All Our Wrong Todays(40)

As he grew up, John continued to have the dreams but rarely mentioned them to anyone. From time to time he’d tell Greta, but she was busy being a teenager and not giving a shit about her family. Greta abides by the reasonable philosophy that there is nothing in the universe more boring than someone else’s dreams.

The dreams never stopped, but John didn’t think much about them as he moved from adolescence to adulthood. The extent to which the cityscape of his recurring dreams inspired him to pursue architecture and fixed his design aesthetic is obvious—a lot. But John didn’t know he was ripping off my world. He just thought he was a genius.

Four months ago something changed—John had a terrible nightmare that his mom had died in an accident, hit by a flying car. He woke up in a panic, called her, disoriented, upset. Of course she was still alive. But the memory, so vivid, stuck inside him, aching, unreachable.

He started writing down his dreams in the sketchbook. He kept it next to his bed so, when he woke up, he could get down whatever he’d dreamed about before it faded from conscious grasp. There are pages and pages of semi-lucid scribbles, details, observations, insights, things I said and things said to me, thoughts I had but never spoke. It’s all true.

John decided his subconscious was telling him a story he needed to write. This was his “novel”—my life in the months since my mother died.

He didn’t actually start writing it. But he did compose a summary of the “story” on his laptop. In fact, he was working on it during a coffee break at the building site, moments before he collapsed in a fit of curse words and frenetic seizing.

You’ve already read what he wrote: I included it as chapters 43 and 55.

So.





66


I grew up as an only child, so it’s really weird to suddenly have an adult sister who appears to know me—or the me she thinks I am—better than anyone else in the world. All my bullshit seems to drive her nuts and yet she also seems wholly at ease with my bullshit. I’ve never hung out with a woman around my age and not worried in the slightest that something I say might render me unattractive. Even with women I wasn’t interested in, I still wanted them to find me attractive.

But with Greta, yeah, nothing. I know that sounds obvious, but I have no frame of reference for the sibling dynamic. I was an only child. I’ve never felt unconditional affection for anyone who didn’t biologically spawn me.

Sorting through this flood of John’s memories, Greta’s there, my sister, in all of the experiences that made me who I am, who he is, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe my whole life I’ve been kind of sexist.

I mean, rereading some of my earlier chapters, the way I wrote about seeing Penelope naked for the first time and sleeping with my exes after my mother died—I’d feel embarrassed if Greta read that stuff. I’m not trying to dismiss any retrograde blunders in the way I talk about the women in my life . . . it’s just hard to recognize your own blind spots, you know?

Part of the problem is this world is basically a cesspool of misogyny, male entitlement, and deeply demented gender constructs accepted as casual fact by outrageously large swaths of the human population. Where I come from, gender equality is a given. I’m not talking about absurdly fundamental things like pay equality. I mean that there is no essential difference in the way men and women are perceived in terms of politics or economics or culture. Your genitalia are considered no more pertinent to your status than the color of your eyes.

Of course, that also means some stuff that’s considered normal where I come from would be super-weird here. Like, okay, in my world, when you break up with someone, it’s considered gracious to offer the person you dumped a lock of hair so that, if they want, they can get a genetically identical surrogate grown for whatever purposes they need to get over you. It has no consciousness, but it looks exactly like you and can be used for rudimentary physiological functions. Like, you know, sex. The expectation is that when your ex feels ready to move on they’ll have it deconstituted into a biological goop and returned to the manufacturer for disinfection and recycling. Describing it, yes, I realize it sounds bizarre, but it’s a fairly everyday thing.

It’s why my mother’s abject devotion to my father rubbed me the wrong way. It’s not just that I wanted to be the center of her attention—it’s that her self-abnegation was so unnecessary. He didn’t even notice most of what she did until she was gone. There was no reason to live that way except as a deliberate choice. It was actually harder for someone like my mother to do nothing but service my father when there were so many options open to her. To anyone.

Except maybe I’m still being sexist. Her choices are her choices.

I went back to chapter 11 and cut out a few indiscreet comments about my ex-girlfriends’ private lives. With my friends, I knew them for seventeen years and feel okay revealing personal stuff about them, but I can’t honestly say Hester or Megan or Tabitha would’ve given me permission to include details about their lives. And if it seems more disrespectful to their memories to elide them from my story, well, you can’t possibly appreciate just how annoying I was to date. Their privacy was earned.

It’s like with John’s condo. My immediate impression was it’s all a sham to impress women. But the more time I spend in his head, the more I realize—it’s just his style. I thought of it as a cheesy seduction ploy because that’s what I would’ve done if I had any confidence in my own taste. Every accomplishment in my life that meant anything to me involved impressing someone who wasn’t naturally inclined to find me attractive. I make my mother’s death a story about sleeping around. I make the end of my reality a story about my broken heart.