Second Chance

by Chet Williamson

  "I did. But that life was the dream. I'm here now, with you, and our life together is what's real. Everything else is a lie. And there's no 'should' or 'shouldn't' involved. It's what's here. It's where we are. And we can't change a thing about it." He kissed her nose and smiled. "And you know what? I don't want to."

  She smiled back. "I don't either. I love you, and my family, and I loved Europe and I love England, and let's stay here another week and be tourists again."

  He laughed. "I can't. Tomorrow night's the end, babe. Next morning back we go, like it or not. Haven't you been on the road enough?"

  "Not really. The kids have though. I'm glad we brought them."

  "Me too." And he was. It was the first time they had ever come along on a tour, and they had somehow held on to their excitement through the long weeks of strange languages and stranger food. Peter was generally a picky eater, but for the first time his adventurousness crossed over into cuisine. He ate everything, and the odder it was the more he wanted to try it. Tracy had mentioned sotto voce to Woody that the boy never would have touched such dishes at home.

  Louisa, on the other hand, stuck to American food when she could, and was much more sedate about their new surroundings than her younger brother. Still, she looked at nearly everything with wonder in her eyes, and even took his hand from time to time when they were walking in foreign streets. Woody felt blessed many times over that he had children, and, most of all, that he had Tracy.

  "It'll be good to get home," he said, and leaned over and turned out the light. She turned her back to him, and he nestled against her like a second spoon, putting his arm around her. She took his hand, kissed it, and pressed it against her. It was the way they usually slept. He wondered how she was able to fall asleep with his breath fluttering against the back of her neck, but she always did, and quickly.

  "How I love you," he whispered, but there was no response. She was asleep, and he closed his eyes too, trading gray darkness for black.

  Sleep did not come, however, and in a while he rolled over on his back, opened his eyes, and stared at the patterns the London street lights made on the walls as they crept around the edges of the curtains.

  She had dreamed of Keith again, of being with him and dying with him. Several weeks before, after the second similar dream, she had told him that she felt as if Keith wanted her somehow. Woody didn't understand at first, and then she explained to him that she thought he didn't want to die alone, and what Woody and the rest had done in taking her away, into her other life, had upset some cosmic balance, and that she was having the dreams because it was Keith's way of telling her that what had happened was wrong.

  As he had tonight, Woody told her that it was foolish, that she was talking about vengeful ghosts, and that Keith was not a ghost. Of that much he was sure.

  But his certainty was not the result of a disbelief in the paranormal. The presence of his family was proof that there were more mysteries to existence than he had ever imagined. His doubts about Keith's ghostliness came rather from the conviction that Keith was no longer dead, that the closing door he recalled was more than a fancy.

  He hadn't told Tracy, but he had been having his own dreams about Keith, dreams in which Keith and he were both young, and were sitting in the apartment drinking beers, and Keith was talking about bombing something, and Woody said No, you can't bomb that building, and Keith said Not the building, but everything, and just looked at Woody. Then Woody said Everything? And Keith said Yes, you, me, everything, and just sat and looked at Woody with no expression on his face, and Woody was afraid in the dream, and it seemed as if he sat there looking at Keith looking back at him until he awoke in the morning, very tired, as if he had not slept at all.

  He had not wanted to have that dream again, but he had, several times. Keith seemed to be making his way into both his and Tracy's mind.

  He wondered what his children dreamed about, if they saw a man they didn't know, who said strange things to them. They could have no dreams of the other life, for they had never lived in it. Their existence was in this life, this time, this track only, so how could they dream of Keith Aarons?

  They could not, and he would not either, he told himself, as he rolled onto his side and put an arm around his sleeping wife. He thought of music, keeping tunes in his head until sleep took him again, and when he awoke he was refreshed, and did not remember if he had dreamed.

  The matinee that day at the Albert Hall marked his last performance in Britain, and the end of the European tour. A recovered Michael Lester had joined the group in Paris, but they had made Ivan Redburn, who had so competently replaced him, a fifth member for the tour, playing piccolo bass in counterpoint to Michael's double bass. Woody liked the sound of it, and thought about keeping Ivan on permanently when they returned to the states, if Ivan agreed and Michael was willing to share the bass lines.

  After the first set, Woody went backstage, got a drink of water, and swabbed his oboe. He set it in the case and walked about backstage to stretch his legs and get the blood flowing, after standing still for so long.

  Then, on a production table, he saw a dogeared paperback copy of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf.

  He had not seen the book in years, and recalled that it had been Keith Aaron's favorite novel. He had read it, but it had been well over twenty years before, and he remembered nothing, not even the framework of a plot.

  Woody picked up the volume and opened it at random, near the back. The first thing he read was:

  Make a little room on the crippled earth! Depopulate it so that the grass may grow again, and woods, meadows, heather, stream and moor return to this world of dust and concrete.

  The lump that had come to his throat at the first sentence now thickened, and he knew what Keith had meant in the dream, and he knew that he had heard that door close in reality, and knew that Keith was alive, and because he was alive he, and no one else, was Pan.

