All Our Wrong Todays(77)
Like movies. You know how movies work, right? What you see as a moving image is actually a series of sequential still frames that your brain interprets as movement thanks to persistence of vision and the stroboscopic effect. Your brain’s prodigious capacity to cohere data is why a painting can look gorgeously lifelike from a distance but, up close, degenerates into globs of pigment on canvas. Or how the individual instruments of an orchestra gel into a symphony.
Lionel’s version of time travel didn’t ask his brain to hold simultaneous memories of the same time at the same time. He experienced his trips to the past as present-tense events. He always returned to the present after the same amount of time he spent in the past—if he left the present at 8:00 P.M. and spent two hours in the past, he’d return to the present at 10:00 P.M. The reason for this time management was so he could age properly, but it also meant his brain was never required to double up on its experiential intake. When he got back to the present, his memory of the past didn’t feel like the past. It felt like he’d teleported to another location in another time zone. It’s just that the time zone was in the past. So his memories maintained accurate chronology.
But Ursula’s didn’t.
Lionel wasn’t overwriting his own experiences, but she was, and it destroyed Ursula’s mind. The conflicting timelines gnawed at the structural integrity of her neural barriers. They were just trying to protect her marriage by using only the hours they already knew would be safe, but each time Lionel went back to see her Ursula’s brain mapped a new memory over the old one.
The immediate effect was negligible. The cumulative effect was devastating. Her brilliant, expansive mind, the thing that most attracted him to her, that made her who she was, came undone. No human being had ever experienced this before, having small parcels of their memories revised, again and again and again. To cope, her brain, as a biological organ, began to secrete neuritic plaques to scab over what it interpreted as damage to the gray matter, similar in protein structure to the abnormal neurofibrillary tangles of Alzheimer’s disease.
As their time-travel romance continued over the years, these neuritic plaques, unique in human neurology because her situation was unique in human history, curdled into a coarse poison—malignant cancer cells buried deep in the memory centers of Ursula’s brain. They didn’t affect her everyday activity, until they outgrew their nest and went looking for new real estate.
Ursula knew she was losing it. She could feel her sharp, complex mind collapsing in on itself like a neglected backyard shed. For the preceding months, she’d kept their encounters brief and carnal to conceal the truth from Lionel. She never told him that she’d started chemotherapy treatments. She was worried about what he might do.
She knew him well.
116
It’s the middle of the night on the other side of the planet, and between the trip to San Francisco, the flight to Hong Kong, and the shuffled time zones, Penny’s had a few days to think about everything that happened. What is she doing right now? Did she open the store, greet customers, shelve returns, order stock, act like nothing’s wrong? Is she sleeping peacefully or not at all? Is my absence making things better or worse? How can I prove to her incontrovertibly that John will never come back?
I need answers but what Lionel is giving me is just information. I expected the Lionel Goettreider who died in 1965, the selfless genius-martyr, his mistakes and failures and heartbreaks retroactively bronzed into biographical trivia. But here, in this world, they’re just mistakes and failures and heartbreaks. His face is not the face of a statue. It’s the face of a man worn down by time. And the more he talks, the less I trust him.
Maybe Penny would know how to respond to his confessions. Maybe she’d show the right mix of compassion and respect and curiosity. Maybe Penny would trust him. At least the Penny who existed before I showed up in her life. That morning with John, maybe it created a new version of reality, just like my time traveling did, one in which Penny is as different from the woman I met in the bookstore as I am from John.
You don’t need time travel to smash apart a world.
But it helps.
117
Unfortunately, this is not the story of how Lionel Goettreider cured cancer. It’s the story of how the smartest person who ever lived failed to save the love of his life—and what that failure did to him.
Lionel was a physicist and an engineer, not an oncologist, not a geneticist. His genius had limits. He spent the next eighteen months trying to cure cancer or at least slow its progress. He couldn’t do it. Maybe if he’d attempted it a few decades earlier. But even his great insights into the mechanics of time travel happened in his forties and fifties. The subsequent decades were about solving the logistic barriers. He finished building his time machine in 2002 and had spent the past dozen years sleeping with Ursula and self-medicating to be physically capable of sleeping with Ursula. His best years were behind him. Still, he tried.
His most effective notion was nanotechnological hybrid bacteria that eat cancer cells. The problem was getting them, once unleashed, to distinguish midfeast between corrupted cells and the healthy cells adjacent to them. Sometimes the nanites just kept eating once they got a taste for human flesh, so they had to be carefully monitored.
Lionel went back to his final visit with Ursula. He didn’t want to be in the same place at the same time as himself, so he used the out-point of the beacon as his in-point. To Ursula, it was like he disappeared and instantly reappeared looking two years older.