“I was listening,” my mom says. “You feel like a fraud. You’ve convinced yourself that you plagiarized all your best ideas from another dimension.”
“All those buildings that everyone thinks are so bold and visionary,” I say, “I didn’t come up with any of it. I dreamed it and claimed it as my own. I’m not some genius. I’m a rip-off artist and sooner or later they’ll figure it out.”
“That’s how everybody feels,” she says. “You don’t think I felt like that when I started teaching? When I wrote my first book? When I became dean? We all feel like frauds. That’s the secret of life. Everybody’s winging it.”
“I know what imposter syndrome is,” I say. “This isn’t that.”
“Okay,” she says, “you’re not some hotshot architect. You’re a phony and a thief. Except you’re plagiarizing buildings that don’t exist. That have only ever existed in your mind. So, take a moment to consider maybe that’s how everyone who creates something new feels. As if they had nothing to do with it. Like they plucked it out of the ether and signed their name at the bottom and none of the credit is deserved.”
“No, Mom, this is something else.”
“You got a little bit famous. Even a little bit of fame can mess with your head. It’s a cognitive disease, you know, fame? It used to only be for royalty and we know what they’re like. I’m not much of a Freudian, but something about fame makes the id and the superego devour the ego like anacondas in a cage, right before they cannibalize each other. Fame warps your identity, metastasizes your anxieties, and hollows you out like a jack-o’-lantern. It’s sparkly pixie dust that burns whatever it touches like acid.”
“Mom, I’m an architect. I’m barely famous. I’m maybe slightly well-known.”
“And look what happened,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been slightly well-known for six months and the fact that it coincided with you going kind of bonkers is, what, unrelated? Random happenstance? Do you know what Jung said about coincidence? He said just because we can’t see the destination, it doesn’t mean that no road goes there.”
“I’m too tired to keep talking about this,” I say. “Especially if you’re going to bring Freud and Jung into it, that’s just cruel.”
“Then consider this one last thing,” my mom says. “There’s no way back. This disappointing, moribund reality you’re stranded in, we don’t have any time machines here. Your home planet is gone forever. You know that, right?”
I shrug. I can’t quite say it out loud.
“Maybe it’s all true,” she says. “Maybe you are stealing all your best ideas from your magical fantasyland. But if that world is lost and if, as you claim, you’re the one who lost it, then don’t you owe it to that world to make this one better?”
“Better how?” I say.
“You have a responsibility,” she says. “You’re the only one who can show us what paradise looks like. You can build us a future to live in. And I mean that literally, build it in brick and steel and glass. You may not think you’re a genius. You may think you’re a fraud, a bandit, a world-killing monster. But you’re all we have.”
I don’t know what to say to that. It sounds a little triumphalist to me, but my mom wouldn’t be the first mother with a grandiose perception of her child.
“Chase this mystery to San Francisco if you have to,” she says. “But be safe and come home to us. There’s work to do here, in this world, the world you live in, not the world you dream of. They don’t actually even need you. Not like we do.”
My mom hugs me, opens her office door, walks down the hall to her bedroom, and joins my dad inside.
93
Penny and I go back to her place. I’ve basically been living there since we met because my condo doesn’t feel like home. She calls one of her staffers to open the bookstore so we can sleep most of the day. Her bedroom windows face east and the morning sunshine is bright and pushy.
Everything that happened last night rattles around in my head as I try to sleep next to Penny. She’s deadweight pressed against my side, wearing underwear and a soft, thin T-shirt, her head notched into that groove where my shoulder meets my collarbone, wisps of her hair tickling my chin and lips. She breathes out, heavy and deep.
I feel lighter, unburdened after telling my family the truth, even if it would’ve been smarter, probably, to let them think my feverish babbling about alternate realities at the hospital was just a fleeting synaptic glitch.
I forgot to write tonight. Penny suggested that I jot down recollections of my life, a few minutes every evening before we go to bed, a daily routine as a way to hold on to the truth. So I’ve been doing that, typing on John’s laptop, a little bit each night. But the world feels too big and the words feel too small, and turning the slushy tangle of memories into clean lines of text makes them feel less real, more fictive and faraway.
And what do those memories really get me? Was I happy there? No.
Lying here with Penny, I feel happy. Curled up with her in the bed that feels like home to me, I realize that for the first time I’m intentionally letting Tom go. John is slipping under the door like fingers of smoke from a basement fire, wonderfully calming compared to Tom’s constant anxious clamoring. Everyone I care about will be happier when I’m gone. Even Penny. Tom makes everything so hard, so messy, so complicated.
John wouldn’t still be awake. He’d realize his whole life had been slightly out of focus and now it’s finally in crisp relief—he had an undiagnosed mental illness that quietly cohered in the damp corners of his mind and, when his defenses were temporarily lowered, it tried to seize control. But its moment has passed. The virus that is Tom has no plan of action, just a list of demands. It wanted to be in charge but, like so many aspiring despots, it hadn’t projected beyond the coup to the day-to-day grind of running the show. Anyone can overthrow a government. It’s ruling that’s hard.
Penny shifts in her sleep, turning onto her side. She presses her underwear-clad ass against my hip, pulls the covers up under her chin. I twist onto my side too and she pushes into me. Her hair smells of lemon and rosemary and something else, a scent I’m still trying to place when I fall asleep.
94
I wake up feeling clean. No, cleaned out. Hollowed out maybe, but in a good way. Like a fat tumor was removed while I slept in Penny’s bed.
Tom is gone. That whining, miserable, damaged jerk-off is gone. Good riddance.
He haunted me like a ghoul my whole goddamn life. I thought it would be a relief to let him out of his cage but he turned out to be a yawn. All that pointless regret.
I’ll give him one thing, he found Penny. Laid her out for me on a silver platter. No effort required. Just lying there next to me, ready for whatever I want. So I kiss her neck until she starts to wake up and then I tug down those panties. She keeps trying to turn around and look at me but I don’t let her. Maybe I’m too rough, hard to say sometimes with women, the ways they like to be treated that they can’t admit out loud.
After, she’s quiet. Asks what’s wrong with me and I say I’ve never felt better. And it’s true. My mind has never been so clear. She starts to cry. Asks what happened to Tom. I tell her he’s gone and she cries some more.
I grab a shower. Water pressure’s crap. Whoever built this dump got ripped off by the plumbing contractor. Shower doesn’t even have a rain head. She comes in, naked, staring me in the eye, hard and soft at the same time, hot water spraying down on us, and asks if I’m still in there. I say what does that even mean and she says I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to him. Tom.
I think about pretending to be him for long enough to have her again but I don’t even want her anymore. Not worth the hassle.