  It came as less a surprise to Woody than he thought it should, and he realized that he had known it all along, but had not wanted to admit it to himself. It meant too many things.

  It meant that he had been responsible for everything that Pan had done, the lives he had taken, the property he had destroyed, the families he had ruined. It meant that if they had not gone back in time and returned the way they did, that none of Pan's actions would have occurred.

  It meant that in exchange for Tracy, Peter, and Louisa, he had turned loose a monster on the world.

  Orpheus. Yes, he was Orpheus, all right, playing his music and leading Eurydice out of the hell of fiery and painful death. But he had led out the demons as well.

  "Oh God," he said softly, "I knew it. I knew all the time."

  "Yo, Woody!" He looked up and saw Jim Columbo's shaggy head around a curtain leg. "Almost time, bud." Woody nodded. "You okay?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine." He made himself walk toward the dressing room. "I'll get my horn."

  "Would be advisable," said Jim, then smiled as if to alleviate whatever downer he thought was bothering Woody. "Come on, man, that's an evening crowd in the afternoon, huh?"

  Woody smiled back and nodded, got his oboe, and placed the reed in his mouth to moisten it. But he couldn't think about the music. All he could think about was Keith Aarons and Pan and people dying and Jesus but what have I done.

  He knew now, but he had to be sure. And he thought of the way just as he stepped onto the stage and the applause began and swelled, and people began to cheer, and he stood in the light.

  Woody would play. He owed them that. He would try to put everything out of his head but music. And afterwards, when he returned to the states, he would go back to Iselin and, if he could, learn just what had happened at the ROTC building all those years before.

  He would find out who had really died that night, leaving Keith Aarons free to become Pan.

  And as he began to play, the music took control as it always did, weaving its web through the hall, binding everyone who listened, until, bound
too, Woody Robinson surrendered his mind to it.

  He ended the set, not with an up tempo tune as he usually did, but with "Tracy's Song." The crowd applauded for twenty minutes afterward, but he gave them no encore.

  Chapter 25

  Woody flew to Pittsburgh six days after he returned to California. There he rented a car and drove once again to Iselin.

  By the time he pulled in to the Holiday Inn parking lot, it was dark, and raining heavily. In his room, he paced like an angry bear. There was nothing he could do until the next day, but he knew he could not sleep, not yet. He tried to watch television for a while, thinking about Tracy and her questions about his return to Iselin and his insistence that she should not come along. He knew that his reasons had sounded feeble—something about tying up a few loose ends, and just checking on some things he still didn't understand. She had been reluctant to let him go, especially after they had been away from home for so many weeks, but when he told her that it was important, and to trust him as she had always done before, she relented, but told him not to be gone long.

  Thinking of her made him pick up the phone and call their home. Hearing her voice was wonderful. There were still times when he scarcely believed in the miraculous reality of her existence, and to touch her or hear her speak at such times was nearly epiphanic. He told her he had arrived safely, told her he loved her, told her he would be home as quickly as he could. If he could have, he would have told her everything in his heart, the fears of what he had done, the unforeseen crime that may have been committed in the name of her resurrection.

  But he said nothing of that. Even if he learned that everything he suspected was true, he did not know how he could bring himself to tell her.

  After he hung up, he lay on the bed for a long time, then closed his eyes. He thought about getting in the car and driving over to the apartment, but it was still raining hard, and besides, what would it prove? The summer session had ended, so the place would be vacant, and he could not get in anyway. What would he do? Sit in the car and look at the dark windows through the wet windshield? Did he think he would see Keith there? Or Pan? Or whatever it was that Keith had become?

  No, he would try to sleep. He had to rest, because tomorrow could be tedious, and he could not afford to go to sleep before he found what he was looking for, before he found who the hell had died in that explosion instead of Keith Aarons.

  And suddenly exhaustion caught up with his racing mind, and he fell asleep on the motel room bed with his clothes and shoes on, the lights burning, and the sounds and water color images of the television set. He awoke several hours later to white noise, shed his clothes, turned off the lights, and slept again until dawn.

  ~*~

  "It's a pretty weird state of affairs," Woody told the young woman behind the reception desk of Iselin's administrative building. The way she had smiled when he told her his name indicated that she had at least heard of him.

  "I knew this kid back in the sixties. . . well, he wouldn't be a kid anymore," Woody said, smiling. "He was in this blues band. Played harp, uh, harmonica, and sang. And he wrote this one song that I never forgot. And I'd kind of like to do a cover of it with my group—you know, record it? But I sure don't want to steal it, so I'd like to get in touch with him and make some arrangements."

  "Well," the young woman said, "the Alumni Association sends out questionnaires every few years, so if he's returned them his current address should be on file. What's his name?"

  Woody grinned sheepishly. "That's the problem. I don't remember. I don't recall if I ever really knew his name."

  "Did you look through your yearbook? Maybe you'd recognize his face."

  "That's another problem. I've looked through the yearbook for my class of '70, but I don't know if he was my age or younger. I don't even know if he graduated. Seems to me he kind of dropped from sight. Maybe he dropped out or was drafted or something."

  The woman pursed her lips. "Then how do you expect to find him?"

