I Time Travel and Still Need Onlyfans for Rent PT. 1

Clara looked down at her Latte. She would’ve never walked into this cafe before, but since October 7th 2023 she had become a regular. Demanding standards and consistency, she had come to prefer the chains, though she would never admit this to anyone. Her friend Ingrid had told her this cafe had added Pumpkin Spice, and so she had cut her last class short to come here. She looked down again. The Barista, perhaps remembering when Clara asked them whether they were deaf and heard “milkshake” instead of Latte, had added merely a dollop of cream, thin layer of froth, which was already retreating from the center of the cup and clinging to the edges. It was in Clara’s nature to agitate until the world lived up to her expectations, but in the “milkshake” incident she had requested to speak to the manager and the manager sided with the Barista, so she relented.

“You like the Coffee?” Ingrid asked, not as oblivious as she was putting on

“We need to go to the Korean cafe next time”

Ingrid twisted the knife further “Cheer up Clara, don’t you feel good about your cruelty free coffee?

“Do you feed off my pain? Do you know how cruel it is to build up a white girl’s hopes with Pumpkin spice and leave her with… whatever this is?”

“Alright Clara, stop it with the tropes, next you’re gonna say I’m harvesting your blood”.

Clara was the consummate blue chipper. Her perfect grades and perfect SAT score went without saying, as did the extracurriculars, she participated in: Math Olympiad, Model UN, and Robotics club. And standing at an even 6’0”, her team won the Massachusetts State Championship in Volleyball. 6 '0 " is not exceptional however for Volleyball, and in that one, maybe only, place in the world where she wasn’t physically exceptional, she showed her ferocious competitiveness. They said on the court that she was possessed like a demon.

Ingrid was reminded of her Volleyball body as her long legs stretched out to her side of the table.

They met as Freshmen in the dorms. Really as Ingrid’s study. Ingrid always noticed Clara doing odd things around campus such as climbing trees, dusting the hard to reach places of AC which maintenance never reached, and putting on the communal microwave with nothing in it and screaming when it reached 0. When she’d taken enough anthropological notes, Ingrid figured, anthropological subject though she may be, Clara was still a white girl, and attempted to coax her with a Pumpkin Spice Latte. And in speaking to her she saw all of the things everyone else saw, the brilliant and ferocious . But what she uncovered was that beneath everything Clara was a sensitive,lonely girl. She didn’t hate volleyball, school, or Math Olympiad, in fact she loved them. She was great at them. But through these avenues, no one saw the Clara who wiped away tears when she saw homeless people, or looked longingly at the girls who walked around simply as friends, not as teammates or connections.

Ingrid believed her study had discovered this Clara, her Clara, and cherished her as such. She couldn’t believe her luck that some curiosity about some weird girl had uncovered for her, and her only, a beautiful genius, with a beautiful soul. They went through college, and Clara, who was set up for Goldman or McKinsey, inexplicably changed her major to sociology and decided to pursue a career in academia. To her colleagues, her teammates, and her parents, this seemed like she was checking out. The usual burnout after a kid peaks in high school. Only Ingrid understood that Clara intended to pursue life as energetically and obsessively as she had before, and the only thing that changed was that she was set on something she believed in, that she had chosen for herself. This only increased Ingrid’s admiration for Clara, and made her envious that she couldn’t have that same bravery. Thereon Ingrid, with the office job she knew she would surrender to, devoted herself to supporting Clara, and making sure that she would never go broke following her dreams.

So Clara and Ingrid sat in the Cafe, grad student and the consultant. Clara brooded over her “latte” and Ingrid, remembering how she had coaxed Clara with Pumpkin Spice nearly 10 years ago, and feeling bad about teasing her said. “We can go to another cafe if you want”

“I’ll manage. I have some papers to grade tonight, and I’d rather get started on that now”.Clara, reading the first lines of the first essay remarks “It’s either ChatGPT or idiocy with my students now.” Clara sighed “ How did any of them get into Harvard?”

Clara let her Latte get cold as she again made frustrated remarks about how hard this semester would be. Clara knew when she saw the name “Trevor Tanner” Reading it outloud:“Communism killed millions of people. It’s a sign that the west is losing its moral center that Marx is being taught at this university.” Before Ingrid could respond, they heard from the next table

“This is why we should repeal the 19th amendment”

Clara turned her head right, and there sat a big black guy with a MAGA hat, Clara was undeterred as always and simply hit him with the “Excuse me” and nordic stare, which usually was enough to make a man crumble

Malik may not have been Clara, but he was made of tougher steel than that. He had scoped out this spot for left wing snowbunnies for years, and at this point had stumped nearly all of them. Not that it was too hard, he usually only targeted undergrads, who relented after something as simple as “Stalin recriminalized homosexuality”, but here he tried to test his luck with a TA. He knew he was outmatched for knowledge, but he could always fall back on “why are you, a white woman, telling me, a black man what to do?”. He doubled down “When the founding fathers created this country, they never imagine that women would vote”

Clara then stood above him, looked down, and said “The founding fathers never envisioned black people voting. They owned them as slaves.”

Malik, shocked by her bluntness, fell back on “Your ancestors owned my ancestors. I can’t believe that you a white woman are telling me a bla-”

“You’re wearing a MAGA hat. Your ‘fellow patriots’ think you’re scum and would try to reenslave you if they had the chance. Don’t pull that shit with me.”

