All Our Wrong Todays(88)

Paramedics carry off the witnesses too injured to walk. The rest limp and crawl out of the lab. Goettreider is roughly hauled to his feet. A paramedic inspects his wounds as he sits against the wall in a daze, bleeding from the tip of his burned nose, staring at the machine, flayed palms open on his lap.

Firefighters pull away wreckage to clear a path to the door. They pry Ursula from Jerome as she screams and reaches for him. Ursula sits on the floor, cradling Jerome’s head, sobbing, while he shudders and twitches, clutching his cauterized stump.

The Engine stops spinning, slows, Goettreider powers it down, he runs a safe shut-down procedure, his hands scorched and raw, he stumbles to the instrument panel, he rises from the spot slumped against the wall where I pushed him right before I switched the Engine back on and ricocheted to my own time.

By the final seconds of this rewound thread, as I sync up to the point when I first arrived at this moment in time, my mind is utterly scrambled. I see the events I already experienced, but frenetic and unlatched, like a stream of all the right words laid out with all the wrong syntax, off-kilter and half-deranged.





127


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Lab his in standing figure ghostly a sees Lionel. Field invisibility his disrupts and Tom hits plume a until. Harmless but dazzling, room the through wildly arc light glittering of plumes. Energy of amounts massive in pulls and speed to up gets Engine the.

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128


If you want to remember what happened the last time I visited July 11, 1965, go reread chapters 44 to 54. I’m so disoriented I miss everything up to about chapter 52.

My plan was that, on arrival, I’d take control of my own consciousness in 1965 the way I had John’s consciousness in 2016—two versions of me simultaneously inhabiting the identical point in space-time, my current mind steering my earlier self to trigger the emergency return function on the time-travel apparatus before the Goettreider Engine is even turned on.

But the plan immediately goes sideways. I arrive, yes, inside my own body, but I’m woozy and addled. I can’t think straight, let alone stop myself—the Tom I was on my first trip to 1965—from making the exact same choices in the exact same sequence as last time. I don’t know if it’s because I’m inside my own earlier mind, but I can’t seem to grip the cognitive wheel. I can only observe my actions, unable to alter them.

Did I live through fifty years of stasis just to watch myself make the same disastrous mistakes? If I fail, I know my sanity can’t survive another try. I’ll come undone. I may have already come undone.

I’m trapped in my own mind, watching myself blunder forward in time, unable to stop him, me, us.

I guess this is probably how John feels about me.

There’s a reference in those earlier chapters to a “tickle” in the back of my mind telling me—Tom, the previous Tom—to stay concealed behind the crowd instead of repositioning to get a better view. Now I realize that “tickle” was me—the current me, goddamn it’s hard to get the pronouns right—straining with all my cognitive power to seize control of Tom’s—the other Tom’s—consciousness before he slips from his hiding spot into Lionel’s line of sight. And there’s not much time. Lionel is moments away from turning on the Engine.

I’ve got to get myself out of the path of the energy plumes that are about to erupt from the Engine and disrupt my invisibility field, triggering the whole chain of events I came here to stop. But I can’t. I’m a powerless observer in my own mind.

Picture a room. Four walls, one with a big, wide window through which you can see the outside world. The room’s walls are made of memories, layered over each other like panes of stained glass, an infinitely dense story of a life. This is Tom’s mind in 1965.

Now drop an identical room into that room. This is my mind returning to 1965 for the second time, inhabiting the same body. The walls are made of my memories and there’s another big window, but this one looks out at the first window.

And there’s a third room inside the second room inside the first room—John’s consciousness inside my consciousness inside my earlier consciousness, like nesting dolls. That room is made of John’s memories and, for now, he’s locked in there.