Before giving up, because it’s the Internet, I look up ex-girlfriends. Hester Lee, nothing. Megan Stround, nothing. Tabitha Reese, nothing. Robin Swelter, nothing. I try my friends, but there’s nothing for Deisha Cline or Xiao Moldenado and Noor Priya or Asher Fallon and Ingrid Joost either. No trace of them online, no social media pages, no blogs or articles or tags of any kind. They don’t exist. They never existed.
I do find the official website for Ubly, Michigan, that abandoned town we visited. Except here it’s not abandoned. My friends are gone but around 830 people currently live in Ubly. John’s cell estimates the drive would take five hours, up the Don Valley Parkway to the 401 until it splits into the 402, then across the Blue Water Bridge onto the 25 alongside Lake Huron to East Atwater Road, which becomes Ubly’s Main Street when it runs right through the center of town. The library I saw, with the trees growing from the rotting books, is still standing. I could knock on every single door in town to search for whoever owned that pocket watch. If they’re alive, if they still have it, I could make them an exorbitant offer, pay any price they asked. I could hold the exact same watch in my hands, just like I did that final day at the lab.
But what would be the point? It’s just a watch. It didn’t have a life. It didn’t have a career like Deisha or a fiancée like Asher or a child like Xiao. It wasn’t my friend, even if I wasn’t that great a friend in return. It didn’t love me, maybe a little, the way Hester or Megan or Tabitha sort of did, briefly and without much benefit. It didn’t alter the trajectory of my life like Robin did over five gawky, glorious nights. It’s a thing.
And then, because I can’t help myself, I look up “Penelope Weschler” online.
For at least thirty seconds, I just stare at the screen until my eyes water, and it’s not because I can’t seem to blink.
It’s because there she is—Penelope Weschler.
She exists.
Except she’s not Penelope Weschler.
71
Penelope Weschler lives right here in Toronto. She goes by Penny.
She owns a bookstore, in a neighborhood called Leslieville, on the east side of the city just past the ribbon of murky gruel known as the Don River. There are a lot of effusive write-ups about the bookstore online. It hosts reading series with authors and weekly book clubs. It’s called Print Is Dead.
I click around until I find a photograph of her.
I stare at it, woozy and jittery at the same time.
She is not Penelope Weschler. Or, no, she is, but she looks like someone else. She is someone else.
It will turn out that despite the changes I caused to the timeline, her father, Felix Weschler, and her mother, Joanne Davidson, still become high school sweethearts and still decide to start a family shortly after college, and Felix still wants to name his first-born daughter after his beloved grandmother Penelope, and Joanne still agrees. The Penelope Weschler I knew was never born on January 12, 1985. But another Penelope Weschler was, on June 9, 1985, just under five months later.
Instead of the Penelope Weschler I knew I originally wrote my Penelope and deleted it—as if she ever belonged to me, as if she ever could.
This Penelope looks like her in some ways, different in others. Like they’re sisters. Except they’re not. She’s a genetic variation conceived five months later by the same parents, the identical combination of chromosomes with an alternate result. Her freckles are all wrong, like a map of the night sky on another planet. The shade of her hair, the color of her eyes, the shape of her jaw, her optometric prescription, the epidermal ridges of her fingerprints.
The way she kisses.
I’m getting ahead of myself. As with everything in my life, both my lives, all my lives, things go awry when Penelope Weschler is involved.
72
I stand on the sidewalk outside Print Is Dead. I haven’t called ahead, she probably isn’t even here, and maybe that’s for the best because I can’t think straight, the mesh of my thoughts knotted up into oceanic noise. I just had to come here right away. I have no plan.
The hours are printed on the glass front door. The store closes in twelve minutes. It’s the ground-floor shop front of a speckled brick building, apartments on top, a dingy law office on the right with its dust-caked blinds shut, a coffee shop on the left with a bearded barista in overalls hissing out foamy drinks for the customers squatting on mismatched chairs at a pale-wood communal table, their faces glowing blue-white from the cell screens propped before them. A streetcar rumbles along Queen Street East, squealing against the metal rails laid in the asphalt.
I go inside. It’s warm and bright and smells like ink and glue. Rows of shelves made from reclaimed barn board, knobby and pleasingly asymmetrical. Covers and spines of every hue and font. Displays of signed copies by local authors. Framed prints of vintage editions on the walls.
And Penny Weschler on a stool behind the counter, reading a novel. The place is empty. She hasn’t looked up. I could still leave without her seeing me.
I’m not going anywhere.
I pretend to browse, so I have something to stare at other than her. Most of these authors should never have been born, but here are their books in neat little rows, millions of words that weren’t supposed to be written, saying things that weren’t supposed to be said. In the V section are eight novels by Kurt Vonnegut that shouldn’t exist. I run my fingers over their spines.
Every step feels heavy, like my heart is exerting its own gravity, trying to drag me to the floor with a pulverizing force, so I’m liquefied against the clean herringbone tiles.
She looks up at me. Propriety dictates I nod or smile or avert eye contact, anything but stare right at her like a lunatic. I resolve to play it cool. My resolve doesn’t even make it to the first syllable.
“Penelope Weschler,” I say.
“Hey,” she says. “Sorry, do we know each other?”
Her voice is different because her larynx and tongue and teeth and lips are different. But the way she looks you right in the eye when she talks to you is the same.
“Yes and no,” I say. “I’m from an alternate reality.”
Penny closes her book without marking the page.
“So, we know each other in another reality, but not in this one?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“How did you get here? To this reality?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I bet,” Penny says.
“I can tell you about it, if you’d like.”
“You’re John Barren,” she says.
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve seen your picture. You designed that tower that’s going up downtown. People on the Internet say you’re maybe some kind of genius. And not just the Internet. Real people too.”
“Well,” I say, “I stole all my ideas from another reality.”
“The reality you come from,” she says.
“Yeah. You’re taking this pretty well. You don’t think I’m demented?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “You might be demented. But there are security cameras recording us and you’re sort of well-known. Not, like, famous. But semi-recognizable to people who pay attention to local city stuff. If you do something violent or crazy or whatever, they’ll find you right away.”
“I’m sure they will.”
“Why are you here? I mean, here in my store.”
“To see you,” I say.
“To see me,” Penny says.
“I realize everything I’m saying sounds extremely weird. I’m sorry. I should’ve come up with an actual plan. But as soon as I saw you, I couldn’t lie to you.”
“About how you’re a quasi-famous architect who is secretly plagiarizing his brilliant ideas from another dimension?”
“I didn’t know I was doing it until a few days ago,” I say.
“What happened a few days ago?”
“I’d like to explain it to you,” I say, “but it involves time travel and I’m concerned that even telling you that much is going to irrevocably freak you out. I don’t know why I feel compelled to be honest with you when I know I sound kind of insane. But it’s a pretty good story. Even if you don’t believe it, I think you’ll be entertained.”
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I close in a few minutes,” she says. “Go outside while I text a bunch of people that I’m going for a drink with you and if I turn up missing you definitely murdered and possibly ate me.”
“Great.”