There is a future in which skanky summer is quite popular. People walk around in bathing suits, waterproof briefs, shorts, breast-baring monokinis, sarongs—all with personal climate control units attached to the base of their necks.
Hwang emerges from his room, shivering in a wrinkled button-down, sweater, and corduroy pants. That day, the rain drifts down as gently as snow, and it gets you wet so gradually that you are startled to realize it, like a boiled frog in a pot of water.
Hwang never sees his son again. Upon waking for the first time, Hwang goes out into the world and finds that his son is a computer mogul who lives in a cheesy yet terrifying house surrounded by a moat. This house has no right angles, and a viscous red substance continually flows down the sides and into the moat.
A security guard grabs the back of Hwang’s jacket as he backs up to get a running start so he can jump the moat. You’ll never make it, she says, and he realizes that the security guard is his daughter. She sighs, looking him up and down.There’s a shelter a few miles away. You can get a decent meal. I’ll drive you.
His daughter does not look how he’d expect, but her eyes, when she glances at him in the rear-view mirror, are familiar and bright. But I’m his father, says Hwang. She laughs.
The computer mogul, famously, has no father (and says so often). Of course. Hwang sits in the back seat like a lump. He realizes that he can no longer enumerate to himself the ways in which he has failed, that his failure has turned into an exponential number residing within him, sleek and unutterably dense and deadly.
There is a time during which Hwang’s visits are foreseen. His daughters tell him that his story has been passed down from their mothers. That their great-great-great… will come into their lives, recognizable by his blue sweater and brown corduroy pants (You dress like a fucking teddy bear, his son used to say—it felt like affection).
And then what? It is disputed. Is Hwang a force of good? Is he evil? How does he choose which daughters he appears to? Is he a matrilineal family curse? He tries to explain but it is not satisfying to his daughters.
The next time he jumps, it is a hundred years later and his story has been forgotten.
Hwang’s daughter listens to his story. When he is done, she pulls a pill case from her bag. Sounds like you need to change your point of view, she says. Try a Chip or a Barbara.
Hwang chooses a pill from the compartment labeled “Chip.” Chip and Barbara are personality construct drugs, named for the people from whom they originated.
In an hour, he feels loose. He is young, and has plenty of time to decide what he wants to be when he grows up. He doesn’t know if he wants to have kids yet. Come on, man, that’s ages away. Let’s have some fun before fun ends.
Hwang is still Chip when he goes to sleep, but it wears off in the night. He goes to find it again, to feel simultaneously free yet locked into the right time with no sense of slippage, but discovers that Chip and Barbara have been taken off the market.
In bare feet, Hwang was half an inch shorter than his wife, which seemed within the bounds of acceptability. But the world conspired to tip this delicate balance, with slanted sidewalks, with Italian heels, with poor posture. Hwang and his ex-wife each thought that the other cared more about their height discrepancy.
Your wife is white? said a sophisticated older aunt. Then your daughters will be beautiful. They were, because all daughters were beautiful; that is what Hwang believed. But Hwang was never one to be proud of their beauty. He was proud because they were brilliant, or they were about to be; they were at the age at which youthful precocity grew distinct and immutable. That is where they stayed.
Hwang always wakes up in the lab. The lab is always the same.
The time machine is a gnarled, charred mess on the floor, and the curtains are skeletons. Grishkov’s body is curled like a cat in the corner; his face is untouched like a peaceful waxwork, and for that, Hwang is grateful. Hwang sleeps on the couch, which has blackened and split like a bratwurst. As unkind and sooty as the lab is, Hwang lingers there to hold off timeshock and cultureshock.
When he needs to use the bathroom, he has to leave.
In time, Hwang begins to suspect that he is not only being pulled forward in time as he sleeps; he is also being pulled sideways in space, to parallel universes.
He thinks he has confirmation of this fact when he arrives at a time when everyone is green. (Don’t worry—there is still racism!)
Hwang sits with his daughter at a diner and tries to question her about what has happened. She explains, but language has changed, and he has trouble understanding her. Lincoln, he says. Kennedy. Were they assassinated in this timeline? She opens her mouth and taps at her translator earbud.
Doowah? she says.
Soon there are no more bananas. The iconic Cavendish banana, tall and bright and constant, has gone extinct. It is true that no one’s favorite fruit is the banana. But now that bananas as he knew them are gone, Hwang feels like he’s been trapped in a house without windows.
There is no backwards from this forwards. No more bananas for anyone ever again.
Hwang has learned a valuable life lesson: never allow someone to test a time machine on you.
No matter how certain they are it will work.
No matter how certain you are that it will enable you to fix your life and the lives of your loved ones.
But Hwang must have done some good for his later daughters; he has to have done some good; he has to.
Would it all be worth it, then?
Once, he wakes up, opens the door to the lab, and steps into water. He doesn’t know how to swim. He is a giant lead teddy bear sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and as he flails in the water, his thoughts are not about how it’s all over thank god, they are about expelling water from his lungs and if he could just take another breath please that would be perfect thank you thank you thank you let me live.
Someone grabs him and pulls him up. It’s a woman wearing a cheap waiter’s tuxedo. All around them, houses and restaurants and offices bob impossibly.
Do you have a reservation? The woman, his daughter, asks. He is exhausted. Fine, his daughter says. Wait here. I’ll bring something. Don’t touch anything. You need to be disinfected. His daughters are always so exasperated with him.
The time after that, everything is dry again. Hwang asks his daughter where the ocean is. His daughter shrugs. We put it somewhere else. It was in the way.
Hwang needs to understand that someday he will wake up and no one will be around, for good.
Once, when Hwang was thirteen, he came home to find his father strangling his mother. They rearranged themselves right as Hwang walked into the house; they must have heard his key. Stranglings can be quiet. He stood and saw his father flexing his hands and smiling, his mother wiping water out of her eyes and turning a sob into a smile, the way she turned seemingly random organic matter into food, work into money, disorder into order. If she was anti-entropic then his father was the opposite. Money for booze; so much grain goes into alcohol; carbohydrates are then wasted in the fermentation process; it is not sensible. Hwang had been sent to the library. When he came home early, it was awkward; Hwang did not know before then that the terrible could also be awkward.
His father did not murder his mother that day.