Nomad (11 page)

"Let me help. I'm a hardened veteran of the furniture-assembly wars." Audra took another, hesitant step closer.

"Please! I need to finish this bed so I can pass out on it."

"Let's look at what you have...where are the sixteen screws that look like this?" Audra pointed to the open instruction sheet.

"Wait." Raven flipped back to the cartoons on the first page of instructions. She pointed to the guy with the pencil behind his ear, the guy whose presence apparently made it magically OK to begin assembly. "It says you have to put a pencil behind your ear if you're going to help."

"Wow, we almost totally screwed that up." Audra dashed through the bathroom to her room and returned with a mechanical pencil behind her left ear, mimicking the cartoon. In a solemn tone, she announced, "I am now fully qualified to assist in making your bed." She sat on the floor next to Raven. "The key is to avoid thinking too much..."

Within twenty minutes, they'd assembled a small bed with two huge drawers in the side.

"A single bed?" Audra asked. "Trying to keep your life simple, huh?"

"I suppose."

"I understand. I'm kind of on a sex hiatus, too, this semester. Let's do your desk--I bet I could handle that even without a pencil behind my ear." Audra tossed the pencil aside.

"That's much too risky!" Raven pretended to be horrified.

"I live for danger." Audra tore open the next box.

When they were done, Raven stacked her new textbooks on her desk. Audra picked up one title with a curious look on her face. "
Conspiracy and Power: A History of Political Assassination
. History class? Light bedtime reading? Planning to overthrow the government?"

"History class," Raven said. "I read some on the bus today. It's pretty interesting. The author starts by saying that the real impact of political assassination on history is both smaller and larger than most people think."

"That's exactly the kind of thing professors like to say." Audra flipped through the small book. "It makes them right no matter what happens."

"He says that, in Western society, the most famous assassinations are often the least important. Abraham Lincoln was killed for the Confederacy, but they'd already lost the war, and his death didn't change that....He even goes back to Julius Caesar's assassination, and he says it just led to Caesar's family becoming the imperial family. His nephew Octavian became the first emperor of Rome."

"I'm sure you could find examples where it changed history, though," Audra said. "Like the Kennedys."

"But it's hard to know just how history was changed. He says it's rare for the assassin to get the results he actually wants--assassination is more likely to lead to a chaos in which anything can happen." Raven was delighted to talk over her problems with somebody else, however indirectly.

"Sounds like you've got a paper due on this." Audra smiled.

"Yeah, a very big paper..." Raven hurried to think of a lie. "It's a little strange, though. We're supposed to write about a situation where we can travel back in time and kill a future dictator when he's still young, before he's ever in power. Would we do it? What would happen if we did?"

"That is strange. Sounds like a cool teacher," Audra said.

"What do you think?"

"About your teacher?"

"Would you travel through time and do it?" Raven watched closely as Audra considered the question.

"That's hard for me, because I'm really about nonviolence and peaceful solutions," Audra said. "But if you have a chance to kill somebody like
that
, it's hard to say no. Think of all those lives you'd save. An evil dictator, right?"

"Lots of people killed, lots of people put into prison camps. Open warfare in the streets."

"Wait, who are we talking about?" Audra asked.

"Nobody specific."

"It would depend on the specifics, though." Audra looked off into space for a moment, as though daydreaming. "You have to wonder whether he's right. I mean, if you just take one individual out of the situation, even one major individual, will you really change everything? Or anything?"

"That's what I'm wondering. Then how would you change the past?"

"You'd have to figure out
exactly
what happened, all the details, and change the events that led to it," Audra said. "Find the keystone, if you can."

"The keystone?"

"Yeah, the
one
event that could go differently." Audra sat up straighter, excited. "If you really want to prevent World War II and the Holocaust, you have to change something about World War I, don't you? Rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, maybe. Maybe not, but there would have to be
something
you could change to reshape the broader society. Right?"

"How can I do that, though? How do I find the keystone?"

"I don't know, but I'm glad it's not my assignment." Audra checked the time on her phone. "Sorry, study group tonight. I have to run."

"Thanks for helping with my furniture," Raven said.

"No problem! Hey, listen, there's a good band playing tomorrow night, I'm meeting some people there. Want to come with me?"

"I'd like that." Raven smiled at her, and she smiled back. Raven thought Audra's dark amber eyes seemed particularly kind.

After Audra left, Raven thought over their conversation and felt better about her choice not to kill Logan right away, but to explore her options instead. She hadn't failed in her mission, she told herself. She'd recognized that a broader mission was needed. She was adapting to reality.

Her new mission, she had decided, would require her to do more than pull a trigger. She needed to intervene in Logan's life and somehow change its course. She had to determine how to steer the way in which his family's power and influence was used. Some kind of profound change was needed, but it wouldn't happen unless she made it happen.

She couldn't simply tell Logan the truth, that she was from the future, or he would naturally assume she was insane. In order to interact successfully with him, she had to project herself into his reality, in a sense, taking on an identity appropriate for his place and time.

She had created "Riley Falcourt," a sophomore at another college in New Haven, and was assembling the pieces of her new life. She hoped the false identity lasted long enough for her to make a difference, before the security agents from the future found her again.

Chapter Twelve

The next day, Raven visited the supermarket to stock up on food. The apartment's kitchen offered an amazing amount of storage space, she thought, with a full-sized refrigerator and a pantry. The kitchen's designer must have been optimistic that the world would always overflow with food.

The grocery store nearly overwhelmed her with table after table offering mountains of fresh fruit and vegetables. She had a visceral reaction to the sight of an entire wall of freshly cut meat. The dairy case offered fresh milk, not powdered or canned, and row after row of different varieties: skim, whole, buttermilk, chocolate and strawberry milk, pure cream, goat milk.