Malik, stunned, knew he couldn’t get her on political ground, tried then to get her on more conventional grounds. He wasn’t smart, and he knew it. But he, like so many other dumbass men, had a near preternatural understanding of female psychology. The special ed niggas who manipulate bitches with psychology degrees. He saw her piercing gaze and behind it saw a voracious appetite. For life, for control, for something else… and targeted it. He knew “you haven’t been fucked right that’s why you’re mad” didn’t work for these kinds of girls, he instead said “you seemed stressed out, I just wanted to bring some humor into your life”.

Clara, of course, knew the game he was playing, and was annoyed by the fact that it was still working, responding “now you’re the good samaritan, after telling me I don’t deserve rights”

“I’m sorry ma’am”, Malik didn’t push his luck. He had planted the seed, and better yet, he had been able to glean her name from looking over to the essays she had been grading. “Clara Fairchild”. He knew well enough that he could catch her at a more vulnerable time.

***

Legally she was Ingrid Weismann, but on Instagram she was Ingrid Park. As the product of an Oxford Study, a Jewish father and a Korean mother, she had a contempt for her father for taking the easy way out and her mother for indulging him. Mercifully for Ingrid, her conception wouldn’t be dignified by a loving marriage. Her father and mother would amicably divorce after her father’s career in finance drew him to New York and her mother’s in medicine drew her to Ann Arbor Michigan. At first, it seemed like her mother had gotten what she wanted. Ingrid was born with round hazel eyes and chestnut colored hair. Her eyes would remain colored, and her hair would remain light throughout her childhood. Though as she grew into an adult, it appeared her father’s genes had been perhaps too strong. Her round hazel eyes would sink deeper into her skull and give her black circles, her once straight nose acquired a hook, and a bump on the bridge, and her hair, always wavy as a kid, would become frizzy. The one unambiguously Korean feature she did inherit was the no body odor gene, and it was really for this that she decided to go by Park instead of Weismann. Though she did have the respectable reasoning that her mother raised her.

She had long since abandoned the fake “pride” in both of her sides. Having gone on birthright in high school and, not enticed by tanned Mizrahi boys, or even girls that they put in front of her, and seeing in a mix of self-righteousness and genuine pity the Palestinian people upon which the country was built; she became disillusioned with the project. Korea gave her a similar disillusionment. The work culture, the wealthy clans which still dictated politics, and alcoholism being the only remedy for it. She didn’t care at all for the “development”, and half in jest but half seriously prayed that Kim would come and burn this American slave outpost to the ground. She had dreamt similarly, while “back packing” across the Grand Canyon that the ghosts of Pancho Villa, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull would call their vanquished legions and destroy this America.

It was 2 AM. Ingrid had invited Clara over to her apartment, as she always did when Clara was distressed. Clara could only afford a shoebox apartment on her Grad Student salary, and Ingrid knew the futon from ‘95 couldn’t give her a proper sleep. Ingrid didn’t sleep much, so she didn’t have much problem lending her bed to Clara, who fell fast asleep at 10 PM every night. She looked at Clara, her hair still a pristine straight silver blonde, not that she wouldn’t make sure to comb out its imperfections in the morning, her strong nose, which ended at a right angle instead of a hook, giving all of the strength of Ingrid’s Jewish nose but with no suggestion of duplicity. She chuckled, remembering Clara’s was the face which smiled at Tribal Chieftains as they forced them to sign treaties they intended to break anyway. The faces which sang “John’s Brown’s Body” as they marched into Richmond, and then left black people to suffer racial peonage for a century. She thought it absurd that her nose said “liar” and Clara’s didn’t, and yet she felt it to be true regardless.

Sometimes she felt the slow death that Clara’s people were facing was justified. Thinking of Anaximander’s assessment that “It is necessary that things should pass away into that from which they are born. For things must pay one another the penalty and compensation for their injustice according to the ordinance of time.” But she didn’t really believe it. For what unprovoked injustice had the Indians visited upon anyone to deserve their eradication? She knew what had really happened; that the Anglos, like the Indians they had eradicated, had become too human. They cared about silly things like honor and happiness and ignored what really mattered, survival. Being a model minority and a Jew, she had grasped this very early. Her people had come out of the ghettos of Europe, and rose to be the financiers of world spanning European Empires. Then when Europe tried to eradicate them, and nearly succeeded, they founded their own state and became the symbolic bastion of Western Civilization. She thought again of Clara’s “honest” nose, and once being envious of it, now saw it as a weakness. Clara never believed herself to be a vermin who would be ripe for extermination, and so she, like the Indians, was woefully unprepared for the tools that are being used against her. Though she did find some cosmic justice that the machine, industry, which was bringing the end of Anglo people, was of their own creation.

Whether it happened to be the slow death of deindustrialization or the rising of the Wretched of the Earth that finished the WASP race, Ingrid wanted to keep a glass bubble around Clara, to protect her from it. She knew Clara’s psychotic drive and feelings of righteousness would’ve manifested as it did with the Victorian “heros” who were truly her kin. With the slaughter of Zulus, Sudanese, and Indians for civilization or, perhaps restrained by her sex should would’ve been a Nightingale who merely helped those slaughterers become better slaughterers.

Better slaughterer than survivor, she thought. She knew whatever passed, she would survive, and she hated herself for it. She thought often that she was ugly as some sort of cosmic punishment for not paying the “penalty and compensation for her injustice according to the ordinance of time”. And maybe it was that Clara was beautiful because she was temporary, that her people had already paid the price and now she was living in some cursed, but noble purgatory. She looked down at Clara and started stroking her hair. Clara opened her eyes and Ingrid snatched her hand away, before Clara woke up in earnest. Clara muttered something and then closed her eyes again. Ingrid was happy that this would slip her memory, but both really knew why Ingrid never slept in the same bed with Clara.