“Thanks for being an awesome study-buddy and nefarious cigarette smoker, Rosa. You are the best.”
She laughed in surprise. “You aren’t so bad yourself, Beth. Maybe you’ll come close to beating my score on the final. Maaaaaybe.” And she flicked the last ember of her cigarette in a perfect arc toward the sidewalk, where it winked out harmlessly.
“Let’s go finish that stupid lab.”
I took Anita’s advice and signed up for a class about time machines in the winter quarter. Hamid took an upper-division class in film theory, and we amused each other by coming up with imaginary names for new schools of thought. There were “The Great Man Gaze Theory” and “Subaltern Wormholes” and “Historical Amnesia for Beginners.” Nobody else understood our jokes, and we liked it that way. I still missed Lizzy sometimes, but I had new friends who didn’t think murder was awesome. I hoped that Tess had finally succeeded in her mission, whatever it was. Sometimes I thought about her out there, living with the memories of a different timeline where I’d killed myself. Was she the same person as the Lizzy I avoided in second-quarter chem? Probably not. The more I learned about how the timeline worked, the more convinced I was that Tess wouldn’t exist in my future. And nobody knew where she would be.
THIRTY-TWO
TESS
Los Angeles, Alta California (2022 C.E.)… Raqmu, Nabataean Kingdom (13 B.C.E.)
The headache clamped down on my sinuses, drilled into my skull, and shot metal rods into my spine. And that was the easy part. When I stumbled out of the Machine at Raqmu in 2022 with Anita and Morehshin, I knew I wouldn’t be staying for long. The light blinded me and my memories split apart again, making it hard to figure out what I was doing from minute to minute. My past was like a wadded-up piece of paper, and it looked different every time I smoothed it out.
Somehow, with the help of a lot of painkillers, Anita got me to the little airport that would take us to Tel Aviv, then back to Los Angeles. We checked our mobiles to see whether anything was different. Morehshin borrowed a tablet from Anita, poked it for a while, then made a mewing sound. When she looked up, I could barely recognize her underneath the weepy smile. “The Comstock Laws… they were overturned in the 1960s.”
I swiped a search query into my mobile, flooded with disbelief and hope. I checked and rechecked what I found, to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding what I read. Then I practically shouted, “Abortion is legal in almost every state!” For a few minutes my pain was gone and we hugged each other, laughing and making squee noises.
It didn’t last. I felt the throb of Beth’s life in my memories again, along with something else—the agony of her rejection that night at the show, worse than the pain of losing her to suicide. After too many ibuprofen, I was able to lie back on the plane and think about it. I’d turned my life around after Beth died, choosing nonviolence, swearing to make it up to her under my new name. In a way, I’d tried to become Beth. But now the clean burn of that motivation was engulfed in smoke. There was no sudden moment of realization, no wake-up call. Beth was still around to look accusingly at me in chem class during freshman year. Instead of setting out on a crusade, I’d wandered through a series of murky decisions that brought me here.
But as I’d told Anita before, my pain didn’t seem to come from holding those two histories in my mind. It was from holding two sets of feelings. The Tess whose best friend committed suicide knew who she was. She had a purpose. The Tess whose best friend lived felt… ambivalent about herself. Not all the time. She was happy, but always also sad about something. She’d built a new identity around an almost unbearable ambiguity, and the gradual realization that she would never be perfectly good or principled. This Tess would always know she had done bad things, and suffered the consequences. That was the awful new feeling scraping the inside of my skulclass="underline" my best friend, whom I loved more than anyone at the time, had rejected me personally rather than rejecting life itself.
“Hey, Tess. We’re here. Do you want me to drive you home? You look like shit.” Anita shook me gently and I woke up at the Los Angeles airport to find the pain had not gone away at all.
“Yeah.” I popped another few ibuprofen. “The feeling I told you about before… it’s worse here.”
Anita guided me to her car, and we said goodbye to Morehshin. The geology department would put her in travelers’ housing. We promised to meet at the Daughters of Harriet meeting next week, when C.L. was reachable—we’d arrived in our present, during the timespan when they came back to research the machine data. Our present C.L. would be back in a few days, seconds after our past C.L. left.
I groaned as we got into Anita’s old Prius.
“It seems like it’s worse the closer you are to our present.” She was thinking aloud. “Did it hurt this much in 1894?”
“No. It was uncomfortable, but not like this.” I stumbled after her through the parking lot. Sunlight was painful, and everything I looked at left a neon stain on my vision.
“Did it hurt in Raqmu when we went back to the fourth century B.C.E.?”
“No. I mean, a very tiny bit, once in a while. But not really. And nothing in the Ordovician.”
Anita raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting.”
I was barely able to manage the seat belt fastener. “I really hope I don’t have to go live in the Ordovician.”
Back at my apartment, everything was maddeningly the same as when I left. I’d only been gone about four days in real time. Flopping on the couch, all I wanted to do was drown in the comfort of musical nostalgia. Squinting at my phone, I poked my streamer app and hunted for Grape Ape’s rare EP, the one with “See the Bitches” on it. That was weird. It wasn’t listed in my collection. Nor were any Grape Ape albums. I wondered if there’d been some annoying dispute with the streaming service that meant I’d have to get some other app if I wanted to listen to Grape Ape online. I didn’t have the energy to investigate, so I knelt down next to the cabinet with my record collection. I’d gotten a new turntable and this was an excellent chance to try it out.
None of my Grape Ape albums were there.
Had somebody broken in and stolen them? I suppose they were worth a little money—I had a few collector’s items, but only for that small subset of people who cared about feminist punk of the early 1990s. I rocked back on my heels, wondering if I’d stashed all my Grape Ape albums somewhere else during a fit of cleaning that might have been years ago in travel time. But then a terrible feeling started to grow in my gut.
I searched for Grape Ape online and found only references to a cartoon from the 1970s about a giant purple ape and his tiny dog friend. No matter what search terms I used, nothing came up. No Glorious Garcia, either.
Somehow, an orthogonal deletion had eliminated Grape Ape from the timeline.
I didn’t care if the neighbors heard me screaming.
A week later, the Daughters met at Anita’s house. We didn’t bother with preliminaries, and instead gave the floor to C.L., who made a full report on how we’d saved the Machine. It was their first time presenting a formal edit, and they had overprepared in the best possible way, giving us a nicely formatted dataset with a clear explanation of how to extract and analyze any slice you might want. To be fair, the news was so good for our project that they could have dumped a malformed smear of numbers with no metadata and we probably would have cheered.