Where I come from, the storytelling ritual is a private one, because to experience an immersive narrative saturated with your own psychological weirdness is viscerally personal and your body reacts like it’s actually happening: laughter, arousal, disgust, rage, terror. Experiencing that in public would be as socially inappropriate as passing gas in an airtight container surrounded by strangers—but then someone sitting near me seems okay with that too.
Of course, most people would consider this progress—hundreds of us squeezed into a 750,000-pound metal tube hurtling 35,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, atomized by headphones and screens, drinking syrupy liquids and ignoring each other’s body odors in the bubbles of pseudo-privacy that social propriety carves from this temporary communal space. But what really stands out is how joyless it is. The technology that makes it possible to fly through the air, across the planet, inspires none of the honeyed optimism that’s at the core of my world’s sense of itself.
And I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. My sister was talking about this at dinner the other night: The current state of the world isn’t because we stopped believing in an optimistic spirit of wonder and discovery, the current state of the world is the consequence of that belief. People are despondent about the future because they’re increasingly aware that we, as a species, chased an inspiring dream that led us to ruin. We told ourselves the world is here for us to control, so the better our technology, the better our control, the better our world will be. The fact that for every leap in technology the world gets more sour and chaotic is deeply confusing. The better things we build keep making it worse. The belief that the world is here for humans to control is the philosophical bedrock of our civilization, but it’s a mistaken belief. Optimism is the pyre on which we’ve been setting ourselves aflame.
If this was fiction, I’d need to think hard about what message I hope to convey as an alternative to the control myth that’s ideologically warped our species into progressive self-annihilation. Fortunately, this is a memoir. And the best thing about a memoir is it doesn’t even need to make sense.
I try to rest my delinquent brain by listening to songs on John’s cell. I think about what makes music here so different from the music I grew up with. It takes me most of the flight to figure it out—punk and hip-hop didn’t happen in my world. So, yes, I admit that this world has the edge when it comes to music.
104
The plane lands and I catch a car service from Chek Lap Kok airport, across Lantau Island, Tsing Yi, and Kowloon, and through the tunnel under Victoria Harbour to Hong Kong Island. I check into a hotel in Causeway Bay and ask the night-shift concierge, Roland, if the information I called ahead from San Francisco to request has arrived. It hasn’t, but I slip Roland a grand in US cash for arranging the inquiries on my behalf. I’m so turned around by the time zones that I can’t sleep even though it’s the middle of the night. I walk down streets lit up so bright with shadowless fluorescence it feels like I’m in a mall with an infinitely high ceiling. I find an all-hours noodle shop, slurp back slippery ropes in a fragrant broth, and on the way back to the hotel I take some stupid detour through an underlit side street and get mugged by a teenager who waves a knife at me, lazily threatening. I’m too out of it to do anything but hand over the wad of Hong Kong dollars I bought at the price-gouging airport currency exchange and let him count his bounty right in front of me. It doesn’t feel like my adrenaline even spiked, but when I get back to my hotel room I fall into a dreamless sleep.
A ringing phone wakes me up in the early afternoon. It’s the day-shift concierge, Ana?s, letting me know the information I called ahead from San Francisco to request is waiting for me in the lobby, along with a local gentleman demanding five thousand dollars for its retrieval. Groggy from circadian dysrhythmia, I tell Ana?s to pay the guy and have the information brought up to my room by a bellhop, along with some coffee and milk. She takes a moment to run my name through whatever database she has at her disposal and decides to just do it without additional fuss.
Six minutes later I’m drinking not completely horrible coffee with too-thick milk, looking at the view of Victoria Harbour out the wraparound windows and holding an envelope licked shut. When I open it, the adhesive is still damp from a stranger’s tongue. Inside is a piece of paper, folded twice, printed with an address.
The car service takes me to Wan Chai, where I discover I’m actually looking for Chai Wan, which seems a bit deliberately confounding but for all I know there’s an obvious pronunciation difference and my confusion is culturally insensitive. Wan Chai is west of Causeway Bay and Chai Wan is east so the driver, a paunchy local with a jaunty chauffeur’s cap and an Australian accent, backtracks past the gleaming towers and high-end shops of Causeway Bay to the less glittery, more industrial side of the island.
The driver pulls up at the address—a warehouse, huge but unadorned, at the end of a blunt, unpopulated road. It has aluminum siding from top to bottom, flat roof, no windows, and the only visible way in or out is a single heavy steel door. I press a buzzer next to the door. Nobody answers. I try the door. It’s locked. I walk the perimeter of the warehouse, which takes almost ten minutes because it’s really big. The back and sides look just like the front except without a door. The building appears to be a perfect cube.
But when I come around to the front again, a thick-necked man in a well-tailored suit stands outside the door with a cell to his ear. He barks at me in Cantonese and I hand him the piece of paper, which he crumples into a ball in his fist. His suit jacket hangs open just enough to show me a semiautomatic pistol in a shoulder holster. He murmurs something into his cell, which apparently has a call running, listens, looks at me, and nods. He uncrumples the piece of paper, takes out a pen, and writes another address on it.
I walk away from the man with the gun, and the car service takes me to the new address in Shek O, a peninsula on the scenic southeastern tip of the island. The address turns out to be a multileveled modernist mansion perched on a craggy red cliff overlooking the South China Sea. It’s sleek but classic, sharp lines, elegant materials, integrating local architectural traditions with a confident globalist style. The driver says a house like that on a property like this would cost around thirty million dollars. I think he’s expecting quite the tip.
As I crunch along the pebbled courtyard leading to the front door, I notice the stones have two shades, light gray and dark gray, and they form a shape that’s ubiquitous where I come from but considerably less so here. The pebbled shape is huge, big enough that you could see it from a satellite in orbit. The pilomotor reflex kicks in, every hair on my body raised in its pore. Because—it’s a whorl.
I knock on the hand-carved wood front door.
The door opens.
When I saw him in 1965, he was forty-two. Which makes him ninety-three now. He still has the long face and crooked nose, although some blood vessels have broken along the bridge. Those full lips are thinner, his face ridged with wrinkles, his curly hair gone white and brittle. But he still has the thick eyebrows over three-colored eyes. He meets my startled expression with an amused grin.
It’s Lionel Goettreider.
“Finally,” he says.
105
So, Lionel Goettreider is real, he’s alive, and he’s been waiting for me.
“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Barren,” he says. “I’m Lionel Goettreider. I assume you’re here to talk about time travel.”
Since leaving San Francisco, I’ve been practicing what I might say, on the off chance I actually found him, to convince Lionel Goettreider I’m not a lunatic. I didn’t expect that I wouldn’t have to explain myself at all. I thought I’d be more nervous meeting him, the towering figure of my world. But I’ve seen him so many times in simulations that it’s like running into the parent of a childhood friend at the grocery store—the main shock is how they’ve aged.