Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

“Please don’t tell me you want sherry.” Soph gave me a sideways glance.

“Fuck no. I love gin.”

“Thank the goddess for that!” Soph laughed as she poured generous slugs and raised her glass in a toast. “Here’s to freedom.” We clinked and drank. I thought of the fancy gin bar in my neighborhood back home, where all the Silver Lake hipsters went to sample the spirits made with locally sourced juniper. On weekend afternoons, I sometimes met Anita there to talk about research, politics, and everything else in our lives. As I tasted Soph’s gin, I had a vivid recollection of Anita’s “no more fucks to give” face as we dissected the motives of that douchebag on the geoscience department hiring committee, whining about how diversity had gone too far. What I loved most about Anita was the stubborn way she refused to describe setbacks as failures. Several years ago, Berenice was denied tenure because, according to the committee, they couldn’t count her postdoctoral work because it had been written under her deadname. We’d gone out drinking to commiserate with her. “Every edit is an invitation to edit again,” Anita said. “The shitballs will never win as long as history can be revisited.” We’d been talking about the timeline, but it gave Berenice an idea. She sued the tenure committee for discrimination, and now she was the first tenured trans woman in our department. At least, she had been. Fuck. I thought of Enid, who had sworn at our last meeting to save Berenice. Had she succeeded? Was Anita drinking with her and Berenice upstream? Suddenly, I missed my friends so much that my chest ached.

I gulped the rest of my drink and set the glass down more forcefully than I intended. I needed to find out where my new friends stood. Were we merely drinking buddies, or were we going to get serious and do some edits? “So what do you ladies think about Lucy Parsons? I thought she gave a damn good show.”

“I admire her. But I think there are a lot of struggles that she ignores.” Soph gestured around her parlors. “We need liberation from the government in our homes, too.”

Aseel nodded and poured us another round. “Back in Arizona, I heard about Lucy Parsons from some folks who knew her in Texas. They said she used to be a slave. But she won’t admit it! If anyone asks, she says she has ‘a touch of Spanish blood.’ She’s passing as white. I don’t understand how she can say she wants freedom for all when she won’t even admit what her real background is. I mean, a lot of people would benefit from seeing a colored lady telling white men what to do.”

“Are you talking about Sol?” Soph laughed.

“No!” Aseel frowned. “I mean, yes, but also all of them. All the men.”

“It’s not exclusively men who are the problem, though,” Soph replied. “There was a letter in the Tribune from the Lady Managers Association about how it was a mistake to give former slaves the vote along with white women. I guess their candidate is running on some kind of de-abolitionist platform.”

“Why doesn’t Lucy Parsons talk about that white suffragette crap?” Aseel took another drink and looked like she was going to smash something. “Thank goodness for Senator Tubman.”

I raised my glass. “Cheers to Senator Harriet Tubman!” We all drank another shot, and I was suffused with drunken love for these two women, fighting alongside the Daughters of Harriet without realizing it. But I wasn’t here to revel in intersectional sisterhood across the centuries. I was too old to spend years in the past, tentatively building a network of sympathetic allies. I needed to find out right now whether Aseel and Soph were on my side. And the only way to find out was to gossip.

“You know who is absolutely the worst? Emma Goldman. I worked with her in New York a few years ago, and she was…” I searched for the right words but was too tipsy for nuance. “She was an asshole. Love her writing, she’s a big inspiration to me, but what a mess. She’s obsessed with using violence to change history. Remember that whole thing where she sent her boyfriend to kill Henry Frick? I mean, first of all, that was a terrible idea. The press was already destroying Frick for sending Pinkertons to kill strikers. We were winning! And then she decides it’s time to send her completely useless boyfriend to kill him? On top of everything else that’s awful about that idea, she couldn’t do it herself?”

“I read about that in the paper.” Aseel made a face. “Didn’t he shoot Frick twice, and then stab him? And he still couldn’t kill the guy? What was his name again? Emma’s boyfriend?”

“Sasha Berkman.” I smacked my forehead as I thought about him again. A hot intellectual bad boy—though definitely erring on the side of hotness rather than intellect. “A couple of strikers actually saved Frick from Sasha. That’s how bad it was. Our own people protected a murdering boss from being murdered.”

Soph nodded sympathetically. “I like her ideas about free love, but violence is always the wrong way forward.”

That gave me a pang of relief. I couldn’t team up with people who liked to watch things burn. Unless those things happened to be cigarettes. Soph extracted some tobacco and papers unsteadily from a drawer and returned to flop on a pillow. We smoked silently for a minute, looking up at the wriggling rings of light cast on the ceiling from the lamps’ glass globes.

“Nobody hates Emma Goldman more than Lucy Parsons. And vice versa.” Aseel’s tone hung between annoyed and amused. “Their war is endlessly nauseating.” It seemed like she’d been following this particular political train wreck closely, but didn’t like the infighting. That was a good sign too.

“Regale us with all the sordid details, my dear.” Soph rolled over on her back, buoyed by pillows, and looked at us upside-down.

Aseel swirled her gin and batted her eyelids theatrically. “Well. So, a few years ago, Emma started publishing articles about how women should be permitted to enjoy sex the same way men do. You know all about that, darling.” She winked at Soph and I felt a twinge of jealousy. Travel is always a lonely business, and I wanted to be a part of their easy rapport. I wanted to trust them. But what would they say if they knew who I really was?

Aseel continued her story. “After a while, that Puritanical dingus Anthony Comstock got Emma arrested on indecency charges. So Emma demanded that Lucy write a testimonial supporting her as a fellow anarchist. But instead Lucy published an article about how sex shouldn’t be part of the revolution, and that free love is a distraction from the fight for workers’ rights. Of course Emma had to write her own article about how Lucy has lost sight of the true nature of liberty. I couldn’t be bothered to read the awful thing Lucy wrote in reply, and what Emma wrote after that.”

That sounded like Emma. After years of working with her, I knew she was always surrounded by a blast radius of toxic drama. She was doing good work. But she also loved to pit her friends and followers against each other, demanding unreasonable loyalty, or seducing people then going cold. She played so many power games in her personal life that it was hard for me to believe she truly wanted to abolish power structures.

Soph leaned on her elbows and flicked ash onto a dainty shell plate. “Maybe Lucy enjoys the publicity because she wants more fame. She’s probably never had to struggle for anything in her life.”

“I tell you, she was a slave !” Aseel banged a hand on the table, dark eyes narrowed. “She’s struggled!”

“It’s well documented that she was a slave,” I said. Both women stared at me. That’s when I realized my mistake. The evidence had only come to light a few years ago, in my present.