There’s a jarring buzz and the glitter spray stops. The voice on the speaker tells us they ran all the requisite tests and there was no radiation leak—the alarm was triggered by a malfunction in the security system that monitors contaminant levels, but all precautionary protocols were followed, we performed admirably in a high-stress situation, and we can resume training as soon as we get dressed in the clean uniforms already waiting for us outside the decontamination chamber—but I’m not really listening because I’m trying to memorize every contour of Penelope’s body in the last few seconds we have together.
The air lock pops open with a depressurized hiss, and without a word, Penelope turns to exit ahead of me. And I think that would’ve been the end of it, I would’ve stuffed my febrile crush down into the fertile self-loathing I keep watered in my guts, and the rest of it never would’ve happened. Except as she bent over to squeeze out of the air lock, Penelope looked back at me. It wasn’t to confirm that I was okay after the scare or that I was following protocol. She was checking to see if I was staring at her ass on the way out. Which I was. By the time I understood why she’d even care it was much too late.
17
As the boss’s son, my introduction to the chrononaut team inspired some initial curiosity. A few of the understudies even flirted with me. But it didn’t take long for them to lapse into resentment and contempt. It was like my new colleagues took the same emotional journey my father did from the day I was born, except it took them only a month instead of thirty-two years.
The actual front-line chrononauts were mostly nice to me. Not, like, interested in my thoughts on the issues of the day or my taste in popular culture or my most endearing personal anecdotes, but they were basically polite. People with that level of focus and drive don’t spend much time thinking about anything other than the incredibly challenging tasks they’re facing. Bland friendliness is easier than spending even one joule of energy formulating an opinion on someone fundamentally irrelevant to you. Same with the scientists who worked on the theoretical models and the engineers who had to actually build the outlandishly complex technology. I was, after all, the boss’s son.
But the other understudies hated me.
To put this in perspective, even though they were not the front-line chrononauts chosen for the primary mission team, they were all highly accomplished top-tier professionals who would, in all likelihood, embark on subsequent missions.
And then there was me. They all knew I was there only because my father waived every possible qualifying requirement. Every task I messed up, every training module I failed, every cognitive analysis I couldn’t quite parse, not only made my presence more of an insult, but also pulled down their cumulative scores. To stay at an acceptable average, these hardworking men and women had to work even harder.
It was terrible. I would’ve quit after the first month. If it wasn’t for Penelope.
All of my father’s employees had felt obligated to attend my mother’s funeral, so when I started at the lab there was this awkward ritual where the first time I met anyone they immediately expressed sympathy for my loss. I’m sure they meant it, but I’m also sure that what they really wanted was for me to mention to my father how thoughtful they were if they ever came up in conversation with him, which they didn’t because my father and I barely spoke. Once our strained dynamic became common knowledge, the compassion seeped away, along with the intermittent flirtation and ambient curiosity.
The first time I met Penelope Weschler, it wasn’t that I was intimidated by her reputation or desperate to impress her, although I was both of those things, or even how she looked, lean and coiled and ready for anything at a time in my life when I felt qualified for nothing. The thing I noticed about her right away was what she didn’t do: mention my mother at all.
I assumed she was too immersed in her training to care about social niceties, but then, two weeks after I’d been assigned as her understudy, I showed up for a seminar on how the original Goettreider Engine prototype operated—the internal machinery was exceptionally complex, but to activate the device required just a single lever that was pulled up to turn it on and pulled down to turn it off, although it was designed to never switch off except in an emergency—and the technician giving the talk, whom I hadn’t yet met, took me aside for the ritualized expression of sympathy. I mumbled some socially mandated gratitude and sat in my assigned seat next to Penelope. In two weeks she hadn’t said anything to me that wasn’t a technical instruction about tolerance ratios or grid diagnostics. So I wasn’t expecting her to speak, in a low voice only I could hear, her gaze never wavering from the presentation happening in front of us.
“Sympathy is a transaction,” Penelope said. “If you let your grief be for sale, it’ll end up worthless.”
I was so shocked she’d spoken to me that I couldn’t muster a reply. But I knew exactly what she meant.
Like those little medical hammers that test reflex amplitude, a lifetime of paternal distance and maternal neediness had primed me to bond instantly, like an abandoned duckling to a passing swan, to a specific frequency of phatic empathy—genuine understanding stripped of pity.
I was in love with her, even though she didn’t know or care or want it. Her not knowing or caring or wanting it was intrinsic to her allure. I would’ve claimed, had anyone asked, that if Penelope actually liked me I’d probably be repelled. But as usual I was wrong.
18
When you’ve never really known what you want in life, spending a lot of time in close proximity to someone like Penelope Weschler is mesmerizing. She understood that my presence at her side for concurrent training was a requirement of her job and accepted it without question. Like the uniforms we wore at the lab, I was just part of the gig.
At least that’s what I figured. When you jump off a cliff, falling can look a whole lot like flying, for a while anyway.
I spent hours scrolling through dating algorithms trying to embroider my profile so the system would match me with Penelope, but her name never came up. A few of the other understudies overlapped with my appeal spectrum because profession is considered high yield for romantic compatibility, but by the expansive standards of artificially intelligent data correlation, Penelope and I were not a match. There was no math for us.
I spent three months training next to Penelope. She kept her hair bound in a tight ponytail, but sometimes wisps escaped and they’d dance in the breeze from the air-conditioning system. It’s the only thing about her that could be described as even borderline whimsical. Otherwise, she was relentless in her focus, determination, and grit.
It was clearly inappropriate and sort of creepy to ogle her when she had no choice but to train with me, so I willed myself not to look at her unless there was some reasonable professional justification for doing so. The exception was her hands. Since I was supposed to be learning from her, it was okay to watch her hands on the simulator controls. Her long, tapered fingers and peaked knuckles, wrists oddly delicate, somehow too thin for the tensile strength on display, muscles taut and wiry. I studied her dermatoglyphs like an antique palmist.
Penelope would display total mastery of whatever task she was given and when it was my turn she’d watch, patient, impassive, as I flailed around trying to imitate her moves. I felt ashamed, but the shame was wrapped around something else, like insulation—I knew the longer I failed, the longer she’d look at me.