Still, Charlie feels his skin tingle. They are getting closer to a truth they may never reach, but the journey is satisfying in itself. They are not mere motes tossed around by some unseen God; there is mechanism, and so maybe control. That is good enough, yes. For now.
* * *
Back to the Future, at its Westwood Cinema premiere, is appreciated by the jaded Hollywood crowd, who even laugh at the more Oedipal scenes from 1955. There are still some Freudians around, a lot of them screenwriters who have been through analysis. Rog Ebert laps it up, and he and Charlie exchange insider jokes with sly grins during the after-party. But Charlie is more interested in whom the film will flush out from under cover, which reincarnates will come his way, and what they might do together.
Not engaged in a conversation, he lets his eyes wander for a moment and finds himself fixed in the sights of—Gabriela. There she is, the ravening mocha body in another wraparound little black dress. She knows how to find me. Charlie quickly infers that she has finagled a date with the Action Pictures executive near her who is talking to an assistant director.
It is only a matter of moments before Gabriela takes him off to the side. “So, señor, you have put us up on the screen for anyone to see!”
“You know I haven’t done that, Gabriela.” Her eyes flash. “But yes, I want to meet other reincarnates. This is kind of my calling card.”
“And to what effect, I think?”
“Well, we’ll have to see. Won’t we?” He uses a straight stare, challenging her. He has written scenes like this before.
She turns and stomps off as heavily as her sharp heels allow. Then he shakes his head and takes a few steps back. Gabriela is too much for him right now.
* * *
But the night will have another surprise. Driving up to his Wilshire high-rise condo, he sees a woman waiting at a polite distance behind the valet.
Once he has surrendered his car, he looks briefly at the woman, finding her familiar but unplaceable.
She smiles back at him. “Michelle. Don’t you remember?”
He looks again. The frizzed-up ’80s hair has led him astray. Underneath a layer of sophisticated makeup and thirtysomething fattening, it is the face of the woman he fell for hardest.
“Michelle, of course!” His Hollywood manners allow Charlie to recover impeccably. He offers her his hand.
She takes it but moves toward him, alcoholic vapor and perfume breaking over Charlie. His chest squeezes brutally. It’s as if the years since their last morning never happened. He looks directly into her eyes, almost faltering, as her pupils bear into him.
“I know about you, Charlie.”
He takes a step backward, but she won’t let go of his hand.
“Um, Michelle, would you like to come up for a drink?”
In the elevator she wraps her arms around him and pushes her body against his. For Charlie it is awkward, confusing. A cadence of emotions pounds at him—fear, longing, hurt, none of them unmixed, all of them bewildered, strays from a life that he feels is slipping away from him at the end of a long evening. Why does he mean so much to people, he wonders, when he is just passing through their world, a migrant through his second incarnation, with so many up ahead?
Inside his condo Michelle pulls away from him and smooths the shiny blue fabric of her dress. The mixture of girl and woman that he fell for is long gone, along with the shimmering long blond hair. Her jawline is firmer, eyes shrewd. The creature before him is harder, yet perhaps more desperate than the morning she rejected him.
He wanders toward the bar, avoiding her stare.
“You werrren’t lyyying to me, werrre you?” Her consonants are slurred.
Charlie is measured. “No, not at the end.”
“I read about your movie. In the magazines. It’s all there. I know.”
“What are you having?”
She tosses her head, just as she did long before, a gloriously free movement of neck and hair, like a flag of independence. It brings Charlie’s first quivering of desire. “Vodka tonic.”
“Oh . . . kay.
“You son of a bitch, I should have listened to you.” She takes an unsteady step toward him.
“How could you have believed me?”
“It would have been so much better if I had.”
Charlie allots himself one rueful smile, no more.
“I know you’re thinking . . . you’re thinking that I want the money, the fame, all that kinda stuff.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Fuck yourself, Charlie Moment. You can fuck yourself.” She abruptly puts the drink down and throws her arms around him, leaning heavily against him.
