The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  “Okay.”

  “The story is that he invited us to his house, tried to get us drunk, and said we had to take off our clothes. Then he grabbed Soojin, and we attacked him without thinking.”

  “And we didn’t go to the police because we were so scared.”

  “We didn’t realize he was dead when we left.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s good. We thought we’d only beaten him up.”

  “Are you okay with that, Beth?” Everybody looked at me.

  “Sure.” I nodded vigorously, but some unnamable feeling compressed my chest so hard that black dots fizzed at the edges of my vision.

  * * *

  Our homicidal improv exercise turned out to be overkill in the end. A week later, the story hit the papers everywhere. It wasn’t a snippet in The Orange County Register like when Scott died. The cops claimed they’d discovered the mastermind of a child porn ring, right at Irvine High School. They suspected that Mr. Rasmann had been murdered by some of his co-conspirators. We all got letters on official Irvine High letterhead, explaining that nobody had reported any wrongdoing at the school, but they were doing a “thorough investigation” anyway. They helpfully included a list of churches we could call for counseling.

  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. T
ess 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.

  It didn’t seem like Tess was having the same lexical vertigo. “Lizzy has a lot of problems and she’s sucking you into them. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I have problems too. I’m the one who killed Mr. Rasmann. I’m the one whose dad…” I stopped myself. There was no easy word, like murder, for what my father had done.

  “Yeah, but Lizzy caused that. I mean, she caused the murder.” She shot me a nervous frown, and for the first time something looked vaguely familiar about her. Trying to find my features in her face was the inverse of hunting through my mother’s baby book, packed with snapshots of a tiny, puffy-faced stranger. I couldn’t believe either of them was me, separated only by years of cell division.

  “Okay, so what do you want me to do about Lizzy?”

  “Do about…? No, there’s nothing you can do. You have to get the hell away from her.”

  “She’s my best friend. Our best friend! I can’t do that. Plus, what about Heather and Soojin? I can’t stop talking to them, too.”

  Tess seemed pensive, as if she hadn’t really considered any of that. “You don’t have to stop talking to them. But you have to get away from Lizzy. If she tries to pull you into this murder thing again, you have to say no. You have to leave, no matter where you are. Do you understand?”

  “Why aren’t you talking to Lizzy instead of me? Shouldn’t you be telling her to stop murdering people too?”

  She sighed. “No. It’s about more than the murders. Lizzy is a bad person. At least, she is right now. She’s out of control. She gets people to do things and then doesn’t take responsibility for it. Do you understand what I mean?”

  I thought about how Lizzy was always the decider. Then I remembered how she’d hugged me when I was scared. How she and her mom had rescued me from the worst possible thing I could imagine. I shook my head. “I don’t think Lizzy is like that. I mean, she’s not perfect, but … she wants to protect us.”

  “She didn’t have to murder Scott to protect you. She didn’t have to murder Mr. Rasmann. And now all of you are implicated.”

  “I mean, she’s angry sometimes … and I know we shouldn’t have killed anybody. I know that. But it’s not going to happen again.”

  “It will.”

  “But maybe we’ve already changed the timeline, right? Maybe I can stop Lizzy next time and then there won’t be more murders.”

  “Travel can cause a lot of random effects, so I suppose that’s remotely possible. But typically edits of that magnitude are a lot more difficult than you might think.” She sounded like a professor, which I guess she was. At least she’d gone into geoscience like I planned.

  Tess regarded me with her uncanny face, half-self, half-other. I knew she was right that we’d done something very wrong, and we had to stop. But I didn’t want to be on her side about dumping Lizzy, especially when she used her teacher voice. I stood up. “You don’t know for sure! I might be about to change the future right now!”

  “You’re not. And besides, you don’t need to change the future. You need to deal with what’s happening today. This situation with Lizzy is going to get really dangerous. These murders have consequences.”

  “You said before we’re not going to get caught. Do you think anyone believes that we could kill a serial killer? Or a rapist? No! They blame it on drifters and criminals! They say men did it!” My voice was jagged with rage, and I was saying everything that came into my head. “I don’t care if you are me—you aren’t me! I would never stop being friends with Lizzy! She’s a good person! So whatever fucked-up shit you did to become you, I’m not going to do it!”

  I walked away fast, before Tess could reply. When finally I glanced back, she was hunched over, hands covering her face.

  * * *

  My mom was on the phone when I got home. She ignored me as I pulled the vacuum cleaner out of the hall closet and dragged it upstairs. My father’s shoe obsession had evolved into a more generalized obsession with preserving the cleansed state of the rug. I vacuumed upstairs twice a week, making sure to get every corner. Sometimes dirt and fluff would hide between the edge of the furniture and the wall. The worst was the hair, though. My mother and I both had long hair, and removing it from the rug was a key part of this chore ritual.

