Replay

by Ken Grimwood

  The water was calm and blue today, and as they walked along the dunes they could see the hump of Poplar Island off the Eastern Shore. A clutch of boats trolled among the marker buoys, working the rich Chesapeake Bay oyster beds. Jeff and Pamela took what comfort they could from the deceptive serenity of the familiar scene and did their best to ignore the pairs of dark-suited men who kept pace a steady twenty yards ahead of and behind them.

  "Why don’t we lie to him?" Pamela asked. "Tell him there’ll be a war if we maintain our military presence in Iran. Christ, for all we know there may be one."

  Jeff stooped to pick up a slender stick of driftwood. "They’d see through it, particularly when they put us on the pentothal."

  "We could still try."

  "But who knows what effect a lie like that would have? Reagan might even decide to launch a preemptive strike. We could end up starting a war that may still be avoided."

  Pamela shuddered. "Stuart McCowan must be happy," she said bitterly, "wherever he is."

  "We did what we thought was right. No one could have predicted this sort of outcome. And it hasn’t been all bad; we’ve saved a lot of lives, too."

  "You can’t put human life on a balance sheet like that!"

  "No, but—"

  "They won’t even do anything about the storms and the plane crashes anymore," she said with disgust, kicking at a clump of sand. "They want everybody, particularly the Soviets, to think we just disappeared, so they keep on letting all those people die … needlessly!"

  "Just as they’ve always died before."

  She spun toward him, her face full of a rage he had never seen in her. "That doesn’t cut it, Jeff! We were supposed to be making the world a better, safer place this time—but all we really cared about was ourselves, finding out how much longer our own precious little lives were going to be extended; and we haven’t even been able to do that."

  "It’s still possible that the scientists will come up with a—"

  "I don’t give a shit! When I look at the news, all the death we’ve caused by what we’ve told Hedges: the terrorist attacks, the military actions, maybe even a full-scale war corning … When I see that, I wish—I wish I’d never made that goddamned movie, I wish you’d never come to Los Angeles and found me!

  Jeff tossed the stick of driftwood away, looked at her in pained disbelief. "You don’t mean that," he said.

  "Yes I do! I’m sorry I ever met you!"

  "Pamela, please—"

  Her hands were shaking, her face was red with anger. "I’m not talking to Hedges anymore. I don’t want to talk to you anymore, either. I’m moving into one of the rooms on the third floor. You can tell them any fucking thing you like; go ahead, get us in a war, blow the whole damned planet up!"

  She turned and ran, slipped awkwardly in the sand and found her footing again, dashed toward the house that was their prison. One of the teams of guards raced after her, the other closed in on either side of Jeff. He watched her go, watched the men escort her back inside the house; Hedges was at the door, and Jeff could hear her shouting at him, but a gust of summer wind from off the bay swallowed up her words, drowned out the meaning of her cries.

  He awoke in a current of cold, synthetic-smelling air. Sharp, thin rays of brilliant sunlight sliced through half-closed slats of vene-tian blinds on the nearby window, illuminating the sparsely furnished bedroom. A portable stereo sat silent on the floor in front of the bed, and an old cassette recorder and microphone with a WIOD logo lay cushioned on a pile of clothes on the dresser.

  Jeff heard a distant chime over the hum of the air conditioner, recognized it as a doorbell; whoever it was would go away if he ignored it. He glanced at the book in his hands: The Algiers Motel Incident, by John Hersey. Jeff tossed it aside, swung his feet off the bed, and went to the window. He lifted one of the white slats of the blinds, peered out, and saw a tall stand of royal palms; beyond them there was nothing but flat marshland, all the way to the horizon.

  The doorbell rang again, and then he heard the approaching whine of a jet, saw it glide past a few hundred yards behind the palm trees. Landing at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International, Jeff realized. This was his apartment in Dania, a mile from the beach and too close to the airport, but it had been the first place he could really call his own, his first wholly private living quarters as an adult. He’d been working at his first full-time news job, in Miami, beginning his career.

