Аннали Ньюиц: The Future of Another Timeline

A pasty white boy grabbed Heather roughly and she stumbled toward him, a red lipstick smile bright in her brown face. The boy’s right ear was crusted with safety pins and dried blood. Piercing injury. Very punk rock.

What was his name? A jagged shard of imagery was lodged in my mind, painful and opaque. Oh fuck. The slurry of psychological muck that usually buried my high school memories was gone, leaving behind a crisp picture of what that kid’s face would look like in three hours, when it was covered in blood. I stared at him as he twitched to the music, angry and alive. I had to intervene. If I didn’t, something horrific was going to happen. Many horrific things. And they would all lead, in the end, to a broken and beloved body, robbed of the consciousness that hurled it off a bridge.

Now that I was here, maybe I could undo that whole narrative and make everything right. I muscled my way out of the orchestra section, away from Heather’s laugh and my own age-reversed face, back down the path to the parking lot. Passing the merch table, I felt a painful twist of nostalgia as I read Grape Ape’s once-familiar slogans: MAKE BAJA MEXICAN AGAIN! SUCK MY PLASTIC DICK! SLUTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! At last I reached my rental car. I’d made it out before the encore, which should give me enough time to make an edit. As I turned the key in the ignition, recklessness oozed into me. Had I really come back because of Berenice’s report, or had I been hoping subconsciously for something like this to happen? Some excuse to intervene in my own past?

I wished I could remember my favorite shortcut from thirty-eight years ago, through Irvine’s palimpsest of malls, churches, and walled subdivisions. I’d have to brave traffic. Merging on the 405 freeway, I slowed down and considered what the hell I was doing. The Daughters of Harriet were waiting for me back in 2022, and I needed to tell them about the Comstockers. I should be headed back to the Machine. But this was an emergency. I had to save that boy’s life.

Irvine, Alta California (1992 C.E.)

I love the pause right before an encore. We could pretend that Grape Ape wasn’t coming back unless we broke the world with our noise. The whole crowd stood up and screamed and I kicked the folded-up seat of my chair until it felt like Irvine Meadows was the epicenter of a shallow quake, its high-frequency vibrations booming through the Earth’s crust. For a few rare seconds, we were a number on the Richter scale. I looked up at the sky, scattered with ancient blobs of exploding gas, and wanted the anticipation to last forever.

“Where’s Heather?” Lizzy leaned in close, and I could feel the prickly tips of her soap-stiffened mohawk on my cheek. People used to say we looked like sisters until she went bleach blond and pierced her lower lip.

I pointed at the mosh pit. “She went down there with Scott!”

Glorious returned to the stage, trailed by Maricela on guitar, and they tore into the title track from their first EP, Our Time Was Stolen . I still had the poster for it on my bedroom wall at home, with its lush drawing of what the Machines looked like hundreds of millions of years ago, before their interfaces eroded away to nothing. It was an aerial view, showing two red, crescent-shaped rocks curving around a circular pearlescent canopy that covered the entrance to the wormhole. From that angle it looked like a beautiful, stylized vulva and clitoris. But it was also an ancient rock formation. I loved it instantly, and loved everything Grape Ape had done since.

When the last chord died, everything sounded faraway and dull.

“I hope we can find Heather,” Lizzy grumbled. “She has my fucking cigarettes.”

Shrugging, I tried to hold on to the pre-encore rush but felt myself returning to a baseline of sadness. Maybe the concert had been pretty good, but I still hated everything. Grape Ape didn’t play that one new song I really loved. My tights were scratchy. Pretty soon I’d have to go home and deal with my parents. Music was nothing like life. When Glorious stopped singing, I missed her magnificent sound, with its power to merge my soul with the crowd and obliterate loneliness. I was stuck in a body. I had to communicate using the pathetic phonemes of language. Suddenly my throat hurt and my eyes were burning and I had to swallow hard to keep myself from breaking down right there in front of every punk rocker in Irvine. This was always happening to me—something random would make me want to cry. But it had gotten a lot worse lately. It was harder to stop the tears before they fell.

“There they are!” Lizzy pointed at Heather and Scott, waving to us from the bottom of the suddenly floodlit arena. Roadies were grabbing things off the stage and we joined the slow river of people draining into the parking lot.

Soojin had watched the show in rapt silence next to us, but now she wanted to discuss Maricela’s new guitar pedal in great detail. “I think she had that thing engineered just for her.” She readjusted a plastic barrette in her bobbed hair with thoughtful intensity. “I haven’t seen anything like it in the catalogues.”

Heather bounced up with the cigarettes and Scott played with the blood-caked safety pins in his ear as we made it out the front gate.

Everybody started talking about the show, and Scott disagreed with Soojin’s opinions about guitar pedals while Heather made faces behind his back. It was the same pointless debate they always had. With each passing word and sentence, I felt like I was lagging further behind the conversation. Their voices were nothing but a distant whine now. Maybe I was sliding downstream in time, doomed to vacillate endlessly between weeping and numbness. While my friends barreled into the future, I was back here in the past, unable to move on.

But when Lizzy spoke, I snapped back into the present. “You guys, let’s not go home yet,” she said. “We can drive up to Turtle Rock and look at the lights.”

Heather rubbed her hands together with a high-pitched giggle. “Let’s do it!”

Soojin gave a thumbs-up sign.

I still had an hour before curfew and my urge to cry had evaporated. “Okay. As long as I’m home by midnight.”

Lizzy’s car was one of those infinitely long station wagons with two rows of generous seats and a long, carpeted cargo area that ended in a rear door designed to drop down and become a tailgate picnic table. It was designed for parties of another era. In the front seat, we were blasting The Bags, rehashing the best moments of the show, and smoking weed out of a perforated Coke can.

From the top of Turtle Rock, we could see a fringe of lights from the subdivisions around UC Irvine. Dark puddles of undeveloped land spread outward from our parking spot at the edge of the road. Lizzy started imitating the way our hippie social studies teacher always made air quotes around the phrase “Western belief system.” Soojin and I could not stop cracking up.

In the cargo area, Scott and Heather were making out.

“Let’s get some air.” Lizzy shook the pack of cigarettes and raised an eyebrow.

I nodded and spoke in a loud, stagey voice. “Yes, let’s stretch our legs.”

“We’re going to stay here where it’s warm!” Heather called from the back.

“No shit,” I mumbled.

We scrambled out of the car and walked up an unlit dirt path, sharing a cigarette and trying to find a spot with a better view.

When the car was out of sight, Soojin snorted a laugh. “It was getting a little awkward in there.”

“How long should we give them, do you think?” I picked up a rock and threw it down the hill.

Lizzy let out a long stream of smoke. “I dunno. Ten minutes? Fifteen? How long do you think it takes to give that dumbass a blowjob?”