All Our Wrong Todays(65)
98
“I don’t know how to prove it to you, but I’m me,” I say.
“I can’t see him again,” Penny says. “And you can’t promise he won’t be here when you wake up tomorrow.”
“What can I do?”
“Find proof,” she says. “Maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am. Maybe I’m just another girl who falls for the wrong guy and talks herself out of running away because she thinks love matters. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe you’re crazy and I’m stupid and this ends in a courtroom or a cemetery with everybody I know saying she seemed so smart, how could she be so dumb?”
“I know my promises don’t mean much right now, but . . .”
“But nothing,” she says. “I love you but I can’t see you again until you can prove to me you’re telling the truth.”
She looks me in the eye, wary, checking, and I can tell it doesn’t matter which of us I am, not anymore, that everything is different now and has to be.
My father spent his whole life chasing a trail back to Lionel Goettreider and the events of July 11, 1965. And now I have to do the same. His trail was made of tau radiation, but mine is made of something that can be just as malignant—memory.
Penny locks and bolts the door behind me. I go home and book a flight.
99
I’m on an airplane, flying from Toronto to San Francisco, the last forty-eight hours careening around in my head like a windmill that’s shredded its bolts and is about to hurtle across the landscape like a gigantic shuriken.
I believe Penny and I believe Beth. What I typically don’t believe in are things like blacking out and hurting people. I don’t want to be the kind of person who tells stories to himself that he wouldn’t believe if they were told to him. And I also feel like—this is not what I signed up for. You probably feel that way too. This was supposed to be, like, a time-travel romp, you know? I’d make some mistakes but in the end I’d set things right. I fantasized that despite or maybe even because of everything I’ve done wrong, I’d somehow come out of this a hero. The hero.
In principle, I realize that heroism demands sacrifice. But I didn’t understand what I’d actually have to sacrifice. Write a list of the things you can’t imagine giving up and that’s the list of things you’ll be forced to lose. Except you couldn’t even draw up the list, because they’re all the things you take for granted as essential elements of yourself. They don’t seem removable from what makes you who you are.
So, I’m sorry this isn’t a time-travel romp. I was expecting causal loops and reality fluctuations and branching dimensions and scientifically questionable solutions to ornate space-time paradoxes. I wasn’t expecting actual human pain. I didn’t ask to question the foundations of my sanity. Wiping someone out of existence because of a time-travel glitch is haunting, but distant and blurry. The woman you love saying that you physically hurt her, even if it wasn’t exactly you, isn’t distant or blurry. It’s heavy and solid. It burrows under your skin to build a nest of poison in which to lay its toxic eggs.
Whether I’m right or whether I’m crazy, the only way through is the path that leads to Jerome Francoeur and whatever he might know. Maybe nothing. Maybe he’s just a photo in an old book on my dad’s office shelf that I somehow remembered from my childhood and I embellished an opulent delusion out of an evocative detail like the sleeve of a blazer stitched at the elbow.
If Jerome Francoeur has no idea who Lionel Goettreider is, I can’t go back to Penny and ask her to trust me, not when I can’t trust myself. But if I can’t go back to Penny, I don’t know where else to go. There’s nowhere else I want to be.
100
“Can you do me a big favor?” says Jerome Francoeur. “Can you tell me why the hell you’re here? Because you’re not writing about my wife. I mean, I like that you went right for the gut there, went all in on the dead wife, that’s a sharp move. And maybe if I was a little more senile it would’ve worked. So, cut the horseshit. What do you want?”
I’ve been sitting in Jerome’s house in Palo Alto for about ninety seconds. I stood on the pedimented wraparound porch of the gabled Queen Anne house, staring at the jaunty asymmetrical facade when his daughter, Emma Francoeur, answered the front door, polite, stiff. On the way down the hall, she told me how moved she is that I want to include a chapter about her mother for my book on pioneering women in physics. So I was thinking my lie worked like a charm when she opened the study door, revealing Jerome perched in an antique wingback armchair like a hawk on a branch, his sleeve clipped at the elbow above his missing forearm. Emma pads off to the kitchen to get us coffee. Jerome waits until she’s out of earshot before drilling right through my deception.
“Mr. Francoeur,” I say, “sir . . .”
“I’m a reasonable judge of character,” Jerome says, “and I can see you’re about to double down on the horseshit. I have the Internet, Mr. Barren. I know who you are. I read your little speech from the other day. You’ve got stones, telling all your peers they’re worthless, although from where I sit it was a lot of generalities and not a lot of specifics.”
“I hadn’t prepared anything,” I say, “so bravado seemed like the way to go.”