His mother slumps a little and pulls a strand of hair back from her forehead. That loving but weary smile that will later grow so thin embraces Charlie, and his chest almost melts in the love that he thought he had lost forever. How did he find his way back to this day? In delirium, under the knife? Or perhaps this is an afterlife?
“I called Trudy yesterday,” his mother says. “She will be here after she comes back from church.”
Charlie nods awkwardly. He feels a sudden note of embarrassment. To have a seventeen-year-old girlfriend? At his age? But his loins stir from the distant memory of making out with her in her parents’ car. Just thirty-two years ago, he calculates, and eight days earlier than this now.
“I know you like her, Charlie. Don’t act cool with me.” She reaches out with both hands and takes his hand between hers, inspecting his fingers. He never knew why she did that, but he always liked it. Her face has a pleading loneliness that will grow horrible after his father’s death. Charlie looks at his mother with sympathy, disquiet, and love—then realizes these feelings could get him into trouble. No sixteen-year-old boy is going to pity his mother with such depth of understanding. He pulls his arm back and sits on his hands, looking down at his untouched hamburger.
“It’s a hard time for you, Charlie. You are becoming a man, but you’re still mostly boy.” His mother’s empathy is battering at his defenses, and the weight of coming back to her is pushing him hard. What is all of this? He has adult thoughts but the surging emotional tides of a kid. Maybe his racing hormones? Or can this be hallucinations after surgery, or a coma with—
“Charlie!” Trudy kisses the side of his head and plops down onto his sister’s chair. She is wearing her tennis whites, her light-brown hair swinging in a short bob, all dimples and bright-blue irises. His zingy girlfriend, yes. Impossibly young.
“I thought we might get a squash game in, Charlie!” Trudy’s good spirits are indomitable. Charlie feels his old affection for her burst out into a smile and a lingering look. Trudy reads this as a declaration of interest, and her sense of triumph and ownership makes her chest flush pink. Charlie’s mother notices, smiles ironically to herself.
Charlie recalls that his mother and Trudy never entirely settled the terms of escrow for the deed to his soul, which may have played a part in their eventual breakup during his first year of college. He stands, happy to get out from under his mother’s searchlight. He kisses her cheek lightly and runs off with Trudy.
As they turn the corner toward the locker rooms, Trudy stops him. “What about your squash racket?”
Charlie turns toward her without a word and presses himself against her, catching her by surprise, his lips soundlessly confessing to her his years of longing for her—for her as she was that day, so full of hope, fresh and yielding. And now here it is again, and it’s better than the first time.
“Charlie!” She pushes him away and stares into his eyes with amazement and joy. “Now I know you love me. You can’t hide it anymore.”
“Of course I love you, Trudy.” His voice rings with the depth of emotion and wisdom that he never had at sixteen.
He tries to put his arms around her again, but she keeps him away with a stiff-arm and a mysteriously powerful look in her eyes. She holds him with her hand and her gaze, and then grabs his hand and runs away with him.
In her father’s car, deep in the underground parking, she pulls down his pants, kissing him hard on the mouth. With his hands pushing her top up to find her breasts, his erection is instantaneous. Trudy grabs him. His groaning warns her that he is about to come—
It happens incredibly fast, his whole body strumming with pleasure. Middle age had stolen more from him than he knew.
He leans back on the cold leather of the car seat and looks fondly at her in the dim underground light. This is a dream, he thinks. Gotta be.
I will wake up now, he thinks, in terrible pain in a hospital bed somewhere in DC, in 2000, and none of this will be here for me. Trudy will be married to a stockbroker, rich and bored in a Connecticut commuter village, and I’ll be an associate professor at George Washington.
* * *
That night Charlie helps his mother scrape and rinse the dishes for the dishwasher, not saying much. His father is catching up on the Sunday New York Times, while his sister gabs on the phone upstairs.
“Did you enjoy your squash game this afternoon, Charlie?”
“Uh, yes, Mom.” His body hummed with joy at the exercise, his shots coming without effort. Part of it might have been Trudy beforehand, the simmering zest of it singing in memory. Youth relived is still better than his memories.
