Reflexively, I put on my best movie preview voice. “It was a simple family vacation. They thought it would be paradise… but they wound up in HELL.”
“Don’t even get me started.” Hamid shrugged in disgust. “It’s going to be so boring. There will be nothing to do but play with my five-year-old cousins in the pool. Maybe Heather and I can go see some Disney movies if we’re lucky.”
I couldn’t think of a good reply. There was a stopper made of doubt in my throat. I wanted to feel like none of this mattered, but I was starting to suspect it did.
Hamid called me that night. We talked for a while about the stupidity of Disney World, and how it was like wanting to take a vacation inside a plastic replica of a vacation. Then I tried to defend Disney on the basis of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Tron, and we wound up in a half-serious, half-giggling debate that reminded me of talking to Lizzy. It was nice to have a conversation with a guy who wasn’t trying to impress me or snub me or worse. Then I thought about all the evenings we’d spent in his car with the reclining seats, and remembered how Hamid wasn’t like Lizzy at all.
“I’ve had a lot of fun these past couple weeks.” My heart pounded as I said it.
“Me too.”
“We should hang out when you get back.”
I could hear him moving around and maybe shutting a door. “Yeah, I want to. We’ll be back in July.”
He was infuriatingly casual about it. We’d lost our virginity to each other! It seemed like we should be saying something more profound, or romantic, or explicitly dirty. But I couldn’t think of a way to get us there, without an extremely awkward detour. So I resorted to irony.
“Awesome. I’ll be awaiting our rendezvous with excitement.”
It turned out to be the right move. “Totally.” He laughed, and then it was almost like I could hear him accumulating seriousness in the low hum of our phone connection. “I’m going to miss you.”
Something was squirming in my chest like an alien. It felt good, but I also wanted it to stop. Part of me was glad I wouldn’t have to see him again for a while.
“I’ll miss you too. Send me the worst Disney postcards you can find.”
“Challenge accepted.”
I hung up with a smile on my face.
SEVEN
TESS
Chicago, Illinois (1893 C.E)
I’d been working at the Algerian Theater for two weeks when Aseel announced that we’d have a rare night off. She told the men they could take advantage of an offer from the Expo bosses, who promised bonus pay to laborers willing to work through the night on construction. The women filtered out to Cairo Street, where dozens of Egyptian entertainers were cooking up real dinners in their fake homes.
I was on my way to the brand-new industrial wonder known as the L train when Aseel caught up to me. “What are you doing tonight?”
“I’m going home to get some supper.”
“Soph and I are going to see Lucy Parsons speak. Do you want to come?”
I was torn. Like anyone who studied this period, I knew the anarchist Lucy Parsons. In just over a decade, she would found the Industrial Workers of the World, known to cowering bosses and idealistic unionists as the IWW or Wobblies. Seeing her in person would be a thrill. But it would also, inevitably, be a disappointment. I’d learned that the hard way, after meeting some of my heroes among the anarchists of New York a decade before. I really hoped Aseel and Soph weren’t entangled in the sectarian garbage fire of this decade’s socialist politics.
“Are you interested in joining Parsons’s movement?” I asked.
Aseel shrugged. “I like women who can make an auditorium full of men listen to them. I’ll attend to what she has to say before deciding.”
I laughed. “That’s a good reason to see Lucy Parsons.” I agreed to come along, and we linked arms as we strolled. If nothing else, I could use this lecture as a chance to gather legit academic data about the founder of the IWW. We had to maintain the facade of the Applied Cultural Geology Group, and I couldn’t exactly return to 2022 and report to our funders that all I’d done was wage an edit war.
The lecture hall was packed with Chicago’s finest rabble-rousers and intellectuals. Lucy Parsons was one of the most famous anarchists in the country, and her speeches were legendary. Her writing burned up the pages of The Alarm, and she’d founded a new anarchist publication here in Chicago called simply Freedom. She was always getting arrested for her articles, especially after publishing a simple recipe for TNT because she believed everyone should know how to make bombs. A few years earlier, the state had executed her husband for his role as a supposed bomb-thrower during the Haymarket Riot. Parsons suffered for the cause, and radicals loved her for it. Besides, anarchy was having a moment. Banks were closing around the world, unemployment was spiking, and the Chicago steelworkers had led a successful strike. Parsons and her comrades seemed to have the right medicine for an ailing nation.
Soph met me and Aseel in the back of the hall, where we added our cigarette smoke to the general haze overhead. When Parsons strode onto the stage, plain black dress buttoned to her throat, her charisma was palpable. She didn’t wait for an introduction, and she gave no preamble. Even without a microphone, we could hear her voice booming: “I AM AN ANARCHIST!” She pushed a lock of tight curls behind her ear and continued, her tan face luminous with determination. “Today we are celebrating a victory for labor in this city. Boss Burnham has agreed to a minimum wage for Expo workers, and is granting overtime pay on nights and Sundays. We forced him to agree to overtime on Labor Day!”
Cheers erupted, and I looked around at the room. Workers still reeking of the stockyards rubbed elbows with tweedy professors. New Women passed flasks of gin to governesses. A lady in a fancy French dress took rapid shorthand notes in her stenographer’s notebook.
“I am an anarchist, but that does not mean I carry bombs. I carry something the capitalists and politicians know is far more dangerous. A vision of freedom from their rule! Freedom from life on the street, from starvation, and from work that is meaner than slavery!” Parsons passed her level gaze over the whole room, taking our measure, absorbing the cries of her fans. “We cannot stop with this one victory. The city of Chicago murders anarchists! We need to fight for justice now more than ever!”
Watching her reminded me of what I felt when I was at that Grape Ape show. Cheers and chants erupted all over the hall, and I could feel a new sense of purpose flooding through all of us—including the cynics like me. Maybe I’d been wrong to say that Parsons wasn’t helping to build a better world. She wasn’t perfect, as I knew well from working with the anarchist movement. But without her call for direct action, my present day might have looked very different. When the politicians ignored us, and the capitalists strangled us, we could always link arms like the IWW and refuse to comply.
After the lecture, Soph fanned herself. “Well! I need a drink after that.”
“Let’s go to your parlors!” Aseel jumped up and down. I almost did too. I hadn’t been inside Soph’s rooms yet, and I was dying to see her Spiritualist headquarters. It was like that high school feeling of heading to a friend’s house when her parents were gone, so we could drink their bad liqueur and listen to music. Then I remembered my last look at high school life, blood dribbling from that old car, and was consumed with regret.
We passed the door to my room like all the other Spiritualists did, and entered Soph’s place through a parlor with some wooden chairs and a coat rack. Double pocket doors opened into a high-ceilinged living room—though temporal locals would probably call it a sitting room. I was surprised to discover it wasn’t jammed with Ouija boards and crystal balls atop velvet draperies. Instead there were overstuffed pillows, fainting couches, chairs, sofas, and an archipelago of coffee tables stretching across a thick fur rug. Streetlamps outside provided dim illumination through two ample window seats, also piled with fur and pillows.