All Our Wrong Todays(44)

I’m not going anywhere.

I pretend to browse, so I have something to stare at other than her. Most of these authors should never have been born, but here are their books in neat little rows, millions of words that weren’t supposed to be written, saying things that weren’t supposed to be said. In the V section are eight novels by Kurt Vonnegut that shouldn’t exist. I run my fingers over their spines.

Every step feels heavy, like my heart is exerting its own gravity, trying to drag me to the floor with a pulverizing force, so I’m liquefied against the clean herringbone tiles.

She looks up at me. Propriety dictates I nod or smile or avert eye contact, anything but stare right at her like a lunatic. I resolve to play it cool. My resolve doesn’t even make it to the first syllable.

“Penelope Weschler,” I say.

“Hey,” she says. “Sorry, do we know each other?”

Her voice is different because her larynx and tongue and teeth and lips are different. But the way she looks you right in the eye when she talks to you is the same.

“Yes and no,” I say. “I’m from an alternate reality.”

Penny closes her book without marking the page.

“So, we know each other in another reality, but not in this one?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“How did you get here? To this reality?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I bet,” Penny says.

“I can tell you about it, if you’d like.”

“You’re John Barren,” she says.

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve seen your picture. You designed that tower that’s going up downtown. People on the Internet say you’re maybe some kind of genius. And not just the Internet. Real people too.”

“Well,” I say, “I stole all my ideas from another reality.”

“The reality you come from,” she says.

“Yeah. You’re taking this pretty well. You don’t think I’m demented?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “You might be demented. But there are security cameras recording us and you’re sort of well-known. Not, like, famous. But semi-recognizable to people who pay attention to local city stuff. If you do something violent or crazy or whatever, they’ll find you right away.”

“I’m sure they will.”

“Why are you here? I mean, here in my store.”

“To see you,” I say.

“To see me,” Penny says.

“I realize everything I’m saying sounds extremely weird. I’m sorry. I should’ve come up with an actual plan. But as soon as I saw you, I couldn’t lie to you.”

“About how you’re a quasi-famous architect who is secretly plagiarizing his brilliant ideas from another dimension?”

“I didn’t know I was doing it until a few days ago,” I say.

“What happened a few days ago?”

“I’d like to explain it to you,” I say, “but it involves time travel and I’m concerned that even telling you that much is going to irrevocably freak you out. I don’t know why I feel compelled to be honest with you when I know I sound kind of insane. But it’s a pretty good story. Even if you don’t believe it, I think you’ll be entertained.”

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I close in a few minutes,” she says. “Go outside while I text a bunch of people that I’m going for a drink with you and if I turn up missing you definitely murdered and possibly ate me.”

“Great.”

“You don’t mind me telling people that?”

“I’m just happy you’re willing to spend a few more minutes with me after what I just said.”

“Pretty much everything you said sounds crazy,” Penny says. “But you know what’s crazier? I think I might have been waiting my whole life for you to walk in here.”





73


I decide to tell Penny some of the truth but omit the more off-puttingly painful details. I promise myself I’ll reveal those things later, maybe, if it seems like she trusts me enough to hear the whole story . . .

But as soon as I’m sitting across a wobbly bar table from her and she’s looking at me, the singular object of her full attention, it all spills out. I tell her everything.

It takes a few hours. We’re in a peaty, underlit dive bar up the block from her bookstore, a holdover from the neighborhood’s run-down past that’s being co-opted by its gentrifying present, much to the delight of the proprietor, who is discovering how much she can charge for a glass of booze if she cultivates just the right air of alluring disrepute. Our table for two is propped up against the front window, separated from the rest of the bar, perfect for two people to talk until closing time over several overpriced bourbons.

Penny has a lot of questions about the other Penelope, how she became who she did, her failure as an astronaut, her reinvention and self-destruction, my role in it. She cries when I tell her how Penelope died, and why, our cell. I tell her about breaking into the lab, traveling back in time, screwing up the world, ending up here, as John—she doesn’t totally get how temporal drag works, but then again neither do I—deciding I need to put things right but not knowing where to start.