Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  As Charlie peers through the gloom, a Latino walks briskly up to Delgado’s table and sits down. Delgado seems almost to crouch in submission. Charlie hears him say, “Hombre!”

  There is something familiar about the man.

  Charlie watches as the hombre with the power orders food for Delgado. Then Charlie is startled by a young Latino waiter.

  “Excusing, señor.” The waiter expertly slides chips, salsa, a menu, and some water before Charlie.

  When Charlie looks at the hombre again, his heart freezes in the middle of a beat. He has seen the hombre before, in Chicago. At Elspeth’s revolutionary cell meeting.

  Panicked and confused, he leaves a dollar bill on his table and moves out of the restaurant, eyes checking everyone he sees.

  * * *

  Over the next few days Charlie swims in swarming confusion. What is the relationship between Elspeth and the Hombre? And what does Elspeth know about the Hombre and Delgado? Is that why she was so scornful of Kennedy before, last time?

  Charlie decides to play his cards with greater care. Heinlein’s warnings surface in his mind with authority. There are people out there, people who may know about Charlie, or may not.

  Charlie’s one point of comfort is that he has told no one, not even Heinlein, about what he is doing. And certainly Elspeth wouldn’t know.

  * * *

  Charlie’s opportunity with Delgado comes during a street fair. Delgado is strolling down First Street, relaxed, almost childlike, talking to the street vendors. He stops to talk to an attractive Latina standing behind a table of handmade belts.

  Charlie casually walks up behind his prey. “Juan!” he calls insistently, just over the din.

  Delgado’s head snaps around to face him. “Señor?”

  “The Hombre sent me.”

  Juan drops his smile and shows the girl that he has to go with a few downward looks, comic sad-sack mouth, eye rolling—then a grin. It is a friend of the Hombre, and he has no choice.

  Charlie drives away in his Dodge with Delgado. He gets Delgado’s address, a small apartment where Costa Mesa runs into Santa Ana. Charlie parks outside and takes the man in. Delgado is chattering in Spanish, sometimes trying fragments of English, but Charlie just grunts.

  The door to the small place closed, Charlie backs away from Delgado and takes out his gun.

  The Latino stands his ground bravely, but his eyes seem to tremble. “No, señor. I say Hombre that I do as he say.”

  “No problemo, Juan.” Charlie’s tone is cold. Having killed himself deliberately in pursuit of a new history, he knows that he can kill Delgado if he has to.

  But not this time. He makes the man put his arms around a pipe in the wall. The handcuffs snap on easily; Charlie has been practicing doing it with one free hand.

  Charlie steps away from the man, the gun still in his hand. Delgado breaks his silence with, “Por favor, señor. No keel. No keel.”

  “No, not this time, Delgado. And you won’t either.”

  Charlie sets about planting the carefully bagged cocaine on the unsteady linoleum table near the hot plate.

  It is the work of minutes to get to a pay phone to call the police. After what seems like hours waiting half a block away in his car, Charlie sees two black-and-whites pull up in front of Delgado’s apartment building. The man is led out a few minutes later, this time handcuffed by the police. An African American officer is not gentle as he shoves Delgado into the back of his patrol car.

  39 In the weeks that follow, Charlie stays in his apartment, savoring the ’60s vibe for a third time. He watches his eleven-inch black-and-white tabletop TV, following the primitive coverage of the primaries. Kennedy’s speeches are transfixing the nation. Not as warm as his brother Jack, but much more of a visionary, RFK is indeed everything that Charlie hoped for. Again. Just let that bastard Nixon try to beat this guy, Charlie tells himself over and over.

  April 4, 1968, was the day when Delgado shot RFK, back in that lost Charlie One world. Charlie thinks of that fading memory as his home time, that Land of Ago. Then it seemed as if Bobby was the only force holding the country together, the only white man the black community respected. The last bridge standing to the Land of Reconciling. Eugene McCarthy was the great hope of the white kids afraid of the draft. RFK was too tainted for them, with his years working for Joe McCarthy and then his tough attorney general stint with his brother—all still casting a shadow, at least for the children of liberals who read the New York Times. But Charlie knows that McCarthy will not be able to defeat Nixon, even if Johnson pulls Humphrey out of the campaign—as the home-time Johnson did. McCarthy was just too inept.

