All Our Wrong Todays

by Elan Mastai

Except we don’t. Of course we don’t. We live in a world where, sure, there are iPhones and 3D printers and, I don’t know, drone strikes or whatever. But it hardly looks like The Jetsons. Except it should. And it did. Until it didn’t. But it would have, if I hadn’t done what I did. Or, no, hold on, what I will have done. I’m sorry, despite receiving the best education available to a citizen of the World of Tomorrow, the grammar of this situation is a bit complicated.

Every kid knows how to spell his name using the catchy mnemonic tune that goes G-O-E-T-T-R-E-I-D-E-R.

I wobder if this is the mickey mouse song

Sometimes there are fascinating parallels, a loose story point in one version that’s the climax in another, a line of dialogue in the wrong character’s mouth, a striking visual composition framed in a new context, a familiar chord progression with radically altered lyrics.

Because Cat’s Cradle influenced Lionel Goettreider so deeply, in my world Vonnegut was considered among the most significant philosophers of the late twentieth century. This was probably great for Vonnegut personally but less so for his novels, which became increasingly homiletic.

Lionel Goettreider read Cat’s Cradle and had a crucial realization, what he called the “Accident”—when you invent a new technology, you also invent the accident of that technology. When you invent the car, you also invent the car accident. When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash. When you invent nuclear fission, you also invent the nuclear meltdown. When you invent ice-nine, you also invent unintentionally freezing the planet solid. When Lionel Goettreider invented the Goettreider Engine, he knew he couldn’t turn it on until he figured out its accident—and how to prevent it.

Every person you meet introduces the accident of that person to you. What can go right and what can go wrong. There is no intimacy without consequence.

They met at the University of Toronto. My father’s parents had emigrated from Vienna to Toronto when he was nine years old, and he never lost an Austrian clip to his vowels. My mother came from Leeds on an international exchange program to continue her undergraduate degree in literature and never lost her British ability to reflexively vector herself within rigid class dynamics.

Part of his blissfully unaware state of grandiose self-importance is that he noticed none of it.

When you’re young, you think of your parents with the simplest adjectives. As you get older, you add more adjectives and notice some of them contradict each other. He’s tall. He’s tall and strong. He’s tall and strong and smart. He’s tall and strong and smart but busy. He’s tall and strong and smart but busy and aloof and judgmental. She’s safe. She’s safe and kind. She’s safe and kind and caring. She’s safe and kind and caring but sad. She’s safe and kind and caring but sad and lonely and brittle. Maturity colonizes your adolescent mind, like an ultraviolet photograph of a vast cosmic nebula that turns out, on closer examination, to be a pointillist self-portrait.

I’m standing there, naked. She’s standing there, naked. They spray this mist onto us from nozzles in the ceiling and it smells metallic but it looks, basically, like glitter. You know, the kind that kids sprinkle on glue for craft projects. I’m sure there’s a sound medical reason for its appearance, but it makes my possible death by radiation poisoning seem awfully festive.

“Sympathy is a transaction,” Penelope said. “If you let your grief be for sale, it’ll end up worthless.”

When you jump off a cliff, falling can look a whole lot like flying, for a while anyway.

I applied a pharmaceutical patch to my abdomen, right over my liver, that let me set my preferred blood-alcohol ratio, like cruise control for booze. If I exceed my fixed limit, my liver is flushed with toxin filters. I went with light-headed and garrulous without careening into impaired motor function or loss of social inhibition. That sweet spot between confident and arrogant, loose but not sloppy.

She was even more into it than any of the boys. She’d been waiting her whole life for a total stranger to walk up and propose an adventure, but one that didn’t require leaving the safety of her bedroom.

Returning to school after I ran away, I made the most important discovery of my adolescence—it doesn’t matter if you’re smart or skilled if you can somehow be first.

I had no sense that the currency of my early experience would be radically devalued with oversaturation. By age fifteen, wrung dry of my secret knowledge, I collided with an impenetrable obstacle. The girls wanted it to mean something. They wanted to count on me. They wanted me to confide in them. Sex wasn’t enough anymore. They wanted love. I felt like a runner who discovers he is not, in fact, racing in a marathon—it’s a triathlon, and not only did he forget to bring his bicycle but he never learned to swim.

But biannual became annual and annual became biennial and biennial became never

The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.

Then again, are any of our choices actual choices? The brain is a soupy lightning storm swirling and crackling in three pounds of wet meat. Do conscious decisions even exist, or is everything an instinctual response gussied up with malformed logic?

