My father’s interpretation of “He’s lost, my love, so you must help him be found” was to offer me a job.
We sat in his study, the lemon tree that saved his life outside the window, fat lemons hanging heavy on its branches, ripe for lemon tarts that would never be made for a birthday that he would forget and I would ignore. My father has given countless public lectures about the future, but this was the only one I can remember that had anything to do with me. The gist of it was that his father gave him the freedom to find his own way in the world and he’d wanted to do the same for me, to respect that even if it seemed that I was meandering through a dispiriting procession of pointless endeavors, maybe an actual direction would eventually emerge, as if by sorcery, from the haze of randomness and caprice. But after thirty-two years, my father thought it was time to reassess that judgment. After all, my grandfather was a pharmacist, not a visionary inventor, so it stands to reason that I, as the progeny of greatness, might require firmer parenting.
To sum up—he’s a genius, I am not, I am a disappointment, he is not. He didn’t need me to tell him he was a genius, and I didn’t. I didn’t need him to tell me I was a disappointment, but he did.
It’s interesting that neither of us, for even a moment, thought my mother might not have been talking about me. “He’s lost, my love, so you must help him be found,” she said. We both assumed I was the lost he and my father the my love. Even though I was the one at her bedside, holding her hand in those final hours, feeling the papery skin against my fingers, trying to ignore that everything below her rib cage was gone, a grim magic trick. But the idea that he might be the lost one wasn’t worth considering, let alone that I could be the one to help.
All the chrononauts had understudies—contingency associate is the official term—who trained alongside them, learning everything they did, ready to take their place on the historic mission in the unlikely event they were somehow incapacitated. When my father appointed me as Penelope Weschler’s understudy, he presented it as a vote of confidence, letting me train next to his very best chrononaut.
This was obviously bullshit. I was made Penelope’s understudy for two reasons. One, the condescending side of my father hoped if I worked closely with someone as impressive as her, some of her focus and drive might rub off on me. Two, the pragmatic side of my father recognized that, of all the chrononauts, Penelope was by far the least likely to need an understudy. She was the most instructive and also the safest choice.
On a petty, sad, adolescent level, I still get a tiny shiver of pleasure at how seriously, for all his towering intellect, my father misunderstood Penelope.
But not me. He had me pegged just right.
This is how someone of my wildly limited capacities was granted a key—although clearly incidental—role in the planet’s most sought-after scientific experiment.
You could see it as my father dutifully honoring my mother’s deathbed wish. I prefer to think that she had to die for him to pay attention to anything she said.
13
Death is slippery. Our minds can’t latch onto it. Over time, you learn to accommodate the gap in your life that the loss opens up. Like a black hole, you know it’s there because it’s the spot from which no light escapes. And there’s the sinewy exhaustion, the physical toll of grief that you just can’t seem to sleep away. If I’d been thinking clearly I never would’ve accepted the job with my father.
My mother drove me crazy a lot of the time, but the idea that she’s never coming back makes no sense to me. She birthed me. Half of me is made of her. She was shaping my consciousness before I was a self-aware entity. Whatever her faults, she was a warm place no matter how cold a day might be. But she’s never coming back.
When you’re young, you think of your parents with the simplest adjectives. As you get older, you add more adjectives and notice some of them contradict each other. He’s tall. He’s tall and strong. He’s tall and strong and smart. He’s tall and strong and smart but busy. He’s tall and strong and smart but busy and aloof and judgmental. She’s safe. She’s safe and kind. She’s safe and kind and caring. She’s safe and kind and caring but sad. She’s safe and kind and caring but sad and lonely and brittle. Maturity colonizes your adolescent mind, like an ultraviolet photograph of a vast cosmic nebula that turns out, on closer examination, to be a pointillist self-portrait.
In a world of negligible crime, police services were combined with actuarial functions—cops were federally empowered security and insurance operatives who assessed damage, allocated blame, and assigned reparatory figures. Within hours of the accident that killed my mother, the circumstances were analyzed, the appropriate funds transferred, a diagnostic patch relayed to all linked navigation systems, a letter of apology issued by the liable companies, and the assembly robot that constructed the faulty code box disabled and melted into repurposable scrap.
My father arranged the funeral, tied up some legal matters, and was back to work within the week. After all, he had his arbitrary deadline to hit—mourning makes the days seem both longer and shorter, but July 11, 2016, was fixed on the calendar, and nothing, not even his wife’s death, would stop my father from making history. And if any small part of me considered, even for a moment, that he might not be thinking clearly either, it was a small, silent minority too disenfranchised to raise its voice.
14
I mentioned there are two reasons I was assigned to be Penelope’s understudy—my father’s condescension and pragmatism. Plus the deathbed promise, which I guess makes three reasons.
But there’s a fourth reason too: Penelope and I were genetically compatible for the defusion sphere. It’s a machine that infuses your body with a molecular immateriality field, allowing you to physically move through objects and vice versa. So, if you launch back in time and accidentally land in the middle of some object, large or small, it’ll pass harmlessly through your body or you through it. Chrononauts remain immaterial the whole time they’re in the past. They can touch nothing and nothing can touch them.
The immateriality field lasts a maximum of fourteen minutes. Beyond that, your molecules drift apart and, well, you die. From the moment you’re decorporealized, you have fourteen minutes to return to the defusion sphere before you come fatally unglued.
Because the fourteen-minute window is so strict, the six chrononauts all require their own defusion sphere, so they can be simultaneously rendered immaterial prior to engaging the time-travel apparatus. But it’s extremely complicated to calibrate a device that requires precision at the molecular level. It’s also very expensive.
What helps with both calibration and cost is if you put only genetically compatible people into the same defusion sphere. Recalibrating to accommodate major genomic inconsistencies takes several days. When my father’s invention is brought to market, they’ll need a more efficient way to make time-travel tourists immaterial in the past—but that’s a problem he doesn’t need to solve just yet.
As it happened, Penelope Weschler and I were highly genetically compatible. It’s the kind of thing that might come up on a cell-donation program if your fetal stem cells had accidentally been corrupted during cryogenesis and you developed some eukaryotic biomolecular illness. Or on a dating profile if you were looking to start a family but faced reproductive challenges. Our respective chromosomes naturally lined up like zipper teeth. It made it quick and easy for the technicians to recalibrate Penelope’s defusion sphere when her contingency associate needed to use it.
They told me that, of all the understudies, I required the least recalibration to my assigned chrononaut. It was without a doubt the only criterion at which I excelled, because of course it was the one that didn’t require me to try. I simply had to . . . exist.