by Ryan Schow
Okay, so this is someone I really want to talk to. Why? The same way you would avoid people with the intelligence quotient of a garden slug is the same way you gravitate towards smart people with good energy. Ten seconds into our conversation and already I know we’ll get along.
Her name is Nichole (but please, everyone calls me Nikki) and she tells me she’s in her sixties, that she’s raised five kids, endured two marriages and that she recently survived the death of her mother. The way she says this, how she’s so stoic but her watery eyes are giving her away, my heart breaks for her, and it sings. This is a triumphant woman in touch with her emotions.
Then my cell phone poops all over the moment by ringing incessantly. I check the number. It’s unlisted. So it’s not Holland, thank Christ.
“Excuse me,” I say, picking up. “Hello?”
It could be anyone; it could be important.
“Big Sur will always be there,” the soft voice says, “but right now you’re needed here.” Future Alice can change bodies like she changes clothes, and she’s got a pretty level disposition it seems, yet there is something unsettling in her voice that makes me cringe. It’s the same thing that lets me know she is Alice without her having to tell me.
“I don’t want to come home,” I say, glancing sideways at Nikki. “I’m finally doing something for myself, something that matters.”
“You’ll have the rest of time for your current self. Your future self, however, she moved today. Blinked her good eye open. I think she needs to see you. I think she has something to say, a message perhaps.”
The idea of returning to the future version of me—the warrior, the hater, the revolutionary and the martyr—it makes me hang up the phone and return to my conversation with Nikki. She finishes telling me how she escaped the woeful slog of her life and embarked upon the journey that would later usher her into a life of peace and gratitude. At this point, really, I don’t have time for Alice.
Right now, it’s all about Nikki.
God, how I envy her! The way she’s untied her past, how she lives a life no longer inhibited by mistakes. No longer laced with emptiness. A darkness she claimed used to rest firmly inside her heart, that was what she fought and effectively escaped. Her story has me in a state of wonderment. It’s got me in a state of awe. What truths will I discover along the way to true happiness? Is this even possible for me?
I ask, “Do you think the future is per-ordained?”
She smiles and in that smile my body finds a safe harbor. I don’t need to crawl her brain to get a sense of her. Her memories don’t define her. Is it possible all the grief I carry, all the fear and guilt that festers in me constantly, is it possible I can break free of this?
“I released it one day. I just got in my car and left everything behind. My things, my businesses, all the ‘stuff’ that defined me as me. I just went. I didn’t know where I was going, I only knew I didn’t want to be where I had always been. In essence, I left myself behind.”
The feeling she evokes scrapes at the darkness inside me. Lets a sliver of light peek through.
“What about your family?” I ask.
She smiles again, softer this time, and then she lets the sea pull her away from me. Gazing into the blue wonder, she says, “We text.”
A reactive snort escapes me. I cup my mouth shut with my hand and still the humor inside me.
“What?” she asks, genially.
“It’s just that…well, technology is unravelling the fabric of communication, stripping away the telling nuances of conversation, and this is how you’re keeping them close?”
“It’s how I keep them at a distance without having to let them go fully,” she says. “I’m still their mother. They’re still my children.”
“And yet you’ve left yourself behind.”
“Yes, I left myself behind. But not them. I adore my kids,” she says, “but they have their lives, and I needed one of my own.”
“If you could give me one piece of advice—” I start to say.
“Close your eyes and jump.”
“What does that even mean?” Really, I want to know.
Her gaze shifts again, those sparkling eyes lost once more to the rhythms of the sea. Waves crest and break, smashing themselves against the rocks, flattening all along the shore. In an almost whimsical voice, like she’s done with the conversation, she says, “It means whatever it means to you, sweetheart.”
10
Driving up Highway 1, not going ninety or ninety-five along the curves like my old self so desperately wants, I think a lot about Nikki and Sebastian, about the places I went on this trip, about the peace that aches to open like a flower inside me and I realize I have to do what Nikki said and just jump.
I think maybe I get it now.
What I need is the courage to do what I’m damn terrified to do, what makes the least amount of sense but will solve the most problems. My butt cheeks pucker at the thoughts swimming inside of my head. There is truth in there, and right now it’s all so very clear.
I have to erase my past, leave my future behind.
But isn’t this what I started out to do in the first place? Indeed it is. There’s no more Savannah Van Duyn. No more Abigail Swann. I am Raven de’ Medici, am I not? The me I’ve resigned myself to, she’s the third translation of Holland’s dream, and the initial version of the Dulce doctor who made me a hybrid of science and technology, a product of biological impossibility.
I’m me, and I’m not me.
It only makes sense that I leave me again.
Then my brain churns out a memory. Something future Alice said to me that night in the desert when we were heading home. Alice said, “Who you are in the future is inspiring, Raven. You single-handedly bring thousands of years of corruption to a grating halt.”
Shouldn’t that be a good thing? In the end, by the look of my future self, it wasn’t for her. Yet I know why she did what she did, and it has me thinking, can I leave it all behind? Can I leave humanity in a state of perpetual slavery?