  He took a deep breath of the stale, chilled air, sat back down on the rumpled bed. He’d died on schedule, at six minutes past one on October eighteenth, 1988; there’d been no all-out war, not yet, though the world had been—

  The doorbell sounded again, a long ring this time, insistent. Goddamn it, why wouldn’t they just go away? It stopped, then rang immediately a fourth time. Jeff pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of denim cut-offs from the heap of clothes on the dresser, stalked angrily from the room to get rid of whoever was at the door. As he walked into the living room a motionless wall of sweltering, humid air hit him; must be something wrong with the air conditioner in here, that was why he’d been in the bedroom in the middle of the day. Even the broad-leafed fern in the corner was limp, yielding to the force of the claustrophobic heat. Jeff pulled open the door just as the bell began its urgent chime once more. Linda stood there, smiling, the golden streaks in her waves of russet hair highlighted by the sun behind her. His wife, once-wife, his wife-not-yet: Linda, beaming with the undisguised extravagance of her fresh-born love for him, and in her outstretched hand a bunch of daisies. All the daisies in the world, it seemed, and on that sweetly unforgotten face shone all the ardent bliss and generosity of youth.

  Jeff felt his eyes brim with tears, but he couldn’t look away from her, couldn’t even bring himself to blink for fear of losing one precious instant of this vision that had lived in his memory for so many decades and now stood recreated in all its loving radiance before him. So long, it had been so goddamned long …

  "Aren’t you gonna ask me in?" she asked, her girlish voice at once coy and inviting.

  "Ahh … sure. Yes, I’m sorry, come on in. This is … wonderful. The flowers are great. Thank you. So unexpected."

  "Have you got something to put them in? God, it’s hotter in here than it is outside!"

  "The air conditioner’s broken, I—Just a minute, let me see if I can find something for the flowers." He glanced distractedly around the room, trying to remember if he’d owned a vase. "Maybe in the kitchen?" Linda said helpfully. "Yeah, that’s a good idea, let me just check in there. You want a beer, a Coke?"

  "Some ice water would be fine." She followed him to the cramped little kitchen, dug out a vase for the daisies as he poured her a tall glass of water from a pitcher he found in the refrigerator. "Thanks," she said, fanning herself with her open hand as Jeff took the flowers. "Could we open some windows or something?"

  "The air conditioner’s working fine in my room; why don’t we go in there?"

  "O.K. Better put the flowers in there, too. They’ll wilt in this heat."

  In the bedroom he set the daisies on a nightstand, watched her pirouette before the vents of the air conditioner, her bare skin in the backless sundress gleaming with jewels of perspiration. "Oooh, this feels nice!" she said, raising her slim arms above her head, her small, firm breasts rising beneath the thin white dress as she did so.

  They’d done exactly this before, Jeff recalled: found the vase for the flowers, come into his room to stay cool, she’d twirled and posed in just that way … how long ago? Lifetimes gone, worlds past.

  Her wide brown eyes, the liquid warmth in them as she looked at him: Jesus, no one had looked at him that way for years. Pamela had secluded herself on the top floor of the government house in Maryland as she’d threatened, had coolly averted her gaze from him on the rare occasions when she’d joined the rest of them for dinner. The eyes Jeff best remembered from the past nine years were the dangerous blue orbs of Russell Hedges, staring at him with increasing malice as the
world slid into its hellish morass of terrorist attacks and border skirmishes and U.S.-Soviet confrontations of which Jeff knew nothing, could predict nothing.

  What would become of that drastically altered world now, Jeff wondered, if it continued on its own divergent time line, followed the course he and Pamela had, with all good intentions, inadvertently set for it? A state of martial law had existed in the United States for three years already, in the aftermath of the November Squad’s destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the massacre at the United Nations Building. The 1988 presidential election had been indefinitely postponed because of the newly imposed restrictions on large public gatherings, and the heads of the three major intelligence agencies were effectively in control of the country "for the duration of the emergency."

