Replay

'Well, that was my last major work. Somehow I just … dried up after that, I don’t know. There was so much I wanted to express, but I either didn’t dare to or I couldn’t capture it all on canvas any longer. I don’t know whether my art failed me or the other way around, but I essentially stopped painting around 1975. That was the same year Dustin and I separated. No major blowup; it was just over, and we both knew it. Like my painting.

'I guess it had something to do with the fact that I was halfway through that replay, and knew that everything I was achieving would be wiped out again in a few years. So I just became a sort of butterfly, roaming around the world and hanging out with people like Roman Polanski and Lauren Hutton and Sam She-pard. With them, there was a sense of … transient community, a network of interesting friendships that never grew too close and could be stopped or started again at any time, depending on your mood and what country you were in at the time. It didn’t really matter.'

'Nothing matters, 'Jeff said. 'I’ve felt that way myself, more than once.'

'It’s a depressing way to live,' Pamela said. 'You have an illusion of freedom and openness, but after a while everything just blurs together. People, cities, ideas, faces … they’re all part of some shifting reality that never comes into any clear focus and never leads anywhere.'

'I know what you mean,' Jeff said, thinking of the years of random, transitory sex he and Sharla had gone through together. 'It seems appropriate to our circumstances—but only in theory. The reality doesn’t work out too well.'

'No. Anyway, I drifted like that for several years, and when the time came I rented a quiet, isolated little house on Majorca. I was there alone for a month, just waiting to die. And I promised myself … I decided, during that month, that next time, this time, things would be different. That I had to make an impact on the world, change things.'

Jeff looked at her skeptically. 'You did that when you were a doctor. And when the next replay began, the children you had treated were doomed to go through their pain all over again. Nothing had changed.'

She shook her head impatiently. 'That’s a false analogy. In the hospital, I was doing patchwork repairs on a few individuals. Purely physical work, and limited in scope. It was well intentioned, but meaningless.'

'And now you want to save the whole world’s collective soul, is that it?'

'I want to awaken humanity to what’s taking place. I want to teach them to be aware of these cycles, just as you and I are conscious of them. That’s the only way we—any of us, all of us—can ever break out of the pattern, don’t you see?'

'No.' Jeff sighed. 'I don’t see. What makes you think people can be taught to carry over that awareness from one replay to the next? You and I have been through this thing three times now, and we’ve known from the beginning that it was happening to us. Nobody had to tell us.'

'I believe we were meant to lead the others. At least I believe that about myself; I never expected you to show up. Can’t you understand what an important task we’ve been entrusted with?'

'By whom, or what? God? This whole experience has made me agree even more with Camus: If there is a God, I despise him.'

'Call it God, call it the Atman, call it whatever you like. You know the Gita:

The recollected mind is awake
In the knowledge of the Atman
Which is dark night to the ignorant:
The ignorant are awake in their sense-life
Which they think is daylight:
To the seer it is darkness.

'We can illuminate that darkness,' she said with unexpected fervor. 'We can—'

'Look, let’s drop the spiritual stuff for a minute. Finish your story. What have you done during this replay? How did you manage to get that movie made?'

Pamela shrugged. 'It wasn’t difficult, not when I was putting up most of the money myself. I bided my time in school, making plans. Motion pictures were obviously the most effective way to communicate my ideas to a mass audience, and I was already familiar with the industry through Dustin and all the people I’d known the last time through. So when I was eighteen I started making some of the same investments you’ve talked about: IBM, the mutual funds, Polaroid … You know what the market was like in the sixties. It was hard to lose money even if you were buying blindly, and for someone with any knowledge of the future it was easy to parlay a few thousand dollars into several million in three or four years.

'I’m proud of the screenplay I did, but I’d had many, many years to think about it. After I’d written it and formed my production company, it was just a matter of hiring the right people. I knew who they all were and what their strengths would be. It all fell together exactly the way I’d planned it.'

'And now—'

'Now it’s time to move on to the next step. It’s time to alter the consciousness of the world, and I can do it.' She leaned forward, looked at him intently. 'We can do it … if you’ll join me.'

TWELVE

'… apparent murder-suicide. Initial reports indicate a scene of awesome mass carnage, bodies strewn everywhere about the settlement, the corpses of infants still in their dead mothers' arms. A few of the victims had been shot to death, but most seem to have taken their own lives, in a macabre ritual unlike any—'

Jeff reached for the frequency dial of the shortwave set, tuned it away from the BBC news broadcast until he found a jazz program.

The coffeepot began to burble. He poured himself a mug, added a dash of Myers’s Rum for extra warmth. There’d been a fresh snowfall last night, six inches or more; one windblown drift already covered the lower half of the kitchen window. He really should shovel it away this afternoon, he thought. And it was time to get out to the storage shed, split another batch of cedar kindling, and haul some more white oak firewood up to the back porch. But he didn’t feel like doing any of that, not right now, at least.

Maybe he was still vulnerable to the general malaise that always gripped the world the week of the Jonestown horror, despite his having heard the loathsome tale revealed afresh three times before. Whatever it was, all he wanted to do today was sit by the crackling wood stove and read. He was halfway through the second volume of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, and was planning to reread A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century next. Both had been published just this year, but he’d first read the Tuchman book over twenty years ago, the summer he took Judy and the children across Soviet Asia on the Trans-Siberian Express. Just looking at the cover of the volume brought back memories of the vast steppes, the infinity of silver birches outside Novosibirsk, and little April’s fascination with the ancient yellow samovar in the corridor of their railway car. The conductress had kept the samovar steaming with chunks of slow-burning peat, had served up endless glasses of hot tea from it on the six-thousand-mile journey from Moscow to Khabarovsk, north of Manchuria. The metal holders for the glasses had been engraved with images of cosmonauts and Sputniks. At the end of the trip the conductress had given April a pair of them to take home with her. Jeff remembered seeing his adopted daughter curled up before the fireplace in the house on West Paces Ferry Road in Atlanta, sipping a glass of hot milk in one of those holders, just a week before he’d died …

He cleared his throat, blinked away the memories. Maybe it would be best if he did do some chores today, kept himself physically occupied instead of just sitting in the cabin and thinking. There’d be enough