Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

Also, apparently, Soojin hadn’t been entirely wrong about the serial killer thing. Police were reopening the unsolved murder case of a girl who went to an L.A. high school where Mr. Rasmann had been a student teacher. Several of the evening news shows ran pictures of her and said the police had evidence that she was one of his victims. One of the girls in his look book, perhaps? I should have felt better, but instead it made me feel worse.

I couldn’t sleep, but I couldn’t open my eyes either. My mom knocked loudly on my door at noon on a Friday. “Lizzy’s on the phone! Do you want me to tell her to call back whenever you decide to get out of bed?”

Waking up was like swimming through reeking hydrocarbons. “I’ll get it. I’ll be down in a sec.”

Bleary and exhausted, I went downstairs and picked up the phone. “Meet at the usual place?” Lizzy sounded breezy. “Soojin and Heather are coming out too.”

“Sure. Can you pick me up?”

Lizzy and I met up with Soojin and Heather at the mall cookie shop across the street from UC Irvine. We shared sugar and cigarettes in our favorite spot at the top of an unnecessarily elaborate bridge leading to the quad where a scene from one of the Planet of the Apes movies was filmed in the ’70s.

Heather kept high-fiving us. “Heroes! We are goddamn heroes!”

Lizzy grinned and blew a smoke ring.

I still thought we should have done it differently. But I couldn’t say that out loud. It was getting hard for me to keep track of all the things I couldn’t talk about: the sex, the abortion, the murders, and my worry that we’d done something really, really wrong. Nothing felt real. The physical world was a blob of light at the end of a long, elastic tunnel that kept squeezing shut.

“Who’s our next target?” Heather rubbed her hands together and cackled.

I knew she was joking, but suddenly I couldn’t deal. “Hey, so… I promised my dad that I would get all my chores done this afternoon,” I said. “I think I’m gonna take off.”

“Are you sure? Do you need a ride?” Lizzy sounded genuinely concerned.

“Naw, I’ll take the bus.”

As I walked away, I heard Heather ask Lizzy if I was doing okay.

“Obviously she’s dealing with a lot of shit…,” Lizzy replied.

And then I was out of earshot. I really did need to do my chores, but first I wanted to sit in the middle of all the huge eucalyptus trees at the center of the UCI campus. The place was pretty deserted in summer, except for a few wandering college students who ignored me. If I concentrated hard enough, I could pretend I was one of the trees, eating light and sucking energy from soil.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

I almost jumped up and ran. It was the woman from the night of the murder, sitting on the other end of the bench. What was she doing here? Suddenly, I couldn’t stop feeling Mr. Rasmann’s eyeballs under my thumbs. My hands shook and ice clotted under my skin, but I couldn’t move. The woman wasn’t in that Gunne Sax outfit anymore. Now she looked relatively normal in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. In the light, I could see her long hair was streaked with gray, and her tiny wireframe glasses looked like something out of a Merchant Ivory movie.

“It’s you again.” I was too freaked out to say anything else.

“We really need to talk.”

“Yeah, I think we do.”

She looked relieved. “Oh good. That wasn’t what I thought you’d say.”

“Who the fuck are you, and how do you know Lizzy and me?” It came out harsher than I intended, but I was too strung out to translate my feelings into words a grownup could handle.

“Beth, this is going to sound really strange, but bear with me.” The woman took a deep breath and resettled her glasses on her nose. When she spoke again, there was a tremor in her voice. “I’m you. From the future.”

My brain was doing the thing that happens when a PC crashes and the screen turns a blank, menacing blue. I couldn’t fully process anything. Finally I found my voice. “Isn’t that against the law?”

“Well, it’s not technically against the law unless I tell you something that would limit your agency or give you an unfair advantage? But yeah, it’s a gray area. I could get in a lot of trouble.”

I scrutinized her face, looking for traces of myself, but all I saw was a middle-aged stranger. Our conversation had gone from unnerving to seriously dangerous, and I considered the possibility that every fucked-up thing in my life had finally driven me insane. Given that, I might as well find out what this possibly imaginary person had to say. “So… what are you… am I… doing here?”

“I’m here to tell you to get away from Lizzy. She’s going to keep killing people and it’s… you know it’s wrong. Plus, she’s a toxic friend. She’s not good for you.”

Those were words I had not allowed myself to think and I desperately wanted to change the subject. “You’re a traveler? I thought we were going to study real geology…”

“A lot changed after you… after the murders. I can’t tell you much, but it was really awful. I wanted a totally different life. I changed our name, too. I go by Tess now.”

“Are you serious? I hate that name.”

“Remember how we used to hate dark chocolate in elementary school? Now it’s the best ever, right? Things change.”

“I guess.” I shook my head, trying to imagine a future where I traveled through time and called myself Tess. “I read that you can die or go insane if you meet yourself when you travel.”

“Yeah, I was worried about that. There is almost nothing in the geoscience journals about it. That’s because of legal issues, obviously. But there could be other problems, like an edit merging conflict where two versions of history overlap. That could cause… extremely negative cognitive effects. I’m taking a risk.”

As I listened, I realized that Tess’s eyes were the exact same color as mine. Of course they were. And her right ear was triple-pierced; I could remember getting that done last summer at the mall. For the first time, I considered that this was actually happening. This was real. I was having a conversation with my future self and I was murdering people… or maybe I was being fucked with on a grand scale. If this woman was not a hallucination, maybe she was some kind of con artist.

“How do I know you’re really me and not a scammer?”

“I know you had an abortion. Because of what happened with Hamid. I also know you only told Lizzy, Soojin, and Heather. And Lizzy’s mom.”

“You could have found that out from the doctor, or from any of my friends, or who knows what.”

“Your… our father. We never told anyone what happened that one night.”

I dug my fingers into the park bench so I could feel the splinters go in. Tess was right. I had never told anyone. Hearing someone talk about my secret—even if she was technically me—had an almost physical effect. A stagnant pool of feeling was evaporating out of my chest. Tess had confirmed that my memories of that night were real.

“Now do you believe me? Can we talk about Lizzy?”

“Is something bad going to happen to us? Are we going to get caught?”

Tess shook her head. “I’ve already said enough. I’m not going to tell you anything else about the future. Let’s focus on the present.”

I couldn’t reply. There was too much happening. I kept grinding my hands harder into the bench and thinking about how every time my father touched me it felt like drowning. I stared at Tess—at myself—and wondered what pronouns to use for her. It sounded weird to call her “me,” but scientifically inaccurate to say “her” or “you.” Still, if I really was me, I was an unknown me, or possibly a potential me. We were altering the timeline right now. I decided to go with “she” and “her” as pronouns, at least for the moment.