  It had seemed likely that a fascist American state was in the making, which of course had been the goal of the international terrorist underground from the beginning. Its members had wanted nothing more than to bring on a genuinely oppressive regime in the United States, one that even ordinary citizens might consider fighting to overthrow. Unless, of course, the militantly anticommunist CIA/NSA/FBI troika that ran the interim government first decided to bring on the worldwide nuclear conflict that had been threatening to erupt since the late seventies.

  Linda stood with her naked silken back against the cool rush of air, her eyes closed and one hand holding her hair high on her head to expose her slender neck to the soothing flow. The shafts of light from the blinds showed the stretch of her dancer’s legs through the sun-sheer white dress.

  Pamela had been right to turn on him, Jeff thought with anguish; right to denounce them both for what they’d set in motion, however unwittingly or altruistically. In making themselves known to the world and in dealing with the government in exchange for the paltry information they had received, they had sown the seeds of a vicious whirlwind that some other world must now reap. It remained to be seen whether she—or either of them, for that matter—would ever be able to forgive themselves for the brutal global violence they had wrought in the name of benevolence and understanding … And it would be years, perhaps a decade or more, before he would even have the opportunity to try to talk to her again, to attempt some reconciliation of their personal estrangement and to come to terms with the tragic totality of their failure to improve mankind’s lot. That world was lost, as surely as Pamela was now lost to him for unknown years to come, perhaps forever.

  "Tickle me," Linda said in her sweet, clear voice, and for a moment Jeff didn’t know what she meant. Then he remembered the delicate touch she once had relished, the slow, gentle trailing of his fingertips across her skin, so lightly it was almost not a touch at all. He took a daisy from the bunch that she had given him, used its feathery petals to trace an imaginary line from her ear along her neck and shoulder, down her right arm, and then back up her left.

  "Ooh, so good," she whispered. "Here, do it here." She loosened the thin shoulder straps of her dress, let it fall away from her youthful breasts. Jeff caressed her with the flower, bent to kiss each nipple as it came erect. "Oh, I love that." Linda sighed. "I love you!"

  And on this perfect, twice-lived day he took his needed solace in the unquestioning passion and affection of this woman with whom those feelings had been so long denied. In her love for him, his refound love for her, he lived again.

  The citrine streaks in Linda’s hair had been lightened to an even paler yellow by the days in the Moroccan sun, making it seem as if her hair were reflecting the imagined light from the great gold sunburst tapestry behind the lengthy bar. She clutched at the bar’s railing, laughing, as the ship rolled gently in the North Atlantic swells. Her gin and tonic began to slide across the tilting oaken surface, and she caught it with a deft move, the ice in the glass tinkling with her laughter.

  "Encore, madame?" the bartender asked.

  Linda turned to Jeff. "Do you want another drink?"

  He shook his head, finished his Jack Daniel’s and soda. "Why don’t we take a walk out on the deck? It’s a warm night; I’d like to look at the ocean." He signed the bar tab with their cabin number, handed it to the bartender. "Merci, Raymond; à demain."

  "À demain, monsieur; merci."

  Jeff took Linda’s arm, and they walked through the slightly swaying Riviera Bar and out onto the Veranda Deck. The striking red-and-black smokestacks of the S.S. France jutted above them into the night sky, their sleek horizontal fins like the immobile flippers of two gigantic whales frozen in mid-leap. The great ship rose into an oncoming swell, dipped smoothly into the trough between the immense but steady waves. The stars above were unobscured by clouds, but far to the south a line of thunderheads lit the horizon with constant bursts of lightning. The storm was moving this way, though at thirty knots they’d be clear of the tempest before its violent winds and pelting rain reached this stretch of ocean.

  Heyerdahl, Jeff thought, wouldn’t have the luxury of escaping such a random fury; he’d see the coming storm with different eyes, wary and concerned at the tiller of his little papyrus boat, so far from land. It was just such a storm that had stopped him last year, forced him to abandon his damaged craft in heavy seas, six hundred miles short of his goal.

