All Our Wrong Todays(84)

A raw terror creeps up and I try to mash it back down because this isn’t going to happen in real time, right? This is going to accelerate, any moment now, any moment now, any moment now, any moment now, any moment now, any moment now.

It doesn’t.

This is what Lionel neglected to mention—I’d go back fifty-one years and experience every second of it. Although it doesn’t take long for concepts like seconds and minutes and hours to feel like nothing but the abstract human constructs they are.

I watch Lionel and me talking in the domed room, our herky-jerky movements and reversed dialogue. But I’m not paying close attention because I’m waiting for everything to speed up into a dizzying wormhole velocity that instantly propels me to 1965. So I miss what turns out to be the last sight of myself that I have for five decades.

The platform that the Goettreider Engine sits on lowers into the windowless underground chamber from which it powers Lionel’s operations. And I follow it down, frozen in the position I was in when the time machine engaged, tethered to the Engine, invisible, immaterial, immobile, holding the device like a courier bringing a package to someone’s door. I’m not following myself back in time. I’m following it—the Goettreider Engine. A reverse path into its own history, winding up the thread of its tau radiation trail like an unspooled yo-yo.

I don’t see anyone for what feels like months. It turns out Lionel doesn’t visit the Engine too often. As long as everything runs properly, he has no reason to. He checks the machinery once or twice a year, but his visits are abrupt and banal, eyes darting across the readouts, nodding, and leaving. And Lionel is the only one who comes in, not trusting anyone else, which makes sense when you have the most valuable piece of technology in history and don’t want to share it.

I would’ve lost my mind within a week if not for Penelope.

Not Penny—Penelope. It was that thing she told me, how she’d master a training module by breaking down each technical procedure into discrete tasks and counting them down by the second. It was a way to take control of something as vast and liquid and riotous as time. It’s what kept me sane in that first decade. Or as sane as can reasonably be expected in a circumstance for which the human mind is not fit. And so Penelope Weschler did for me what I couldn’t do for her: She saved me.

The system is automated and through careful observation I come to know the precise, rhythmic sequences that comprise the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. The Engine is never turned off, so the radiation thread is never severed.

I stand there. I hold the time machine. I wait.

Seconds into minutes into hours into days into weeks into months into years into a decade of standing there, of holding the time machine, of waiting.

This is probably what it was like for Lionel, wondering when I’d knock on his door and set this sequence of events in motion. Maybe he did this on purpose, to punish me, torture me, teach me what it was like to be him and why he did the things he did.

And even if that wasn’t his plan, it works. I get it. When you spend more than fifty years waiting for something to happen, everything else erodes into meaninglessness. You have one goal and whatever doesn’t help you achieve it is just in the way. Morality seems very small and wet and delicate, a bug you find in your boot.

In the early years, I think about my family a lot, frozen like me in a moment of peril, but it’s hard to maintain a state of primed anxiety for that long. Besides which, I’m already doing the best thing I can to help them, and they’re not in more peril—they’re in the exact same amount of peril, tiptoe on the point of a long, sharp knife.

And Penny. The acuteness of her, despite my determination and focus, can’t help but fade. She starts to feel, increasingly and then maybe irrevocably, like someone I knew long, long ago for a very, very brief time. I want to save her, but it’s also sort of like being asked to risk your life for someone you met once as a child. You want to be the kind of person who would sacrifice everything for the one you love, but as the years stretch on and you’re imprisoned, static, in a dark, whirring room it begins to feel like, what, her, that woman I knew for a few weeks ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago? That’s who I’m willing to die for? No, I hope she’s okay but that’s not what this is about anymore. This is bigger than that, more crucial—it has to be or no amount of counting time will keep me from going mad.

It becomes obvious that I can’t let the world continue to suffer in a technological and social wasteland just because I have emotional connections to four individual human beings. To squander global civilization and the fundamental welfare of the planet itself because I like my family better and Penny likes me better is selfishness at its most cruel and idiotic. Really, who is the greater monster, Lionel, for a few threats and manipulations in pursuit of a better world, or me, for resisting it when so much good was undone by my folly? Me. Clearly me. It only takes, like, ten or eleven years for me to let go of every last vestige of my egotism so I can genuinely accept it. By around 2004, I’ve fully committed to resetting the timeline to its original path. Rather than, you know, trying to get revenge on Lionel and rescuing Penny and my family.

Fourteen years in, Lionel finishes his time machine. It’s ready to test.

And that’s when my true education begins. I have the privilege and the curse of watching Lionel spend nearly forty years trying to build it. His workshop is in a corner of the same underground bunker where the Engine sits—a man with any imaginable resource, financial, technical, and intellectual, who deliberately chooses to work in what is essentially a prison cell. If he’s aware that I’m an inmate here as well, he never acknowledges my presence. I’m as much a ghost as I was that day in 1965.