It’s amazing how much damage one penis can do.

What I’m saying is, there was a moment there where other options presented themselves. Not wise options. Unwise options. Weird, twisted, self-destructive options. But options with consequences limited to my immediate emotional radius. I could’ve kept it personal.

I’m sorry, I know, I’m like a bad date who spends the whole time talking about their ex and insists it’s so you can get to know them better, rather than that they just can’t let go. I don’t want this part of my story to be over, but it’s time.

There are no specific visual or auditory phenomena associated with time travel. But my father was concerned that the early adopters of the technology would feel let down if there wasn’t some sort of razzmatazz. It was scientifically pointless, pure showmanship. As if just going back in time wouldn’t be cool enough for the high-end consumers my father’s financiers planned to attract. So, a team of psychologists was commissioned to figure out how to make people feel emotionally engaged with the experience, and what they came up with was a melodious hum and a softly oscillating glow of warm light. Those psychologists were good at their jobs. When that hum and glow started, all my grief and anger and shock lifted away. I felt grounded and hopeful and free. And I realized with absolute clarity that this was a terrible fucking idea.

You know you’re having a seriously fucked-up day when ontology becomes a life-or-death proposition.

I know you think it’s changed a lot since then, because of iPhones and drone strikes and 3D printers and, I don’t know, gluten-free pretzels. But to me that stuff feels like the early 1970s. The hospital I woke up in might as well have been a medieval torture chamber, everything looked so clumsy and barbaric.

Something I’ve realized about doctors here—they mostly have no idea what’s going on in your body unless it precisely lines up with standard presentation. Anything just a little bit off course and they’re clueless. Obviously they’d never admit it. They must teach a med school class on carrying yourself with absolute conviction when you have zero idea what’s really happening. The clinical lingo helps maintain the fog of expertise, as does the ambient panic of the patients and their families. Once I could imitate my own handwriting, they were so relieved they didn’t have to keep searching for an answer that was clearly beyond their medieval capacities that they were quick to announce me cured.

The place has a lot of glass windows—you know, melted sand instead of a polymorphic resin—and they don’t do anything cool other than let in light and let you see outside. There’s a device that looks like a Victorian steam engine but is apparently an espresso maker. The whole place is done up in gray hues and dark-toned wood, sharp-lined furniture slung low to the floor to emphasize the ceiling height. I guess the decor is supposed to impress women but it seems cheesy to me. I’m becoming increasingly concerned that John Barren is kind of a douchebag, which is upsetting.

Greta abides by the reasonable philosophy that there is nothing in the universe more boring than someone else’s dreams.

I grew up as an only child, so it’s really weird to suddenly have an adult sister who appears to know me—or the me she thinks I am—better than anyone else in the world. All my bullshit seems to drive her nuts and yet she also seems wholly at ease with my bullshit. I’ve never hung out with a woman around my age and not worried in the slightest that something I say might render me unattractive. Even with women I wasn’t interested in, I still wanted them to find me attractive.

Of course, that also means some stuff that’s considered normal where I come from would be super-weird here. Like, okay, in my world, when you break up with someone, it’s considered gracious to offer the person you dumped a lock of hair so that, if they want, they can get a genetically identical surrogate grown for whatever purposes they need to get over you. It has no consciousness, but it looks exactly like you and can be used for rudimentary physiological functions. Like, you know, sex. The expectation is that when your ex feels ready to move on they’ll have it deconstituted into a biological goop and returned to the manufacturer for disinfection and recycling. Describing it, yes, I realize it sounds bizarre, but it’s a fairly everyday thing.

My mom believes there is no better decoration than a shelf of books, and the house is a testament to that. The rooms are organized by category—contemporary novels in the dining room, the kitchen for cookbooks, the bedroom for non-antique editions of Victorian novels, what used to be my bedroom and is now my mom’s office for literary criticism, the bathroom for my dad’s collection of spry pop-science books, my dad’s serious science tomes in his study, the living room colonized by well-preserved early editions of Victorian novels, the rare first prints in a glass case that hangs in an awkward spot on the wall, not quite in balance with the rest of the room, but necessary to keep it both prominently displayed and shaded from natural sunlight.

“Yes and no,” I say. “I’m from an alternate reality.” Penny closes her book without marking the page.

And now you show up, telling me all the dopey, delusional fantasies I harbored as a frustrated adolescent and sheepish adult were, what, unambitious? That the life I’m supposed to lead is so far beyond anything I was even capable of imagining for myself? That I’m a fucking lioness living like a mouse?”

