All Our Wrong Todays(36)

It never happened and you think my story up to this point has been semicoherent science fiction.

I tried to explain all this to my parents and they were kind about it, careful, concerned, compassionate, hoping this was temporary crossed wires and not an incurable neurological calamity. The doctors weren’t much help with their archaic medical scanners. I knew I wasn’t going crazy, but I could also tell where this was going after a battery of tests revealed nothing tangibly out of order with my brain—psych consult.

And then I’m rescued, sort of, by the intervention of an unexpected party.

My parents are in a heated, hushed conversation with a pack of doctors when the door to my room opens.

She has sharp eyes and a wide mouth and a permanent furrow between her arched eyebrows due to a general penchant for skeptical glares. She seems weirdly familiar for someone I’ve never seen before.

My parents hug her and she squirms at their clinginess. She comes up to my bed, squinting at me like she half expects this is an elaborate practical joke.

“What the fuck, dude?” she says. “You’re freaking out Mom and Dad.”

Apparently, I have a sister.





59


My sister’s name is Greta Barren. She’s three years younger than me.

She immediately takes charge of the situation, asks the doctors to excuse us so we can talk as a family, tells my dad and my mom—who, to repeat, is alive—to take a seat. And my parents do what she says, cowed, squeezing together on the threadbare orange couch under the window, while Greta—who, to repeat, is my sister—leans against the wall by my bed, arms crossed, brow knit, and asks me to repeat my story.

So, with as much lucidity as I can muster—considering I’m in a reality that shouldn’t exist talking to a sister that was never born while my dead mom holds hands with my dad, something I never once saw them do in my entire life—I explain what happened. Greta listens, nods, doesn’t interrupt. But about halfway through my story, her brow unknits and her lips press together like she’s trying hard not to smile. Which starts to piss me off. But I press on, describing the events that occurred in Goettreider’s lab on July 11, 1965, and how they resulted in me turning up here, with them, instead of where I should be, there, without them.

When I finish, Greta looks me in the eye and bursts out laughing. She turns to my confused and worried parents, holding hands on the orange couch.

“Guys,” she says, “it’s his novel.”





60


My mom and dad have no idea what my sister is talking about.

“You don’t remember those stories he used to write as a kid?” Greta says. “About how he lived in, like, the future or whatever? And those drawings he’d do, you know, the weird buildings with all the swirls? Flying cars, robots, jet packs, that kind of crap?”

“Of course we remember,” my mom says. “But what does that have to do with a novel?”

“I guess it was a few months ago,” Greta says, “he told me he found a bunch of his old stories and drawings and thought they’d make a good book or even a movie or something. He said he was going to write it and ask that producer to read it. You know, the one who commissioned the house in Malibu?”

“We saw that producer’s last movie,” my dad says, “the one that won the Golden Globe. It got the science all wrong. I mean, I had half a mind to write the man and explain that the actual science is fascinating and you don’t need to gussy it up with all that nonsense to make the plot work.”

“Focus, honey,” my mom says.

“Sorry,” says my dad.

“I’m still not sure I understand,” my mom says. “When did he write a book?”

“I don’t think he did,” Greta says. “But what he just said, that whole time-travel thing, that’s the plot of his novel. When he told me about it, I figured he was joking. Because, I mean, like he has time to write a book. But, whatever, the point is, whether or not he actually wrote it, he hasn’t had a schizoid break or something. He just got a little screwy and mixed up real life with his story idea. He’s going to be okay.”

My mom and dad look at Greta with gratitude. They’re still holding hands.

I’m propped up in the hospital bed, frustrated, insulted, annoyed, because I know she’s wrong, it’s not a goddamn plot—it’s my life.

Except, I mean, what if she’s right? Am I so sure of myself because I’m correct . . . or because my brain’s gone wonky for as yet undetermined reasons and my reality principle is in stupendous existential flux?

“Hey, idiot, snap out of it,” Greta says. “I have a date tonight.”





61


Apparently, my name is John Barren. Apparently, I have the same birth date, October 2, 1983. Apparently, I’m an architect.

I finished my master’s degree in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology five years ago, did a postgraduate year at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and got a job at a top firm in Amsterdam. I contributed to a variety of projects around the world, including that producer’s house in Malibu, an office building in Kuala Lumpur, another office building in Boston, a ski resort in Switzerland, a bank tower in Singapore, and a convention center in Dubai.