One of Soph’s friends wrote to say that Comstock’s boys from the Society for the Suppression of Vice had stopped harassing abortionists right after the party. For now, the women of New York and Chicago had precarious access to birth control—as long as they ordered the right euphemisms from the right catalogues, or called on a sympathetic midwife.
Comstock, who once boasted of driving sex educators to suicide and had attracted followers from across the timeline, was losing his grip on America’s britches. His “special agent” position with the Postal Service was only as powerful as the elites allowed it to be. Without help from the Four Hundred and their politicians, he would be relegated to the status of a religious nuisance shouting in the halls outside Congress.
I imagined what Beth’s life would be like if the Comstock Laws really were crumbling. What if getting an abortion was an unremarkable aspect of healthcare for anyone with a uterus? What if she didn’t have to risk arrest for wanting a normal teenage life without the burden of early motherhood? Maybe she wouldn’t need me to help her, but neither would all those other girls who hadn’t been born to a mother like mine.
Of course, the reality would be more complicated than that golden arc I’d imagined when we invoked Lady Asenath’s name. Clever moralists of the future might come up with new legal tricks to invade people’s private lives and control reproduction. As long as we had Machines, no edit was permanent. We would have to stay one step ahead, adding loopholes and footnotes and exemptions to their power.
TWENTY-NINE
BETH
Los Angeles, Alta California (1994 C.E.)
I logged into my account from the dorm internet kiosk and opened Pine to read my e-mail. There were two messages: one from the campus lawyer, and one from Hamid. Looking around to make sure nobody could see the terminal, I opened Hamid’s right away:
Hi Beth. First e-mail!!! I’m trying to decide whether to see Short Cuts or Cyborg Cop this weekend. If you come along, you can cast the deciding vote! What do you think?—Hamid
My heart surged like a regular organ instead of an alien invader. I replied:
Hi Hamid. Good job flinging electrons. I vote for Cyborg Cop.—Beth
Then I read the e-mail from the lawyer, who said she’d done some research and I could make an appointment any time to discuss it. I tried to focus on my midterm for Anita’s class, but managed little more than a few paragraphs before falling asleep in a tight ball on my bunk.
I saw the lawyer the next day after class.
She patted a folder of papers on her desk. “This is a pretty unusual situation, but we do have something called a dependency override that allows a student under twenty-four to become eligible for financial aid without parental information.”
I nodded. “That sounds good.”
“I’m not going to soft-pedal this, Beth. It’s a difficult process, and it’s reserved for pretty dire circumstances. But I got the feeling, based on our previous conversation, that you are… estranged from your parents?”
It felt like somebody had punched me in the throat. “I don’t… I mean, I don’t know what that means.”
“Are your parents paying for your college now?”
“Yes, but I want them to stop.”
The lawyer gave me a hard look. “I need you to be honest with me, Beth. You told me before that your father is mentally ill. Your words. Is there some reason your parents can’t take care of you?”
I didn’t know what to say and I stared at my hands, digging into the wooden chair.
“Is your father abusing you?”
My ears burned as I thought about how my father acted at the La Brea Tar Pits. And then his rage over the shoes. Was it really abuse? The word sounded so extreme, like something that would leave scars all over my body.
The lawyer tried again, more gently. “Has he hit you? Or molested you?”
Feeling nauseated, I remembered that night—the one that Tess didn’t actually know about. Maybe it hadn’t been real. I shifted in my seat and watched an ant walk across the floor. My voice sounded very far away when I spoke again. “I don’t know.”
She pushed the folder toward me. “If your father is abusing you, I think we can make a case for dependency override. Especially if you get a job and show you are already working to support yourself. Why don’t you look over some of this paperwork and think about it, okay?” I hazarded a glance at her and she leaned forward. “I don’t know what your home situation is, but if you need help, I’ll do what I can. Don’t be afraid to stick up for yourself.”
“Okay, I’ll look at this and e-mail you.” I jammed the folder into my backpack and walked out into the impossibly beautiful afternoon, where wind attenuated clouds in the sky and eroded the surface of the planet the same way it had for millions of years.
Cyborg Cop was a good choice. It was terrible by any number of measures, and we had plenty of joke material afterward. We sat on a bench near the library and watched students strolling through cones of light from the streetlamps. I lit a cigarette and tried to count the number of times the movie ripped off RoboCop and Terminator.
“Also it’s set in the Caribbean, but there are no black people? Did they turn all the black people into white cyborgs?” I shook my head and Hamid laughed.
But then he turned somber. “I really thought you didn’t ever want to talk to me again after what happened last year.”
I exhaled a long stream of smoke and tried to put words together that I’d imagined saying to him for months. “I know. I shouldn’t have blown you off like that. I mean—you didn’t do anything bad.” Stubbing out my cigarette, I looked up at the moon rather than face him. “But you were about to go off to college, and I barely knew you, and I thought it made sense for us to make a clean break, you know?”
“You didn’t barely know me! We were… we’re friends. You said you liked me.”
“I do like you. A lot. That’s why we’re here, right?” I nudged his shoulder with mine. “But back then, I was doing a lot of really stupid things. I needed to figure shit out.”
“Like what? What kind of shit? You totally stopped speaking to me. Heather said you wanted to pretend I was dead or something.”
It’s true that I’d said something like that, in the weeks after we killed Mr. Rasmann. “I’m really sorry about that. I was…”
“Dealing with shit. Yeah.” Hamid was mumbling, and I realized that at some point his urgency had simmered down into defeat.
“I’m not going to do that again, okay? I’ve made a resolution to… to try to change the timeline for the better. Even though nobody knows how history works.” I put my hands on his shoulders and looked at him. “Can I kiss you?”
He nodded and waited for me to lean forward and find his lips. Only then did he put his arms around me. We walked back to my dorm hand in hand, not saying anything.
I kept thinking about the day he drove me to the abortion clinic, right after he got back from Disney World. Looking back on it now was strange, as if my memories were being reassembled from broken pieces. As I recalled the colors and sounds of that time, they seemed to suture closed over a different set of events. With a shudder, I wondered if this feeling was related to the suicide I didn’t remember.
We’d had to walk a gauntlet of Operation Rescue assholes lined up along the sidewalk outside Planned Parenthood. A woman in a “Jesus Saves” T-shirt held a canvas sack full of baby doll parts splattered with red paint. She threw severed plastic arms at me and the whole group chanted, “Murder! Murder! Murder!” I stared at the sidewalk, imagining the provenance of the clay and chalk that formed it. Then, without missing a beat, Hamid grabbed a bloody hand out of the air and pretended to chomp on it. “Tastes like chicken!”