All Our Wrong Todays(49)
I got a lot of interview requests and my office fielded a flood of calls looking for me to bid on new projects, and apparently I only boosted the swirl of intrigue by refusing to say anything more. This wasn’t a public relations strategy. I was in bed with Penny and I never wanted to leave.
So. Maybe right now you’re thinking—okay, why isn’t this story over? Everything kind of worked out for this jackass. His mom is alive, his dad is nice, his sister is cool, his career is on fire, and he’s actually involved with the woman he obsessed over in his other life—why would he want to go back to a world where his mom’s dead, his dad’s an asshole, his sister never existed, he has no professional accomplishments, and the woman he loved killed herself?
And I get that, trust me, it’s more or less all I’m thinking about. Despite an edgy sense of loyalty to my timeline and compassion for humanity as a species being stranded on this sad, broken planet, my life is much better.
Except that it’s not my life. It’s his life, John’s. The longer I stay here, the less I’m me and the more I’m him and I understand it’s hard to relate to what it feels like to have your consciousness subsumed into its own warped mirror, but let me tell you—it’s goddamn horrifying. It’s burning to death in the flames of your own mind. It’s being eaten alive by alien memories that have taken root inside you, devouring everything that makes you who you are and spitting out someone else right into your own brain. Think about the mass of information packed into the dense, wet folds of your mind, every memory and opinion and impulse, uncountable coiling trails of identity both grand and trivial. Now double them in the same humid box and shake them together and force them to fight. John’s mind is like a sickness that my mind is trying to ward off with the antibodies of what I know to be true, my memories, my opinions, my impulses, my grand and trivial humiliations and delights. Except the truth is—I’m the cancer. I’m the virus trying to colonize John, not the other way around. He’s waging a desperate battle to regain control of his own thoughts and I’m the interloper who somehow escaped his dreams and perverted his consciousness.
Maybe this is what it feels like to go crazy. Every happy moment is compromised by cold fingers around my ankles, trying to drag me into a yawning maw of loss and fear and shame. It would be easier to let go and be John. And I’ve always been one to take the easy way out.
It feels like I’ve been rewarded for destroying the world. The only reason I still feel like myself, like Tom, is a throbbing low-grade ache that says—you should be punished for what you did. You’re not allowed to be happy. Everything you touch will turn to ash. Everyone you love will be swarmed with darkness. You must be held accountable for your crimes, even if the only one capable of passing judgment is you.
82
The staff of Barren & Associates waits for me in the conference room. After I ignored their messages for another week, while Penny and I cloistered ourselves in each other, they threatened to convene the meeting at my condo if I didn’t come to work today. I step up to the glass door and wait for it to slide open, like doors are supposed to, but it doesn’t because there’s a handle to turn, even though the technology already exists for doors to just open automatically. Do you have any idea of the germ count on the typical doorknob? Your exposure to microorganic pathogens would be no worse if you wiped your hand all around the inside of a public toilet.
My fifteen employees start applauding and flexing their zygomaticus muscles to bare their teeth and gums, which makes me recoil until I realize they’re smiling at me. On a conference table made from a slab of maple tree encased in a cube of transparent epoxy are stacked several copies of the Toronto Star with my sketch on the cover. I’m getting better at plucking information from John’s memory, so I recall the one guy who isn’t clapping, a decade my senior, is named Stewart and he’s the firm’s operations manager.
“We’ve had so many calls about your speech that I had to put the interns on the phones to keep up,” Stewart says.
“That’s, uh, good,” I say. “Isn’t it?”
“Look, we all knew what we were signing up for when we came to work for you,” Stewart says. “You are the Barren. We are the Associates. But we spent weeks on that speech. As a team. Not just on the visual presentation. On the text. The references. The research. This was supposed to be the firm’s introduction to the international community. You didn’t use a word of what we all agreed you’d say. You didn’t even acknowledge us sitting there in the audience. It was supposed to be a big night for the rest of us too. And, by the way, the conference is making us pay to replace the glass you defaced.”
I get the impression this is a huge moment for Stewart, a boil that needs to be lanced. My immediate reaction is to get the hell out of here and never come back. I’d rather throw myself through that window I drew on and plunge to my death than deal with office politics. I’ve never been in charge of anything before and it’s a measure of the grasping alarm I feel that the only thing I can think to ask myself is—what would my father do in this situation?
“Tell the conference organizers we’re happy to pay for the window as long as it’s removed without damaging my sketch,” I say. “We’re going to hang it right here in our office, so it’s the first thing anyone sees when they walk in. Now, there were five hundred people at the speech, right? And how many people read this newspaper?”