a shower seems like what an outhouse probably seems like to you—a quaint and kind of gross throwback to an age you’re very happy is long gone. And it’s the big things that get to me, like the framed photo on the desk of my sister, mom, and dad smiling next to a stranger with my face.
I scrutinize photos of John and try to get my hair to look like his, but I have never once washed with shampoo and conditioner—I have to read the fine print on the bottle to find out what conditioner even does—let alone smeared my hair with something called sculpting mousse. In my world, you lower a grooming helmet over your head and it cleans, trims, and shapes your hair for you. Here, when my hair grows too long I apparently have to pay another grown-up to cut it with scissors, like a day-care craft.
I wash, dress, and eat all on my own and I’d be proud of myself except these are the accomplishments of a precocious child. But that’s what I feel like—a kid waking up in an empty home, unsure if his parents are asleep or gone or dead, going through the normal morning routine because it’s the only thing that keeps the panic at bay.
69
I can’t stay here. It’s wonderful that my mom is alive and my dad isn’t a distracted asshole and Greta is, I mean, she’s awesome. Scabrous, incautious, and sharp. She deserves to live, much more than I do. Clearly John has his act together in a way I never did. He’s successful, driven, and impressive. Even if all his best ideas are ripped off from his dreams of my world, even if he’s limited his life to work and convinced himself it’s enough, even if I know why—because he’s always had this steady, bleak, overwhelming sense that none of this is the way it’s supposed to be, that everyone he meets, everywhere he goes, every thought in his head is inexplicably but irrevocably wrong. He holds everyone at a remove because, on a level he could never articulate but could also never shake, he knows they shouldn’t exist. The one exception is Greta, but only because she refused to be pushed away and fought a pitched, merciless, never-ending battle to keep John present in this world. I spent my life wanting my parents to pay attention to me. John has their rapt focus and chronically shrugs them off. He has everything I wanted, but it can’t fill the void that opens up every night in his dreams. And now the void has overtaken him—me, I’m the void.
But I can’t let them in either. Not Greta, not my parents, not this version of my life. I have to keep John’s consciousness tamped down, locked up, swallow whatever affection he feels for the individuals who comprise the lattice of his life, because this world is a dank, grimy horror and I can’t stay here. I have to figure out how to get the timeline back on track and return us all to the future we’re supposed to have. I’m the only one who can do it, and, as pleasant as this interlude has been, it’s monumentally selfish to condemn the rest of the world, reality itself, to this wrong existence just because my little life has been improved. I’m not important, not compared to the billions who have never known how things should be.
70
So, how do you go about changing the last five decades of history in a world where time travel is considered an amusing thought experiment? Even if the science existed, in the absence of crucial advances in related fields—teleportation, immateriality, invisibility, even simple component manufacturing—the whole endeavor is futile. And, of course, my father’s plan depended on following the radiation trail emitted by the original Goettreider Engine. Without that, even if I somehow solved the technical issues, I’d still have no way to get to the exact spot in space at the exact moment in time.
Plus, I don’t know how any of this stuff actually works. I have some insider lingo picked up from my months working at the lab and mingling politely with my father’s acolytes, but I can’t build a time machine from scratch any more than I can build John’s espresso maker from scratch.
And there’s a Pandora’s box waiting to be opened—my dad. After all, he did write a book about time travel, even if it’s considered an eccentric blemish on his academic reputation. No matter how sweet and considerate this iteration of him appears to be, I’m not ready to ask him for this kind of help, not yet.
I need to find out what happened to the Goettreider Engine. Everything stems from that, all that went wrong and all the ways to possibly set it right. I use John’s laptop to search “Goettreider Engine” online—but the computer tells me nothing matches that entry. I try “Lionel Goettreider”—nothing. A billion websites and not one mentions the most important person who ever lived.