“She’s a nice girl.”
Charlie blushes and looks down at the stray pieces of lettuce in the salad bowl.
He hopes this dream will last forever. Could forever be possible? He dredges up the memory. Once, spending hours in the library, avoiding a social studies term paper in college, he happened on a book about the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation. Though the details have always been fuzzy to Charlie, they envisioned a past and future that stretched on endlessly. Humanity dwelled in a timeless universe, no beginning and no end, never mind what modern cosmology said. The whole scheme was based on returning again and again as you moved up or down a karmic ladder. The returns were described in multiples of grandfathers, and by rough calculation Charlie found that the time span implied was longer than anybody thought human beings had even been here. So maybe they’d all started as frogs or something?
Back again in 1968, he has no frog memories, no memories of being a bird or a cat or another person, except himself as the first Charlie, Charlie One, who died the night of his birthday in 2000. He has come back somehow, on a fresh tangent to the circle of life. That has to mean something profound. But what?
Can he change his life? He knows the history of this time pretty well. Not enough to predict stock prices or who will win the World Series, but Charlie recalls the big events that he can’t change and the small ones from his own life that maybe he can. Okay, he can’t stop the Cold War or pioneer the computer revolution—he doesn’t have the skills—but maybe he can yank himself out of the trajectory that led to a life he knows he doesn’t want to relive.
Unless this is all some kind of hallucination, a posttraumatic freak-out. Maybe he is in some other reality, or else out of his head and actually chewing the straps on a straitjacket in some damp, shadowy concrete cell.
As his mother speaks, he nods. A sudden shudder runs through him and he nearly falls. He realizes that he has just made a major decision.
“Charlie?” A warm smile. “Do you love her?” His mother’s face swims in a shining kitchen glow. Warm, soft, far back in time and right here, now.
“Um—yeah.”
He recalls a phrase, A fool’s paradise is better than none.
3 The walk to school on Monday is eight blocks of winter memories. Charlie’s feet bring the world toward him slowly, so he can savor flavors long lost: earthy aromas, sharp slanting sunlight, crisp dry breezes, murmurs of Fords trailing their lead-rich blue exhaust.
He dreamed of the car crash, but now it seems to be just a dream. This world is real. It echoes, too—he is living this and remembering it at the same time. He has a curious double sensation of immersion in a recalled memory, while feeling that memory like a layer on the running present.
Back in the Charlie One life, after his father died they had to sell the house. Alone, his mother became depressed, sleeping all day, watching infomercials all night, unable to cope. Charlie and Catherine hoped that their mother’s girlfriends would stand by her once she was widowed, but they all faded away, clinging to their surviving husbands, perhaps fearful of Jane Moment’s lingering beauty and poignant vulnerability. Such a woman might easily tempt the heart of a man a few years older. They tried an apartment in the area for a while, then a small house near Catherine in Madison, Wisconsin. Nothing really worked for Jane.
Woodrow Wilson High played a large part in Charlie’s developme
nt—teaching him how to write essays, at least. That exposed him to stories of injustice rarely seen in the leafy enclave where his father’s car-parts business provided his family with a good home. The Grapes of Wrath was Charlie’s favorite book. For him the ending was especially wrenching, the woman nursing the sick man and the dead baby being sent down the river. Part of Charlie stayed with the starving Okies, making their way across the country to the false promise of California. When Mr. Owen preached liberalism and reform from the blackboard in grade eleven, Charlie paid close attention.
He walks up the steps to the redbrick building the sunny day after his sixteenth birthday, his second sixteenth birthday, trembling inside. Charlie’s nostrils wrinkle at the commingled smells of hormones and cheap perfume filling the hallway to his locker—and feels the memory of it layer the experience. The banging metal doors, clicking heels, and cacophony of young voices dizzy him. My body is my guide now. Gut knowledge.