  But this time there is no one-eighty by Johnson. Humphrey stays in the race—though well out of the primaries, leaving Kennedy and McCarthy to fight it out against the native sons, the pallid hand-puppet senators and governors standing in for Humphrey. Daily, in fever-browed press coverage rendered in stark black-and-white, Kennedy and McCarthy’s followers grow bitter. They are hammering away at each other in primary after primary. Wallace has come in on the right wing, playing the race card. Wallace is short and brassy and reeks of small-town redneck—and he weakens Nixon’s polls. But having Wallace in the campaign lets the crafty Republican take the center.

  To Charlie, 1968 the third time around is a complete mystery. For a historian—as he once was, he reminds himself—the idea that politics is so flexible, tangled, and weird is still dizzying. He recalls that as a student he liked the solidity of the past. The present got shredded daily, but events a few decades back emerged from the fog of opinion and false talk, shaping up like strong stone, rising from the swamp of passing opinion.

  Now he has used his knowledge to make a world he wants. Shaped the swamp of movieland into the granite of holy Hollywood history. He wonders if he has done the right thing.

  It all comes down to California. Its 1968 primary becomes the hinge for the whole election. McCarthy and Kennedy are everywhere. Charlie hardly has time to eat. He goes out early for breakfast each day, avoiding crowds, and usually has corned beef hash and eggs, and buys all the papers. He devours every word, every newsmagazine, watches all the local and national coverage on TV. Even the Economist has an opinion about the primary. All of Charlie’s hopes, the thrust of his three lives—all now pivot on the returns from the California precincts in June.

  He thinks of Albert dying the last time around. Is he in this world now, alive again? Or has he not reincarnated here? Do any of the ordinary people around Charlie sense how precarious all of this is? How the universe teeters on the edge of an abyss—always, with each passing second, shaving bits of stone off the twisted rock of time?

  No, of course not. He can barely stand it himself, and he has lived in this era several times. Practice does not make perfect; it makes you suspect, fear, worry. So he buys some good Inglenook Cabernet Sauvignon and starts in on it quite early on primary day. In the afternoon he goes out for more.

  The California polls close at 8:00 p.m., and CBS comes in first with a projected Kennedy victory. Charlie finishes his bottle. Luckily, he has planned ahead and has two more.

  Then CBS returns to some idiotic situation comedy. He very nearly throws his empty bottle through his set.

  Charlie switches to NBC, waiting for them to call it for Kennedy too. ABC is still too small a player to matter. He ignores the regular programming, reading the day’s LA Times and Orange County Register for background, waiting for the news bulletins and the 11:00 p.m. news. There is a brief interview with Sander Vanocur, but it is becoming obvious to Charlie that NBC isn’t going to feature RFK as much as Charlie wants.

  He switches back to CBS and is rewarded with a Kennedy interview by Roger Mudd. “Are you saying, Senator, that if the Democratic Party nominates the vice president, it will be cutting its own throat in November?”

  “Well, again,” says Kennedy, “you use those expressions. I think that the Democratic Party would be making a very bad mistake to ignore the
wishes of the people and ignore these primaries.”

  Damn right, thinks Charlie, dropping his newspapers unnoticed on the floor. His hand looks for a bottle of Coke, his fingers finding it from the damp cold of the glass. Got to keep my energy up. Need some water. But isn’t there water in wine? Must be. The Coke tastes of lemon and joy as it rushes down his throat. His life will be worth something again now.

  Maybe he will go back to Chicago, take law, and make a difference in the world. Even though he hates lawyers. Maybe even look up Trudy? But no, he has to follow this trajectory, or lose his own self-respect.

  Roger Mudd is trying to push Kennedy to open up about the future of his campaign for president. “Are some of the delegates listed as leaning or even committed to the vice president, are they squeezable? Are they solid?”

  “Roger, your language! I don’t like either of those expressions.”

  Mudd laughs. “Well, that—isn’t that the way you talk about it?”

