All Our Wrong Todays(86)

I see myself appear—disappear—with Lionel Goettreider looking more or less as he did when I first saw him. It must be July 13, 1965, just after he turned on the Engine and I materialized with the time machine I’ve been carrying for five decades. I watch us talk in the off-kilter glottal breaths of reversed phonemes, which I understand because somewhere in the late 1980s I spent a few years teaching myself backward language. I hear everything we say in inverted real time so that even this, the ultimate moment I’ve been waiting for, the climax of this interminable journey, becomes flat and predictable. By the time I merge with myself at the moment I appear in this timeline, I’ve already experienced it in reverse. I know everything I’ll say and do and everything he’ll say and do and so all that’s left is to replay my part the right way around.





125


I materialize in Lionel Goettreider’s ruined laboratory in the basement of the San Francisco State Science and Technology Center on July 13, 1965. I’m standing right in front of Lionel himself, jarringly close, his hand releasing the lever that he just pulled to switch on the Engine for the first time since the accident.

He freezes, shocked, speechless. There’s an open blister on the tip of his nose from the skin-peeling heat that blasted from the Engine as it prepared to melt down. His eyebrows and eyelashes are just wispy, singed remnants. He wears leather gloves and I remember that his palms nearly burned off in the moments before I was able to shut down the Engine. It must hurt like hell.

The lab is a mess. Jagged cracks across one half of the ceiling, the other half collapsed, machinery from the lab upstairs in a broken pile. The consoles warped and shattered. Steel support beams melted like modern art sculptures. Fire-blackened holes in the walls where the plumes punched through. There’s a dusting of ash on the floor—what’s left of Jerome’s incinerated arm.

As I open my mouth to speak, despite so many decades practicing for this very moment, I almost screw it up by speaking backward.

“Lionel,” I say, “my name is John Barren. I’m here from the future. I know you saw me in this lab two days ago and I know you’ve already theorized that I was a visitor from another time. I know these things because you’re the one who sent me back here.”

“It’s true?” he says.

“It is,” I say. “And the less you say the better. You designed the time machine to follow the radiation signature of your device as far back as it could, to this moment. Now that it’s on, you must never turn it off. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he says, “but . . .”

“I need your help to make the last small jump to just before the accident,” I say. “The unidentified radiation traces you noticed, you’ve hypothesized they’re from the device itself, paradoxically detectable before it was even turned on. That’s correct. And I am the paradox. The time machine is designed to follow the remaining traces in the atmosphere back to the moment the experiment took place.”

I realize I’m still holding the time machine, like my hands are bolted to it. I really want to put the piece-of-shit thing down after carrying it for five decades but can’t quite let go, not yet.

“You’re actually a time traveler?” Lionel says.

“Lionel, you already know this. Please don’t waste time. You sent me here to fix what went wrong. To put the timeline back on track.”

“So the experiment should have worked,” Lionel says.

“Are you done stating the obvious?” I say. “I need power to make the final jump. You designed the two devices to be compatible. Hook them up.”

Lionel hesitates. He looks like he might cry. It’s sort of sweet and sad, but I have no interest in sympathizing with him right now.

“Is this the life you want?” I say, gesturing to the ambient destruction around us. “Or do you want the life you’re supposed to have?”

I don’t mention that in the life he’s supposed to have he’ll soon be dead.

“Ursula?” he says.

“She stays married to Jerome for the rest of her life,” I say. “Unless we change the timeline.”

She stays married to Jerome for the rest of her life in the other timeline too—it’s just that her life lasts only nine more weeks. But, whatever, it gets Lionel to start hooking up the time machine to the Engine. After fifty years, I feel no ethical qualms about lies of omission.

“You will build this time machine,” I say. “It will take a long time. It will seem impossible because it is impossible, but you are Lionel Goettreider and impossible is a meaningless word to you.”

That seems to cow him. Maybe this bullshit pep talk is what corroded him through the decades, but it’s what I already heard myself say when I saw this play out in reverse.

“You said I’m the one who sends you back here,” he says. “But from when?”

“I understand why you’d balk at being told your future is predetermined, but take solace in the fact that you’re the one who determined it. This is your plan. To set right what went wrong.”

“But aren’t you to blame for what went wrong?” he says. “If you hadn’t appeared when you did . . .”

“And if you hadn’t panicked when you saw me, yes, we both made mistakes. Which is why I’m here. I can apologize, or I can fix the timeline so neither of our mistakes ever happened.”