A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “Not really. And there’s not a magical way to hide and transfer knowledge; otherwise I would be able to show you that you should try therapy, like, even once. Funny that you mention magic, though. I’ve recently been delving into the dark arts, mostly to see if there’s anything that’ll help pull me out of this time loop but also because I was trying to help Nina with her ghost problem.”

  I wondered what recently meant to Bonnie. “You know about that? Oh, I forgot again. You know about everything. Did it work?”

  “No,” she said simply and sadly. “It is such an unfortunate truth that shit doesn’t happen to you based on what you can deal with.”

  “Poor Nina,” I said. God, Bonnie really had changed! How many times had I had this thought today? And yet I couldn’t stop thinking it, when everything she said and did kept revealing her newness, and each time in a new way. I checked the time and flinched. “Oh, it’s about to be midnight,” I said, feeling robotic with dread. “I’m just going to distract myself from ontological terror and tell you that next time, please figure out a way to prove it to me from the get-go, and then give me some money so I can stop going to my job and have a nice whole week of fun. What do you say?”

  “I could do that, and I have. It’s futile, though.”

  “Wow, I’m not used to this dark-sided goth of a Bonnie. I’ll miss her and yet I also totally won’t.” It was hard to talk. My teeth were chattering.

  It was about to be midnight.

  One more second.

  THE TIME BONNIE STAYED BACK

  She whispered into everyone’s ears, setting off tiny explosions of shock and awe and gasp, but when she reached me, I just said, “Don’t.” I didn’t want to know what she knew about me already, whatever I told her even though it wasn’t me who told her. (Yes it was no it wasn’t.)

  “No need,” I said. “I believe it.”

  Bonnie nodded and sat down again. All of us were rapt. “I’m in a sharing mood this time,” Bonnie said. “Please, anyone, feel free to ask me whatever you like.”

  Here are a few of the questions I can still remember. We had a lot.

  Q: How do you remember so much stuff if you can’t take anything with you?

  A: Good question! This has all been hugely taxing for my memory. I learned the method of loci from Rhetorica ad Herennium and other texts. The first thing I do when I wake up is type as much as I can remember. Like, in a total frenzy. Good thing you’ve only heard me banging on that keyboard once! Ha ha. Another thing I do upon waking is order a bunch of books and stuff so I can have it all shipped to me as soon as possible.

  Q: Have you ever tried to kill yourself?

  A: No. Before my optimism died, I had always held out hope that I’d be able to escape the time loop eventually. I didn’t want to jeopardize that by killing myself, and I was scared. Then I died by accident, so that answered that. But I would never do it on purpose. I hate the dark in-betweens. They last longer when I’ve died.

  Q: What are some of your favorite memories?

  A: So many! This is going to sound cheesy. Becoming closer with many of you. You don’t remember, but we got close, like wearing-each-other’s-hair-in-our-lockets close. You are all such incredible people. Even you have your moments, Scott. The dark-magic cult that formed about me, I’m not going to say it’s a favorite memory—it was more interesting, but very, very, very interesting. Oh, and I had so much amazing sex. That is, I had an enormous amount of sex and so much of it was amazing, but of course a whole lot was mediocre and embarrassing and some of it was terrible. I’m not a god or anything. Sometimes I can’t know when a bad thing will happen, or I won’t be able to stop it, and though my body gets reset my mind does not.

  Q: Do you want it to stop?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Why do you want it to stop?

  A: First of all, I’m sick of it. In some incalculable, untrackable way, I am old as fuck. Second, and this is the selfish reason, there’s a limit to how much I can improve all by myself. I mean, just because you live the same week over and over again doesn’t mean you’ll be that great or smart. I’m proud of how awesome I got, but I think I’m hitting a wall. Third, I have lately [we wondered what lately meant to Bonnie] been troubled by the feeling that this span of time is being used up somehow. That it is degrading and fraying in some intangible way and there will be devastating consequences. Like it’s going to just poop out. Can’t you feel it? The way everything feels so tired and busted and sad, and it’ll lurch forever but it also can’t go on like this forever? [We all nodded.] I’m scared.

