All Our Wrong Todays(78)
She immediately understood what Lionel’s plan to save her life really was—and she didn’t want it. Her mind was gone and it wasn’t coming back. She was uninterested in a mindless life. She begged him not to go back any further. Even if they figured out the exact moment the cancer first appeared in her hippocampus, lodged deep in her medial temporal lobe, it was several years earlier. She needed her happy memories. She didn’t want to trade years’ worth of them for memories of his desperate and probably fruitless attempts to cure her. She wanted to die peacefully with whatever was left of her once-magnificent brain, lying in bed reminiscing about their times together. His body and her body, connected in a way that gave her life meaning, even if it was a secret meaning, a hidden meaning, a shameful meaning. If he were to take those memories away from her, it would be a far more devastating amputation than what happened to Jerome all those decades ago.
Lionel promised her he wouldn’t go back any further. They cried, they kissed, they said good-bye.
As soon as he returned to the present, he went back again. And again. And again. And again and again and again and again. He lost count of how many times he went back to that exact same moment. It’s not just the promise he made to her—there are technical reasons why he couldn’t go back any further than that last day together. But, each time, he tried a different way to convince Ursula to let him attempt to cure her. Each time, she refused. Each time they cried and kissed and said good-bye and each time he tried again.
He went back and forced her to take the treatment and the treatment failed and she died anyway, her final memory of him one of betrayal and anger. He tried again and forced her again and it failed again and she died in his arms, her brain consumed by out-of-control nanites, Lionel frantically trying to deactivate them before they ate her whole and infected him too. He tried again, failed again, tried again, failed again, and each time Ursula got worse, more confused, more disoriented, less present, less herself. Her husband and daughter just thought it was the ravages of her disease. To them, locked into linear time and unaware of Lionel’s chronic resetting of Ursula’s experience, it just seemed like she got very sick, very fast.
And so, for the first time in his life, Lionel Goettreider gave up. He went back one last time and Ursula was a wreck, because he wrecked her, and so he just held her and told her he was sorry. They cried, they kissed, and they said good-bye.
This time, he stayed in the past. Ursula collapsed in her kitchen the next day and Jerome rushed her to the hospital. She died six days later with Emma at her bedside.
Lionel went to the funeral, spoke with Emma for the first time, tried to apologize to Jerome, and when it was over he returned to the present. Before that, his longest time in the past had been about three hours. His final trip was just over a week.
You love someone for fifty years and then they die. People talk about grief as emptiness, but it’s not empty. It’s full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you would have. How do you keep five decades of love from souring into a snakebite that makes your own heart the threat, drawing the poison up and down the length of you?
Goddamn it, I don’t want to but I can’t help thinking about my father. And what it felt like for him when my mother died. Because of course I never asked.
I remember, a week after her death, finding a dozen grilled cheese sandwiches discarded on their kitchen counter with a single bite taken out of each one. I tossed them in the organic dissolution module and shook my head at my father’s self-absorption—he can unravel the mysteries of time travel but he can’t work the food synthesizer.
Now I understand. It wasn’t waste. It was longing. He was trying to re-create a meal his wife made him for thirty years. But the machine couldn’t get the flavor right. And so something as banal as a sandwich becomes fraught with sadness.
My father spent his life in Lionel Goettreider’s shadow and I spent my life judging him unworthy of the comparison. It took until now to see him for what he didn’t do. He didn’t use his time machine. He didn’t go back. He didn’t save her. Whatever pain he felt, he lived with it. He had an inner compass that eluded Lionel. And me too.
When my mother died, my father was four months away from the scientific triumph he’d worked on his whole life. I was all he had left. Even if it doesn’t matter, even if it never happened, even if the only place that pain still exists is in my memory, it turns out my father finally taught me something about love.
118
Once, over dinner in a small bistro in the countryside outside Clermont-Ferrand, after a day spent hiking the cinder cones of the Cha?ne des Puys volcano range, Ursula ate dessert and explained to Lionel her conception of reality. According to her, reality isn’t concrete. It’s loose and gelatinous, like the crème br?lée she was midway through. The surface is crystalline, but it’s just a hard, thin crust that keeps the soft insides held in place. When pierced, it cracks into jagged shards as the innards spill out.
Lionel admits to me he fears that what he did to the timeline has precipitated a systemic failure in reality itself. It started because two people wanted some time together. But it ended with one unable to let the other go. Returning to the same moment in time over and over again is like repeatedly tapping a spot on a mirror with your fingernail. Is it enough to break the mirror? Probably not. But how do you even tell if it’s doing something imperceptibly damaging to its structural integrity?