All Our Wrong Todays(79)

What happens if the hard skin of reality punctures? What comes out?

I know there is a better version of this world because I lived there and saw its wonders undreamt of. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a much worse version of this world standing in the yard hoping someone leaves the back door unlocked.

Am I being too coy? Let me be more plain—terrors undreamt of, that’s what comes out when the hard skin breaks open.

If a single mistake I made five decades ago can create a whole new reality, what did all of Lionel’s mistakes on all of his trips back in time do to the world? And to me?

I have a question that’s been clawing at me since Lionel started explaining all of this. It’s one of those questions you have to ask even though you know the answer.

“The last time you went to the past,” I say, “when exactly did you get back?”

Lionel checks a readout on his watch. He tells me he returned five days ago, in what would’ve been the early morning of last Sunday in Toronto.

Already knowing the answer doesn’t stop the icy burn from gripping my muscles and organs. When Lionel traveled back to see Ursula that final time and stayed until her funeral, he was gone for much longer than ever before. A week in the past isn’t like tapping the mirror with your fingernail. It’s like hitting it with a hammer. It cracked open the hard shell and something slipped out—John.

Sunday morning was when John woke up in Penny’s bed and I was gone.

I didn’t lose control the way I thought I did. Lionel’s time machine did it to me.





119


This feels all wrong, too murky, too dark, too compromised. Lionel Goettreider invented time travel and used it to have an affair. I’m not a physicist or a philosopher, I’m only an architect in name, I’m not anything in particular, and this is way over my head. I want to be in Penny’s bed, lazing away the morning, cajoling each other into being the one to make a coffee run, contemplating if I’m physiologically able to have sex again without using the bathroom first. I don’t want to be here. I want to go home.

And now I can go home—I needed to prove to Penny I wasn’t crazy. Okay, well, Lionel Goettreider is alive and, sure, narcissistic and weird, but brilliant enough to invent a time machine. So, mission accomplished.

I’ll say a polite but heartfelt good-bye to Lionel and make plans to pick up this conversation again soon. I’ll go directly to the airport, pay as much as it costs to fly back to Toronto right away, and spend the flight rehearsing exactly what to say to Penny to regain her trust. I’ll talk to my family and agree to get whatever psychological help they think I need to stop worrying about me and, I don’t know, maybe that’ll help keep John away and, yes, I’m aware this sounds vague and shaky but I don’t care—I got what I came for and now I’m done.

“Thank you for showing this to me,” I say. “But I think it’s time for me to go.”

“I agree,” Lionel says. “There’s no point delaying any further. Your genetic scans have already been integrated into the transmission matrix and all systems are activated.”

“What are you talking about?” I say.

“Sending you back,” Lionel says.

“Sending me back where?”

“To reset the timeline. Put things back the way they’re supposed to be. I know I’ve caused minor ripples by using it for personal reasons, but you’re the one who started it. You made the first crack in the shell of time. My experiment should’ve worked. Ursula should’ve chosen me. None of this should’ve happened and you can fix it. You can stop yourself from ruining everything.”

“Lionel,” I say, “I’m not going anywhere except home.”

“But you have to,” he says. “You owe it to the world. You owe it to me. This is not my life.”

“Look,” I say, “I should’ve told you something right away. Your experiment should’ve worked, yes, and it should’ve powered the future we never got to have. But you didn’t live to see it. You, Ursula, Jerome, and everyone else in the lab that day in 1965, you all died within weeks of the experiment. That radiation surge you found and fixed after the accident? In my world, it killed you. It killed Ursula too. You don’t get a happily ever after. You never see each other again.”

“So this is it?” Lionel says. “This is the best I get? My reward is to waste my whole life waiting to see her? No. It’s not enough. I’d rather die knowing my work changed the world.”

“I get it,” I say. “I’ve thought about how I could set things right. Go back to the accident and stop it from going wrong, then return to my timeline just one day earlier and make a simple, different choice. I could even sleep with her and, as long as she didn’t get pregnant, everything would be okay. I know that makes no sense to you, but what I’m saying is I understand that when you have the technology . . . change haunts you. It’s so clean and easy in your mind. Alter this one little thing and the rest will work out. But it won’t. It’s messier than you think. You have no control. You can only destroy. Well, I’m done destroying. I want to make things now. I know it’s selfish to keep the world I come from lost forever. But no more selfish than, I’m sorry, the fact that you’ve kept all your inventions locked up in this mausoleum when you could’ve changed the world. I mean, don’t you see that? You could already be everything you think you should’ve been. In my world, you’ve been dead for fifty years. You release all this stuff you’ve been tinkering with, it won’t get us everything we could’ve had, but it’s a hell of a start. And time travel won’t make it better. It will only ever make it worse.”