All Our Wrong Todays(47)
I’m feeling less and less like Tom every day. I can feel it happening. I’m becoming him. Becoming John.
78
We spend the night and the day together. We walk around her neighborhood with take-out coffees. We eat breakfast at a place she likes. She decides to close the bookstore for the day, so we just keep walking, heading west toward downtown. Penny wants to show me her city, the place I’ve lived most of my life but barely recognize.
I talk about how the buildings are all the same. The skin and hair varied but the skeletons and muscles and nerves and organs are virtually identical. Good for making people, boring for making cities. Like with people, you need to manage the inevitability of gravity and decay. Unlike with people, your materials aren’t limited to bone and flesh. Where I come from, there wasn’t much by way of architectural nostalgia. The past was thought of as an unsightly skin tag, kind of embarrassing, mostly benign, but with an implicit warning about how bad things can get if you don’t keep an eye on it. There were landmarks, of course, the Taj Mahals and Eiffel Towers and Washington Monuments of postcard history, but otherwise the charitable thing to do was raze it away.
And I talk about how the buildings are all so different. My world long ago embraced macroarchitecture—designing individual buildings as interlocked parts of an overall municipal whole, fusing cultural precedent, local taste, global trends, environmental context, and geographic specificity. Dubious macrodesigns would occasionally emerge, like how Beijing looks like a dragon from above and San Antonio is shaped like a giant version of the Alamo and Brasília’s grid replicates the map of Brazil. But macroarchitecture mostly spares cities from the aesthetic incoherence of this world.
Penny disagrees. Walking streets lined with mismatched buildings, what she sees isn’t visual clutter—it’s history made vivid, the juxtapositions that narrate the city. Every original detail, every date-stamped renovation, every brick and shingle and window and door and staircase have something to say about the city they made together. And every city has hundreds of these blocks, thousands, pages in its never-ending story.
I think about the other Penelope and the likelihood we ever would’ve spent a day like this. We had only the one night together and then . . . the parallel hits me, hard and blunt: This is the morning after the night before. Standing here on the sidewalk with Penny, it’s almost the exact time of day that Penelope stepped out of the defusion sphere and floated apart in front of me. But here she is, this version of her, the past razed away, sipping a coffee while traffic roars around us. This world is so blaringly, grindingly, screechingly loud, and in moments like this it’s hard to think straight.
“Are you okay?” Penny says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I was thinking about the, uh, other world.”
“The other world,” she says, “or the other me?”
“There is no other you anymore.”
“But there is. In your memory. I’ve dated enough boys with ex-girlfriend issues to understand. Women get to be perfect angels or naggy bitches in the memories of the men who loved them. And I’m guessing she never nagged you. She was probably hotter than me too. It’s cool, I promise I won’t be jealous of myself. I mean, maybe a little . . .”
She comes up close, smiling, playful. But I feel flimsy and unsettled.
“I don’t think I’m ready to joke about it yet,” I say. “Even if I seem okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Penny says. “Honestly, I keep expecting you to drop the act and admit this time-traveler thing is totally a bit you do to hook up with chicks and, once you’ve had enough of me, you’ll be going back to your own dimension forever, which basically means you fully ghost me and I never see you again.”
“I can’t go back even if I wanted to. I don’t know how to invent a time machine.”
“But if you did, that would mean I’d never be born, right? Me and everyone else.”
I think about that thing Penelope told me, how she’d break down tasks into seconds. Does that work with everything? Would it help me forget all the people I erased? Could the steady ticktock rhythm clean away a whole world?
“By the way, I noticed you still haven’t said which one of us is hotter.”
“You,” I say.
“Good answer,” she says. “Kiss me a little and maybe I’ll even believe it.”
We kiss and we walk and we talk. We eat a late lunch, head back to her place, and fall asleep until the afternoon.
It’s my favorite day I’ve ever had. I mean, it’s not even close.
When I wake up, Penny lies curled up next to me, still asleep.
She’s not Penelope. She’s not going to float apart.
79
We lie in bed meandering our way to a decision about dinner when my cell rings. I don’t want to answer it, because there’s nobody I want to talk to that isn’t already lying in Penny’s bed, but she gets up to go to the bathroom so I do. I’ve been avoiding calls from my office for days. I figure maybe if I confirm I’m at least alive, they’ll stop bothering me.
But it’s a panicky programming assistant on the line, asking where I am. She says they’ve been trying me for hours and only just discovered that they’d been mixing up my office and cell numbers. She tells me dinner is almost over and my keynote address is scheduled to begin in thirty minutes.