All Our Wrong Todays(92)
Eight. The next blue pulse comes right at Ursula, but Jerome pushes her to safety, his outstretched arm vaporized below the elbow. I plunge into the murky swamp of my mind, not even sure what I’m searching for—until I find something buried in all the soggy, elastic memories, something hard. The memory is pale and brittle, but solid. It’s the restaurant where Penny and I ate breakfast the morning after our first night together. I don’t know what we talked about or what we ordered, but the feeling is there—possibility. When I wedge this fragile memory into the syrupy web around me, it holds its place. It’s not enough to stop Victor. But it’s not my only memory of her.
Seven. The remaining observers panic en masse as another plume slashes open the ceiling. I build a structure from my memories of Penny. Some are so thin they crumble at the edges when I pick them up. A taxi ride in the rain, city lights blurring vivid like wet paint in a halo around her profile. But some are as strong and thick as bricks. Her bookstore, Penny reading a novel on a stool, too absorbed to look up at the customer who just showed up to change her life. My family home, the dinner that started so well and ended so badly. The auditorium where I gave my speech, ready to risk anything because I walked in holding her hand. Her apartment door, the look on her face as she realized John was wrong when he said I was never coming back. That one is almost too heavy to lift. The night we met, her kitchen, our first kiss. That memory could bear any weight. Victor is a soldier and he knows how to fight. But I’m an architect. I know how to build.
Six. Lionel’s hands blister, the hair on his face catches fire, the tip of his nose burns. When I slam the structure around Victor, he lunges at it expecting to push through with brute force. But these memories are made of something different.
Five. Ursula cradles Jerome as he goes into shock. While I’m busy trapping Victor, John takes command of Tom and I have no idea what he’ll make him do. I keep adding memories to Victor’s prison, as many as I can find, and he can’t figure out how to break through them. Because Victor has no Penny. He doesn’t know what it does to you to love someone the way I loved her.
Four. This is the moment I was so proud of, when I displayed cool under pressure. Except now I know that it’s John who snaps Tom’s cognitive paralysis and animal terror. Which makes sense. Tom was never brave. He was reckless and, in certain circumstances, recklessness can appear courageous. But Tom was never the kind of guy who’d pull it together in the clutch and save the day. I don’t trust John, but he’s the one who gets Tom moving.
Three. Tom shoves Lionel away from the Engine. Or, really, John does. Victor goes ballistic with rage. But why isn’t John pulling the lever and ending this? Why is he relishing the deranged adrenal surge that gushed in when he shoved Lionel? And then, because we’re all in this mind together, I get it—John doesn’t care about stopping the meltdown. He just wants to hurt Lionel for what he did to our family. I didn’t realize John felt that kind of intense, protective loyalty. But if I don’t stop him, he’ll murder Lionel Goettreider in the past so he can never become the man who threatens our loved ones.
Two. A plume hits Tom dead on, frying the time-travel apparatus and triggering the emergency return protocol. I have one second left to pull up the lever. And I finally understand what I have to do. Tom’s crime, erasing a whole world and everyone in it, is incalculably worse than anything Victor or John ever did. I can never forgive myself for that. Even now, it presses down on me, the mountain of regret. I don’t want any of them in me. I don’t want Victor’s viciousness and desolation or John’s arrogance and detachment, but I also don’t want Tom’s glum passivity and callow nonchalance. I want to be purged of all of them. I want there to be nothing in me that isn’t light and pure and good. But of course that’s not real. That’s what happens when you’re a statue in a city square, stripped of any human adornment that can’t be cast in bronze. What knits together all my memories of Penny is the overwhelming feeling that there’s someone who doesn’t need me to be anything except who I am. That’s what love can do for you, if you let it—build a person out of all your broken pieces. It doesn’t matter if the stitches show. The stitches, the scars, just prove you earned it. And so I stop trying to keep all these versions of myself apart. Instead, I make us whole. I let Victor out, but instead of fighting him I pull us together. John doesn’t see it coming until it’s too late and he’s already been drawn into us. Tom has no idea what’s happening in his head but we don’t need him to. We’re in control.
One. We pull up the Engine’s activation lever just as we’re boomeranged back to the present. The only present there will ever be.
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I get a frigid spear of anxiety that I’m going to wake up in the hospital, having just collapsed on John’s building site, and be forced to relive this entire sequence again and again and again in an endless loop. But I’m spared that particular existential horror. This final trip through time is with my father’s instantaneous apparatus, so I’m not thrust into fifty more years of paralytic self-examination. With a sharp flash of light and a thrumming whoosh of sound, I’m back in 2016. It took until just now to truly appreciate my father’s genius in comparison to Lionel’s.
From the perplexed expression on Lionel’s face, standing right in front of me, it’s clear that almost no time has passed. Everything is just as it was when I left, except I’m not holding the time machine.