Like a lot of high-functioning technical geniuses, when Lionel had a plan he could accomplish the impossible. But when he didn’t have a plan, when all he could do was wait with no end in sight, he started to think about the possible. For example, all the things you could do with a time machine.
For thirty-four years, Lionel let Ursula contact him. On a whim, for the first time he contacted her instead. They arranged to meet at a picturesque inn outside Naples. He understood the look on her face when he opened the door to the room—this really was it. She couldn’t do it anymore. She came to say good-bye.
And so, as they lay in bed together, the late afternoon sun glowing through the open window, he told Ursula about his breakthrough. Together, they came up with a plan.
Ursula’s main anxiety was that Jerome would find out about the affair and use it to destroy her relationship with Emma. Her daughter was the great unspoken between Ursula and Lionel. They talked about pretty much everything except the obvious math underlying Emma’s parentage. Ursula led a double life, caught between twin realities, dedicated wife and mother versus torrid, intellectually star-crossed lover. But in Ursula’s mind it required Emma to be Jerome’s.
Time travel solved a number of structural challenges with managing an affair between two hemispheres. This is how they did it—Ursula would go somewhere private, it didn’t matter where, and she’d turn on a signal-frequency beacon that Lionel made for her. If there were no interruptions for an allotted time, say, three hours, she’d turn off the beacon and send Lionel a message with its spatiotemporal coordinates.
As soon as Ursula sent the message, a memory would surge in, like it had temporarily slipped her mind—she had spent those hours with Lionel. He had appeared as soon as the beacon was activated. It could be anywhere. A hotel or an inn, but also her office, even her own bedroom. As long as they were careful and precise, they could have time and time and time. They were both scientists, so careful and precise came easily.
They had more than a decade of this arrangement, seeing each other several times a week, the happiest years of Lionel’s life. Occasionally he considered visiting himself in the past to help develop the technology sooner, so he could have more time with Ursula when they weren’t so old and didn’t need so many pharmaceutical inducements to enjoy each other’s bodies. But that seemed unwise. Dangerous and foolish. He was still a scientist, careful and precise.
And then the beacon wasn’t turned on for a whole week. Then two. Three. Before the time machine, a year or even two could go by with no contact between them. But now he was used to seeing her almost every day.
Still, Lionel was good at waiting. He’d waited most of his life.
It took just over a month before he found out that Ursula was dead.
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Lionel lapsed into a deep depression. It all felt pointless. He began to doubt I’d ever show up. Maybe the time traveling he did to be with Ursula had corrupted his reality. Maybe he was waiting for someone who would never come.
After six months webbed into a restless lethargy, Lionel came up with a new plan. It was bad science, the opposite of genius, but he didn’t care. With Ursula gone, the mask he wore in her presence, the best him, that man was gone too. All that was left was who he was without her.
The last time he’d seen Ursula was the day before she collapsed in her kitchen and Jerome rushed her to the hospital. She died six days later with Emma at her bedside.
Lionel had an existential decision to make. He could use the beacons Ursula had set for him in the past to go back and try to cure her cancer before it took root. But it would mean remaking experiences of Ursula’s that he’d already revised. The results would be unpredictable.
Until this point, his trips back in time had been consistent and seemingly without consequence. This was different. This was tying the space-time continuum in knots. And the effect could be profound—he might save the life of the woman he loved.
So he did what you do when you’re heartbroken and have a time machine—something stupid.
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It was the time travel that did it to her.
I don’t know how much more patience you have for semi-lucid explanations of time-travel physics, but I need to make something clear—Lionel’s version of time travel wasn’t the same as my father’s. Both of them figured out how to send a person backward in space and time, but they went about it in categorically different ways. Two separate roads to the destination.
A crucial distinction is—I went back to before my own birth and accidentally caused a new timeline to branch off from that point, but Lionel was traveling within his own lifetime to other locations on the planet. Which meant he existed simultaneously in two places at the same moment in time.
So it took him a lot longer to realize what I learned right away—time travel is bad for the human brain. Your body can handle it, more or less, but your mind struggles with the cognitive dissonance.
At first, it seems okay. Your brain is very good at managing cognitive dissonance. Arguably, it’s your brain’s main purpose. Your senses absorb a calamitous frenzy of information every moment you’re conscious, and your brain has to streamline it all into coherence so that you can function. It lets you focus, shunts unnecessary stimuli to the periphery, and parses huge gulps of perceptual data with dazzling heuristic tricks.
Like movies. You know how movies work, right? What you see as a moving image is actually a series of sequential still frames that your brain interprets as movement thanks to persistence of vision and the stroboscopic effect. Your brain’s prodigious capacity to cohere data is why a painting can look gorgeously lifelike from a distance but, up close, degenerates into globs of pigment on canvas. Or how the individual instruments of an orchestra gel into a symphony.
Lionel’s version of time travel didn’t ask his brain to hold simultaneous memories of the same time at the same time. He experienced his trips to the past as present-tense events. He always returned to the present after the same amount of time he spent in the past—if he left the present at 8:00 P.M. and spent two hours in the past, he’d return to the present at 10:00 P.M. The reason for this time management was so he could age properly, but it also meant his brain was never required to double up on its experiential intake. When he got back to the present, his memory of the past didn’t feel like the past. It felt like he’d teleported to another location in another time zone. It’s just that the time zone was in the past. So his memories maintained accurate chronology.
But Ursula’s didn’t.
Lionel wasn’t overwriting his own experiences, but she was, and it destroyed Ursula’s mind. The conflicting timelines gnawed at the structural integrity of her neural barriers. They were just trying to protect her marriage by using only the hours they already knew would be safe, but each time Lionel went back to see her Ursula’s brain mapped a new memory over the old one.
The immediate effect was negligible. The cumulative effect was devastating. Her brilliant, expansive mind, the thing that most attracted him to her, that made her who she was, came undone. No human being had ever experienced this before, having small parcels of their memories revised, again and again and again. To cope, her brain, as a biological organ, began to secrete neuritic plaques to scab over what it interpreted as damage to the gray matter, similar in protein structure to the abnormal neurofibrillary tangles of Alzheimer’s disease.