All Our Wrong Todays(64)

“I’m far from perfect,” I say, “but I’m not like him.”

“It’s not just what would happen if you were gone forever,” Penny says. “It’s what would happen if he came back. When I woke up, it really did feel like a nightmare. It had that illogical wrongness to it. You’re with the man you love but he’s someone else, even though he looks exactly the same and there’s no evidence, except for the way he speaks and moves and touches you. After, I thought if I went in the shower with you it would wake me up enough to snap out of it. Like I’d been sleepwalking. I’d look you in the eye and you’d be back and whatever happened in my bed was just a bad dream. But it wasn’t. It was him, saying you’re gone forever. And now you’re here, but how long before he comes back again?”

“I won’t let him come back.”

“You don’t know what you’ll let,” Penny says. “I can’t even be sure it’s you.”

“It’s me. I promise you it’s me.”

“What does that even mean, it’s me, coming from you?” she says.

I catch myself before I speak because—what does it mean? I’m still unclear on what exactly I did to Penny but, whatever it was, it was done with my skin and bones and muscles and nerves, the same lungs breathed the air and the same heart pumped the blood and the same brain that’s clogged with staticky dread and guilt for acts I didn’t even commit, except that I did, apparently, that same brain set the whole chain of events in motion. I feel like someone whose dog just ravaged a neighbor who strayed too close to his property, except I’m the dog and clearly not the master of anything that matters.

This gap between us, it isn’t just empty space. It’s a black hole and I don’t know that we’ll ever escape it. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But I do know one thing—I have to find a way to kill John.





97


“Sitting here all day and all night,” Penny says, “mostly what I thought about is . . . if he comes back and bad things happen, how exactly I’d explain this to, say, the police or my parents or one of the many friends I’ve been ignoring for the past couple of weeks since you came into my life. Well, you see . . . this guy comes into my store one day and he tells me he’s a time traveler from another dimension. And in that other dimension I’m this, like, supercool astronaut. Or I was until I had some neurological episode in outer space and then I trained to be a time traveler instead, but on the side I was really into having unprotected sex with random strangers. And then on the night before the most important day of my life, the day I was going to be one of the first humans to time travel, for some reason I sleep with this guy and he gets me pregnant and I kill myself. And this guy is so sad about it that he goes back in time and screws up the past enough to change the entire space-time continuum. Except he still exists and so do I. Although I look different. The other me was this toned, stoic sex robot, but I’m just a person. With, like, cellulite and calluses and birthmarks in weird places and breasts that hurt when I run. Oh, and he’s handsome and successful and charmingly self-deprecating for someone who’s routinely called a genius, at least on the Internet. Because it’s not like he’s cast himself as this big shot over there who no one recognizes here. In fact, it’s the opposite. Here he’s kind of a big deal and over there he was a bit of a loser. But, and this is the swoony, magical part, he thinks I’m the most interesting person in the world. Even though I’m just a grown-up nerd with a bookstore. And I’ve never felt this kind of chemistry with anyone. I get hit on, you know, from time to time, especially by customers and my friends’ boyfriends’ chronically dateless best friends from college. But this is different. It’s electric. He feels electric to me. And it’s also so comfortable and intimate with him, it really does feel like I’ve known him my whole life even though it’s been, like, two weeks. I don’t read a lot of chick lit but I know what this feels like. It feels like it was meant to be. I meet his parents and they couldn’t be more amazing. His mom is a Victorian scholar with an incredible vintage book collection. His dad is a professor who actually wrote a book about time travel, which I read because I’m a geek. And doesn’t that fit together so well? I have a bookstore, his mom loves books, he’s a time traveler, his dad writes about time travel. And there’s his sister, smart and sarcastic and suspicious of me because she’s protective of him, which gives him this inherent credibility, not that he needs it at this point, because she’s the kind of person I’d want to be friends with. It’s all so perfect. It’s all too perfect. Because when you really think about it, actually, this perfect guy sort of sounds like a paranoid schizophrenic. Even his family, the people who know and love him most, they think he’s mentally ill. Maybe not his adorably befuddled dad, who is clearly sick of being the least successful person with his last name sitting at the dining room table, maybe he’s cautiously optimistic that his pet obsession with time travel has been this long-gestating portal to an adventure beyond his most fevered adolescent fantasies. Although even he’s worried his son’s just crazy. But the women in his life, his impressive mom and skeptical sister, they think he needs immediate psychological help because his story sounds ridiculous when you lay it out, no matter how many intricate details he’s woven into it. But you want to believe him because you love this guy like you’ve never loved anyone. Like you’ve waited your whole life to love someone. You’re a self-made, self-aware woman, sure, but you still want that. So you play along with the family summit and tell yourself it’ll be okay, even though you never believed it until the day he walked into your store, now you know in your bones that love conquers all. But then, after staying up all night with him trying to explain to his family, who you just met, that he really is a time traveler from another dimension, you go back to your place, more tired than you’ve been maybe ever, and you fall asleep next to him and when you wake up he’s inside you. But it’s not like before. There’s no electricity or connection or love. You try to look at him. To understand why he’s shoving himself into you like you’re a sex toy instead of the woman he traveled across cosmic dimensions to find. But he pins you to the bed and he gets his full weight on you and you can hardly breathe and it just keeps going and going and going and it hurts. And so you try to change the narrative in your mind, you tell yourself a little story that he’s trying something new, that everyone has weird fantasies they’re embarrassed to say out loud, that you have fantasies you haven’t told him, and some of those fantasies are a bit weird, you know that, which is why you don’t share them with just anyone, but you were going to tell him because you trust him, and so maybe this is what it feels like for someone to trust you so much that they let you see the scary darkness inside them because they believe your love will make it less scary and less dark, and you want to feel that too because you are not without scary darkness, there are parts of you that have always felt unlovable, until you met him and he made you feel like he loved all of you, even the unlovable parts you hadn’t shown him yet, and so you tell yourself you can love this too, even though it hurts, because it means he’s showing you all of him and there’s something inherently good about that even if it feels so very bad. You try to unlock a part of yourself that might even enjoy being roughly screwed like a piece of meat. But guess what? That part of you doesn’t fucking exist. You can’t find it because it’s not even one tiny bit of you. You start to panic that it’s not even him, because it doesn’t feel like him, so what if it’s a psychotic stranger who broke in and killed the man you love and attacked you in your sleep? And he finally finishes, but you’re afraid to turn around because whatever you see, him or someone else, may define the rest of your life. You hear him start the shower and that’s a bad sign because what kind of psycho killer takes a shower right after? You get up and take off the T-shirt and underwear you slept in because you can never wear either of them again. The shower glass is too steamed up to see who it is in there. So you step inside and it’s him. The man you love. Except it’s not. It’s him but it’s not him. He looks at you and, let me tell you something, I’ve had a lot of men look at me in a lot of ways, but never like that. Like a butcher sizing up a steak. I love my body but that look made me want to cut off my breasts and throw them in the ocean. I know you say it wasn’t you. But he looked at me with the same eyes that are looking at me now. The same but not the same. And with that mouth that’s not your mouth, except it is your mouth, he told me you’re gone forever. He left and I stayed in the shower till the water ran cold, stood there for, I don’t know, hours, just let the cold water pour down on me, hoping it could wear me down to molecules. At some point I got out and I couldn’t go back into that bedroom, so I sat here on the couch all day and all night and I practiced my story if I had to tell someone. In case he came back. But instead you came back. Unless of course you’re still him and he’s just really good at pretending to be you.”