Chapter 14 Adam “American Boy” #2
At this precise point in our history, we were still in it together. We were the Holes, damn it, and about to make our great leap into the world.
I listen to them chatting for a while longer about all the other things they’ve got planned. Just enjoying it, enjoying the ride. What I always promised Jules we’d use our machine for. But only because—heart thump—this thing I’ve come here to do, it’s still not time to do it yet.
Opening a kitchen drawer, Jules pushes a CD across the table at Adam, and I remember this so clearly, like I remember this whole evening.
He kisses her, thrilled, as he reads the words she’s written on it.
Loving the way that, no matter how many years slip by, this ritual of theirs still leaves him feeling young, like he’s seventeen again.
It’s only now that I realize that this is the very last mix she ever made me. The last one either of us ever made.
He puts Born in the USA into the laptop they’ve got rigged up to their speakers.
As “Midnight Rider” by the Allman Brothers starts to play, Adam grins, because it’s one of his favorites.
Only instead of singing along, he once more becomes aware of the other voices in the dining room—Darius and his lawyer.
Then it’s not just hunger I can feel in Adam’s stomach. It’s butterflies, it’s nerves.
“Looks like we’re ready,” Darius says, beaming as he steps through the kitchen doorway.
His hair’s cropped short and he’s wearing a gray suit and open-collared black shirt with fawn moccasins, his metamorphosis from teenage nerd to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk apparatchik now complete.
He waggles an expensive-looking pen in his hand.
“So, shall we?” he says, before turning to Jules. “You too, Mrs. Hole. You don’t want to miss the moment your bright new future begins.”
That sudden sparkle in his eyes…Is it just because of our impending deal, or because he’s looking at her?
Either way, Jules doesn’t need asking twice.
Putting down the bottle of Tesco’s champagne she’s just taken from the fridge next to the champagne flutes she’s already laid out on the sideboard to seal the deal, she hurries over and takes Adam’s hand and squeezes it hard.
Just like my Jules did on the hotel roof terrace last night.
That squeeze of sheer strength. Like she means it with all her heart.
It’s all I want too. Me, the interloper here. To have my Jules do this to me again back in the future. But Adam barely even responds. Worse, he lets go. Not because he doesn’t love her, but because…because…
And even though I’ve run this scene through my mind a thousand times over the intervening years, I’m still shocked by how genuinely frightened he is.
His hands have started trembling. As he joins Darius in the dining room, he clasps them behind his back, while the lawyer talks him through the contract that’s laid out on the dining room table and has already been signed by Darius’s uncle in the States and by Darius here.
Meaning only Adam now needs to countersign it to make it fully legally binding.
But all Adam can do is stare at the silver pen in Darius’s hand and think about the four other failed businesses his best friend has already been involved in, and how this could be number five.
He thinks about how much his dad ended up owing, and how if he loses the hundred thousand he’s just borrowed against the house to stake this venture… he knows he can never bounce back.
This fear of his, it’s so acutely overwhelming that it nearly overwhelms me too, because before I can stop him, he looks across the table at Jules—because, yes, this is where he does it, where I did it—and opens his mouth to tell her, I can’t.
I just can’t bring myself to sign. I’m sorry. But I can’t.
Only now it’s me looking through his eyes at this contract too and remembering what Darius said on the phone just now about how I’d chickened out.
Yeah, well, screw you, Darius, because I’m sure as hell not chickening out now. I’m taking that fucking pen.
Imposing myself on Adam, I make him do just that.
Straightaway, I can feel him resisting. Violently. Like a horse bucking, trying to throw me off. Only no matter how hard he tries, I refuse to let go.
It’s because I see it now. How this was the moment, the fulcrum, where everything tilted and started going wrong between me and Jules. This is where I failed to be the man she wanted me to be. It’s where I let her down.
Forcing Adam to lean over the contract, I feel Darius’s hand on his shoulder, giving him an encouraging squeeze. Yet still Adam fights. Terrified of the consequences, horrified that some part of him that he doesn’t understand is clearly planning on signing anyway.
