Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

“He was smart, but he was lazy.” Except for the pronoun, it was the exact thing my father always said about me. “He always got tired of whatever he was doing when it got hard. He went from job to job, you know? First he was selling birdcages, then musical instruments. And somehow he always had money to start a new business. Then one day the police showed up at our house. I was nine. It turned out he’d been burning his shops down for the insurance.” My father paused, the lines in his face erased by a taut bitterness. I could see the little boy he’d been, innocent and outraged. “He was an arsonist, and it was… you know the term ‘Jewish lightning’?”

I didn’t.

“It’s a myth, that Jews burn their shops down for the insurance money and blame a lightning strike. Like the myth that we have horns, or we killed Jesus. But there he was, an actual kike firebug .” My father spat the words. “The judge thought he was going to save all the good Christians of Los Angeles from us. Nobody was hurt, but the cops charged my father with aggravated arson, which is normally only for situations where people were killed or injured. But my dad used a timer device to set the fire, and that technically made it ‘aggravated.’ So his sentence went from three years to ten. I didn’t see him again until after I married your mom.”

I was shocked. I barely remembered my grandparents. They were two old people with thick accents who died before I was old enough to hold a conversation with them. “But how did you get the auto shop?”

“One of his business partners covered for us, pretended he’d bought the whole thing from my father. He let your grandmother and me work there so your uncles could eat. And then he cut me in for half when I turned eighteen.”

“I didn’t know that.” I met his eyes awkwardly.

“That’s why we have to push you not to be lazy, Beth. I worry you want to get things the easy way. You spend so much time with your friends that it interferes with your studies.”

It was his usual accusation, and it never failed to paralyze me with frustrated rage. But this time, in this context, it meant something different. He was trying to warn me somehow, or maybe warn his dad retroactively through me. Don’t light things on fire. Don’t leave.

“Let’s look at something else.” I pointed ahead of us, where a team of researchers cleaned fossils behind a floor-to-ceiling glass window.

“What are they doing with those piles of dirt?” My father seemed glad to focus on something else too. “Shouldn’t they be looking at bones?”

“Actually that’s not dirt—they’re sorting microfossils.” Excited to explain it to him, I gushed everything I knew. “A bunch of tiny stuff got trapped in the tar along with the mammoths. There are teeth, insects, plants, and shells, and those can all tell us a lot about the Ice Age ecosystem.” I was warming to the topic when a woman next to us interrupted.

“Not that many people know about microfossils. Are you studying paleontology?”

“I’m going to study geoscience at UCLA next year.”

“That’s where I did my undergrad! I’m doing a Ph.D. in paleo now.” The woman pulled her hair back into a scrunchie as she talked, and I realized she was only a few years older than me.

“Are you studying microfossils?” The world had dropped away, and all I cared about was learning more.

“Do you know what paleobotany is? I’m studying pollen and seeds from the Pleistocene.” She glanced around conspiratorially. “Do you want to take a peek behind the glass? I can take you in.”

I barely restrained myself from jumping up and down. “Yes! That would be awesome.”

She turned to my father. “Are you her dad?”

“No. I’m… a friend.” His eyes had gone opaque, and he backed away. He hated talking to strangers, and always came up with bizarrely obvious lies to prevent them from knowing anything about him.

She looked confused, but continued cheerily. “I’m Quan. Do you like fossils too? Want a backstage tour?”

My father backed up more, his face blank. Quan was freaking him out. He sometimes got like this in unexpected social situations, and I couldn’t predict what he would do. It might be really bad.

“You know, we should probably get going. Thanks for the offer, though.” I hoped Quan wouldn’t be offended by our abrupt withdrawal. We left her standing next to the lab door I’d been hoping to enter, to see what remained of the Ice Age.

Somehow we wound up outside, next to the mammoth scene of anguish that had joined us in the past.

My father cocked his head, eyes cloudless again, and seemed to realize for the first time that he was witnessing a horrifying death. “I guess that’s kind of scary for kids, now that I think about it.”

“I always thought it was cool.”

He continued to contemplate the mammoths, then hung his arm around my shoulders. “You are really smart, Beth.” His skin was rough where it touched the back of my neck, and hard with muscle. He gave me a grin I hadn’t seen in a long time. “But I hope you know it’s more than that. You’re talented. You’re not going to be some boring high school science teacher. You’re going to discover something amazing. I bet people will be visiting your museum in a hundred years.”

I felt proud and sad and suddenly very old. Older than my father, like Tess. I put my arm around his waist and hugged back. “Thanks, Dad.”

The baby mammoth was still screaming silently. Her father was still trapped. Nothing had changed except me. I no longer believed I could save my own father from whatever was sucking him under.

Soojin was getting really good at playing electric guitar. She screamed and howled on key, too, which meant she could do a reasonable facsimile of Grape Ape’s repertoire. Her parents wouldn’t let her practice at home, though, so we had a perfect excuse to spend lunch in the music room instead of with Lizzy and Heather. Admittedly, it wasn’t as if they were desperate to hang out with us either. We’d all adopted a policy of extreme avoidance. Saying hi in the hallway was fine, but there were no conversations. We were no longer phone friends.

I’ll never know how Lizzy cleaned up her homicidal mess at the world’s shittiest rock party, but it must have been pretty spectacular. Richard’s death made the L.A. Times, but only as a tiny notice. According to the paper, he’d produced a few albums for Epic, then died tragically after taking a ton of drugs and jumping off the roof of that house into an empty swimming pool. Soojin and I talked about the possibility that maybe the guy who owned the house had covered up the murder. Because how could Lizzy and Heather have dragged that guy up to the roof? And even then—how do you make stab wounds look like injuries from a fall?

“Rich white men get away with everything!” Soojin half sang, half spoke the words as she played a distorted chord. Then she paused, hanging both arms over the body of her instrument. “Seriously, though, I bet this shit happens all the time. Cops don’t care.”

“But when a rich white man dies, doesn’t that kind of invalidate the whole equation? Shouldn’t the cops try way too hard to solve his murder?” We’d discussed this a million times, and it had become a kind of ritual to mull it over again.

“Then it’s about who is richer. Dude who owns the house is super rich. Dude who dies in his house is like… junior rich. My mom says that back in Korea, you could get out of anything if you paid the cops a big enough bribe. I bet it’s the same here. Super rich defeats junior rich.” She smacked a fist into her palm, like she was squashing a bug.

“Have you talked to Heather or Lizzy at all?”