All Our Wrong Todays(59)

She starts to tear up. And it doesn’t matter if I’m a time traveler or a nutcase or just a guy with a headful of bad chemistry—it still hurts to see my mom cry.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll get myself checked out. I’ll talk to someone. I’ll do whatever it is you do when you want to know if you’re depressed.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“After I get back from San Francisco.”

My mom closes her eyes and a mosaic of nonverbal reactions flutters across her face. When she opens her eyes and looks at me again, it’s with compassion.

“It’s normal, you know?” she says. “To feel like a fraud.”

“What?”

“I was listening,” my mom says. “You feel like a fraud. You’ve convinced yourself that you plagiarized all your best ideas from another dimension.”

“All those buildings that everyone thinks are so bold and visionary,” I say, “I didn’t come up with any of it. I dreamed it and claimed it as my own. I’m not some genius. I’m a rip-off artist and sooner or later they’ll figure it out.”

“That’s how everybody feels,” she says. “You don’t think I felt like that when I started teaching? When I wrote my first book? When I became dean? We all feel like frauds. That’s the secret of life. Everybody’s winging it.”

“I know what imposter syndrome is,” I say. “This isn’t that.”

“Okay,” she says, “you’re not some hotshot architect. You’re a phony and a thief. Except you’re plagiarizing buildings that don’t exist. That have only ever existed in your mind. So, take a moment to consider maybe that’s how everyone who creates something new feels. As if they had nothing to do with it. Like they plucked it out of the ether and signed their name at the bottom and none of the credit is deserved.”

“No, Mom, this is something else.”

“You got a little bit famous. Even a little bit of fame can mess with your head. It’s a cognitive disease, you know, fame? It used to only be for royalty and we know what they’re like. I’m not much of a Freudian, but something about fame makes the id and the superego devour the ego like anacondas in a cage, right before they cannibalize each other. Fame warps your identity, metastasizes your anxieties, and hollows you out like a jack-o’-lantern. It’s sparkly pixie dust that burns whatever it touches like acid.”

“Mom, I’m an architect. I’m barely famous. I’m maybe slightly well-known.”

“And look what happened,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been slightly well-known for six months and the fact that it coincided with you going kind of bonkers is, what, unrelated? Random happenstance? Do you know what Jung said about coincidence? He said just because we can’t see the destination, it doesn’t mean that no road goes there.”

“I’m too tired to keep talking about this,” I say. “Especially if you’re going to bring Freud and Jung into it, that’s just cruel.”

“Then consider this one last thing,” my mom says. “There’s no way back. This disappointing, moribund reality you’re stranded in, we don’t have any time machines here. Your home planet is gone forever. You know that, right?”

I shrug. I can’t quite say it out loud.

“Maybe it’s all true,” she says. “Maybe you are stealing all your best ideas from your magical fantasyland. But if that world is lost and if, as you claim, you’re the one who lost it, then don’t you owe it to that world to make this one better?”

“Better how?” I say.

“You have a responsibility,” she says. “You’re the only one who can show us what paradise looks like. You can build us a future to live in. And I mean that literally, build it in brick and steel and glass. You may not think you’re a genius. You may think you’re a fraud, a bandit, a world-killing monster. But you’re all we have.”

I don’t know what to say to that. It sounds a little triumphalist to me, but my mom wouldn’t be the first mother with a grandiose perception of her child.

“Chase this mystery to San Francisco if you have to,” she says. “But be safe and come home to us. There’s work to do here, in this world, the world you live in, not the world you dream of. They don’t actually even need you. Not like we do.”

My mom hugs me, opens her office door, walks down the hall to her bedroom, and joins my dad inside.





93


Penny and I go back to her place. I’ve basically been living there since we met because my condo doesn’t feel like home. She calls one of her staffers to open the bookstore so we can sleep most of the day. Her bedroom windows face east and the morning sunshine is bright and pushy.

Everything that happened last night rattles around in my head as I try to sleep next to Penny. She’s deadweight pressed against my side, wearing underwear and a soft, thin T-shirt, her head notched into that groove where my shoulder meets my collarbone, wisps of her hair tickling my chin and lips. She breathes out, heavy and deep.

I feel lighter, unburdened after telling my family the truth, even if it would’ve been smarter, probably, to let them think my feverish babbling about alternate realities at the hospital was just a fleeting synaptic glitch.