  "Do you really think he’ll make it this time?" Linda asked, staring at the jaggedly illumined clouds in the distance. She’d been thinking the same thing, wondering about the fate of the affable bearded Norwegian with whom they’d shared the labors and accomplishments of the past three weeks in the ancient fortressed port of San, where he’d built—and had last week launched—his historic, purposefully primitive little boat.

  "He’ll make it," Jeff said with assurance.

  Linda’s filmy dress fluttered in the wind from the approaching storm, and she held tightly to the ship’s railing. "Why does he fascinate you so?" she wanted to know.

  "For the same reason Michael Collins and Richard Gordon fascinate me," he told her. And Roosa, he could have added, and Worden and Mattingly and Evans, and the POWs who’d start returning three years from now, in 1973. "The isolation, the utter apartness from the rest of humanity…"

  "But Heyerdahl has a seven-man crew with him," she pointed out. "Collins and Gordon were completely alone in those capsules, for a while, anyway."

  "Sometimes isolation can be shared," Jeff said, looking at the billowing ocean. The warm smell of the oncoming tropical disturbance made him think of the Mediterranean, of a day when that same scent had drifted through the open window of a villa in Majorca. The peppery savor of paella, the lacerating wistfulness of Laurindo Almeida’s guitar, the mingled joy and grief in Pamela’s eyes, her dying eyes.

  Linda saw the shadow that had crossed Jeff’s face, and she moved her hand to his, gripped it as firmly as she had the ship’s railing. "I worry about you sometimes," she said. "All this talk about loneliness and isolation … I don’t know if this project is such a good idea. It seems like it’s getting you too depressed."

  He pulled her to him, kissed the top of her head. "No," he reassured her with a smile full of affection, "it’s not depressing me. Just making me thoughtful, that’s all."

  But that wasn’t entirely true, he knew; his meditative state had brought about the undertaking that obsessed him now, not the reverse. Linda’s presence, her unaccustomed loving openness, had calmed his battered senses since that day in August 1968 when he had resumed this life to find her waiting at his door with an armful of fresh-cut daisies. But not even the unexpected rebirth of all they’d shared so long ago had been enough to make him forget the torments he had indirectly inflicted on the world through Russell Hedges in that previous life, or the estrangement all of that had forced between him and Pamela. Guilt and remorse were inescapable; they formed an unremitting undercurrent that seemed to constantly erode the foundations of his resurrected love for the woman he once had married. And that ongoing diminution led to new modes of remorse, a present guilt made all the worse by his conviction that he should be able to change his feelings,
let go the past and give himself as fully to Linda as she now did to him.

  He’d immediately quit his reporter’s job at WIOD in Miami, couldn’t stomach the daily task of seeking and observing and describing human tragedy, not after all he held himself responsible for during those dead years at the government retreat in Maryland. That October, Jeff had waited until Detroit was down three games to one; then he’d put his savings on the Tigers to sweep the last three games of the Series. Mickey Lolich had brought it home for him, as Jeff had known he would.

  The stake had enabled him to get a new apartment on the water at Pompano Beach, closer to where Linda still lived with her parents and attended college. He’d met her every afternoon when she was done with classes, swam with her in the gentle ocean or sat beside her by the pool at his place as she studied. She’d moved in with him that spring, told her parents she was "getting a place of my own." They endured the fiction, never visited the tenth-floor oceanfront apartment that Jeff and Linda shared, and continued to welcome him into their home for Sunday dinner every week.

  It had been that summer, 1969, when he’d conceived the project that now consumed him. Linda’s father had planted the seed in his mind one Sunday evening over coffee at the dinner table. Jeff’s habit by then had become to ignore the news, to politely tune out any discussion of national or world events. But that week, his former father-in-law had seized on a single topic, wouldn’t let it go: the just-aborted voyage of Thor Heyerdahl and the Norseman’s quixotic attempt to prove that early explorers, sailing in papyrus-reed boats/could have brought Egyptian culture to the Americas more than three thousand years before Columbus.