She resisted the urge to stock up on everything and forced herself to buy just a few days' worth. She had to convince herself the store and its mountains of food would still exist the following week.

She looked over the bewildering array of cosmetics and hair products that took up both sides of an entire aisle. Most of the college girls she'd seen, except for Audra, wore make-up, but not in the over-the-top theatrical manner in which Raven and her friends painted themselves for nightclubs in the 2060's, with chromatic makeup that shifted colors with changes in body temperature. Raven would have to learn about contemporary styles it if she wanted to appear normal.

She couldn't avoid the fact that she was female, her target was male, and her odds of connecting with him would only increase if he found her attractive. She'd noticed the kind of attention the handsome young future dictator drew from other women. She would need to compete for his attention.

Raven chose a large makeup kit at random. At the checkout aisle, she noticed a number of magazines advertising tips on makeup, hair, attracting men, and even sex advice. She bought a copy of each, hoping they would provide some guidance for how she should look and act.

When she returned home, she intended to study and practice making herself look like a normal girl of this time and place. Instead, she read
Slaughterhouse-Five.
She'd begun to suspect the main character wasn't really traveling in time at all, but was experiencing and remembering his life as broken fragments dissociated from each other. With her own memories cracked into pieces, and large chunks of her life still missing, Raven could still identify with him.

The book also made her see war in a new way--not as a clash between good and evil, but a senseless collision of misguided, ignorant people, many of them innocently trying to serve some higher cause while obliterating each other with deadly weapons. War seemed sadder and more pointless that way, she thought.

She felt more secure in her choice to delay killing Logan. Her new mission was unclear, and she was proceeding blindly toward an uncertain goal, but the uncertainty seemed better than simply acting as an agent of destruction and spreading a war from the future back into the past.

Raven finally finished the book. She carried her new makeup kit and women's magazines into the bathroom and did her best to imitate the models, smearing on eyeshadow, blush, lipstick, and blobs of black mascara. The image in the mirror didn't look right at all. It was garish, like the face of a psychotic clown.

She heard the front door creak, then Audra's light footsteps in the living room. Audra knocked on the bathroom door.

"Anybody in there?" she asked.

"I'm just...trying some new makeup," Raven said.

Audra opened the door, had a look at Raven's face, and burst into laughter.

"That's great!" Audra said. "Are you going to an early Halloween party or what? Let me guess--you're a dead hooker, right?"

Raven frowned at herself in the mirror, and her unnaturally red lips amplified it.

"I don't know what I'm doing!" Raven threw down the lipstick. "I look terrible."

"Are you serious?" Audra covered her mouth. "You're not
trying
for the dead hooker look?"

"I don't have much practice. I need to look...better."

"Why?"

Raven shrugged, and Audra uncovered her mouth, smiling.

"It's a guy, isn't it? You're trying to get your hands on some guy?" Audra asked.

"No...maybe. I don't know." Raven turned on the faucet and washed her face.

"Hm, 'maybe' usually means 'yes' in this situation." Audra looked at her in the mirror. "Are you telling me you've never used makeup before? Were your parents fundies or something?"

Raven didn't understand the second question, so she just shrugged. "You don't wear any," she pointed out.

"You should have seen me in middle school, up at four-thirty every morning to get my face and hair right. Since then, I've learned to reject the billion-dollar fashion and beauty industry and the way they create and exploit female insecurities." Audra glanced at the magazines on the edge of the sink. "Not that I'm trying to proselytize or anything, but I know I became much happier once I stopped focusing on my appearance and obsessing over how people saw me."

"I'm not obsessing, I'm just trying to..."

"Look good for your crush? What's his name?"

"I'm not...it's not..." Raven felt flustered and splashed more water on her face.

"Come on, tell me!" Audra grinned in the mirror. "If you tell me, I'll help you with your look. I promise you won't end up in hemp sandals. Not yet, anyway."

"You can't tell anyone," Raven said. "I'm serious."

"My lips are zipped! You can trust me."

"Okay." Raven took a deep breath. "His name is Logan."

"Logan what?"

"Carraway. You probably don't know him, but--"

"Wait a minute. Carraway, as in the hellspawn of Senator Carraway?" Audra looked angry, her hands balling into fists.

"His grandfather is a United States Senator. Do you know Logan?"

"I know about his family, like anyone with a basic awareness of our modern political environment. They're the worst. They protect the companies that dump toxins into our water and air. They're lap dogs for the pharmaceutical lobby, the oil lobby, Wall Street...they support every war anyone's ever proposed..."

"You're talking about his grandfather, though, right?" Raven asked. "Do you know anything about Logan himself? He can't control what his family does."

"They're probably all the same. They've been that way for generations." Audra shook her head. "Why are you interested in that guy?"

"It's hard to explain."

"It's hard to
understand.
Listen, Riley, people like us are better off avoiding people like that."

"People like us?"

"People who work in the dining halls, people on financial aid. You're like me, aren't you? Normal life, public school, parents who worried about the bills every single month of your life. You worked hard to get where you are, on your own strength. You're not one of them. You've never had staff to wash your laundry and cook your meals. You don't have millions of dollars waiting in a trust fund somewhere. I can tell that about you."

"So what? We're all human, aren't we?"

"No, we're not. People like you and me, we meet someone, fall in love, and have children. People like them forge alliances and breed heirs. What kind of alliance are you offering? Is your family rich and powerful?"

"No," Raven whispered. Her memories of her family and childhood were still missing. She only remembered the war.

"Then he will never take you seriously," Audra said. "Will he sleep with you? Sure. Will he ever see you as an equal? Of course not. You might be a plaything to him, for a little while, but eventually he'll get serious and find someone of his own class."

"You can say that without even knowing him?"

"I know the type."