The campaign was a spectacular failure. Men achieved universal suffrage, and women were sacrificed for the sake of Republican unity. A freedman named Hiram Revels won the Mississippi senate seat. Harriet Tubman went broke, and was forced to beg Congress for the soldier’s pension she hadn’t been granted previously because she was a woman. I returned to 1991 full of rage. We were so close to winning! Maybe if I’d participated, committed one small edit, it would have changed the fate of over half the people in the United States. I felt the effects of our loss in my present, and in my bones. Women still couldn’t vote in Mississippi, nor in most of the South and the Midwest.
My supervisor was extremely pleased with the data I brought back, and immediately turned it into a research paper for lobbyists about why women’s suffrage had a long history of failure in the United States. I got fourth author credit, and he offered me another assignment right away—this time for a State Department committee evaluating whether to fund human rights organizations in Haiti. “You may have a career in witnessing key political failures,” he mused. “What do you think about traveling to Haiti in the late 1790s, to record how the slave uprising was put down? You’ll fit in there, too.” I looked into his watery blue eyes and stopped believing that he was ignorant but meant well. He was fucking with me, and profiting from my research to boot. That’s when I decided the point of travel was not to observe history, but to change it.
I have recorded my experiences during the Haitian Revolution in another document. Hopefully, if you are reading this, you are in a timeline where my edit has not been reverted. The uprising was a success, though I nearly lost an arm in the fighting. Transformation rippled down the timeline. Seventy years later, abolitionists and suffragettes rejoiced together when Harriet Tubman was elected to the Senate in the United States. When I returned to 1991, my supervisor treated me differently. He never once suggested I wouldn’t be first author on our paper about what makes slave uprisings successful. There were also a few more brown faces in our lab. These small changes mattered.
I don’t believe I was responsible for altering the timeline. I was merely one of many people authoring those edits across many generations. What I learned on that trip to Haiti is something I try to teach to my students, and to the Daughters of Harriet. Nothing is inevitable, and you always have to go back farther than you expect.
But like I said, I don’t tell them everything about the timeline I remember. I don’t want them to know how close we are to that other version of history. I want them to have hope.
TWENTY-EIGHT
TESS
Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory… Chicago, Illinois… New York, New York (1893–94 C.E.)
We’d given ourselves six months to complete the Comstock edit, but Morehshin and I couldn’t book passage on a ship back to Chicago for three weeks. It was an annoying delay, but it gave me a chance to spend more time with Anita, processing everything that had happened. To earn money while waiting for us, Anita took on some research duties with the American Geophysical Union and taught public classes at Raqmu Technical University. Meanwhile, C.L. traveled back and forth to do more analysis and possibly get some clues about what those cuts in the Machine interface might mean.
As long as I kept busy with research at the AGU library, I could put aside my emotional vertigo from what had happened with Beth. The local pharmacist got used to my requests for willow bark extract, which made my stomach burn but took the edge off my near-constant headache. After a couple of weeks it got so bad that I bought some opium to relieve the pain.
I tried to keep it to myself, but it was hard to fool Anita for long. We were sharing a small room. One night she came home early from the university and caught me with a dab of opium, blowing smoke out the window.
“Tess.” She folded her arms. “You know that stuff is seriously addictive.”
“Sorry. I don’t do it very often. Sometimes it hurts too much to sleep.”
“You’re still getting those headaches? From the double memories?” Anita sat on the edge of our cubby while I stashed the remaining nugget of opium in a silver snuff box. I hadn’t smoked very much, but my agony had dulled to a twinge. I was probably too high to have this conversation, but I knew she wouldn’t let me off the hook.
“Correlation doesn’t equal causation, so we can’t be sure the pain is related to my memories.” I was mumbling. “Besides, the memories aren’t the difficult part. It’s more… the feelings.”
“What do you mean?”
“I used to feel certain about our mission. Like we are definitely making the timeline better. Now I feel… divided. What if we’re making things worse?”
Anita sighed. “I’ve been feeling this way a lot since my mom died.”
“Wait, what?” Some of my drug haze lifted. “Your mom died? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was right after you left, and there’s been so much going on… I guess I didn’t want to deal with it.”
I thought of Anita’s mom, a fierce woman named Yvonne who had raised Anita by herself and worked the whole time as a nurse—then, when she had time to get more education, a doctor. When she visited L.A., I often went out to dinner with the two of them. I’d heard the story about how Yvonne hooked up with Anita’s dad while carousing across the U.K. with hippie friends. Anita’s parents had one of those baby boomer relationships I didn’t really understand, half-traditional and half-liberated. They never married, but her father had taken care of Anita financially, given her his last name, and invited her on summer trips to London, Mumbai, and Singapore. He’d been in and out of Anita’s life, but Yvonne was there every day. Anita called and texted her all the time. I couldn’t believe we’d been talking about my stupid headaches when Anita was dealing with this.
“Anita, I’m so sorry. What happened?”
“You know… getting old. She died in her sleep. But somehow that makes it worse. It’s like her time came, and it was peaceful and natural, but I wasn’t ready at all. I feel like I’m in the wrong timeline, even though I know this was supposed to happen. Suddenly I can’t figure out who the hell I’m supposed to be. She was the only person who remembered my childhood other than me, you know? I keep wanting to get her advice, and thinking that I see her…” Her voice cracked, but she didn’t cry. Somehow that made her face look more raw and broken.
I hugged her and listened for a long time. We talked about how death feels like abandonment, especially when you lose your mother. “Mothers are a primordial force that links us to our history,” Anita said through tears. “When they die, it’s like some of history dies too.” In the early hours of the morning, we kept whispering through our exhaustion. I wondered whether the timeline itself was an endlessly repeating cycle of loss that divided humanity from itself, and Anita nodded, her face wet on my shoulder. Wrapped in blankets together, holding hands, we finally started to drift off.
“Anita, don’t ever do that again, okay?”
“What?”
“Don’t not tell me when something huge happens to you. You are my best friend. I don’t want to feel like we’re in one of those crappy movies where the black girl has to fix all the white girl’s problems and deal with her own shit too.”