Making Space (The Time Traveler's Passport)

by R.F. Kuang

In her less charitable moods, she imagines what they must have been like. Satanic cultists. Sick fucks. Didn’t know what they had. Threw it all away.

Then they realized that this is just how neighborhoods gentrify: young, wealthy couples drawn by the same amenities, the good schools and the green space, the rising 18property values and the Sweetgreens and barre studios replacing those terrible, run-down buildings.

Chris disappears among the cluster of husbands, who are headed out back to look at Harry’s new Cybertruck.

They have all had those testy brunch exchanges with Billie. Don’t you think it’s wrong to bring children onto a dying planet, don’t you think it’s selfish to procreate when there are so many other children in need, if you want children so badly then why don’t you just adopt, why are people so attached to their own genetic material? Are you so convinced that your genetic material is better than the Asian or African orphan’s?

Over by the drinks table, Billie is now waving around a glass of champagne, expounding on why she thinks commercial surrogacy should be banned.

Jess confessed her suspicions only once, on the phone to her mother, in a moment of weakness. “He just cares so much,” she cried. “I feel like—I feel like he looks at her, and all he sees is what I couldn’t give him. And I’m scared—it could be—” What hung in the air: that Nina is white, and Chris is white, and Nina’s husband Harry is Asian. 21 “Well, I guess we’ll know soon enough,” said her mother, and this left Jess sobbing with laughter.

“White women. I don’t know. They can just pick up children like handbags.” “What happens when she gets bored?” “She’ll dump him back in the woods, I guess.” 22 And then the women laugh, that mean, ugly laugh that is somehow only reserved for minorities.

“Because it’s not fair,” Buddy bursts out. “Because you burned the world, and we suffered for it, and it’s not fair that you get Eden and we have to choke, just because you’re here now, and we are not. It’s not fair. But I am here now, and I am going to make space.”

Jess tries to imagine these people, this nameless pair who gave Buddy his thick brows, his long lashes. All she knows is that they are survivors in a dying world, a world where the air is not breathable and the ground scorches and floods take away everything you know in an instant, people who loved their child enough to send him to a safer past rather than burning with them. She is their promised land.

She can provide everything they hoped for: a childhood in this time, when the earth was still green. Her. Here. This sad little marriage, this sad little home. They looked at this and called it Eden.