“Hey, Charlie, you ol’ fuckhead.” A handsome jock punches Charlie right in the middle of his chest. Charlie lets go of his books but squats quickly enough to grab them before they hit the floor. It’s Robert Woodson, his fake-tough buddy—who died, he recalls as he looks at Robert’s smooth face, in a terrible 1971 car crash fueled by fraternity-party alcohol. Here he is, back in the flesh—thick brown hair, quick smile, on top of the local pecking order.
“Sixteen and still a virgin, you loser.” Robert grins broadly and shoves Charlie down the hallway, turning away to bound off to class, his powerful legs springing along the polished hall floor, a superhero off to fight crime in the metropolis.
Charlie shakes his head. “Not so,” he says to nobody. But he’s still reacting inside, with clashing responses from Charlies One and Two. Robert! The jock! Charlie feels dizzy from his interior time swings. The Charlies fight for control. He breathes deeply.
Robert is dead in that other now, dead in 2000—Like me. Perhaps this is a crazy afterlife?
Steadying, he recalls his locker number: 555. He’s already past it, doubles back and sees James standing at 557. Charlie glances sideways, has to stop. The sight of the pale James is almost supernatural in itself. Bony, big Adam’s apple, thick wrists and hands like dots at the ends of his thin arms making exclamation points, shirttail untucked, long stringy hair with dandruff like melting snow. Charlie takes a breath and walks up to James, who turns with a downcast, embarrassed gaze.
“Sorry, but I didn’t get you anything for your birthday.”
Charlie speaks softly to his friend from a perspective of decades, easy and low. The living speaking to the dead. “Hey, that’s all right, James.” James insisted on the dignity of his full name. He was institutionalized for progressive schizophrenia with catatonia. Or will be. His blond hair and pallor make him a ghost in Charlie’s eyes. Charlie wonders if he can make it through the day.
“Just kidding.” James grins and reaches into his locker and pulls out a plastic-wrapped LP of Cream’s Disraeli Gears, the huge cover a jumble of orange and red psychedelic images.
“Wow, with ‘White Room,’ ” Charlie comments.
“That song isn’t on this album, Charlie.” James looks confused. “ ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’ that’s the big song on the album. ‘White Room’?”
“I think I heard that’s the new single.” Charlie Moment is panicking, afraid of being caught out.
James frowns.
A lanky boy with thick glasses yells at them as he walks by, “Ready for the test?” Charlie tries to remember who he is, but fails. Then he’s gone.
“What test?”
“The big history test, Charlie! You’re the brain! Hey, did you score some dope for your birthday, Charlie? Don’t tell me you gave it to Trudy, to get her to put out.” His slack-jawed shock seems genuine.
“Trudy isn’t anything like that.”
“Okay, okay. Lay off me, man.” Rolling eyes. “Like, I’m your best friend since sixth grade, you jerk.” James gathers his books together and locks up.
“Sorry, James. I didn’t sleep well this weekend.”
“I know, man. I’m getting a lot of headaches—can’t sleep worth shit myself.” He looks pointedly at Charlie’s open locker. “Don’t you think you should go to the test too?”
The history exam covers the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention. Charlie breezes through the five short-answer questions but sits stumped by the assigned essay. Mr. Owen wants five hundred words on the question of states’ rights in the framing of Congress? Maybe one hundred thousand would scratch the surface.
He buckles down to work, his loopy handwriting filling up line after line with fluid ease. Maybe education is wasted on the young. He looks up with a smile. He is a bit surprised to see Mr. Owen gazing wanly at him with soft eyes. I wonder if he’s gay, Charlie thinks. His teacher is wearing his usual black suit, threadbare and shiny, with a white shirt and thin black tie. Lincoln Owen was a major influence on Charlie, turning him from a soft-focus liberal to a radical just in time for the Chicago riots during the Democratic National Convention.
Weird, looking down the long periscope of time at this, he thinks, drifting forward to that summer of 1968, still to come. The riots. His arrest.
He brings himself back to the room by studying Owen, the thin neck and thinning hair. He looked so ancient to me, Charlie thinks, realizing that Owen must be no older than his late thirties, a decade younger than Charlie One was, is, would be. Charlie sighs out loud. The cute blonde next to him gives him a scowl. What was her name?
