All Our Wrong Todays(73)
The sick thing is he didn’t even sell off his best stuff—it was all the things he didn’t need anymore because he’d already moved beyond them. Like how at his home there are no electrical cords, because Lionel invented wireless electricity fields more than two decades ago. Fifteen years ago he dropped electronics altogether and shifted into photonics, which he then replaced with experimental polaritonics five years later. He left humanity to cobble together modern civilization from his discards and trash.
The world I come from isn’t quite as lost as I thought. It turns out it was concealed in a little pocket of the planet, conceived and built and nurtured by Lionel Goettreider, and he was profoundly uninterested in sharing it with the rest of us.
109
It’s easy to be distracted by Lionel, the layers of ego, resentment, vanity, and expectation roiling and lunging and grappling for dominance in his tone. It’s like he wants my approval and my awe but also can’t help jabbing at me for taking so long to find him. I can sense this abyss of black terror under everything he says.
I know that terror because I felt it the last time I saw Penny—it’s the fear that what my brain is telling me isn’t real, that something fundamental is defective inside me, and that everything I think I know is an auroral lattice of self-justification erected to protect me from my own bad wiring. What if I’m a Goettreider Engine with a fatal flaw, but instead of power I generate florid delusions that poison me like a radiation leak?
The thing is, I miss Penny so much. I think about her constantly. I know I sound like a teenager with a newborn crush, but goddamn it, it’s hard to focus on anything except her. What we had was so unexpected and now that I don’t know if we’ll ever have more of it I feel doubled over with longing and loss.
I’m sitting in a super-car with the world’s smartest person, the key to everything I’ve been searching for, and he’s taking me to a covert lair full of secrets and mysteries and yet my mind can barely absorb any of it. My graceless disaster of a brain keeps abandoning the present to flit back to moments like the first time I kissed Penny, the precise pressure her lips exerted on mine in that initial contact between our mouths, the seesaw of our jaws as we found the right fit, her top lip, my top lip, her bottom lip, my bottom lip, the stubble on my chin rough on the soft skin of hers.
If Lionel wants to hoard his treasure like a fairy-tale creature, that’s up to him. I just want Penny to trust me again.
Anxiety lurches up sticky in my throat because everything rests on this ninety-three-year-old man nattering on next to me, and I’m sorry if that sounds cruel but as he gloats about how he finally deigned to grant the world the technology that enabled cellular networks and global positioning and the Internet itself decades after he first invented them, all I can think is: What if he’s crazy too? Maybe this is some communal delusion, like religious zealots who writhe on the floor and speak in tongues. Maybe Lionel and I share a unique psychological disorder where we think we rightfully belong to an alternate techno-utopian reality and we’re crucial to the true destiny of humankind. What if meeting him doesn’t prove I’m right—it just proves we’re both wrong?
110
We pull up at the Chai Wan warehouse and Wen locks us in the car while he does a perimeter sweep. Lionel fidgets with a button on his shirt. The thread that binds it has started to come loose.
“I’m sorry,” says Lionel, “but something puzzles me. Why do you keep calling it an engine?”
“What do you mean?” I say. “That’s what it’s called.”
“But it makes no sense,” he says. “Engines turn energy into force. Generators turn force into energy. It should be called the Goettreider Generator.”
I actually remember a cranky science teacher in high school griping that Lionel Goettreider would be aghast that his legacy had been tarnished with this fundamental inaccuracy. When President Johnson announced the invention to the world in a televised address on August 22, 1965, his science advisers were still arguing over a list of names. Two of President Johnson’s special assistants, Jack Valenti and Richard N. Goodwin, both took credit for calling the device “Dr. Goettreider’s Engine of the Future”—the cheery appellation that Johnson used in his speech—which was soon informally shortened to: Goettreider Engine. The name stuck.
Of course, the reason the invention could be named by a presidential speechwriter instead of its inventor is that Lionel didn’t live long enough to see his device change the world. He didn’t even live long enough to give it a name. I know I should tell him this, that every moment I don’t will only make it more awkward when I do, but it’s hard to explain to someone that they should’ve died in hideous, molten pain five decades ago.
Before I can make a decision one way or the other, Wen gives the all clear and Lionel does his stiff-but-fluid walk to the one door in the otherwise impenetrable box. He makes this conductor-like gesture in front of it and the door opens with the clunk of heavy bolts retracting.
Inside, the warehouse is as unadorned as the outside, blank cement walls, soundproofing insulation, exposed joists and beams. Lionel’s home felt like the last refuge of the world I left behind, but his warehouse is just a warehouse. The air in here is cold and astringent, like anything organic has been thoroughly purged.