All Our Wrong Todays(37)
Nine months ago, the firm was approached to do a condo tower in Toronto, my hometown. After clashing with my bosses over the design, I made what sounds like a super-rash decision to quit and go out on my own. For reasons I don’t understand but that supposedly involved an impassioned speech to the board of directors of the development company about how this tower won’t redefine just the Toronto skyline but the way the world understands what a building can be, launching a new vanguard of modern architecture—I have no idea what any of that means—I was given full control of the condo project and returned to Toronto six months ago to open my own firm. I quickly booked several high-profile commissions, hired a bunch of junior associates with slim-fit black clothing and eccentric eyewear, and have been the subject of several fawning media profiles on my visionary design philosophy.
This is madness because I don’t know a goddamn thing about architecture.
Except, impossibly, I do. Tumbling around my brain are years of studying and considering and experimenting and failing and failing and failing and coming up with something not totally horrible and failing and failing and failing and glancing on a not completely embarrassing notion and failing and failing and failing and failing and then achieving a minor success and then achieving a slightly less minor success and then clearly descending into narcissistic self-delusion by striking out on my own with some hazy but confidently articulated pronouncements on the future of architecture.
Still, I must be a total sham because how could I—who never had an original thought or created anything of value, who only ever disappointed and underwhelmed—accomplish anything other than unpredictable new ways to screw up not just my own life and the lives of those I love, but the fundamental integrity of the space-time continuum.
And then I see some photos of the buildings I worked on. And I get it.
After I’m released from the hospital, I insist my mom and dad and sister take me to the building site where I collapsed. It’s a big square hole in the ground with a poured foundation and the first few stories framed in steel. Inside the on-site trailer, there’s a detailed model of the building-to-be and I stare at it for a long time. Because it’s the way things are supposed to be. It looks like home.
Whatever contradictory memories are surging through my mind, I know I’m Tom Barren, from the real 2016—but John Barren is in me too, his memories and thoughts and preferences and opinions sticking to my own memories and thoughts and preferences and opinions like the gunky residue on your skin after you peel off a bandage.
By the way, I only know that because I pulled off the bandage that was on the crook of my elbow, covering the spot from which they drew blood—where I come from, trying to protect a wound with a piece of adhering fabric would seem cluelessly vintage.
But I’m starting to understand. Until this afternoon, when my consciousness somehow seized control, John’s consciousness was the dominant one. I—me, Tom—was in there too, tucked away like a bill in the pocket of a pair of jeans that went through the laundry, another analogy that would’ve made no sense to me before I found myself in a place where clothes are made of processed vegetation or animal hide, instead of recombinant molecules.
There was a barrier between us, me and John, but it was porous. From his earliest moments of awareness, John drew off my earliest moments of awareness. He saw what I saw, but he perceived it as his imagination. His childhood drawings of vast, weird cityscapes—I dug them up from a box in my parents’ basement and they’re eerily accurate depictions of the cities from my world. The cutting-edge ideas he introduced to his designs at the Dutch firm, the bold concepts that marked him as one to watch by his employers and one to envy, loathe, undermine, and imitate by his peers—they’re typical of even the most basic and functional buildings where I come from.
All his supposedly innovative design concepts, the brash structural effects, the sleek but organic interiors and modern but majestic exterior embellishments, the integration of material and environment, the complexity masquerading as simplicity, and of course the whorls, everywhere with the whorls—it’s cribbed wholesale from the architecture of my reality. The designs he’s currently developing, including the condo tower in Toronto that’s creeping its way up to the sky on skeletal steel fingers, they’re rip-offs of buildings from my world, the world we’re supposed to have. The Toronto project looks almost exactly like the building that sits on the same lot in the other world. He re-created what should’ve been there and called it his own.
I’m not a visionary. I’m a plagiarist. Only I’m plagiarizing buildings that never existed, designed by architects who were never born, in a world that never happened.
62
My dad, Victor Barren, is a tenured professor of physics at the University of Toronto with a specialty in photonics—the replacement of conventional electronics with exponentially faster and more capacious photons instead of sad and puny electrons, enabling aspirational projects like quantum computing with the power they need to effectively function. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, he publishes in arcane scientific journals, he spent seven years as his department’s representative on the campus union council, he applied twice and was twice rejected to be department head, and he’s occasionally a talking head on local news when some development in the world of physics is buzzy enough to catch the fleeting attention of the general public, in large part because he has a deep, commanding voice that’s offset by his entertaining tendency to make deadpan comic references to popular science-fiction movies when explaining complex scientific principles.