A part of me also knows that this is wrong, that I should feel guilty, but Totally Sirius was my idea as much as Darius’s, wasn’t it? Aren’t I owed this payback? And what was it Darius said over that dinner a couple of weeks back with the kids? How I always was into softer games…
Meaning maybe this doesn’t just have to be about me making my own life and my family’s life better.
What if, by signing, I can make the world better too?
What if I can steer Darius and God knows how many millions of kids away from games like Zombie pHUK?
Even get them into something more constructive and positive like Earth Twin instead?
Then I feel it…Adam’s resistance slackening. Like he’s absorbed what I’m thinking.
As the CD in the kitchen starts up on another track—and Estelle and Kanye West’s “American Boy” starts to play—I just do it.
I sign.
***
I’m expecting somewhere glamorous, somewhere American. Like a condo in Pacific Heights. Or a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Montecito. Surely, after signing that contract, that’s the kind of luxury pad I should now be calling home back here in the future?
Instead, opening my eyes, I once more find myself back in my minging old shed in Brighton.
Only this time sitting at a desk in front of a state-of-the-art laptop, surrounded by reams of paper, covered in character sketches and scrawled-out game story notes…
notes I see pinned to every available surface and wall, and even hanging down from the ceiling like vines…
Right away I know something’s gone deeply wrong.
Even if this new me on this new timeline cashed in and exited from Totally Sirius and moved back to the UK at the same time as Darius, why aren’t I now living in some tacksville mansion like his up on Tongdean Avenue, with an infinity pool, tennis court, and private cinema of my own?
I stare across at the old Sony boom box.
It’s not switched on or even plugged in.
Like it hasn’t been played in years. But at least that makes sense, right?
Since on this new alternative timeline, in this new universe, Jules and I wouldn’t have ever had a fight after Darius’s party about me not signing the contract—because of course I now did—meaning I’d never have stomped in here and discovered how our machine worked.
No—it’s more why the fuck I’m still here that’s the problem…
Only, ssshhhhiiiiiiIIIIIITTTT…here it comes…a tsunami of memories from this new timeline rushing over me, as old me and this new me start to merge…
To begin with it’s great. After signing that contract eight years back, we all moved to San Francisco, where Groucho didn’t like his new food much to begin with, but where the kids quickly settled into their high school.
I see Nelly got her California driver’s license on first go and then bagged a place at Rutgers in New Jersey to major in American Studies, while Liam got into skateboarding right from the start and even gained himself a following on YouTube.
Jules started working for Henri Chaptal in Inner Sunset, and soon made quite a name for herself as the new British chef at Bistro Bon Georges…
and, wowzer, just to see it now, that look of sheer happiness and pride on her face…
Then Doodles—yay, Doodles—moved out to California too, in 2018, a couple of years after they legalized weed there for recreational use, setting up a small chain of marijuana shops called Pot Doodles—with Snoop Dogg as his partner, no less.
Only then my new memories of him, Jules, and the kids get sparser, somehow colder, even, like I’m looking back at them through thickening ice.
Because soon for me—the me on this timeline, that is—everything became about work.
I started spending whole weekends, then whole weeks away at conventions and fundraisers, as over the next five years Darius and I built Totally Sirius into the storming success it became.
I also began obsessing over Earth Twin, before compulsively, addictively developing it in-house as a rival to the more violent games Darius and his uncle insisted on launching with instead.
It wasn’t just me I lost sight of. It was her. Jules. Then Jules and Darius, as the two of them started spending more and more time together…
Until…Jesus Christ…she left me. Jules left me.
She left me for him.
The memory leaves me iced. Frozen. But not this Adam, this new Adam I’m becoming one with. All he can still obsessively think about is his work, spending every waking moment in this fire hazard of a shed, continuing to develop Earth Twin, despite having enough money to never have to work again.
Only he can’t give up because to do that would be to admit that his work is not of vital importance. To admit that would also be to admit that he should have been focusing on Jules and the kids instead. And he still refuses to admit he was wrong.
Well, fuck him, because I sure as hell don’t want this. I don’t want this life to be mine.