He returns to his essay with a surge of libidinal energy and within the allotted time period has an essay that he can live with. He hands it in to Mr. Owen with a conspiratorial smile, but the teacher looks startled. Charlie realizes that he isn’t acting like a high school student, and proceeds to slouch out of the class with the appropriate degree of insolent apathy—shoulders hunched, mouth twisted scornfully. Years of college teaching have given him many role models for the ritual indifference of the young.
* * *
Charlie wakes up in the night and wonders where his paunch is, why his body feels strange, vibrant. Then he remembers what has happened, and feels an odd wash of nostalgia for his older self. Charlie One made his way in the world, struggled over the hurdles. There was some achievement in that.
The feeling passes. He realizes that he has to get on with his new life.
Has anyone else ever had to do this? he wonders.
* * *
James and Charlie are watching basketball on the television in the basement of James’s house. The image is so low grade it is like watching the game through a kaleidoscopic snowstorm. James’s parents are much older. They always seemed surprised to have James living with them, and the fact that he had even one friend was obviously a miracle to their eyes. They generally left him alone downstairs. It makes Charlie think that perhaps James was adopted, but he never learned anything about it the last time. The last time, Charlie wonders, was there a last time?
“Man, were you adopted?”
James starts coughing and quickly hands Charlie the tiny roach that he was toking off. “What?”
“You know, your parents. They’re hardly aware that you exist.”
“We can’t all have dads who’re Fred MacMurray.” James seems hurt, pushing some of his blond hair behind his left ear.
“Okay, man. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah . . . uh, well . . . I was. My birth mother was a teenager, they tell me. No way to raise me, so she gave me to an agency.” Now James is like a deflated balloon, air rushing out from his admission.
Charlie takes a toke off the clipped roach, feeling a need for some self-medication in his new life. “That’s tough, man. Real tough.”
He makes no move toward comforting James. He remembers that James doesn’t like to be touched.
Their evening basketball broadcast is interrupted by a newsman with hollow eyes and what looks like bright-orange makeup. “This just in from the Pen
tagon. The USS Pueblo has been taken by the naval forces of North Korea. President Johnson has ordered the aircraft carrier Enterprise to proceed toward the area. More news at eleven. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”
James says, “Fuck, man! Those commies are doing it again.”
Charlie laughs. “Commies?”
“Yeah, like first in Vietnam—well, maybe first in Korea. But now they’re acting up again in Korea, too. Johnson has to get tough.”
“What are you talking about, James? Vietnam is a lost cause. It’s a civil war between the communists and the corrupt South Vietnamese regime.”
James rises up from his ancient sofa, his posture quite rigid, the rims of his eyes red. “Stop with that shit! I am so sick of your attitude. Don’t you care about your country?”
With a sense of shock echoing through the paradox of time, Charlie snaps into the present, a 1968 rife with intense polarization. Vietnam is a bleeding wound in the American psyche, and the pain of it will touch everyone. James will soon be drafted and go to Nam. There his mind will fray beyond recovery from the killing and the lies, starting his long slide toward psychiatric oblivion.
“It’s all right, man. I’m on your side.”
* * *
Late the following Sunday afternoon, Charlie takes a long shower after spending the afternoon on driver’s training. He has a driver’s exam scheduled soon. To his surprise, he still has to pick up some of the wary road skills. Muscle memory, he guesses. It isn’t all in the brain. The warmth, moisture, and relaxation of the shower let him reflect with some peace of mind.
This can’t be a dream. Dreams don’t last so long, with so much consistent detail.
He wonders if he has died and gone on to the next life. But going back to live your life again doesn’t fit with any biblical conception of heaven, hell, or purgatory. It seems more like Hinduism. But you are supposed to go up or down the karmic ladder, not repeat.
A thumping on the bathroom door. He hears his father’s muffled voice but can’t make out the words. He turns off the comforting water and steps out of the bathtub.
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