Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

Over time, Comstock amassed a huge collection of dildos and erotic postcards. These he brought with him in a steamer trunk to a congressional hearing, thus cementing his reputation as a righteous man, passionately ferreting out moral crimes of the modern age. Indeed, his campaign was so successful that the federal post office granted Comstock “special agent” status, basically giving him and his goons permission to open everybody’s mail and arrest anyone who violated obscenity laws. Under Comstock’s reign, “obscenity” included information about birth control, abortion, and sexual health. His followers were eyes on the street, and his office gave him eyes on the mail. Some offenders were jailed for years, or financially ruined. Others, as Soph had told us in her parlors, killed themselves rather than face imprisonment.

I wondered what kind of crazy bullshit this lone Comstocker had planned, if he could get the police on his side. Would he throw the whole Midway in jail for indecency? Send the women of the Algerian and Tunisian Villages back to Africa? Luckily, he was getting nowhere with his increasingly loud complaints. Pinkertons were thugs for hire. They didn’t mind smashing the skulls of strikers, but they weren’t big on arresting pretty ladies. Especially when there was no money in it for them.

The Comstocker marched away in a huff, and we tailed him down the Midway. It was getting late, and only a few clots of stragglers were left beneath the warm reddish glow of carbon filament bulbs. Outside the west entrance, he met up with another man and started yelling again. These guys were not exactly masters of spycraft. Standing nearby and pretending to admire the lights, we could hear everything they said.

“We can’t let this go on, Elliot! These dances are more lewd than anything I’ve ever seen in New York City!”

“I thought you were doing a citizen’s arrest?”

“The police are all a bunch of Chads. They won’t help. We’ve got to bring Comstock here, in person.”

My breath quickened. He was using anachronistic slang right out of the Celibate4Life forums in my time, where “Chads” were men who had fallen for women’s wiles and refused to join the fight. No way was this guy from the 1890s. Or if he was, he’d been spending time with C4L travelers. Which still made him an agent in the edit war.

Aseel and I exchanged looks and made a big show of oohh-ing and aahh-ing over the new subway entrance. She leaned over and spoke in a low voice. “I think that’s one of the fellows from the press club.”

I glanced over quickly, and sure enough, it was the creep who’d been handing out zines at the Grape Ape show. Now I had a name for him: Elliot. He scratched his muttonchops and grunted as the C4L guy continued to rant about how he was going to send a telegram to New York right now and teach everyone a lesson about virtue.

At last, Elliot cut him off. “I have a better idea.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I think we should take this to the Lady Managers Board.”

“The what?”

“You know the Woman’s Building on the other end of the Midway? It’s run by a group of upstanding women, and a lot of them are Prohibitionists. Good, faithful wives. If they get one look inside one of these places, they’ll bring the wrath of God.”

I could hear the C4L guy practically hyperventilating. “And then Comstock will have to come! He’ll have to!”

“He’ll arrest every one of those foul bitches.”

“Meet at the usual place tomorrow night, and we’ll figure it out with Ephraim.”

“Yes, sir.”

They broke apart and Elliot headed for the subway entrance. We turned our back on him and linked arms, walking at a leisurely pace like two ladies out for a stroll. When I glanced over my shoulder, Elliot had disappeared.

“We’ve got to do something to stop them.”

“Perhaps we’ll write our own song lyrics for that tune and start selling it, so those Persian Palace bints can’t claim they’re me.”

I couldn’t believe she was still obsessing about the Persian Palace. “Didn’t you hear what those men said? They’re going to bring the Lady Managers to the theater! They’re the most politically powerful women in the city, and they have Comstock’s ear.”

Aseel was angry. “Look, I know you’re on this traveler mission to stop Comstock, and I’m with you. But I can’t go back to some fancy future like you can, okay? I have to think about what’s happening right now. I can’t imagine those bumpkins coming up with a foolproof plan to stroke their own cocks. They’re idiots! I’m less worried about the Lady Managers shutting us down than I am about losing business if everybody is copying my dance.”

“But we have the jump on those guys. If we can get to the Lady Managers first, maybe they’ll ally with us and we can fight the Comstockers together.”

“You aren’t hearing me, Tess.” Aseel whirled to face me. “Didn’t you understand what you saw at the Persian Palace? Not all women are your allies. You know that, right? We have to protect the village.”

It was like we were defending a little town in the Maghreb against the Alexandrian army. I wondered, not for the first time, whether I’d been traveling too long. Times bleed together in my mind. But maybe that’s because there are always villages being ground to a pulp by somebody else’s war.

I hung my head. “Okay, I’m sorry. You’re right. You should write some lyrics. Sol could sell them for a nickel outside the theater.”

“He’ll love that.”

“But I still might visit the Woman’s Building tomorrow. If nothing else, maybe I can get them to meet with us.”

Aseel shrugged. “No harm in it.”

“What are you going to write the song about?”

“I think it should be about those two sad little Comstockers. They’ll never enjoy anything. They’ll never see the hoochie coochie.” She wiggled her hips, imitating the Persian Palace dancer imitating her.

“What the hell is the hoochie coochie?”

“You haven’t heard? That’s what they’re calling the danse du ventre . Soph is really peeved about it, but I don’t mind. Hoochie coochie! It sounds like being tickled.”

I laughed. “It also sounds a little naughty.”

“I’d be disappointed if it didn’t.”

The next morning, I stood in the long hall of the Woman’s Building, its soaring walls punctuated by a comically large number of arched doorways and pillars. When I climbed a lacy iron spiral staircase to the second level, the place took on the appearance of a blimp hangar whose curving roof was improbably made of glass.

Sunlight poured into the building, playing over a timeline mural that unspooled the history of U.S. womanhood as I walked toward the Lady Managers Board office. Painted beneath 1700 were white women in pioneer outfits, cooking and cleaning. In 1840, they joined hands with black and brown women, marching for abolition and universal suffrage. At least twenty feet were dedicated to the year 1870, with women dancing beneath the text of the Fifteenth Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex, race, color, marital status, or previous condition of servitude.”

There was the election of Senator Harriet Tubman, under 1880, the only prominent brown face on the wall. A collage atop a waving American flag showed women voting, running their own stores, teaching children, working as nurses, and smashing liquor bottles in a Temperance march. Eighteen ninety was entirely devoted to the construction of the Woman’s Building, of course, with women looking at blueprints and picking out some of the bizarrely mismatched interior details for the hall’s décor. Beside the office door was a final panel devoted to the far-off year of 1950, where women were looking through telescopes and operating giant dynamos. A white woman’s face, capped by a bulbous, “futuristic” hat, hovered over the words “Lady President.” I stared at the political prediction, still a fantasy in my time, and could imagine Anita adding it to her ever-expanding list of “Great Moments in White Feminism.”