If I don’t rise to the challenge, someone will, I tell myself. Not all of humanity is weak. They will not all drop to a knee and fearfully kiss the boots of their oppressors, will they?
I have to believe they won’t.
When I sloshed through the memories in future me’s head, I found that I did these things Alice said I did. I murdered Presidents and dignitaries, CEO’s and market makers, international bankers and the heads of the most powerful organizations on earth. Dead by my hand were the social cannibals and the heathens who turned the world into a prison, men and women too cruel and unreasonable to let live, men and women with such a frothing distaste for humanity they referred to everyone else as the bottom ninety-nine. As in the ninety-nine percenters. The unwashed masses. The useless eaters.
In the process of righting wrongs, I laid entire countries to waste. When a child is born, if there’s no human contact, the child can die from neglect. On the flip side of the equation is a mother who loves her child so fiercely she can crush the very life from it in a hug. I never found that fine line, that middle ground, as Raven de’ Medici. So ferocious was my thirst for vengeance, for justice, I squeezed too tight and killed the thing I fought hardest to protect: humanity.
I lost.
And so many lost with me.
If there are lessons to be learned, it’s that you can’t unseat one leader without another taking his or her place. One dead President won’t solve anyone’s problem. Dead bankers, dead CEO’s and dead politicians aren’t the answer to centuries of corruption, although right now it feels like a damn fine start. People rallied around future me at first, but in the end, what did she really do but transfer the balance of power from one treasonous cockroach to another? That’s why she gave up and endured the prison, why crawling through her memories, I felt myself enduring the punishment with her.
The truth is, I hate the future me, how—through her memories—I saw society becoming weak, fat and needy, h
ow the order of this world fell to the clever, the shifty, the undeserving. Mostly, I hate that with all this power, with all this strength and my immortality, the future me still lives as a prisoner. Killing all those cowards and fiends, it was really just the future me struggling to break out of my own prison. It never worked. All I ever did seemed fruitless.
A waste of time.
In the end, the future version of me spent half a century in a bottomless pit in the desert getting brain f*cked and tortured while suffering malnutrition and neglect. After taking the world tour of my future self’s life, when I tried to sort out my feelings with future Alice, I figured she might understand me, maybe even help me find resolution. At least, that was my hope. She didn’t help.
Instead, that day in the lab when I came out of future me’s head, she said, “You’ve always been one to push the envelope too far. And you didn’t ruin civilization as much as you forced evolution.”
In that moment, to her, I said, “I don’t want to be that girl. I just wanted to be skinny, and pretty. Never…her.” At this point, we were standing over a steel gurney holding the curled up, mangled future me. Alice smiled, which even on a different body had that kind of sadistic Alice smile.
“Well you are her,” she said. “I mean, you will be.”
“So why did you bring her to me?”
“Because you asked. You said, ‘If I ever get caught, if something bad ever happens, bring me back to me. Take me back to Astor. Take me back to me.’ You called out to me, so here I am. With you. With both of you.”
I was standing in the lab with Holland, looking at Alice as if Holland wasn’t there, much less alive. Making sense of any of this seemed incomprehensible at the time, and perhaps is still feels that way. In either case, I’d looked deep into future Alice’s eyes and said, “Why would I ask this of you? Why would I want to do this to myself? Force me to see this monster I’ve become?”
She shrugged her shoulders then said, “Probably so you could find out what you did wrong and fix it in the future. If you know how you’re going to get caught before you get caught, it would stand to reason that you’ll never get caught.”
She sounded like Holland in that moment.
Now I’m wondering, what if I never play the game? “Don’t play the game,” I say aloud to no one as I’m driving up the coast doing the speed limit.
But what about the future? I wonder. Alice would say, everything is malleable, even time. And she would be right. Great, I’m now taking phantom advice from a girl in a body-suit operating nearly a millennia into the future.
If you told me this little gut-melter child I socked in the face on a San Francisco sidewalk would borrow a body, travel back in time to rescue me while bringing the eight-hundred year old version of me in tow, I would tell you you’re freaking certifiable. Now here I am. Running away from fate. Trying to change the future with an Eat, Pray, Love trip through Southern California in my badass Audi.
What a fool I am!
How stupid.
Alice is like me, though. We’re children of mad men and science; we are all abominations that survived, and tried to thrive. And now we are trapped, tending to each other because whom else do we have? We have no one.
I have no one.
When I finally get home, back to Astor, back in Holland’s underground lab, I head straight to my future self, take her hand in mine and mentally work to rouse her. When I left, she wouldn’t wake up. I feel her now, fighting her way into consciousness. It takes her every effort.
When she finally wakes—which in itself is a shared struggle—she puts her one good eye on me and from her devastated mind to mine, she blocks off the tsunami sized waves of despair and chaos and confusion and she whispers, “Kill me, Raven. Kill us.”
I look at her, a blank look in my purple eyes and I think, can I even do such a thing? I turn and look at future Alice and Holland and they simply look back at me with no answers in their eyes.
After a moment, she closes her eye, and a warm tear slides out. Then her mind is gone again, the waves crashing over it, her soul sucking itself back into the protective mire, back into that tiny little spot at the bottom of the well under all the stagnant water where she hides safely from herself and everyone else.
