C.L. was unconvinced. “I’m going to stay here to keep monitoring the Machine, and if the emissions reach dangerous levels I’m going back there to… to do something.”
Anita cut them off. “I’ll stay here with you, C.L. If it comes to that, I’ll go with you. Let’s use 1893 as our home time, so neither of us is too far ahead of Tess when we get back to 2022.”
“Yes. When we get back to 2022,” I affirmed. “That will be a lucky edit.” As I mouthed the cliché, I realized I’d never thought about its actual meaning. A lucky edit was an event out of our control, the side effect of a fungible timeline, sometimes good and sometimes bad. But of course there was no such thing as luck. There were only deliberate revisions, hard-won changes, and their unintended consequences. A headache worked its way down my neck and beneath my shoulder blades. I needed sleep.
Everyone agreed it was time to turn in. Morehshin took the bedroom with C.L. and I rolled myself up in a thick rug next to Anita. We had a cubby next to the dining room to ourselves.
“Anita, I need to tell you something.” I couldn’t keep the anxiety out of my voice.
She propped herself up on one elbow. “Sounds serious.”
“You know when I told you guys about seeing that Comstocker back at that concert in 1992? Well… I did something else while I was there.”
“Did you make an edit?”
“No. I mean, yes… but that was later. My younger self was at the concert, and I felt fine after seeing her. So… then I snuck back upstream. From Flin Flon once, and then a couple nights ago from ancient Raqmu. I changed something in my past.”
“Tess.” I could tell she was biting back what she wanted to say.
“I know. It was stupid. But it seemed… I don’t know. I thought it would be okay. But it wasn’t. And now I feel really, really awful. I’m in a lot of pain.”
“Oh fuck. You need to tell me everything.”
I put my head in my hands. For my whole adult life, I’d striven to make significant edits. I’d dreamed of saving Beth. And now I realized that those goals had always been part of the same fantasy. I’d drawn Beth into terrible, fucked-up things when we were young. But there was one time I’d helped her, when she got that abortion. Maybe, all this time, I’d been trying to propagate my gift to Beth across populations and years. If our edit of Comstock took, there would never be another teenage girl driven to desperation by laws that turned her body into a destiny she could not change.
I looked at Anita, waiting for me to spill my guts, and decided to stop lying to myself. Beneath the modern political rhetoric and academic theories of history, I had an ancient hope that was indistinguishable from Spiritualism. If my edit took, maybe the good I’d done would outweigh the evil.
TWENTY-SIX
BETH
Irvine, Alta California… Los Angeles, Alta California (1993 C.E.)
I stood in front of the double doors to my house, which were actually one door made to look like two because that gave the illusion that we lived in a castle instead of a condo. The moon was up and there were no lights on in the windows. I shivered. It was 2 A.M. and I couldn’t stop thinking about Tess calling my dad “mentally ill.” Not crazy or psycho or nuts. Her use of the more clinical term made it real. It also meant that Lizzy had seen what nobody else had. She knew my family wasn’t normal.
As quietly as possible, I unlocked the door, took off my sandals, and crept upstairs in the dark. My parents’ bedroom door was closed, and I made it to my room without any confrontations. I was suddenly so tired that I couldn’t do anything other than climb under the covers in my clothes and fall asleep.
The next morning, there was the same eerie silence as the night before. I pulled on jeans and sneakers before going downstairs, my muscles tensed for a fight. But my father had gone to the shop and my mother was on the phone, talking about the Orange Unified School District’s leadership training. She glanced up once from a notepad full of her tidy handwriting, its extreme legibility optimized for filling chalkboards with instructions. I stood in her gaze, waiting for a reaction. But almost immediately, her eyes abandoned me for the notepad.
I poured a cup of coffee and made toast for breakfast, stepping into the familiar role of pretending everything was normal. The L.A. Times was tossed on the table, and I forced myself to read the comics before flipping anxiously to news. There was a slightly more in-depth story than the one in the Weekly about how the Machines were exhibiting new behavior, but it mostly dealt with how India might leave the Chronology Academy and form its own regulatory agency. Nobody in the story talked about actual science, and I had nothing left to distract me from worrying about last night. Had Lizzy followed that guy Elliot and murdered him after I left? What did it mean that Tess remembered a timeline where I’d killed myself?
“You’re on restriction until you leave for UCLA,” my mother said. She’d hung up the phone and was using the impersonal voice she favored when meting out punishments. “Your father and I will talk to you about your behavior tonight.”
That was what I had expected, especially the part where my parents prearranged a yelling session for after work. I knew rationally that the whole situation was absurd because I was moving into the dorms next week. But I felt my eyes throbbing with tears anyway. This always happened when I was in trouble with my dad. It was a physical reaction I couldn’t control, like throwing up. At least this time I was able to blink my eyes clear, dislodge the lump in my throat with a cough, and nod at my mom.
“Do you understand what that means? You do not leave this house until we get home. No talking on the phone, and no inviting friends over.”
“Yeah, I get it.”
As my mom backed her car out of the garage, I thought about Tess. At least there was someone out there, somewhere in time, who knew how fucking shitty this was. Even if it was actually Lizzy, or some version of her. I still didn’t quite understand how that worked. It was scary to think about that other timeline of my life. Based on what Tess said, I must have stayed friends with Lizzy, and killed more men. That might have been enough to make me want to die. Still, I wondered if something else had been different for the other Beth too—something Tess didn’t know. Like maybe there was another horrendous shitshow along the way, some epiphenomenon that spun out of our friendship. Maybe jumping off the bridge was an emotional reflex like my tears, an uncontrollable reaction that took possession of my body. Maybe it was something I’d planned for weeks.
Probably I would never know. Whatever had changed, this version of me did not want to die. All I wanted was to get the hell out of my father’s house and never come back. Monday was move-in day at Dykstra Hall. That meant five days of restriction, then I was gone.
Those thoughts sustained me several hours later, when the plates were cleared from dinner and it was time for our “talk.” My father always started by telling me that he and my mother saw a pattern in my behavior that revealed my basic terribleness as a person. My disobedience was a symptom of how flawed I was. I was a sneak, a lazy cheat, and I was already on my way downhill despite my young age.
During these lectures, I coped by staring at one specific corner of the dining room. It was behind my father’s head, so it looked like I was paying attention, but I was really thinking about the calcium in the white paint, the chalky drywall below it, and then the cellulose and minerals that made up the bones of the house. When that got old, I recalled the first time I saw Grape Ape at a backyard show and how Glorious Garcia sang, “RISE UP RISE UP.” I thought about that painting from their EP Our Time Was Stolen, where the curved rock of the Machine sat undisturbed millions of years ago, long before humans learned to wreck each other’s histories. If I focused hard enough, my father’s face disappeared and so did his voice. It was me and the molecular structure of our house and songs about smashing the chrono-patriarchy.