  I began in my room, using the hose attachment with its bristly mouth to get beneath the narrow bed and around my dresser. I shook out the comforter covered in horses I’d gotten for Hanukkah seven years ago. Then I dusted my desk and bookshelves, all part of a fancy wooden wall unit my father had installed with maniacal precision, deploying rulers and specialized screwdrivers and a level full of golden liquid that caught the light as he worked. My books covered up the indentation where he’d punched the wall when one of the screws didn’t quite fit. I could still hear his voice from that day, rising to a high, birdlike pitch as he reached the peak of his rage. “You know why this doesn’t work? Because the people who put this kit together are goddamn lazy! There’s no reason why they can’t give you good materials! No reason other than … deliberately cutting corners!” And then the blur of his arm connecting with the wall as his words crashed together to make one, furious sound.

  I moved into the hallway, around the nook where we kept the Mac SE on a tiny table, its only companion a tidy plastic box of floppies. As the roar of the vacuum cleaner sank into me, it became a soothing overlay on everything that had happened this afternoon. I wondered if I should have stayed to talk with Tess for longer. Maybe she could have told me more about what was going on. Or maybe she would have kept insisting that I dump Lizzy as a friend. Which—it’s not like I hadn’t considered that on my own. But I loved Lizzy, and we’d been best friends since we were little. I couldn’t imagine my life without her. I wasn’t going to stop being friends with her just because some asshole from my future said so.

  I was so deep in thought that I almost jumped when my father’s hand wrapped around my shoulder from behind. Thankfully I remained outwardly calm and switched off the motor. In the years since that night—the one Tess confirmed was real—I’d learned to make no sudden moves.

  “Thanks for doing the vaccuming, Beth.” His pale blue eyes revealed nothing. I couldn’t tell what his mood might be, which meant the best tactic was to play along. Pretend I’d done the cleaning to be nice, rather than to avoid punishment.

  “No problem.” I smiled brightly. Were we friends today?

  He smiled back and I didn’t relax at all. “Let’s see how it looks.” He walked into my room and swept his fingers through the rug, leaving a jagged claw mark behind. One long hair was snarled between his fingers. “Huh.” He sounded perplexed, as if he couldn’t understand how the strand had gotten there. Then he looked meaningfully at me.

  “I’m not really done yet. Almost, though!” I smiled again, his friendly daughter, having a perfectly normal conversation with her perfectly normal father.

  He walked back downstairs without saying a word. I wasn’t in trou
ble, but I’d been warned.

  A few hours later, the rug was clean enough that it was safe to call Lizzy. The answering machine was on, and I had to yell after the beep. “Hey, Lizzy! It’s Beth! Pick up, pick up, pick up! Are you there?”

  A series of bumps and clicks. “Hey, Beth! Can you go out tonight? I found out about this awesome backyard party in L.A.! It’s a total lucky edit. Grape Ape is playing! It’s going to be fucking amazing. Can you come?”

  I glanced over at my father, who was swirling a stir-fry together in the wok. The kitchen smelled like garlic and ginger. “Can I go out to the movies with Lizzy tonight?”

  He smiled and nodded: I was in his good graces for now. I’d gotten pretty good at tiptoeing around his moods, but he could still be unpredictable. This time I got away without a scratch.

  * * *

  Lizzy picked me up around eight, and we headed up the I-5 into L.A., inhaling the fossil fuel stench of street and air, blasting a Screamin’ Sirens song. We sang along, and talked about how ska was more intersectional than punk, and then wondered what the modern equivalent of a band like the Sex Pistols would be. Maybe Green Day? Maybe Nirvana? We didn’t like either of those bands: they were definitely the slick, mainstream face of punk. As traffic thickened around us, brake lights occasionally flaring red like an ephemeral river of blood, I wondered whether there were any flecks of evidence left in the back of Lizzy’s station wagon. But I didn’t ask. It was nice to have a conversation that never once touched on the topics of men or murder.

  I hadn’t been to a backyard party before, though I’d heard a lot about them from people we knew in the scene. Lizzy had scored a flyer from somebody at Peer Records. I touched its uneven edges and took in the sketchy, Xeroxed graphics of headless mannequins and skulls. Letters and words cut from magazines spelled out the evening lineup: GRAPE APE x CHE MART x XICANISTAS x BRAT PUNXXX. The address was on a narrow street off Whittier in East L.A. I glanced at the flyer again as we cruised for parking, and wondered if we’d need to show IDs to get in. I had a really shitty fake ID that I’d never used, tucked into the inner pocket of my craziest plaid pants. It was still warm outside, so we left our jackets in the trunk and did a final outfit check. Lizzy readjusted the skinny black suspenders over my Grape Ape T-shirt, the one with an aerial view of the Machine stamped with the word “STOLEN.” I held up a mirror so she could darken the mascara rings around her eyes. She had on a ripped-up, glittery ’60s dress and Docs.