  "Well, I kind of remember when he sort of disappeared—sometime in the fall of '69."

  Woody held his breath, but the woman's face gave no response to the mention of the date. The bombing had, after all, been more than twenty years before. It might linger in campus legend, but who this girl's age would draw a connection?

  Woody went on. "I thought I might be able to get the names of the students who left school around that time. Then maybe check against the pictures you have on file here. We all had photos taken as freshmen, I think."

  "Oh yes. They're stapled to all the files. Before 1975 we just have student cards with photos, addresses at the time, height, weight, that kind of thing. There's also a space that shows when they graduated or left the school. But since you don't know what class this student was in, someone would have to check every single card from several years." She shrugged helplessly. "And we just don't have the manpower to do it. It could take hours, even days of digging to come up with your name."

  "It's not computerized or anything?"

  She shook her head. "Not that far back."

  "I'd be willing to do the digging. Unless, of course, there's some regulation against it."

  "Well," the woman said, "the grades are kept elsewhere—they are all computerized because of transcripts. There's really no confidential information on the cards, so I don't see why you couldn't go through them. Would you mind waiting for a moment while I check?" she asked, gesturing with her head to the chairs in the waiting room.

  Woody walked back into the room, but was too nervous to sit down. Instead he stood and listened as the woman pressed a button on her phone and spoke softly into the mouthpiece. He tried to overhear what she was saying, but could not. So he walked around the room, looking at the black and white framed photographs hanging on the wall, photos taken as long as fifty years before, showing different sides of student life.

  There was a picture dated 1956 of ROTC pledges standing at attention in what Woody recognized as the Haines Hall parking lot. Another was dated Homecoming 1944, and showed a young woman with wavy hair waving from a float laden with paper flowers. Behind her was a cutout of an American Eagle with the legend, "V for Victory."

  Unofficial campus activities were pictured too. Woody smiled at the photo of a thirty foot long human chain hanging from a balcony of Coombs Hall, which had been torn down in the seventies. There were even a few shots from Woody's era—a candlelit campus protest, with three students' faces visible. He recognized one of them, an English lit major even more flaky than most of them had been. He didn't know the other two.

  There was also a shot of the Student Union coffee shop, scene of so many political and/or jock discussions. It seemed to be the only place on campus where everyone from football jerk to ROTC creep to math nerd to semi-pro radical could get together and not call each other commies or faggots or pigs. In the foreground of the shot were six students, three men and three women. He recognized a couple of them—the black student who had been his freshman lab partner in bio, and the girl, a year younger than himself, who he had come on to once at a party just for the hell of it and could have easily slept with if he hadn't remembered Tracy.

  He drew closer to the picture and squinted, trying to make out the title of the books that sat in piles on the table in front of the students trying to look oh so mature and sophisticated with their too relaxed postures and cigarettes that drifted smoke into one another's faces. Maybe, Woody thought, that's why their eyes were half closed.

  The photo was too grainy for him to make out the print on the book covers, but by drawing close to the picture he saw something else. There were two male students sitting at the next table. One had his back turned, but Woody recognized him anyway. There was a certain way the boy held his long-haired head, cocked to one side, chin thrust toward the other student like a spear.

  It was Keith Aarons. Woody had no doubt of it.

  But it was the other boy that gripped his attention, a boy with long dark hair much like Keith's, b
ut parted in the middle. His face was only a small blur, but there was enough of it to make out the expression of awe, of intense concentration on whatever it was the student across the table was saying.

  No, Woody thought, Keith wasn't saying. Keith was pontificating, preaching, proselytizing. Keith was making another convert to the cause, a follower who would be willing to follow him into . . .

  Into what? Into the hell of a bomb blast that would rip him apart, make him unrecognizable, sear the flesh off his fingertips, destroy his face, even shred the teeth blasted from his jaw?

  And Woody remembered, remembered in this life, the boy he had seen Keith talking to, not just in the coffee shop, but at some of the rallies. He thought that one time Keith had even introduced him to the boy, but he couldn't recall his name.

  Woody hissed air between his teeth. It was hard enough to remember the details of things that had happened twenty years before in his original track of existence, let alone in a life that had happened only vaguely, in remote and seemingly manufactured memory. But at least now he had a face, if ever so obscure, and the frail thought that the boy had been younger.

  "Mr. Robinson?"

  He turned around guiltily, and saw the receptionist standing in the doorway smiling at him.

  "It's all right for you to go through the photo cards if you like. There are thousands of them, though."

  He smiled back gratefully. "That's all right. I think I can remember what he looks like. Could I start with the class of '71?"

  It took Woody four hours to find Benjamin Wallace, three of which were spent in futile roamings through the class of '71. When he started looking through the class of '72, he covered the A's and B's, then went backwards, flipping from Roberta Zielinski toward the front. When Wallace's moony face looked into his, Woody knew he had his man. Beneath and beside the photo the data read:

  BENJAMIN THOMAS WALLACE

  Ht. 5'10" Wt. 158

  335 Park Circle Eyes: Brown Hair: Brown

  Pittsburgh PA 15219 PH: 412-555-5398