As their time-travel romance continued over the years, these neuritic plaques, unique in human neurology because her situation was unique in human history, curdled into a coarse poison—malignant cancer cells buried deep in the memory centers of Ursula’s brain. They didn’t affect her everyday activity, until they outgrew their nest and went looking for new real estate.
Ursula knew she was losing it. She could feel her sharp, complex mind collapsing in on itself like a neglected backyard shed. For the preceding months, she’d kept their encounters brief and carnal to conceal the truth from Lionel. She never told him that she’d started chemotherapy treatments. She was worried about what he might do.
She knew him well.
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It’s the middle of the night on the other side of the planet, and between the trip to San Francisco, the flight to Hong Kong, and the shuffled time zones, Penny’s had a few days to think about everything that happened. What is she doing right now? Did she open the store, greet customers, shelve returns, order stock, act like nothing’s wrong? Is she sleeping peacefully or not at all? Is my absence making things better or worse? How can I prove to her incontrovertibly that John will never come back?
I need answers but what Lionel is giving me is just information. I expected the Lionel Goettreider who died in 1965, the selfless genius-martyr, his mistakes and failures and heartbreaks retroactively bronzed into biographical trivia. But here, in this world, they’re just mistakes and failures and heartbreaks. His face is not the face of a statue. It’s the face of a man worn down by time. And the more he talks, the less I trust him.
Maybe Penny would know how to respond to his confessions. Maybe she’d show the right mix of compassion and respect and curiosity. Maybe Penny would trust him. At least the Penny who existed before I showed up in her life. That morning with John, maybe it created a new version of reality, just like my time traveling did, one in which Penny is as different from the woman I met in the bookstore as I am from John.
You don’t need time travel to smash apart a world.
But it helps.
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Unfortunately, this is not the story of how Lionel Goettreider cured cancer. It’s the story of how the smartest person who ever lived failed to save the love of his life—and what that failure did to him.
Lionel was a physicist and an engineer, not an oncologist, not a geneticist. His genius had limits. He spent the next eighteen months trying to cure cancer or at least slow its progress. He couldn’t do it. Maybe if he’d attempted it a few decades earlier. But even his great insights into the mechanics of time travel happened in his forties and fifties. The subsequent decades were about solving the logistic barriers. He finished building his time machine in 2002 and had spent the past dozen years sleeping with Ursula and self-medicating to be physically capable of sleeping with Ursula. His best years were behind him. Still, he tried.
His most effective notion was nanotechnological hybrid bacteria that eat cancer cells. The problem was getting them, once unleashed, to distinguish midfeast between corrupted cells and the healthy cells adjacent to them. Sometimes the nanites just kept eating once they got a taste for human flesh, so they had to be carefully monitored.
Lionel went back to his final visit with Ursula. He didn’t want to be in the same place at the same time as himself, so he used the out-point of the beacon as his in-point. To Ursula, it was like he disappeared and instantly reappeared looking two years older.
She immediately understood what Lionel’s plan to save her life really was—and she didn’t want it. Her mind was gone and it wasn’t coming back. She was uninterested in a mindless life. She begged him not to go back any further. Even if they figured out the exact moment the cancer first appeared in her hippocampus, lodged deep in her medial temporal lobe, it was several years earlier. She needed her happy memories. She didn’t want to trade years’ worth of them for memories of his desperate and probably fruitless attempts to cure her. She wanted to die peacefully with whatever was left of her once-magnificent brain, lying in bed reminiscing about their times together. His body and her body, connected in a way that gave her life meaning, even if it was a secret meaning, a hidden meaning, a shameful meaning. If he were to take those memories away from her, it would be a far more devastating amputation than what happened to Jerome all those decades ago.
Lionel promised her he wouldn’t go back any further. They cried, they kissed, they said good-bye.
As soon as he returned to the present, he went back again. And again. And again. And again and again and again and again. He lost count of how many times he went back to that exact same moment. It’s not just the promise he made to her—there are technical reasons why he couldn’t go back any further than that last day together. But, each time, he tried a different way to convince Ursula to let him attempt to cure her. Each time, she refused. Each time they cried and kissed and said good-bye and each time he tried again.
He went back and forced her to take the treatment and the treatment failed and she died anyway, her final memory of him one of betrayal and anger. He tried again and forced her again and it failed again and she died in his arms, her brain consumed by out-of-control nanites, Lionel frantically trying to deactivate them before they ate her whole and infected him too. He tried again, failed again, tried again, failed again, and each time Ursula got worse, more confused, more disoriented, less present, less herself. Her husband and daughter just thought it was the ravages of her disease. To them, locked into linear time and unaware of Lionel’s chronic resetting of Ursula’s experience, it just seemed like she got very sick, very fast.
And so, for the first time in his life, Lionel Goettreider gave up. He went back one last time and Ursula was a wreck, because he wrecked her, and so he just held her and told her he was sorry. They cried, they kissed, and they said good-bye.
This time, he stayed in the past. Ursula collapsed in her kitchen the next day and Jerome rushed her to the hospital. She died six days later with Emma at her bedside.
Lionel went to the funeral, spoke with Emma for the first time, tried to apologize to Jerome, and when it was over he returned to the present. Before that, his longest time in the past had been about three hours. His final trip was just over a week.
You love someone for fifty years and then they die. People talk about grief as emptiness, but it’s not empty. It’s full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you would have. How do you keep five decades of love from souring into a snakebite that makes your own heart the threat, drawing the poison up and down the length of you?
Goddamn it, I don’t want to but I can’t help thinking about my father. And what it felt like for him when my mother died. Because of course I never asked.
I remember, a week after her death, finding a dozen grilled cheese sandwiches discarded on their kitchen counter with a single bite taken out of each one. I tossed them in the organic dissolution module and shook my head at my father’s self-absorption—he can unravel the mysteries of time travel but he can’t work the food synthesizer.
Now I understand. It wasn’t waste. It was longing. He was trying to re-create a meal his wife made him for thirty years. But the machine couldn’t get the flavor right. And so something as banal as a sandwich becomes fraught with sadness.
My father spent his life in Lionel Goettreider’s shadow and I spent my life judging him unworthy of the comparison. It took until now to see him for what he didn’t do. He didn’t use his time machine. He didn’t go back. He didn’t save her. Whatever pain he felt, he lived with it. He had an inner compass that eluded Lionel. And me too.
When my mother died, my father was four months away from the scientific triumph he’d worked on his whole life. I was all he had left. Even if it doesn’t matter, even if it never happened, even if the only place that pain still exists is in my memory, it turns out my father finally taught me something about love.
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