All Our Wrong Todays(21)

The gist of what he said is he wished I was never born.

That everything would’ve been better if I didn’t exist. Listless, aimless, useless, my life had no value. Worse, I’d ruined the lives of my betters. Namely, him and to a much lesser extent Penelope. That my mother was lucky she died before the true immensity of my failure was revealed.

All of a sudden it sunk in—my father thought that what I did with Penelope was all about him. An act of patricidal aggression. Penelope Weschler was his anointed one, our mission leader, the chrononaut to whom all others were compared and found wanting, and the night before the experiment that’s supposed to cement his scientific legacy not only do I have sex with her but I get her pregnant. Like I was claiming her.

To be honest, I’d never considered that there might be a thorny root of vengeance burrowed deep inside my longing and desire. No, that was too messed up even for me. So I was totally goddamn outraged. Like, of course my arrogant, egocentric, cheerless father would try to take this from me and make it his. Maybe we find the most offense in the truths we can’t admit.

I decided it was time to ask the fundamental question of my life.

“Why did you even have me?”

“Because I had work to do,” my father said, “and your mother was lonely.”

Today was supposed to be a day unique in human history. And it was. It was the day my father was finally honest with me.

Listening to him rant, while the woman I loved sat there calculating how to turn this to her advantage, I felt like I was time traveling, back to every moment in my life when my father could’ve gotten angry at me, could’ve gotten anything at me. It was a glimpse at what it might have been like if I’d grown up with this father, the honest one, instead of the liar, the genius, the ghost.

The time I ran away from home for nineteen days, this is what I wanted. Instead, my mother made me a grilled cheese sandwich and refused to discuss any of it. My father wandered into the kitchen and, without even acknowledging I was back, picked up the sandwich, assuming it was for him, and trotted back to his study to eat it behind the heavy closed door. My mother cried and I held her and apologized over and over.

Eventually my father’s venom tapered off and Penelope tried to steer the conversation back to how crucial she could still be to the mission.

“You slept with my son,” my father said. “You’ll never be part of this or any other mission. Everyone will know what you did. It’s over for you.”

“This mission means everything to me,” Penelope said. “Please, Dr. Barren . . .”

“By all means, call me Victor,” he said. “Since you don’t work for me anymore.”

I don’t know if he was trying to hurt her or it was just that the outer halo of his anger for me was corrosive to all who ventured near, but something inside her switched off. She went numb, her face pale and loose, eyes glassy, opaque. She understood.

My father told her to submit a final report while he informed his investors that, due to an unfortunate personnel issue, the experiment was postponed until further notice.

He was really doing it. He was canceling the first mission back in time. The best day of my life followed by the worst day of my life. Everyone would know. Everyone would know about this forever.

Penelope left without another word. I stood to go too, but he said he wasn’t done with me yet. He wasn’t even mad anymore, like his last jab at Penelope expelled the poison and he could go back to being detached and superior. My father droned on, cataloguing the many cascading disappointments I’d subjected him to over the years—my unimpressive academic record, lack of personal interests, listless career track, inability to foster a single socially, culturally, or even politically meaningful relationship—and, honestly, I was surprised he remembered any of that stuff since he rarely even acknowledged I was in the same room with him.

And that’s when I realized something that made me just about explode.

Penelope wasn’t going to file a report. She had nothing left to say. She was going somewhere else and she was going there right now.





33


For all my father’s genius, he had no clue why I lunged for the door. He hadn’t figured out what Penelope was about to do.

I raced down the hall, twisting my ankle as I took a corner too fast, bounced off a wall hard enough to leave a bruise, and skittered down the stairs, my foot flaring hot with pain. I knew I was right because I heard that familiar basso profundo hum as soon as the door seal cracked open to the high-ceilinged room that housed the defusion spheres.

One of the spheres was active.

I was rooted to the floor, my mind as blank as it’s ever been. Maybe this was what Penelope felt like when she went to space. I heard people skid into the room behind me, technicians yelling at each other about how the security protocols were overridden. The alarms blared just like the day Penelope and I first saw each other naked. But that was the beginning of something and this was the end.

Penelope came out of the defusion sphere. Except the entry hatch was still closed. She walked right through it. Which is supposed to be impossible because the defusion sphere is constructed from a high-density compound that suppresses immateriality. Or at least it does within safe dosage parameters. Nobody’s ever seen what happens at unsafe dosage.

Which is why everybody went silent when she stepped out. Stepped through.