  Q: Whoa. I thought I’d just been depressed.

  A: Yes. You are also that. I am concerned that whatever is happening to me is coming to an end but not the end I sought. I’m worried there won’t be any future. And I really wanted the future to happen, more than anybody—[Please, Bonnie, we said]—okay, fine, I want it as much as anyone else does, and to think that I won’t get to see it, that none of us will—

  This was around when Bonnie stopped talking. She had a look like someone who had run full force into a glass door, like: Aaaaah! And like: OUCH. And like: Well, of course. I did know that door was there.

  She got up to leave, telling us that this week was going to be very busy and it was important to get it just right, so please don’t do stupid shit expecting it to be undone. Please. When we tried to ask her one last thing, she blew right out of there, leaving the question to twist in the air and plummet to the floor in a crumpled ball.

  The question was: Why you, Bonnie?

  We never stopped wondering and we never found out.

  Bonnie decided to throw a giant party at our place. It would be on Tuesday night, the last night of the week, because everything in Bonnie’s week took place on the exact wrong day. “People will come,” she said. “I know how to get them here. And I deserve a real birthday party! In a sense, I’m like a million years old.” I asked her if she kept count and she shook her head, saying she was bad at keeping numbers in her mind, but that had to be a lie.

  Such terrible things happened this week. Huge startling ones and small boring ones. But in other ways we had a wonderful week. We remember it still.

  Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that fucking major?

  At the party, which everyone did attend—not that we doubted Bonnie more than just a little bit—I spotted the man I knew at my last job. The Man. But not really The Man, not really deserving of capitals, because there had been a few in my life but this one only happened to be the most recent and I was maddest at him. Most recent also meant that I had thought I’d become old enough to respect myself and to be able to foresee every future event (was I expecting too much?) so that I wouldn’t keep saying yes to a man when I wanted to say no and thus pave the way for me to say no to that man and have him still do what he wanted and leave me totally confused, knowing that something was very, very wrong. Thus when all of that nevertheless came to pass I got really mad at myself and additionally mad at him for making me mad at myself, and, of course, I was mad at myself for being mad at myself.

  My fingertips sizzled.

  The time was after midnight. Bonnie wasn’t here anymore. I felt it, like she told me we would. She said she had had a sudden flash of insight, or maybe not so sudden because she had been thinking over it for years, and now she knew what she had to do. It had taken her so long because it was a weird solution and one that made her quite unhappy. “Only at first. I feel much better about it now. Nobody should be sad for me,” she said. When the time came, Bonnie was going to allow the future to move ahead. The way it would move ahead was if she stayed in the past. It wasn’t too hard to do, more a matter of intention and perspective than anything else. You didn’t even need dark magic. Well, some helped. “I wish I could be there. To see it,” she had said. “But I love you all and I’m sick of you all and I’m sick o
f power and power is sick of having me.”

  The man was talking happily to a young woman, as if he deserved to stand in the light. Amazingly, he truly did think that he was a nice person. I could have pondered that riddle for endless weeks of Bonnie time. It was like he was afflicted with anosognosia, a condition of not believing you have a mental illness because you have a mental illness, which was a major trouble of my aunt’s, who I really had loved. I had been afraid of becoming like her and having no one ever believe anything I’d ever say again, but that already came to pass anyway. This man wasn’t ill. He was just a cowardly sex criminal who was wrong about so many things, such as the future we were entering.

  As I crossed the room, people made way. I called his name. He glanced up, looking so unafraid that it made me want to pull him into fifty pieces. I lifted my hand a little, and he stood taller. He might have straightened when he saw me. Also likely was that a horridly strong cackling force might have frozen him in its thin-fingered grip and lifted him high on his toes.

