All Our Wrong Todays(41)

I feel superior to John because I come from a more technologically and socially advanced world. But none of that has anything to do with me. I was just born there. I contributed nothing to it—except my sense of entitlement.





67


I’m doing this all wrong. I shouldn’t be rambling on about my inchoate gender epiphanies, I should be developing the “characters” of my mom and dad and sister instead of just cataloguing the ways they’re not like who they were or, in the case of Greta, who they weren’t.

I had dinner at my parents’ house with Greta, and I found myself slipping effortlessly into conversation along the various narrative strands of the infinitely dense soap opera that is our family life—my mom’s department politics, research projects, interesting and/or inane comments made by colleagues in her meetings, my dad’s department politics, research projects, interesting and/or inane comments made by students in his classes, something a neighbor said, something a neighbor did, something a neighbor plans to do, lunch with an old friend who told an amusing and/or sad anecdote that made them laugh and/or cry, frosted with sarcastic comments by Greta and punctuated with intermittent jokes by me that my mom and dad laugh at way too hard.

It’s comfortable and easy. It’s terrifying how comfortable and easy it is to sit around the dinner table with these strangers, and I have to keep reminding myself it isn’t real. This is not my family. The comfort and ease are a lie. Only the feeling that I don’t belong here is true.

My parents live in the same overheated Victorian row house where Greta and I grew up, in a neighborhood called the Annex, half a dozen blocks from the university campus where they both work. My mom believes there is no better decoration than a shelf of books, and the house is a testament to that. The rooms are organized by category—contemporary novels in the dining room, the kitchen for cookbooks, the bedroom for non-antique editions of Victorian novels, what used to be my bedroom and is now my mom’s office for literary criticism, the bathroom for my dad’s collection of spry pop-science books, my dad’s serious science tomes in his study, the living room colonized by well-preserved early editions of Victorian novels, the rare first prints in a glass case that hangs in an awkward spot on the wall, not quite in balance with the rest of the room, but necessary to keep it both prominently displayed and shaded from natural sunlight. It makes every room feel cramped and still, because the thick wood shelves make the walls feel two feet closer and the volume of paper absorbs most ambient sound.

I’m in my dad’s study, trying to appear casual as I scan for books on time travel, when Greta leans in the doorway.

“You’re acting weird,” she says.

“No, I’m not,” I say.

“You’re making a lot of jokes,” she says.

“They’re not funny?”

“They’re okay. But you never make jokes around Mom and Dad. You’re always so serious around them.”

“Maybe I’m trying to develop, you know, an adult relationship with them.”

“Bullshit.”

“What do you want from me, Greta?”

“You had a major neurological who knows what and told everyone you’re a time traveler,” Greta says.

“And you made fun of me,” I say.

“Because you’re not a time traveler,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“And now you’re being weird, man. You’re all, like, cracking jokes as if you didn’t just have some babbling seizure three days ago. If you and Mom and Dad want to be in denial, fine, pretend nothing happened. But something happened. So I call bullshit. You’re not acting like yourself.”

“Because I made a couple of jokes.”

“Yes. My brother is a lot of things. But funny isn’t one of them.”

“Maybe I save my best material for my friends,” I say.

“What friends?” Greta says. “You don’t have friends. You have work people and you have me.”

She punches me in the shoulder, harder than necessary.

“I have friends,” I say. “You think I don’t have any friends?”

“Do you honestly think you’re from the fucking future?”

“No. I’m not from the future.”

This is, of course, true. I’m not from the future. I’m from an alternate timeline. It’s still today. It’s just a different today.





68


I wake up stiff and groggy and annoyed that my virtual environment projector has malfunctioned, until I remember I’m in John’s condo bedroom. I assume the searing headache must be another neurological spasm, like the one I had at the construction site four days ago, but then a single word pierces the mental fog—coffee. I manage to manipulate the steam engine until it squirts out an oily jet of espresso. Headache cured.

Finally, something in this crappy world that actually does what it’s supposed to.

I wish I had more of a sense of humor about all the, like, fish-out-of-water hilarity as I try to fit into this backward mess you call a civilization. Of course, there’s something absurd about an adult human who doesn’t know how to open a jar of peanut butter or work an elevator or use a credit card. To an outside observer, I probably look like I’m suffering from some debilitating cognitive trauma.