All Our Wrong Todays(50)
One of the associates pulls up the information on her cell and shows it to Stewart.
“Three hundred thousand on weekdays,” he says. “Five hundred thousand on weekends.”
“Tell them I’ll expand on my speech in an exclusive for their weekend edition. They can publish what I was supposed to say with all the images I was supposed to show. Five hundred people in a room versus five hundred thousand people in a city. Even more online.”
“With your name on it, of course.”
“With all our names on it. They can say Tom Barren in the headline, but we’ll insist everyone who worked on the material is credited.”
“Did you just say . . . Tom Barren?”
“No,” I say. “Did I? I don’t think so. Anyway, I’m sorry if I screwed up.”
“You’re . . . apologizing,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I’ve never heard you apologize to anyone. Has he ever apologized to anyone?”
The associates all shake their heads, mute, riveted.
“John, we’re worried about you,” he says. “You were in the hospital. One minute you’re ordering around the foreman and complaining about the client’s lack of vision, the next you’re writhing around in the mud. I’m the one who called the ambulance.”
“I’m fine,” I say.
“All of us left very good jobs at very good firms to work for you because we believe you see the future of architecture the way nobody else does. But that means we can’t do this without you. If you’re having health issues, we respect your privacy. We’re just asking you to trust us with what’s going on.”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“You don’t know,” says Stewart. “Okay, well, that’s the other thing I’ve never heard you say. You always know. You’re the most arrogant know-it-all son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
My brain feels swollen, like it’s trying to push out of my ears and find a more hospitable residence. I press my forehead against the table’s cool, epoxied surface. I can feel the sweat trickling from my armpits down along my rib cage. I’ve spent my whole life deliberately avoiding situations in which anyone looks to me for answers.
“You’re right,” I say. “I do know. I know what every building in this city should look like. What every city on this planet should look like. We’re so far away from where we should be. But it’s too much. I can’t fix the whole world.”
“John, nobody expects you to,” Stewart says.
“I’m taking an indefinite leave of absence,” I say. “Starting today.”
“What are you talking about?” Stewart says. “We’ve got half a dozen projects in process. Hundreds of commission opportunities have come in since your speech. The concert hall in Chicago. We promised to deliver your initial concept next week.”
“I’ll come in on the weekend and finish the design. Put anything that needs my signature on my desk and I’ll sign it. After that, you’re on your own.”
On the way out, I forget the door doesn’t open automatically so I smack my nose against it, hard enough to rupture blood vessels in my anterior nasal septum. I leave a streak of blood on the glass and don’t look back. My head throbs with pain and something else—a slithering coil of anger buried too deep to slow me down. I know I’m destroying everything John built, but I don’t care because it’s all a lie. I’m not a genius or a visionary or a leader or whatever else these people have deluded themselves into believing. I’m not and have never been anything at all.
83
Penny actually gasps when she walks into my parents’ house and sees their elaborate, fetishized book collection. My mom immediately recognizes a kindred spirit and in less than sixty seconds they’re debating the merits of various Victorian binding procedures and I accept that I’m done for—I won’t say anything anyone finds remotely interesting for the rest of the evening.
It gets worse over dinner, some eccentric ratatouille recipe my dad picked up at a conference in Toulouse, when Penny asks about his book on time travel. Greta groans like a teenager and my dad flushes, trying to parse if she’s making fun of him. Penny tells him she’s a lifelong speculative-fiction fan and would love to know more about his views on the topic.
That’s all my dad needs—that and two glasses of pinot noir—to launch into his adolescent obsession and secret shame, prone to whispering key terms as if saying them at full volume would bring the Science Police crashing through the front door to arrest him for Crimes Against Serious Physics. In the other world, my father spoke with arrogant bombast and squinty, patronizing boredom, like he knew everything he said was fascinating and important but the mental energy required to dumb it down enough for anyone other than him to understand wasn’t really worth the effort. Here, my dad is delighted to even be asked, since his colleagues continue to rib him about his book years after it was published to zero acclaim and total neglect by the general public.
My dad’s book was a breezy analysis of why time travel, as depicted in mainstream entertainment, doesn’t make scientific, technical, or logistic sense. But tucked between the zippy puns and pop-culture references was a sincere exploration of how it possibly might work, which was of course the thing my dad continued to ponder even though he knew it could lead only to professional embarrassment and academic censure if he dared to speak his theories aloud in distinguished company or, worse, commit them to publication.