Аннали Ньюиц: The Future of Another Timeline

I shot a look at Hamid and walked with my dad into the hallway.

“Let’s go to your room and get your stuff together. We’re leaving right now.” My father had dropped the pretense and his voice was gravelly with menace.

“I’m not going.” I looked into his face and told myself not to cry.

“Your mother and I know about your little stunt. We got a notice from the tax board. I don’t know what kind of lies you have been telling, but this is obviously an excuse to avoid facing what you’ve done. The laziness, the lack of discipline…”

I realized I didn’t have to listen to those accusations anymore. I had an emergency loan from the university to tide me over until next quarter, when the financial aid officer assured me my big loan would come through. Suddenly, my father’s familiar litany sounded bizarre.

“I am going to pay for college myself.”

“No, you’re not. We’re in touch with the financial aid office. They will give you nothing unless we permit it.”

I stopped feeling the urge to cry. I couldn’t believe he would lie in such an overt way. Had he always lied to me like that? “They’ve already approved my loans.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’ve been lying and sneaking behind our backs. You know you’ll wind up dropping out if you don’t have us there every step of the way. You’ve never completed anything on your own.”

I felt the scream coming from far away, like it had started in Irvine, or maybe six years ago, before reaching my chest and smashing against my ribcage to get out. But I held it in. It charged around my heart with a hatchet; it crammed a knife into my guts. I took a sliver of its rage into my mouth, rolled it around on my tongue, and spoke as quietly as I could.

“Get away from me.”

“I’m not done here.”

“Yes. You are.” I crossed my arms and leaned against the dorm bulletin board, flyers wrinkling under my back. A couple of students walked by, and I could hear Rosa’s high-pitched laugh as she made a terrible pun about covalent bonds. This was normal: people hanging out, doing work, helping each other. I tried to absorb all the safe feelings of normal around me as I stood my ground.

My father cocked his head the way he did when he was about to issue a punishment. And then he looked down, shuffling his feet, making a final stab. “You are delusional. I think you know that. We were wrong to trust you with all this independence, living away from home.” He gestured vaguely at the lounge. “I hope you never expect to get anything else from us.”

I kept silent because I was pretty sure that I had nothing left in me but that scream. My father turned around and left without another word. For an instant, I saw a massive fireball ignite behind him to fill the throat of the hallway with melting flesh and screams. And then he was gone, leaving a faint ringing in my ears.

Back in the lounge, I couldn’t think. “Rosa, can I bum a cigarette?”

“Sure. I think it’s time for a break anyway. I’ll go down with you.”

We worked on our smoke ring techniques and watched a raccoon raid one of the campus trash cans.

“Is everything okay with your dad?”

My eyes prickled and I took a long drag. “Just dealing with financial aid stuff.”

Rosa put a warm hand on my shoulder. “That’s always super stressful.”

“We worked it out, though.”

“That’s really good.”

Then we went back to talking about molecules, and class, and whether our midterm would be weighted the same as the final. Fleetingly, I thought about how I’d be graduating with almost fifty thousand dollars of debt. But that was so far away, and I didn’t have to start repaying it for at least a year after that. More immediate was my sense of relief, which was so intense that it was like being stoned. It filled me with a crazy rush of love for everything: the raccoon, covalent bonds, adulthood, UCLA, and all the humans who populated this place.

“Thanks for being an awesome study-buddy and nefarious cigarette smoker, Rosa. You are the best.”

She laughed in surprise. “You aren’t so bad yourself, Beth. Maybe you’ll come close to beating my score on the final. Maaaaaybe.” And she flicked the last ember of her cigarette in a perfect arc toward the sidewalk, where it winked out harmlessly.

“Let’s go finish that stupid lab.”

I took Anita’s advice and signed up for a class about time machines in the winter quarter. Hamid took an upper-division class in film theory, and we amused each other by coming up with imaginary names for new schools of thought. There were “The Great Man Gaze Theory” and “Subaltern Wormholes” and “Historical Amnesia for Beginners.” Nobody else understood our jokes, and we liked it that way. I still missed Lizzy sometimes, but I had new friends who didn’t think murder was awesome. I hoped that Tess had finally succeeded in her mission, whatever it was. Sometimes I thought about her out there, living with the memories of a different timeline where I’d killed myself. Was she the same person as the Lizzy I avoided in second-quarter chem? Probably not. The more I learned about how the timeline worked, the more convinced I was that Tess wouldn’t exist in my future. And nobody knew where she would be.

Los Angeles, Alta California (2022 C.E.)… Raqmu, Nabataean Kingdom (13 B.C.E.)

The headache clamped down on my sinuses, drilled into my skull, and shot metal rods into my spine. And that was the easy part. When I stumbled out of the Machine at Raqmu in 2022 with Anita and Morehshin, I knew I wouldn’t be staying for long. The light blinded me and my memories split apart again, making it hard to figure out what I was doing from minute to minute. My past was like a wadded-up piece of paper, and it looked different every time I smoothed it out.

Somehow, with the help of a lot of painkillers, Anita got me to the little airport that would take us to Tel Aviv, then back to Los Angeles. We checked our mobiles to see whether anything was different. Morehshin borrowed a tablet from Anita, poked it for a while, then made a mewing sound. When she looked up, I could barely recognize her underneath the weepy smile. “The Comstock Laws… they were overturned in the 1960s.”

I swiped a search query into my mobile, flooded with disbelief and hope. I checked and rechecked what I found, to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding what I read. Then I practically shouted, “Abortion is legal in almost every state!” For a few minutes my pain was gone and we hugged each other, laughing and making squee noises.

It didn’t last. I felt the throb of Beth’s life in my memories again, along with something else—the agony of her rejection that night at the show, worse than the pain of losing her to suicide. After too many ibuprofen, I was able to lie back on the plane and think about it. I’d turned my life around after Beth died, choosing nonviolence, swearing to make it up to her under my new name. In a way, I’d tried to become Beth. But now the clean burn of that motivation was engulfed in smoke. There was no sudden moment of realization, no wake-up call. Beth was still around to look accusingly at me in chem class during freshman year. Instead of setting out on a crusade, I’d wandered through a series of murky decisions that brought me here.

But as I’d told Anita before, my pain didn’t seem to come from holding those two histories in my mind. It was from holding two sets of feelings. The Tess whose best friend committed suicide knew who she was. She had a purpose. The Tess whose best friend lived felt… ambivalent about herself. Not all the time. She was happy, but always also sad about something. She’d built a new identity around an almost unbearable ambiguity, and the gradual realization that she would never be perfectly good or principled. This Tess would always know she had done bad things, and suffered the consequences. That was the awful new feeling scraping the inside of my skull: my best friend, whom I loved more than anyone at the time, had rejected me personally rather than rejecting life itself.