All Our Wrong Todays(97)

We sit around the dinner table, Penny and I and my mom and my dad and Greta and Lionel and, following Jerome’s death, often Emma too, and talk about this. Is it possible to think outside the box of your ideology? Or is ideology the box and you just have to work at opening it? Maybe it’s too late for us and the best we can do is to raise a generation less shackled by outmoded dreams, free to imagine something . . . else. Penny and I are working on that too.

We need new futures.





137


I wrote all this down for two reasons.

The first reason is John. This is the novel he wanted to write. I took over his life and he never came back, at least not yet, so it seemed correct to do this last thing for him.

Why do I even care about doing right by John? Because of Victor. Imagining me and Victor as an angel and a devil on John’s shoulders, like in an old cartoon, it’s comforting. Because it means the life I’m inhabiting in the world I saved isn’t irrevocably contaminated. Maybe, like any life, it could go either way.

Morally, emotionally, ontologically, I’m not sure it matters who was really to blame for the unforgivable things John did. I have to take responsibility because I’m the only one left. If Victor is a tumor I excised, it means it was a problem with a solution. He’s gone, so the people I love are safe. We all have problems we’d like to believe have solutions. We all have parts of ourselves we’d like to cut away.

I know novels shouldn’t state outright what they’re about. But this isn’t a novel. It’s a memoir. So, I hope it’s okay to admit there’s a general point to all of this. I never claimed any wisdom, pretty much the opposite every step of the way, but here’s what I think this book is about—there’s no such thing as the life you’re supposed to have.

Of course, I’m mostly an idiot who has only impossibly brief judders of hazy insight, so by all means feel free to think it’s about something else entirely.

It’s about what you need it to be about.

The second reason is you, Tom.

I want you to know why your mother and I gave you the name we did and what really happened, in case for whatever reason I can’t tell you, or don’t, or won’t. I finished this when I could, a little every night, sometimes with you asleep in my arms while your mother stole a few minutes of rest between feedings. I tried to capture what it felt like at the time, so it would be interesting enough for you to read, not an obligation or an embarrassment, although my limitations as a writer have probably made it a bit of both.

And it’s fine, it’s truly fine if you don’t believe a word of it, if you think even this final chapter is a weird affectation, another of your father’s odd jokes, pretending a novel is a memoir when it’s obviously the most absurd fiction. Tell your friends your parents named you after a character in a half-baked story your father once wrote down because of a dream he had that he couldn’t shake—but that he refused to admit it, that he always took the joke too far, that he insisted to the end that every word of it was true.

The thing is, I saw you come out of your mother and it changed my life. All the other moments that changed my life seem so clean and orderly in retrospect. This was messy and loud, sweat and blood and tears and a whole new life with its eyes, your eyes that already looked like her eyes, squeezed shut, and its mouth, your mouth that already looked like my mouth, wide open, and Penny squeezing my hand and looking at me and me squeezing her hand and looking at her and both of us knowing it was finally starting. The world we were supposed to have. It was you.

All along, it was you.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


“We must suffer fools gladly, otherwise how can we help them to stop being fools?” is inspired by something my mother, Judith Mastai, used to say. And, more to the point, how she approached her work and her life. She died on February 17, 2001, and so she never got to find out what kind of people her son and daughters would become. This novel is dedicated to her memory.

The concept of the Accident is influenced by the writing of Paul Virilio, particularly Open Sky. Greta’s critique of science fiction is influenced by the writing of Daniel Quinn, particularly Ishmael.

There are few people in one’s career who do exactly what they say they’re going to do. My agent, Simon Lipskar, is one of them and I’m grateful for his indispensable guidance. Thank you to Maja Nikolic, Katie Stuart, Celia Taylor-Mobley, Taylor Templeton, Joe Volpe, and everyone at Writers House for their efforts on my behalf.

This book was written with zero expectation that it might actually get published, but because of a number of people at Penguin Random House that expectation was thwarted.

Thank you to my American editor, Maya Ziv, who was the first to acquire this book and—with great wit and even greater patience—helped me to make it better. Thank you as well to Ben Sevier, Christine Ball, Amanda Walker, Alice Dalrymple, Eileen Chetti, and everyone at Dutton.

Thank you to my Canadian editor, Amy Black, for her thoughtful guidance in refining this novel. Thank you as well to Kristin Cochrane, Val Gow, Susan Burns, Melanie Tutino, Christie Hanson, Tracey Turriff, and everyone at Doubleday.

Thank you to my British editor, Jessica Leeke, for her incisive observations and ardent support. Additional thanks to Alex Clarke for his editorial input. Thank you as well to Louise Moore and everyone at Michael Joseph.