  “No, I don’t go that far, I don’t, I don’t.” But Kennedy laughs too.

  Charlie can tell that this is the turning point of the 1968 campaign, the fulcrum of the whole tumultuous decade. Watching alone yet with millions of others, he sees Kennedy reassembling America, a continent tumbling apart since his brother’s assassination and the mess of Vietnam. Only this time the presidency will unite the country around respect for civil rights, a just foreign policy, and an end to politics as usual.

  Charlie swallows. If it took my death to bring all this about, it was worth it. He lets himself sink into the moment, dreamy and warm. “And malt does more than Milton can / To justify God’s ways to man. . . .”

  Is that it? Expressing his hopes through action on a stage no one has ever imagined? Never have to pay the price of dying? He decides, coolly and without pity, to let all those old ideas—the baggage of living one mortal life—slide away. Down they go, on the greased skids of time. He feels reborn truly, as he never has before. He had to make a world he could live in. A world set right. He is no genius like Einstein, no agent of some ideology like Elspeth. He is instead carrying out an experiment with time. He could slip through many histories, many choices, merely by dying.

  All to make a life worth living. A future worth owning. Worth being in. Not a world weighed down by a stultified America. No world he has seen . . . yet. Not anything built up from ideas, either. Action makes worlds. Theories come on the battlefield only after all has been decided, and then the wounded are shot.

  Charlie celebrates by adding rum to his Coke, and he feels better than he has in years. His whole life is ahead of him, and a new future for the country.

  But he has the victory speech to look forward to. Around midnight Kennedy mounts the stage with his wife, Ethel, by his side. She is great looking, for all those kids, thinks Charlie, all tension gone from him.

  Kennedy begins by congratulating Don Drysdale for pitching his sixth straight shutout, making the crowd laugh over the diversion. He thanks his campaign manager, Steve Smith. Then Cesar Chavez, Rosey Grier, and a slew of others. He thanks his dog, Freckles, and finally his wife, Ethel, though “not in order of importance.” The crowd laughs some more.

  Then Kennedy turns serious. He refers to the farmworkers who have supported him, not just in California, but in South Dakota, too, which is also counting its primary ballots.

  And then to the meat of his campaign. “I think that we can end the divisions within the United States.”

  Charlie’s heart surges. It is everything he wants to hear.

  “We can start to work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country. I intend to make that my basis for running.”

  Kennedy offers change but also reconciliation. He congratulates McCarthy and his followers for their efforts. He makes sure that everyone in his campaign, and all his supporters, feel good about the night’s victory. “My thanks to all of you, and on to Chicago.”

  He reaches out to the audience, which surges toward him. In the crush there are too many for him to exit through the ballroom itself. One of the hotel staff leads him out through the back of the stage.

  Charlie watches the crowd and the jubilation, standing by himself in his apartment in his T-shirt and shorts, waving his rum-laced Coke. He turns on a radio for more commentary but finds it’s playing “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys. He hasn’t heard it in ages.

  But from the TV comes an odd popping sound. The voice-over commentators are going on, but Charlie sees the crowd milling fearfully. He quickly turns off the radio. Something has happened. The camera jerks to sweaty, worried faces. Something is wrong, but no one knows what. The ballroom audience grows hushed. A bustle and shoving over by the side.

  Steve Smith walks to the ballroom microphones. He quietly tells the crowd to disperse. Frowns, gaping mouths. The TV commentators begin stammering, voices tight and high, repeating rumors that someone has attacked Kennedy.

  Charlie’s chest seizes up with fear. They have succeeded. Again. He knows that Robert Kennedy is dead or dying.

  40 Charlie spends the next three months drinking away the last of the money that Elspeth gave him. The Ripple bottles stack up in the garbage. The white-trash landlord finally evicts him, more in sorrow than anger. Charlie has made no secret of how he feels about Kennedy’s assassination, and the landlord sympathizes. But he isn’t the owner, and the pathetic, scraggly haired hippie has to vacate. As Charlie walks away, toting a bag of dirty belongings, his head spins. He needs a drink, bad.

