All Our Wrong Todays(85)

What I witness is—failure. Entire decades spent failing. The farther back I go, the more failure there is. This is how you discover who someone is. Not the success. Not the result. The struggle. The part between the beginning and the ending that is the truth of life. Whether or not he intended it, this is Lionel’s gift to me. Respect him, despise him, judge him, absolve him, marvel at his achievements, plot his demise, I came to know Lionel Goettreider better than anyone. Hunched over his worktable, scribbling calculations with a chewed yellow pencil, tinkering with equipment, running simulations on a computer of his own design, day and night, weekends, holidays, every day, he worked. He was trying to make something no one else ever had. Just like my father.

I can’t say I forgive my father for his distance through so much of my life, but I finally understand what he was doing all those years, in his study, in his lab, around the dinner table, giving a speech to his peers, ordering around his employees, tuning out while my mother spoke to him, leaving the room when I walked into it—he was failing.

Watching Lionel, I learn something about success I never did in a lifetime as my father’s son. You keep working. You keep trying. You keep failing. Until one day in the distant future, that for me is the distant past, the failure ends. That’s all success feels like. It’s not triumphant. It’s not glorious. It’s just a relief. You finally stopped failing.

You can do a lot with fifty years of nothing but thinking.

I consider what Deisha once said to me in an abandoned town in a lost world. Do something. Be something. Make something. And what that actually means.

I come up with a plan for what I’ll do when I finally arrive at my destination. Not just one linear plan, a continuity of plans, every potential contingency unpacked, considered, fit into the lattice of eventualities.

Whatever anger I felt for Goettreider dissipates over the decades. It feels like an ancient family grudge, one I know should matter, but it was all too long ago to bother with. Besides, his is the only face I ever see and as I watch him decompress from old age, unfolding into the man I first saw back in 1965, I can’t help but feel affection for him. Seeing him walk straighter, his face smoother, his body looser, his hair thicker and darker, his eyes brighter, more keen, I empathize with him, isolated, brilliant, lost. I did this to him. That’s something that echoes through me as I watch him become the man he was: I was the toxin that unmade him. I told him to wait, that I’d come to fix what went wrong, but I didn’t understand what the waiting would do to him.

Or maybe I did. After all, I haven’t told him to wait yet. The me trapped for five decades is the one who will make that decision. Is it to punish him for doing this to me, a loop of pain that neither of us can escape until it’s run its course? Or did fifty years of nothingness inure me to the agony of an endless wait?

Eventually, there are no more plans to make. I know what to do, what to say, everything he could possibly say in reply and how I will respond, a branching nest of words and actions that can lead only to their proper resolution. So I move on from plans.

I turn inside. I figure out who I am, what parts of me are Tom, what parts of me are John, where they overlap and why they differ. We reach an understanding—John doesn’t even mind receding into the deepest folds of our shared mind as long as I give him something to think about.

Together, John and I design every building in every city on the planet. We draw a blueprint of the world and it is magnificent. All that John accomplished before now was the aimless doodling of a child. Together we build a new hull for our civilization.

I write this book, chapter by chapter, memorize the words in sequence so I can assemble it at will. I remember composing this chapter. It was some forty years into the process, the mid-1970s judging by Lionel’s appearance, although of course by then I’d long stopped caring about dates.

I try to hold on to Penny, I do. It’s not just that two weeks out of fifty-one years is a wisp of time. Lionel made his life about Ursula and it brought him equal measures of happiness and pain. But he got to refill that tank in occasional gasps, their intermittent reunions tightening the bolts and scrubbing away the rust of their perpetual emotion machine. All I had were memories. Sunlight in hair. The pitch of her deep-throated laugh. An elusive scent that might have been her or might have been the other Penelope or might have been someone else or might have been nothing at all.

I considered going into more detail here, trying to convey what it feels like to live through fifty-one years of inverted chronology. How by the time you get to them, events you thought you’d be thrilled to witness—Lionel first setting up his worktable in the corner of the room, opening the first of hundreds of notepads, chewing the first of thousands of pencils—feel stale because you’ve projected so many different versions of them, reverse-engineering what occurred from what you’ve already seen, that when they happen it’s just a shrug: yeah, that’s how I figured it went.

And what’s the point? The vast yawn of time can’t be described the way I experienced it. Shouldn’t be.

After five decades without breathing or blinking or talking or smiling or screaming, the months pass like hours, the weeks like minutes, the days like seconds. When things start to happen, I’m so beyond noticing physical events that I almost miss it as the thread winds up tight on its spool. The Engine is unhooked from its nest of wires and tubes, loaded on a truck, driven to a dock, hoisted by a crane, packed into a crate. It’s in the cargo hold of a ship. It’s at the Port of San Francisco. Seagulls. Gasoline. Cigarette smoke and pop songs on a staticky radio.