“You don’t mind me telling people that?”
“I’m just happy you’re willing to spend a few more minutes with me after what I just said.”
“Pretty much everything you said sounds crazy,” Penny says. “But you know what’s crazier? I think I might have been waiting my whole life for you to walk in here.”
73
I decide to tell Penny some of the truth but omit the more off-puttingly painful details. I promise myself I’ll reveal those things later, maybe, if it seems like she trusts me enough to hear the whole story . . .
But as soon as I’m sitting across a wobbly bar table from her and she’s looking at me, the singular object of her full attention, it all spills out. I tell her everything.
It takes a few hours. We’re in a peaty, underlit dive bar up the block from her bookstore, a holdover from the neighborhood’s run-down past that’s being co-opted by its gentrifying present, much to the delight of the proprietor, who is discovering how much she can charge for a glass of booze if she cultivates just the right air of alluring disrepute. Our table for two is propped up against the front window, separated from the rest of the bar, perfect for two people to talk until closing time over several overpriced bourbons.
Penny has a lot of questions about the other Penelope, how she became who she did, her failure as an astronaut, her reinvention and self-destruction, my role in it. She cries when I tell her how Penelope died, and why, our cell. I tell her about breaking into the lab, traveling back in time, screwing up the world, ending up here, as John—she doesn’t totally get how temporal drag works, but then again neither do I—deciding I need to put things right but not knowing where to start.
After I’m done, Penny is quiet for a long time. The bar’s empty and we’re getting sharp looks from the bartender. She finishes her fourth bourbon, drops some cash on the table, and stands up.
“Come on,” Penny says.
74
We walk to her condo a few blocks away in an old factory that’s been hollowed out and fitted with floor-to-ceiling windows and poured-cement floors and stainless-steel appliances for two hundred or so urbanites to call home. Her place looks down on a few building sites deconstructing similar factories and replacing them with towers that will soon colonize what’s left of her view of downtown’s jagged gray-and-turquoise skyline and the vast spread of Lake Ontario.
She’s invited me into her home. That seems like a good sign. Although a sign of what I’m unsure.
Penny kicks off her shoes, goes to the kitchen, pours us both some water. She doesn’t turn on the lights, but there’s enough ambient city glare through the windows to give her a soft, glowing outline as she looks at me.
“Look,” Penny says, “you’re either amazingly nuts or the most interesting person I’ve ever met. If you told me that story to score with me, I’m going to be forthright and admit it’s working pretty well, although the four bourbons are playing an important role in that. I have a pretty well-tuned Spidey sense for the bullshit men say to get your clothes off. And if that’s what this is, well, bravo, motherfucker. There’s no reason to believe you. Except that I’ve felt, like, forever, that my life isn’t what it’s supposed to be. That even though the bookstore is going well and I have a nice, tidy, comfortable little life where I’ve rarely got to leave my neighborhood and my customers seem to, like, genuinely appreciate that my store exists in an area that’s in the process of devouring and regurgitating itself into who knows what and they see me as, you know, a symbol or whatever that maybe what it’s becoming won’t be so bad, it might even be better than what was here before, something genuine and particular instead of a bunch of dreary shit-box chain restaurants and logo shops. But I’ve never felt like this was it, the right life for me. I read a lot of speculative fiction, I mean hard-core nerd stuff, I love it, I’ve always loved it, even when it made me weird and the only boys who dug me were way too scared of girls to do anything about it, which meant I always had to make the first move, well, not just the first move, all the moves, and they were so petrified of rejection that they’d seriously rather get angry and call me a skank than risk being lousy in bed. What I’m saying is, my imagination is trained, okay? I’ve considered many other lives that I could be living instead of this one. I’ve luxuriated in what seemed at the time to be outrageously improbable possibilities for who I could be instead of who I am. And now you show up, telling me all the dopey, delusional fantasies I harbored as a frustrated adolescent and sheepish adult were, what, unambitious? That the life I’m supposed to lead is so far beyond anything I was even capable of imagining for myself? That I’m a fucking lioness living like a mouse?”
“Yeah, I guess I am,” I say.
And Penny kisses me.
75
Later, Penny asks why I think I’m an accidental plagiarist—I skimmed over it in my initial explanation because I’d drank a lot of liquor and wanted to get to the part where I found out she still existed—so I go over it again.
“Okay,” she says, “but what if every creative idea that someone has is unconsciously borrowed from that person’s experiences in another reality? Maybe all ideas are plagiarized without us knowing it, because they come to us through some cryptic and unprovable reality slippage?”
“Does that mean, like, the version of you that had the idea in the other reality also stole it from another version of you in yet another reality?” I say.
“I don’t know,” she says, “maybe we can only access a limited number of, like, adjacent realities and we’re constantly shoplifting ideas from different versions of our world and mistaking them for our own insights.”
“Although some realities are going to be superior to others in terms of quality ideas,” I say. “Not to be a dick about it, but there doesn’t seem like a lot my reality can learn from this one.”
“Yeah,” she says, “but for all you know, the best ideas from your reality were stolen from this reality, except here we could never properly execute them because we didn’t have access to the . . . what’s it called again?”
“The Goettreider Engine.”
“Right,” Penny says. “We didn’t have the resources to actually make the stuff we came up with, so we stuck them in our science fiction. We kept them safe in our dreams. And then you assholes raided our imaginations, took credit for our ideas, and built yourself a paradise.”
“That’s actually . . . a not unreasonable point,” I say.
“Or maybe we’re giving individual human beings too much credit. Maybe a vast alien intelligence is seeding original concepts into our minds to test if they can pass through whatever boundary separates us from other dimensions. Like, some ideas are porous, while others are impermeable and can’t escape their root reality. Maybe the best ideas are the ones that travel freely and don’t really belong to any one person.”
“You’re not like the other Penny,” I say.
76