  Charlie ends up on the streets of Laguna Beach, facing an oncoming winter without enough cheap scotch to stay warm. He lies next to the boardwalk with a cap for spare change, begging only quietly, moving on whenever the police tell him.

  One day, while sitting on one of the benches near the boardwalk, he falls into conversation with a grizzled Vietnam vet, Mike Clayman. Mike works as a bartender at the Sandpiper, down Pacific Coast Highway’s surfer zone. Charlie has had a few passing conversations with him before.

  In his alcoholic daze Charlie asks him about the reggae band he saw at the Sandpiper in 1988.

  Mike laughs at him with good-natured ridicule. “Reggie band? What’s reggie music?”

  Dimly Charlie realizes that he is facing alcoholic dementia. Suddenly he feels a bit sober and very hungry.

  “Nothing, man.” It is hard for him to say what he wants, but he knows he has to. “Say, Mike, would you know if there would be any way I could earn some money around here, clean up a bit?”

  “Charlie?” The burly man’s voice is almost tender. “Are you ready to change?”

  “Yes, sir. That I am, Mike, my friend.”

  “No more booze?”

  “Nope.”

  “Like, I’ll beat you up and throw you back in the gutter if you burn me on this, man.”

  “Absolooly.”

  * * *

  Slowly Charlie puts himself back together. He works at the Sandpiper as their janitor for a time, living in a beach shack with Mike. The man is a dedicated Deadhead and doper, but he hates booze. He is the perfect bartender for the Sandpiper, where the staff are too relaxed, especially when LA rockers come south to slum and pick up easy chicks. Mike is the shepherd for the girls who wait the tables, and for Charlie.

  After a while Mike lets Charlie tend bar when the going is slack, especially in the afternoons. He is impressed with how quickly Charlie learns how to mix drinks, from a hundred different martini recipes that Charlie seems to have in his head. At least some of his mental machinery survived, though it needs oiling. Like Mike, Charlie has become an enemy of the demon rum.

  But Kennedy’s death hasn’t entirely left Charlie’s mind. He avidly consumes books about the assassinations of the 1960s, taking detailed notes about Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, and Sirhan Sirhan. He recalls Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4 and wonders if he should have intervened there. In his first life Charlie saw the steady decline of the black underclass, and now he wonde
rs if by saving King, intercepting the assassin, he could have altered that. King’s followers kept on with Ralph Abernathy and the other solid lieutenants, but then media tramps like Jesse Jackson and the comically incompetent Al Sharpton turned a once-lofty movement into a parody of what King had built.

  Then caution descends on Charlie. He failed with Kennedy; best not to take on yet another task in the shifting landscapes of time. So he returns to Charlie One’s habits: do your homework and maybe things will work out.

  He keeps boxes of files under his bed in Mike’s apartment. He looks for signs of conspiracy in each assassination case. Especially he seeks out the telltale signs of losers picked up for brainwashing or manipulation. Charlie is convinced that Sirhan Sirhan was a tool of the Hombre, with the parallels between Sirhan’s odd behavior and the oddities of people suffering posthypnotic suggestion.

  Many times Charlie considers going back to the Society building in New York, but he suspects that he might be killed if he visits again. That car bomb outside on his first visit—was that the same people who killed Albert? Clever, to try it before Charlie even met the man.

  It makes Charlie’s head whirl to think about his life, and his time, as pawns in a larger game. Better to lie low. Play for . . . time. Do what Heinlein did. Maybe there is another way.

  Charlie does go to Orange Coast College, earning stellar grades taking courses part-time. But he enrolls under a different name so that no one will be able to find him, especially not the Hombre. Of course, he doesn’t resume contact with his family back in Chicago. He starts to play the stock market, mostly emerging tech stocks. Then he buys gold just before the price takes off. All these moves he recalls from some economic history papers he wrote back in Charlie One’s 1980s. Sometimes research pays off in unexpected ways. Eventually he has enough money to transfer to the University of California, Irvine, to get a bachelor’s degree in history. He doesn’t look up Jim Benford there, since he’s designing fusion devices at Livermore, yet to get the offer from UCI. All things in their time.