All Our Wrong Todays(57)

Penny looks off-balance, strained. She shakes her head, but I don’t know what she’s saying no to.

“I get it,” I say. “I do. But if I’m crazy, I want to know for sure. Because this doesn’t feel like crazy.”

“We’ll get you whatever help you need,” my mom says. “Maybe it’s psychological, maybe it’s neurological or hormonal or even viral. The brain is a complex thing. The point is you need to accept help.”

“I will,” I say. “Accept help. After we find Lionel Goettreider.”

“The man who doesn’t exist,” Greta says.

“He does exist,” I say. “He might be dead, but he definitely lived.”

“It’s just a bit . . . convenient,” Greta says.

“Stop saying things are convenient,” I say. “How is any of this convenient?”

“I’m not the one hinging my entire lunatic worldview on this one mysteriously nonexistent guy,” Greta says. “Everyone else you mentioned, sure, it’s weird you know the names of all these random old scientists, but I found them online, so you could have too. But this Goettreider guy. Supposedly the world’s smartest man. The genius who changed everything. And yet there’s no trace of him. Nothing.”

“There must be something,” I say. “We can go back to where he was born. In Denmark. Find his birth certificate. He lived in San Francisco. There must be records. He had to have a passport, a driver’s license. The accident happened. Even if it was swept under the rug, there must be some evidence, somewhere. The experiment was funded with a federal grant. The US government must have, I don’t know, a receipt.”

“I’m fairly well-read about this stuff,” my dad says. “I’ve heard of Ursula Francoeur. And some of these others, the sixteen, I recognize their names. But not Lionel Goettreider. I’ve never heard of him.”

“Why don’t we get you help first?” my mom says. “Then, if you still want to, we can look for this Goettreider person.”

“If Lionel Goettreider was forty-two in 1965,” Penny says, “then he’s ninety-three years old now. There’s a slim chance he’s even alive. But, if he is, who knows how much longer he’ll be around.”

“Fine,” Greta says, “you want to go looking for someone who doesn’t exist, go ahead. But speaking on behalf of people who do exist, I think you’re wasting your time.”

“Where would you even start?” my dad says.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Penny says.

Penny flips over the book on the table to show everyone the photo of the Francoeur family. She points at Jerome Francoeur. Smiling, one arm tight around Ursula’s shoulders, protective, maybe a bit too protective. His other arm hangs at his side. The sleeve is neatly clipped just below what should be the elbow. The rest of the arm is gone. Amputated.

“Jerome Francoeur is still alive,” Penny says. “Or at least he was when Ursula died two years ago. Whatever happened back in 1965, if there’s one man in the world who should remember Lionel Goettreider, it’s Jerome Francoeur.”

I guess I’m going to San Francisco.





90


My dad absentmindedly picks crumbs off the tablecloth and drops them in a tiny pile in front of him. He doesn’t look at anyone. One by one, methodical, meticulous, he gathers the crumbs.

“We need to be careful here,” my dad says. “Every family has its own . . . dynamic. Its unique way of handling conflict and crisis. A kind of evolutionary adaptation to its peculiar domestic environment. When you get to the point we’re at, four adults, experienced with one another’s quirks, that dynamic is fairly stable. Otherwise you don’t get to where we’re at. You get divorce. You get estrangement.”

He rakes the pile of crumbs with his fingers, forming an equilateral triangle.

“But there are events in the life of a family,” he says, “just like there are events in the life of a species. Extinction-level events. Cataclysms. And you really don’t know if the dynamic that’s gotten you through so much can handle more than just conflict and crisis. That it can handle cataclysm.”

He uses the edge of his palm to shift the triangle of crumbs into a square.

“Our family dynamic works for us,” he says. “There are jokes and irony and snark. There is occasionally unguarded sentiment. But it’s usually layered with jokes and irony and snark in some sort of emotional tiramisu. I just need us to take this seriously. Because there are things even the closest family can’t survive. And we are not the closest family. Mostly because, John, you’ve always held yourself distant. That’s not a criticism. It’s an observation.”

My dad continues his crumb geometry, squeezing the pile from a square to a circle. He runs his middle finger around the edge, evening it into proportion.

“I don’t believe in the truth,” he says. “I’m a scientist. I believe in questions and the best answer we have right now. That’s all science is. A collection of the best answers we have right now. It’s always open to revision. Yesterday’s fact is today’s question and tomorrow has an answer we don’t know yet. What I’m saying is, I believe what you’re saying. Insofar as you believe what you’re saying. I just don’t want you to do anything . . . rash. To try to prove to us something that seems essential to you. Please don’t keep us outside this.”