Inside, I’m dying for her. Feeling how hers is a mind spoiled by so much abuse, a Rubik’s Cube with all the colors jumbled, incoherent thought interspersed with the emotional and physical memories of decades of mistreatment, and hundreds of years of memories of a life she did not love, and no longer wants.
The familiar darkness closes in on me, and I feel this prison she is in, how she will never find a peaceful end, how our mortality is no longer a gift as much as it is the worst punishment ever. Holland was a sadist before a scientist; he is God and the devil, light and dark. Only when I slip out of her head do I realize I was sucked inside the mire with her.
Four hours have passed.
I gasp for breath upon waking, then I take in my surroundings, slowly because I feel dizzy and nauseous. Holland is at work on something else and Alice is standing beside him, not paying attention. The ground beneath me seems to shift. Somehow, I manage not to fall.
“Get out, please,” I say in a hoarse whisper. The two of them turn to me. “I need…just…can you two please give us a few minutes?”
Unspoken suspicions sit upon their tongues, and in the brilliance of their eyes. What they see in mine, however, is pure conviction. At this moment I feel very vulnerable. Holland sees it; Alice sees it too but doesn’t care.
After a moment, while leaving, Holland says, “You cannot keep kicking me out of my own lab, Raven.”
I say nothing.
I barely even acknowledge him.
The Collapsing of Social Proof
1
Brayden picked up the phone, dialed the number and waited. When the girl on the line picked up, she said, “What.” Not a question. More a statement of irritation.
“I just wanted to let you know I fucked your sister.”
“Constance?”
“Now I see why you like her. I’m half hard thinking about the way that girl kisses.”
“You had sex with Constance,” Julie said. Again a statement, not a question. Like she couldn’t believe it. Like he was completely full of crap.
“Twice. She’s going to call you and tell you. And when she says you’re missing out, you should probably believe her.”
He said this, and then he hung up. He waited ten seconds before the phone rang. He let it go to voicemail. He stood there, hovering over it, waiting for it to ring again. It did. So he picked up. “I’m stepping into the shower,” he said. “Call back in ten.” He hung up again before she could speak.
This game of relationship Russian Roulette Brayden was playing, it had his heart careening into frenzy. His palms were sweating, his breath short. If he got nervous diarrhea—which he didn’t—he’d totally muddy his trousers right now. This is the game, he told himself.
As a reminder of what he was taught, Titan’s mantra rose in his mind: Calm down and trust the game. Trust the game.
He kicked the hornet’s nest with Julie. That was the idea, though, wasn’t it? He was breaking her, but did he really want that? No. Not anymore. What he wanted was for her to take him back. Or at least let him have another chance. Which is why he was doing this. Nothing drove a woman insane like jealousy. It was a dividing agent, or a bonding agent. Time would tell if his angle would work.
So he took a shower and then he called her.
“Sorry,” he said before she even said hello, “I’ve felt dirty all day.”
“You call me, tell me you slept with Constance, then hang up on me because you have to take a shower? Are you freaking kidding me right now?!”
Everything building up in her from the point he said he slept with Constance turned nuclear.
“I didn’t want you to hear it from her first,” he said, his calm against her ferocity. “This is me trying to be courteou
s to your feelings is all.”
“Omifreakinggod, that’s a bunch of bullshit!”
Calmly, not taking the bait, he said, “You’ve slept with her, now I’ve slept with her. What’s the big deal? She’s a sexual goddess stuck with her step-brother for a fuck buddy. Just like you. Really, it was out of consideration for her circumstances and lack of options that I did what I did for her.”
“First Raven, now this?! You’re such an asshole!”
“Look, I’m not going to disagree with you on that point,” he said, his heart clobbering at his ribs despite the even tenor in his voice. “What I’m going to say is a guy knows when a girl’s interest wanes, and yours is waning in me. Not that I blame you. You’re about to be a mother. Again. And there are a whole slew of complications that go along with incestual relationships. I mean, I can’t even imagine the lies you have to prepare for that situation.”
See a puddle of gasoline, drop a match on it…
“It’s not your problem anymore,” she said, surprisingly even keel. His brazen statement should have set her off, but it didn’t. Perhaps she knew the truth when it was pushed in her face.
“What kind of shenanigans you pull with your siblings never was my problem. The point is, if you and I are done, don’t let it be about Raven, or Constance. Raven is a friend who doesn’t like you because you come off like a rotten bitch, even though lately you haven’t been. So I guess I don’t really blame her. I did have a talk with her, though—because it was necessary—and in the end I’m choosing you while you’re choosing otherwise. Unless you were just mad. That’s why I called. To talk to you about us, and what we’re going to do about it.”
“You slept with Constance, Brayden,” she growled. “You slept with Constance!”
“So have you,” he said calmly. “What’s worse is no one would say anything was wrong with me having sex with her, but you…oh, the shit people would say about what you’ve done! How not only do you do it with your sister, but you’re carrying your brother’s baby inside, too. Holy crap. Can you even begin to imagine the conversation that would produce?”
