Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

“Sit down. You want a scotch?” Sol jumped up again and withdrew a bottle from a locked drawer.

“I’ll have a little.”

Sol poured a few fingers of brown fluid into cloudy-looking tumblers stamped with the logo for the Columbian Exposition. “Aseel says you’re a whiz with costumes. You happy with this job? You going to stick around?” I braced for him to say something sleazy or harassing. But he simply paused, waiting for me to reply.

“Sure. I like this job.”

He cocked his head. “You a landsman ?” It was a Yiddish word my father had used, but mostly in the middle of jokes. I’d never heard anyone use it as earnestly as Sol did. When I was working with the anarchists in New York, everyone assiduously avoided talking about how we were all Jewish. The revolution was going to eradicate every religion, including ours.

“I am, but not in a very serious way,” I said.

“You might not be serious about it, but they are.” He gestured vaguely at the window, indicating the throngs of visitors. “They’re murdering our people every day in Russia.”

This was not the conversation I’d been expecting to have. “I… yes, I know about the pogroms.”

He took another sip. “I know what people say about me. I’m a greedy Jew businessman. I’m pimping girls for Satan or whatever imbecilic thing the goyim believe about us this week.”

“It’s definitely imbecilic.”

“I want Americans to learn about other cultures. They pay two bits to see a pretty girl, but they learn a little about the world. Maybe they eat something spicy. Maybe they find out that Jews don’t have horns. It’s not just show business, see? It’s politics.”

I stared at him mutely and nodded. For an instant, I wondered whether he was a traveler too.

“I know you’re one of those New Women. You want to wear pants. You want a lady president. Well, that’s fine with me. But don’t spread the rumor that this is some kind of crazy show for Spiritualists and radicals. I had to say this to Aseel, too. People love us. Families are on the Midway. We’re making money here. Got it?”

“Okay. But… I thought you cared about politics?”

Sol raised a thick black eyebrow at me and tapped his temple with a finger. “You change a man’s mind by showing him a good time.”

I couldn’t argue with that, even if I’d wanted to. He was my boss, after all, and this job put me in a perfect position to make my edit. So I nodded again and followed him back to the theater, where one of the dancers had ripped her gown during the sword dance.

When I wasn’t doing mending, I kept an eye on the audience. It was only a matter of time before the Comstockers showed up again, and I wanted to be ready. Salina stepped onstage and I melted into a wall covered in thick rugs and curtains. The whole theater was hung with bolts of fabric to give the illusion that we were inside a giant tent, enjoying a show in the desert with our caravan. Though the audience was mostly men, there were always ladies in attendance, defiantly alone or clutching the arms of their escorts. Did I recognize any of the men from other missions? I strained to focus my eyes in the dim light, trying to pick out familiar features beneath voluminous moustaches and beards.

I could see Aseel working her way toward me almost a minute before she whispered in my ear. “You have to come to the Persian Palace. Right now.” She was seething.

Fearing another showdown like we’d had at the press club, I raced across the street with her. Unlike the Algerian Village, the Persian Palace made no pretense of being what Sol would call “cultural.” A barker stood outside on a wooden chair, his hat cocked jauntily. “Arabia makes the most beautiful dark-eyed dancing girls!” he yelled. “Looking to see some Oriental jewels, fellas?” He gave a broad wink to a pack of college students milling eagerly outside, waiting for the late-night show. We plunked down fifty cents each and pushed our way through, despite the ticket taker’s half-hearted attempt to block our way. As soon as we got inside, I could see why they’d tried to stop us. There were no women in the audience at the Persian Palace. The place was decorated in feathers, glitter, and mirrors, like a standard burlesque theater.

Still, as we jostled for seats, I saw nothing around me but the usual crowd of mostly drunk men looking for something they could fantasize about later. There were no fights or speeches about vice.

“Why are we here?” I looked at Aseel.

“Wait and see.” She looked like she was ready to kill someone.

Stage lights flared and the show began. A white woman minced out onstage, wearing the flowing skirts of an Algerian dancer and the lacy corset of an American showgirl. Her blond curls flowed around a scarf that had been knotted awkwardly over her mouth and nose: a poor imitation of the already ridiculous veils we’d made for our show. Then the music started. It was the tune Sol had written, but somebody had added supposedly funny dancehall lyrics:

I felt sick. As I guessed back at the press club, I had been witness to the birth of a meme, and this was one of the first variants on it. The dancer did some high kicks and tore off her veil, revealing a Caucasian face slashed with rouge. She moved her hips back and forth in an awful imitation of Aseel’s act. Cheers hammered us. The men stamped their feet on the sticky floor.

Aseel dragged me back outside, her nails digging into my arm, until we were leaning on the wall beneath fake Egyptian pyramids.

“They stole our show! They stole our song! People will think that stupid cunt is Lady Asenath!”

“Nobody who saw our show would mix it up with that garbage.”

“Everybody will!”

As she spoke, I glanced back at the door to the Persian Palace and saw a man standing outside, ignoring the barker. He took a notebook out of his pocket, wrote something down, and turned with almost military precision to look at the Algerian and Tunisian Villages. He took more notes, frowning. I nudged Aseel and pointed at him. This was step one of our plan: Identify and investigate possible soldiers in the edit war. If all went well, Aseel and Soph would help me get to the next step. And hopefully the Daughters would know nothing about it, because they would all be living in the future of another timeline.

We followed the guy with the notebook, who stopped one more time in front of the Moorish Theater, appearing to study the ads for exotic dancing girls. Then he made a beeline for a group of Pinkertons who’d been hired to prevent visitors from falling into the half-finished Ferris wheel steam pipe trenches late at night. I could only hear snatches of their conversation from our vantage point, behind a shuttered Pabst booth.

“…make a citizen’s arrest! This is obscene!” That was our man, yelling at the bored Pinkertons, who didn’t seem to give him the answers he wanted.

“Can’t leave our post, sir…”

One jabbed him lightly on the arm. They seemed to be urging him to move on. But the more they demurred, the more wound up he got. We heard “citizen’s arrest” a few more times, which pegged him as a Comstocker.

One of the strategies that Comstock pioneered in the Society for the Suppression of Vice was the citizen’s arrest for obscenity. He would spy on sex workers or suspected pornographers, figure out where they lived, and surprise them with handcuffs when they least expected it. Then he would declare a citizen’s arrest and drag them to the police, demanding justice. It was a technique he taught at YMCA meetings, inspiring hundreds of eager men to do the same. The Comstockers spent a lot of time discussing exactly the right handcuffs to use, and how to snatch a girl up so that she couldn’t struggle. To find their targets, they pored over fat booklets of pornography and crates of rubber dildos they’d ordered through the mail under assumed names.