“It’s okay, baby.”
She makes an indistinct sound, and Charlie wonders if it is a whimper. “Just hold me. I need you tonight.”
* * *
In the morning Charlie wakes up first. He listens to Michelle’s quiet snoring and watches the white sheets move around her body almost imperceptibly. What the hell am I doing? he thinks. He didn’t need to be told to realize that Michelle’s life has not turned out well. But then his hasn’t either.
So there they are. Just two souls floating through time, his bobbing in the waves of Albert’s four dimensions—or was it eight, that string theory thing he mentioned?—a bit longer than hers. But still incorporeal flotsam. No more.
Charlie gets up slowly and quietly, almost afraid of what Michelle will say when she wakes up.
It doesn’t take him long to assemble his keys and wallet, put on some clothes, and flee. Albert will help him through this, Charlie is certain. He has to be with someone who will understand.
33 Charlie drives the Santa Monica Freeway steadily, staying in the slow lane so he can keep up with Albert’s ideas. Traffic isn’t bad after 10:00 p.m., but he feels uneasy. The night of the premiere has left him uncertain about the rest of this particular life.
“I think we will learn nothing profound from our fellow reincarnates,” Albert says suddenly, peering out at the dim parade of cars. It’s as if the man can read Charlie’s thoughts.
“Well, we’ve had twelve turn up so far.” Charlie is particularly unwilling to accept Einstein’s intuition, since it matches his own. He glances over at the face as worn as old leather. Charlie went back through Einstein biographies and studied the original face’s evolution from a steady, certain gaze to the wise grandfather of glimmering eyes, the smile a tantalizing blend of mirth and sadness. This man beside him is not that one anymore. This Al shows a seasoned sagacity beyond that of anyone he has ever known. Centuries can do that to you.
Al stretches in the car’s confines, as if grasping upward toward something. “Twelve, yes, nearly all actors or authors, yes, men and women of a certain caste. Or should I say, uncertain? They saw through our film to the truth. That does check your idea of drawing them out, ja. But they are actors who have the fundamental insecurity of the trade. Fueled, I suspect, by the enormous uncertainty that comes with being reincarnated.”
Charlie bears down, his executive can-do-it manner extending even into this shadowy subject. “We can research the patterns common to their life experiences. Learn from that.”
A tsk-tsk wag of the untidy head. “I like this term. Research is searching, yes—often with eyes closed. Blind truth. And the ‘re-’ means that you have to do it again and again. Most people cannot take the tension of always not knowing.”
Charlie allows himself a sardonic chuckle. “You’d think knowing you would live again—maybe even goddamn forever!—would make you carefree. But our fellow reincarnates aren’t the happiest folks I’ve ever seen, by a long shot.”
“Wisdom and melancholy are old, close friends.”
“Even Casanova wore out his libertine self, seems like.” Charlie has a sudden flash idea—Reincarnates! Zombies, kinda! Wonder if those old 1930s flicks could use a Spielberg-style comeback? But he turns away from that Charlie Two ferret-self and focuses on Al beside him.
It is
Al’s turn to chuckle. “Our friend seeks to fathom what all this means. I too. But when you do understand . . . ah, that is a sensation unlike anything in life. Seeing into God’s mind. Better than passion, sex, women, fine wine.”
“And fame, for you.”
“The best thing about fame is that if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.”
Charlie laughs. Traffic ahead stalls and he switches on the radio.
“Beethoven!” Albert cries. “Too personal, almost naked.” He clicks it off.
“Y’know, if your analysis works, you’ll have proved that parallel universes exist, that maybe we make them with our minds. Lots of people will hate that idea.”
“One of science’s tasks is to open eyes and make people uncomfortable about what they see.”
Charlie has long wanted to ask one particular question, and he finally braves it. “Do you think all this has a point?”
