She was different. The other Penny—it already seems strange to call her Penelope—had a taut hardness to her, physically and emotionally. Her body practically whirred when she stepped, so calibrated were her movements, muscles in harmony with gravity, not a joule of wasted energy. She was reserved in a careful, feline way, like she’d speak only the minimum number of words necessary to state her core point, not because she didn’t have more to say, but because she knew that in unsavory circumstances every word she spoke could be used against her, so the more precise and guarded her sentences, the less likely her verbal history might undo her. She was all determination and dread that determination wouldn’t be enough. A life spent with a white-knuckle grip on herself, so as to appear without guile or rot, unfouled.
This Penny talks, the words tumbling out of her, gesturing wildly in emphasis. She has slightly rounded shoulders, a loose-limbed walk, an easy laugh. She doesn’t seem at all cautious. She has her issues, like all of us, but that sense of a shameful wrongness that Penelope trained herself to conceal, except when it gushed out like water from a burst pipe, this Penny has no trace of it. It’s not that she lacks murky personal contradictions—she has her fair share of those—it’s that she doesn’t think of them as wrong and they don’t cause her shame. Like everyone, she carries around a suitcase of troubles everywhere she goes, but she leaves it unlocked, for anyone to rifle through if they care enough to be curious.
There are other differences, physical ones, but it seems irrelevant, and impolite, to catalogue them. They had the same name and the same parents, but with markedly distinct results.
One thing they had in common—their hands. I knew Penelope’s hands well from all those hours at the simulators, and Penny has the same long, tapered fingers and thin, delicate wrists, even if the lines and creases and swirls on her palms are her own.
And there was the way they both looked at you. Penelope rarely made eye contact, but when she did you felt like the center of the universe. Penny is like that too. Her attention seems to pour from her eyes into yours, like there couldn’t possibly be anything anywhere as interesting as what you’re saying to her right there and then.
I mean, admittedly, I was either a time-traveling emissary from another reality or a damaged maniac in the midst of a radical schizoid break, so maybe I was interesting regardless. But Penny didn’t need a crazy story to hold my attention—she had it, it wasn’t going anywhere, and as soon as I met her neither was I.
77
The truth is, there are no alternate realities. At least not the way Penny describes them. Maybe an infinite multiverse is born from every action, whether it’s two atoms colliding or two people. Maybe reality is constantly fluctuating around us, but our senses aren’t equipped to detect those quantum variations. Maybe that’s what our senses are, an ungainly organic sieve through which the chaos of existence is filtered into something manageable enough that you can get out of bed in the morning. Maybe the totality of what we perceive with our senses is as clumsy a portrait of reality as a child’s chalk drawing on a sidewalk compared to the face of the woman you’re already falling in love with lying next to you in a mess of sheets and blankets, her lips still pursed as they pull away from your mouth.
But in terms of our actual experience, there’s just one reality, this reality. The other reality, my reality, is gone. I erased it when I interacted with the past—interacted, that’s a nice way of saying catastrophically broke. Nobody in my world is wondering where I am because that world no longer exists. This world is all there is now.
I say all this to Penny. Except the part about falling in love with her. I somehow manage to keep that to myself. Since we just met last night and I’m attempting to appear less like a lunatic around her.
“The truth is,” she says, “you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. All this crap about alternate realities and time-travel contradictions and consciousness transferring, you don’t actually know anything. You’re speaking with authority because it’s calming to feel in control of the unknowable. So chill out, man, and enjoy what you do know. Which is that in this reality, you get to make out with me.”
And I do. But I also know I’m right—because I’m starting to forget.
When I got out of the hospital and found John’s sketchbook, I wrote down a lot of things that I knew for sure had happened, trying to sort out the jumble in my overtaxed brain. It was only a few days ago but when I look through those notes now I can barely remember most of it. The memories have gotten wispy, threadbare, curled up to sleep in some cognitive fold I can’t access. Maybe the brain heals wounds too, grows over the tip of the splinter that broke off when you pulled the rest out with tweezers, leaving a fragment of something foreign to rot inside you.
When I wrote those hasty notes, it felt pretentious to describe it all in too much detail. I wrote out the basic events, and, of course, my narcissism kept derailing the story toward my anxieties and doubts and guilt and regret. But if I’d known I would start to lose all those memories, I would’ve spent every day writing and writing and writing down everything I remembered about my world, no matter how irrelevant or banal or obvious. Because now those pages of scattered, sheepish description are almost all I have left. It might as well be fiction. I might as well be fiction. A life, a world, a whole universe, reduced to twenty-seven pages of scrawled handwriting.
I’m feeling less and less like Tom every day. I can feel it happening. I’m becoming him. Becoming John.
78
We spend the night and the day together. We walk around her neighborhood with take-out coffees. We eat breakfast at a place she likes. She decides to close the bookstore for the day, so we just keep walking, heading west toward downtown. Penny wants to show me her city, the place I’ve lived most of my life but barely recognize.
I talk about how the buildings are all the same. The skin and hair varied but the skeletons and muscles and nerves and organs are virtually identical. Good for making people, boring for making cities. Like with people, you need to manage the inevitability of gravity and decay. Unlike with people, your materials aren’t limited to bone and flesh. Where I come from, there wasn’t much by way of architectural nostalgia. The past was thought of as an unsightly skin tag, kind of embarrassing, mostly benign, but with an implicit warning about how bad things can get if you don’t keep an eye on it. There were landmarks, of course, the Taj Mahals and Eiffel Towers and Washington Monuments of postcard history, but otherwise the charitable thing to do was raze it away.
And I talk about how the buildings are all so different. My world long ago embraced macroarchitecture—designing individual buildings as interlocked parts of an overall municipal whole, fusing cultural precedent, local taste, global trends, environmental context, and geographic specificity. Dubious macrodesigns would occasionally emerge, like how Beijing looks like a dragon from above and San Antonio is shaped like a giant version of the Alamo and Brasília’s grid replicates the map of Brazil. But macroarchitecture mostly spares cities from the aesthetic incoherence of this world.
Penny disagrees. Walking streets lined with mismatched buildings, what she sees isn’t visual clutter—it’s history made vivid, the juxtapositions that narrate the city. Every original detail, every date-stamped renovation, every brick and shingle and window and door and staircase have something to say about the city they made together. And every city has hundreds of these blocks, thousands, pages in its never-ending story.
I think about the other Penelope and the likelihood we ever would’ve spent a day like this. We had only the one night together and then . . . the parallel hits me, hard and blunt: This is the morning after the night before. Standing here on the sidewalk with Penny, it’s almost the exact time of day that Penelope stepped out of the defusion sphere and floated apart in front of me. But here she is, this version of her, the past razed away, sipping a coffee while traffic roars around us. This world is so blaringly, grindingly, screechingly loud, and in moments like this it’s hard to think straight.
“Are you okay?” Penny says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I was thinking about the, uh, other world.”
“The other world,” she says, “or the other me?”