All Our Wrong Todays(54)

“Exactly,” says my mom. “How convenient that his elaborate fantasy world just happens to involve time travel, considering his father wouldn’t shut up about it all through his childhood.”

“You told me to write the book,” my dad says.

“I thought you should get it out of your system,” my mom says.

“You knew it would humiliate me,” says my dad. “And hold back my career. So you could be the successful one and I could be your abashed consort.”

“I didn’t know it would be a bad book about time travel, Victor,” says my mom. “I thought it would be a good book about time travel.”

“Okay,” I say. “That’s enough! Everybody stop talking!”

My family looks at me like it’s possible I’m about to fly into a berserker rage and murder them with my dessert fork. Penny just looks worried.

“Maybe I have lost my mind,” I say. “It feels that way sometimes. But most of the time it feels like the world has lost its mind and I’m the only one keeping it together. And I realize that doesn’t make me sound less crazy. So, how about this. Mom, you can call your expert friends in the morning. Greta, you can make snarky comments to keep the mood light. And, Dad, you can quiz me.”

“Quiz you how?” my dad says.

“Ask me anything,” I say. “About time travel and alternate dimensions, whatever seems relevant or, I don’t know, even irrelevant. I don’t claim to understand everything I’ve experienced, but I’ll do my best to answer.”

“What can I do?” Penny says.

“You can marry me,” I say.

“What?” she says.

“The fact that you don’t immediately think I’m a lunatic,” I say, “is only the foyer of the palace that is all the reasons you’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Greta says.

“Well, this is exactly how I imagined this happening,” my mom says.

“This has been the most interesting family dinner I can remember,” my dad says.

“Penny, I think you should say yes,” I say.

“No,” she says.

“Really?” I say.

“Okay, maybe,” Penny says. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that question right now. Fine, probably. Assuming we sort all this out in a way that doesn’t involve you being committed to a high-security mental facility, which is a kind of big assumption under the circumstances, it’s possible I may decide to spend the rest of my life with you. But that’s not a yes. That’s definitely probably not a yes.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Should we start the quiz?” my dad says.





87


My sister is the one who’s supposed to be having the nervous breakdown. My parents weren’t concerned about me at all until I collapsed in a torrent of curses in the construction-site mud.

At McGill University in Montréal, Greta did a double major in philosophy and computer science, which required her to field approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lame jokes from lame guys at lame bars. The Venn diagram of datable non-idiots pooled between philosophy and computer science majors was anaerobic, or so claimed Greta to explain why she spent so much of her free time working on a smartphone application, which she eventually pitched to her dual-discipline thesis advisers as her field-integrating graduate thesis, allowing her to then spend all her time on it.

Greta has a simple philosophy of life—You Believe What You Do.

Make a list of what you believe in. The top ten most important things to you. Like . . . justice, equality, diversity, sustainability, whatever your politics or religion or morality. Sit down and bullet-point it out. This is what I believe in.

But Greta thinks—bullshit. Make another list. A list of what you did today. It doesn’t matter what day it is, weekday, weekend, holiday, birthday, the calendar date is irrelevant. Write down all the things that occupied your time on a given day. Woke up, ate breakfast, hit the gym, went to work, surfed the Internet, had a coffee with a colleague, did some work, ate some lunch, did some more work, slipped out to buy new sneakers, clicked around on social media sites, went home, called a parent, watched TV, ate dinner, changed outfits, met someone for a drink, made out with them on a street corner, caught a taxi home, read a book, went to sleep.

That’s what you believe in. According to Greta, your belief system is how you actually spend your time every day. She doesn’t mean that to be judgmental. She wants people to be more self-aware. Fundamentally, she believes in action. If you believe in a bunch of stuff but never act on those beliefs, they don’t matter. She wants people to better know themselves so they can better be themselves. This is her philosophy of life and it was also the purpose of her smartphone application.

Called “MapU,” it tracked integrated device operations to graph a user’s daily activity along a series of programmable criteria. The point was to show you who you are by what you do. If you change your daily activity, movements, and durations, the graphs alter to reflect you becoming more consistent with who you believe yourself to be.

She launched the app for public download the day she graduated and, since it was a school project, gave it away for free. Within a year, 2,000,000 people downloaded it. It was a hit. But it generated no income and the server space needed to store all the data was expensive and growing exponentially as she added hundreds of thousands of new users per month. She coasted for a while on an academic grant, but Greta never meant for the app to be a job—it was an experiment. She just liked tinkering under the hood in a place where design met ethics.