  He might be compelled to tell me and this room full of people what he did to so many and who he was and every tiny detail of what went on in his mind. Forget punishment. Or, for that man, having to tell the honest truth, clean of self-preservation and self-regard, would be punishment enough. Or, there could be more punishment later. No need to decide yet. At that moment, all I wanted was the truth that had been denied me so long. Might it be denied me now?

  ALICE SOLA KIM’s writing has appeared in Tin House, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, Lightspeed, McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed Reader, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and other publications. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and winner of a 2016 Whiting Award.

  This book is dedicated to the folks who would not be erased.

  STORY COPYRIGHT CREDITS

  “The Synapse Will Free Us from Ourselves” by Violet Allen, copyright © 2019 by Violet Allen

  “The Bookstore at the End of America” by Charlie Jane Anders, copyright © 2019 by Charlie Jane Anders

  “The Referendum” by Lesley Nneka Arimah, copyright © 2019 by Lesley Nneka Arimah

  “By His Bootstraps” by Ashok K. Banker, copyright © 2019 by Ashok K. Banker

  “The Blindfold” by Tobias S. Buckell, copyright © 2019 by Tobias S. Buckell

  “Attachment Disorder” by Tananarive Due, copyright © 2019 by Tananarive Due

  “Riverbed” by Omar El Akkad, copyright © 2019 by Omar El Akkad

  “Esperanto” by Jamie Ford, copyright © 2019 by Jamie Ford

  “Read After Burning” by Maria Dahvana Headley, copyright © 2019 by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “No Algorithms in the World” by Hugh Howey, copyright © 2019 by Hugh Howey

  “The Wall” by Lizz Huerta, copyright © 2019 by Lizz Huerta

  “Calendar Girls” by Justina Ireland, copyright © 2019 by Justina Ireland

  “Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death” by N. K. Jemisin, copyright © 2019 by N. K. Jemisin

  “Now Wait for This Week” by Alice Sola Kim, copyright © 2019 by Alice Sola Kim

  “Harmony” by Seanan McGuire, copyright © 2019 by Seanan McGuire

  “It Was Saturday Night, I Guess That Makes It All Right” by Sam J. Miller, copyright © 2019 by Sam J. Miller

  “What Maya Found There” by Daniel José Older, copyright © 2019 by Daniel José Older

  “Chapter 5: Disruption and Continuity [excerpted]” by Malka Older, copyright © 2019 by Malka Older

  “O.1” by Gabby Rivera, copyright © 2019 by Gabrielle Rivera

  “Our Aim Is Not to Die” by A. Merc Rustad, copyright © 2019 by A. Merc Rustad

  “What You Sow” by Kai Cheng Thom, copyright © 2019 by Kai Cheng Thom

  “The Sun in Exile” by Catherynne M. Valente, copyright © 2019 by Catherynne M. Valente

  “A History of Barbed Wire” by Daniel H. Wilson, copyright © 2019 by Daniel H. Wilson

  “ROME” by G. Willow Wilson, copyright © 2019 by G. Willow Wilson

  “Good News Bad News” by Charles Yu, copyright © 2019 by MSD Imaginary Machines, Inc.

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  VICTOR LAVALLE is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus; four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling; and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of a comic book, Victor LaValle’s Destroyer. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Whiting Writers’ Award, a United States Artists Ford Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shirley Jackson Award, an American Book Award, and the Key to Southeast Queens. He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in Washington Heights with his wife and kids. He teaches at Columbia University.

  victorlavalle.com

  Facebook.com/​victorlavalleauthor

  Twitter: @victorlavalle

  JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands, Brave New Worlds, The End Is Nigh, and The Living Dead. Adams is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist, and was a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. Adams is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare and is a producer for Wired’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

  johnjosephadams.com

  Facebook.com/​johnjosephadams

  Twitter: @JohnJosephAdams

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