“I do not know what nature has in mind.” A pause. “Or if it has a mind.”
By now Charlie knows Albert’s style—long thought, then these compact conclusions. “It makes me feel more secure, not less,” Charlie says. “I don’t fear death anymore.”
“A mathematical series can be long but still not infinite.”
It takes a moment for this to register as Charlie angles them between lanes, headed to Santa Monica. “So we don’t get to just cycle forever?”
“Three of those actors were in their third and fourth incarnations. I liked the one named Niven. He was dapper, assured. But Casanova in all his incarnations has not met anyone with more than a few dozen lives. He has met over a thousand reincarnates, and none of them have gone around as many times as he has.”
“Good point.” And no thanks, Charlie thinks. I’d rather stay blissfully confident.
“This fact makes those who play the history game more understandable, you see. They use extreme methods because they will not have an infinite number of chances.”
Charlie feels a rush of unease tighten his chest. They have taken risks, exposing their interest through Back to the Future. Now Albert has suddenly shifted the odds. “How are you feeling about history now?”
“When we were in the middle of a divorce—ach!—I came home to find my wife burning all my love letters to her. Already I had agreed that when I won the Nobel Prize—we were both so sure this would happen!—as a divorce payment she could have all that money. This was after I had published the general theory of relativity. So thinking of that, I said, ‘Don’t burn them.’ ‘Think of history,’ I said. And she looked at me and said, ‘I am, Albert, I am.’ I see her point now.”
“But you changed history anyway.”
Albert turns to him with a patient smile. “It was a temptation and I succumbed. Now I am on T-shirts! I read still complimentary articles about Einstein and I wish my parents could read them.” A sigh.
“I sometimes think of the greatest lesson we reincarnates have learned,” Albert muses. “Those who ignore the mistakes of the future are bound to make them.”
“So,” Charlie ventures, “what is your . . . theory of us?”
“I have thoughts, calculations, but the key idea eludes me. I wish to know how to manage our own reincarnations.”
“Our rewrites, I call them.”
Einstein makes a polite chuckle sound. “You see life as screenplays? When I judge a theory, I think, ‘If I were God, would I have arranged things this way?’ ”
“Seems reasonable.”
“So for quantum mechanics, I had to ask—could the good Lord have created beautiful and subtle rules that determined most of what happened, but left some things completely to chance? That was bad enough! But to make us revisit what happened! What kind of Lord is that?”
“A no-rules-at-all Lord?”
Albert shakes his head, ignoring Charlie’s question. “Yet such work is the only thing that gives meaning to life. My life, at least.”
A sleek black car zooms by Charlie’s left window. Then it is gone, speeding forward into the Santa Monica night.
He rolls down his window to get the cool night air in his face and focuses on their route. Heinlein likes to live near the ocean, and he called, saying he wanted to discuss strategy with them, whatever that means.
Albert doesn’t notice Charlie’s distraction. “So now I struggle with your time’s new physics, adding what I know that your physicists don’t. When I was young, we lived in a simple world. Energy makes physical systems do things. Fine.”
He makes an exasperated pffffft! sound. “But now comes this quantum computation view, the latest version of how the universe works. People read their world in terms of what they know, the latest model. That started with the ancient creator gods, whose couplings gave birth to the cosmos. Then Newton’s clockwork sky. Then the nineteenth century’s vision of invisible force fields. All these led to the latest, that the universe is a vast computer. So now, with computers on our desks, we imagine that God works similarly. Information tells the universe what to do.”
Charlie is confused by all of this and has to concentrate on traffic. A metallic taste fills his mouth.
Albert continues. “Already, in this time, there are experiments about sending information backward in time. Just tiny instants, yah, but the principle is important here, not the magnitude. Some backward time movement can be. Soon enough smart experimenters will send entangled particles and photons distances of hundreds of kilometers. So quantum effects can move in space and time.”
