All Our Wrong Todays(35)

Tom has no choice but to take action, shoving Lionel to safety. As the immense heat radiating off the device fries the circuitry of the time-travel apparatus—activating the emergency return function that automatically propels him to his own time—he pulls up the lever to turn the Engine back on before it’s too late.

Not knowing if his desperate final act worked, Tom disappears.





56


Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Shit. Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck fuck shit shit shit shit fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck shit fuck shit fuck shit shit fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Shit shit fuck shit. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit shit fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit. Fuck fuck shit fuck fuck fuck shit. Fuck.





57


You wake up in a hospital.

You wake up in a hospital and they tell you that you collapsed at a building site.

You wake up in a hospital and they tell you that you collapsed at a building site and they’re not sure what exactly went wrong with your brain, but whatever it was involved you twitching and writhing on the poured concrete floor and saying “fuck” and occasionally “shit” over and over again.

They say your name is John Barren.

They say your name is John Barren and they don’t know why you think your name is Tom Barren.

They say your name is John Barren and they don’t know why you think your name is Tom Barren, but it’s probably connected to the collapsing and twitching and writhing and cursing.

You do your best to stay calm.

You do your best to stay calm and explain to them that you don’t know why they think your name is John instead of Tom.

You do your best to stay calm and explain to them that you don’t know why they think your name is John instead of Tom, but you’ve just seen some pretty remarkable things that will forever change the way we think about arguably the most important ten minutes of all time and if you could just see your father, even if he’s furious with you, which you understand is justified, but if you could just tell him what you saw, you know he’ll recognize how important it is and help you explain to them why the very fact that you’re even alive, that any of them are even alive, proves you didn’t screw up as badly as you could’ve, since against all reasonable odds you somehow managed to turn around a situation that was escalating at a rapid pace into some truly abject chaos and, look, while you realize there’s no, like, prize for not irrevocably warping the basic through line of human history, under the circumstances a simple thank you wouldn’t be an unreasonable thing to expect.

They look at you.

They look at you and you realize.

They look at you and you realize they’re your parents.

Your mother is alive.

Your mother is alive and you start to cry.

Your mother is alive and you start to cry and you can’t stop.





58


I’m not great with suspense, so I’ll skip the narrative subterfuge and explain what the hell is happening—I am here. As in, here. The here that you are in. The here I’m not supposed to be in.

It’s 5:57 P.M. on Monday, July 11, 2016. Apparently I’ve been unconscious for nearly three hours.

When the emergency boomerang protocol on the time-travel apparatus got triggered by the incipient meltdown of the Goettreider Engine, I was automatically launched back to my own time, specifically to sixty seconds after I’d left—my father could’ve programmed the return to be instantaneous, but he thought the drama of a full minute’s bated breath would excite his investors.

Except I didn’t reappear in his deserted laboratory. Because here that laboratory was never built. Because here my father never invented time travel. Because here, July 11, 1965, was not the pivot of history. Because here it was just another day.

Do you understand? I’m in the same world you’re in. The world you think you’ve always been in. Dull, vapid, charmless, barely evolved from the 1965 I just left.

I know you think it’s changed a lot since then, because of iPhones and drone strikes and 3D printers and, I don’t know, gluten-free pretzels. But to me that stuff feels like the early 1970s. The hospital I woke up in might as well have been a medieval torture chamber, everything looked so clumsy and barbaric.

I managed to keep the Goettreider Engine from destroying half of North America—but the Goettreider Engine itself and the world its boundless power manifested . . . it never happened.