“I don’t know,” she says, “maybe we can only access a limited number of, like, adjacent realities and we’re constantly shoplifting ideas from different versions of our world and mistaking them for our own insights.”

Cooking smells!

She was all determination and dread that determination wouldn’t be enough. A life spent with a white-knuckle grip on herself, so as to appear without guile or rot, unfouled.

It’s not that she lacks murky personal contradictions—she has her fair share of those—it’s that she doesn’t think of them as wrong and they don’t cause her shame. Like everyone, she carries around a suitcase of troubles everywhere she goes, but she leaves it unlocked, for anyone to rifle through if they care enough to be curious.

I have nothing planned for this crowd of probably very smart, very talented people who are no doubt wondering if the fuss about me—him, John—is remotely worth it and of course it definitely is not.

Think about what you tried to build today and ask yourself if it will change this world into the one we need.

So. Maybe right now you’re thinking—okay, why isn’t this story over? Everything kind of worked out for this jackass. His mom is alive, his dad is nice, his sister is cool, his career is on fire, and he’s actually involved with the woman he obsessed over in his other life—why would he want to go back to a world where his mom’s dead, his dad’s an asshole, his sister never existed, he has no professional accomplishments, and the woman he loved killed herself?

It's true, I was

Penny actually gasps when she walks into my parents’ house and sees their elaborate, fetishized book collection. My mom immediately recognizes a kindred spirit and in less than sixty seconds they’re debating the merits of various Victorian binding procedures and I accept that I’m done for—I won’t say anything anyone finds remotely interesting for the rest of the evening.

That’s all my dad needs—that and two glasses of pinot noir—to launch into his adolescent obsession and secret shame, prone to whispering key terms as if saying them at full volume would bring the Science Police crashing through the front door to arrest him for Crimes Against Serious Physics.

It’s immanently probable there’s a clockwork charm to the whole mess but all we can see is the lonely tip of the smallest hand on the infinite watch face of reality.

“You told me to write the book,” my dad says. “I thought you should get it out of your system,” my mom says. “You knew it would humiliate me,” says my dad. “And hold back my career. So you could be the successful one and I could be your abashed consort.” “I didn’t know it would be a bad book about time travel, Victor,” says my mom. “I thought it would be a good book about time travel.”

The Venn diagram of datable non-idiots pooled between philosophy and computer science majors was anaerobic,

But Greta thinks—bullshit. Make another list. A list of what you did today. It doesn’t matter what day it is, weekday, weekend, holiday, birthday, the calendar date is irrelevant. Write down all the things that occupied your time on a given day. Woke up, ate breakfast, hit the gym, went to work, surfed the Internet, had a coffee with a colleague, did some work, ate some lunch, did some more work, slipped out to buy new sneakers, clicked around on social media sites, went home, called a parent, watched TV, ate dinner, changed outfits, met someone for a drink, made out with them on a street corner, caught a taxi home, read a book, went to sleep. That’s what you believe in.

So, Greta became wealthy and depressed—small-d depressed—and hasn’t really done anything for the past six months except cause my parents considerable anxiety. She was simultaneously the family success story and the greatest concern. Until I made a bold play over dinner for the title of Most Screwed-Up Barren Child.

“I’m in favor of whatever reality I get to exist in, okay?” Greta says. “I’m pro–me existing and anti–me not existing.”

“We need to be careful here,” my dad says. “Every family has its own . . . dynamic. Its unique way of handling conflict and crisis. A kind of evolutionary adaptation to its peculiar domestic environment. When you get to the point we’re at, four adults, experienced with one another’s quirks, that dynamic is fairly stable. Otherwise you don’t get to where we’re at. You get divorce. You get estrangement.”

“Our family dynamic works for us,” he says. “There are jokes and irony and snark. There is occasionally unguarded sentiment. But it’s usually layered with jokes and irony and snark in some sort of emotional tiramisu.

“Maybe it’s all true,” she says. “Maybe you are stealing all your best ideas from your magical fantasyland. But if that world is lost and if, as you claim, you’re the one who lost it, then don’t you owe it to that world to make this one better?” “Better how?” I say. “You have a responsibility,” she says. “You’re the only one who can show us what paradise looks like. You can build us a future to live in. And I mean that literally, build it in brick and steel and glass. You may not think you’re a genius. You may think you’re a fraud, a bandit, a world-killing monster. But you’re all we have.”