“What makes that happen, the backward time leaps?” They are crossing the 405 freeway and traffic brakes. Los Angeles never sleeps, but it does slow down a lot.
“Events can become twisted together, if they share information. Like rubber bands threaded through each other, they are—an entangled state. So you touch a particle here, and far away a particle that was once related to the first, it too moves. Instantly! I regret calling them ‘spooky action at a distance.’ But I was criticizing the idea. It is ugly!”
Charlie glances over at Albert, who is now agitated, rolling down the window to get some air. “But you were right, Albert! Maybe the reincarnate loopers—”
“Being right brings not always joy. This I know. Many said my relativity principle was to blame for abstract painting, atonal music, formless literature, sexual freedom. I would allow the last, since I enjoyed only that—though often.” His composure returns as the night air plays with his hair.
Charlie starts a new question, leading with “So this quantum information—”
“The path is poorly lit by consciousness, Charlie. That is our problem.” A note of both awe and despair slides into Einstein’s voice. “I wanted theories that kept us, we mere humans, out of the action. But somehow we are in it. For physicists of my time, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubborn illusion. Much more, the illusion of subjective humans. But we few know that there is another, deeper truth.”
The tinge of salt in the air brings flavor into the car as they approach the coast. Charlie decides to give up. Enough metaphysics—if that’s what it is—for the evening. They have Heinlein to deal with soon, and the guy is a bit of a drill sergeant.
“So . . .” Charlie hesitates, liking the sea breeze and wanting to hold the moment. “So why not play the history game?”
Albert sighs. “It is the obvious game but, ich denke, maybe not the right one. Politics fades, physics lasts.”
“So your theory—”
“If we understand this—and I remind you that I came back from the twenty-second century to bring such work to light now, so perhaps in my way I am already playing the history game in my own fashion—then we will truly change the long tragedy of humanity, for the better.”
“That twenty-second century—what was it like?”
“I was an experimenter.” Albert shouts joyously, “Me! But”—he leans out the window, face to the wind—“I was the test subject, really.”
“Huh?”
“T
hese matters, of time and life, are of great interest nearly a hundred fifty years from now. Science knows of the reincarnates—though not much. They did experiments, like the quantum entanglements our era here is attempting badly.”
Questions don’t make Charlie feel so dumb. “So they used you to . . . ?”
“As a lab animal. I could cycle backward in time without dying, so they thought—I do not know what they thought. There was strange, silent machinery that aided my mind in casting back. Perhaps contours in my frontal lobe—they do allow faster synaptic correlations over a larger volume, we did discover that. So I tried and tried, every day. Sometimes I could go back a few minutes. Usually not. During one long day I . . . ended up here, your century. In . . . a body.” These last words come as whispers.
A hard motor roar comes up on the right side of the car. Charlie thinks it is probably some kid in a hot rod making for the beach. He moves a lane to the left.
Traffic is heavy and they are going maybe forty. But the roar keeps up, and when he glances to the right, past Albert’s gleaming profile, he sees the same black car that passed them before. As the black car comes steaming past, Charlie sees the rear window rolled down and a hand, a hand holding a . . . gun.
A sharp bark. Another. Another. Drops spatter his right cheek.
Charlie wrenches to the left again, head down, angling toward the fast lane. He swerves around the tail of a pickup truck and floors it. The car fishtails a moment and then gets straight with howling tires. He slams the pedal to the floor and the engine bellows as he guns it. He glances right. No black car.
But Albert is pitched forward and there is blood everywhere. The smell of it swarms up into his nostrils.
34 Heinlein jerks the door open. “You’re late.”
Charlie steps into the condo, blood on his shirt.
Heinlein wrinkles his nose. “Where’s Al?”
Charlie realizes that he must smell of fear and blood. “He’s dead.”
Heinlein keeps his rock-solid posture, hands in the pockets of his smoking jacket. Only a twitch of his mouth shows any reaction. “You need a drink.”
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