“You don’t know,” says Stewart. “Okay, well, that’s the other thing I’ve never heard you say. You always know. You’re the most arrogant know-it-all son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
My brain feels swollen, like it’s trying to push out of my ears and find a more hospitable residence. I press my forehead against the table’s cool, epoxied surface. I can feel the sweat trickling from my armpits down along my rib cage. I’ve spent my whole life deliberately avoiding situations in which anyone looks to me for answers.
“You’re right,” I say. “I do know. I know what every building in this city should look like. What every city on this planet should look like. We’re so far away from where we should be. But it’s too much. I can’t fix the whole world.”
“John, nobody expects you to,” Stewart says.
“I’m taking an indefinite leave of absence,” I say. “Starting today.”
“What are you talking about?” Stewart says. “We’ve got half a dozen projects in process. Hundreds of commission opportunities have come in since your speech. The concert hall in Chicago. We promised to deliver your initial concept next week.”
“I’ll come in on the weekend and finish the design. Put anything that needs my signature on my desk and I’ll sign it. After that, you’re on your own.”
On the way out, I forget the door doesn’t open automatically so I smack my nose against it, hard enough to rupture blood vessels in my anterior nasal septum. I leave a streak of blood on the glass and don’t look back. My head throbs with pain and something else—a slithering coil of anger buried too deep to slow me down. I know I’m destroying everything John built, but I don’t care because it’s all a lie. I’m not a genius or a visionary or a leader or whatever else these people have deluded themselves into believing. I’m not and have never been anything at all.
83
Penny actually gasps when she walks into my parents’ house and sees their elaborate, fetishized book collection. My mom immediately recognizes a kindred spirit and in less than sixty seconds they’re debating the merits of various Victorian binding procedures and I accept that I’m done for—I won’t say anything anyone finds remotely interesting for the rest of the evening.
It gets worse over dinner, some eccentric ratatouille recipe my dad picked up at a conference in Toulouse, when Penny asks about his book on time travel. Greta groans like a teenager and my dad flushes, trying to parse if she’s making fun of him. Penny tells him she’s a lifelong speculative-fiction fan and would love to know more about his views on the topic.
That’s all my dad needs—that and two glasses of pinot noir—to launch into his adolescent obsession and secret shame, prone to whispering key terms as if saying them at full volume would bring the Science Police crashing through the front door to arrest him for Crimes Against Serious Physics. In the other world, my father spoke with arrogant bombast and squinty, patronizing boredom, like he knew everything he said was fascinating and important but the mental energy required to dumb it down enough for anyone other than him to understand wasn’t really worth the effort. Here, my dad is delighted to even be asked, since his colleagues continue to rib him about his book years after it was published to zero acclaim and total neglect by the general public.
My dad’s book was a breezy analysis of why time travel, as depicted in mainstream entertainment, doesn’t make scientific, technical, or logistic sense. But tucked between the zippy puns and pop-culture references was a sincere exploration of how it possibly might work, which was of course the thing my dad continued to ponder even though he knew it could lead only to professional embarrassment and academic censure if he dared to speak his theories aloud in distinguished company or, worse, commit them to publication.
But around the dinner table—while I sop up the remains of the ratatouille with crusty spelt bread and my mom takes the dessert she baked out of the oven and my sister opens another bottle of pinot noir and Penny listens to my dad with guileless interest while her foot occasionally presses down on mine under the table—he can speak openly without fear of any ridicule more acrid than the exasperated sighs Greta doesn’t bother to conceal as she accidentally splits half the cork into the bottle because her fine motor skills decrease exponentially with each glass of wine. I watch, amused, as Greta pours herself a glass flecked with bobbing cork bits and picks them out with her thumb. She looks at me and shrugs and I feel blown through with love for her.
I catch my mom’s eye as she glances over from the kitchen, sprinkling powdered sugar on the dessert. She gives a little nod of approval in Penny’s vicinity.
This is what I’m talking about. This is the happiness I don’t deserve. Not after what I did. This pleasant family moment is a piece of cork floating in a sea of blood.
84
My mom comes out of the kitchen with an antique porcelain platter that belonged to her grandmother, the border an azure geometric pattern laced with gold filigree.
On it are a dozen lemon tarts.
“I made your favorite,” my mom says.
My internal organs clench, a cold, sick sweat worming from my pores. I must look visibly stricken, because my mom hesitates before placing them on the table.
“Wow,” says Greta. “The fancy platter.”
“What’s wrong?” says my mom.
“Nothing,” I say.
“They look delicious,” says Penny.
“It’s my grandmother’s recipe,” my mom says. “I make them every year for John’s birthday. Right before he turned five he announced he hated birthday cake . . .”
“At which point you should’ve used corporal punishment till he came to his senses,” says Greta. “How can a human being not like birthday cake?”
“So, I started making him lemon tarts,” my mom says. “One for every year.”
“Which was an adorable tradition when he was five,” says Greta, “but less so at age thirty-two. He probably eats one and throws the rest away.”
“He does not,” says my mom. “You don’t throw them away, do you?”
“John, are you feeling okay?” my dad says. “You look pale.”
My mother was dead, torn in half by a flying car, and now she’s alive, looking exactly the same except her posture is better, holding a platter of the lemon tarts I was never going to taste again.
“I’m great,” I say. “Thanks for making them.”
I pick up a lemon tart. It tastes the same as the ones from my world. Collapsing the sensory boundary between realities is too much for any pastry to bear. I reach for the wine bottle. And I drink.
I drink because of course I like perfect avocados and waking up into my own dreams and jet packs being a completely reasonable teenage birthday gift and clean air and global peace but I am in no way selfless—I’m happier here with my mom and dad and Greta and Penny than I ever was back there, a place that’s already getting gauzy and frail in my memory. Except there’s Deisha. And Xiao and Asher. And Hester and Megan and Tabitha. And the chrononauts and understudies from my father’s lab and my coworkers and classmates and Robin Swelter and her parents and her brother who punched me and the kids who helped me that time I ran away and the girls who hooked up with me when I came back to school and the billions of unborn strangers I never even met and if I ever forgive myself for taking their lives away from them it’ll be the exact moment they’re all lost forever.
85