Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

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  To David Hartwell and Jerry Pournelle, two giants who made history themselves

  Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly . . . It may be that there is no such thing as an equable motion, whereby time may be accurately measured. All motions may be accelerated and retarded, but the flowing of absolute time is not liable to any change.

  —Sir Isaac Newton

  The Beginning

  People living deeply have no fear of death.

  —Anaïs Nin

  The old blue Volvo pulls slowly out of George Washington University, turns right, and creeps down the dark, snowy street. The late-evening traffic is light.

  Charlie Moment ignores the dashboard light and buzz telling him he hasn’t fastened his seat belt. He sits back and listens to Eliot Karpinsky’s new audiobook on his Volvo’s bashed-up cassette player. The voice blurs and slurs because the car stereo is nearly gone, but he can make it out: “The corporations don’t even want to compete anymore. They stand in line for government handouts, less in need than our poorest poor.” Karpinsky’s tenor voice rings with sour conviction. “Greed is their only mission.”

  Charlie expels a long, sad “ahhhh.” He thinks of his green years, demonstrating in Chicago as a high school student, the McCarthy campaign. Hell, no! We won’t go! In the days when his back was strong, his hair dark brown and long. Not like today. Not like goddamn gray middle age.

  His glasses are grimy, so he rubs them with his free hand. The defrost isn’t working well and the car windows keep fogging. Headlights ahead wear halos of red and white. He clicks on his seat belt. A woman’s voice interrupts Karpinsky: “Please insert cassette five for the remainder of chapter twenty-four.” The cassette pops out automatically and the radio comes on.

  “. . . today’s hearing on the Whitewater scandal revealed new inconsistencies in the testimony . . .”

  “Damn,” says Charlie out loud, turning down the volume. He hates the way they break up audiobook cassettes in the middle of chapters. Couldn’t they use forty-five minutes per side, instead of thirty? He flips to a rock station. It’s playing a Fleetwood Mac song, “The Chain,” with Stevie Nicks growling “Damn your love, damn your lies” over a grinding electric guitar. The light ahead turns red and Charlie stops. He undoes his seat belt and leans over to rummage through the cassettes on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Some ungraded exam papers fall off the car seat and slap onto the pile of cassettes.

  A car horn honks behind him. Charlie looks up and sees that the light has turned green. He steps on the gas, looking down at the jumble of cassettes and exam papers. He dreads the night’s grading, alone in his apartment. It’s his birthday, but he has made a point of not mentioning it to his friends. He doesn’t want to celebrate anything so soon after the final divorce decree. It’s easier to suffer alone, without people trying to cheer him up.

  He sits back and realizes he should in some abstract sense be satisfied. Still alive, at least. Maybe a bottle of a good Cabernet can rub those cares away. . . .

  A blare of horns. A big black semi looms on his right. My God, I forgot the damn seat belt. . . .

  With a shrill scream of tearing metal, it plows through his right door. Light explodes in his head. Pain cuts sharp across him. The truck rolls over his Volvo, crushing the passenger compartment.

  Charlie sees a bright-red color. Feels an overwhelming pressure. Ahhh . . . A hard, dark nothing swallows him.

  * * *

  Part I

  * * *

  Tangent to the Circle of Life

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven!

  —William Wordsworth, The Prelude

  1 Charlie’s body jerks backward against a mattress. His arms and legs snap inward to clasp his gut. Panic squeezes the air from his lungs with a grunt, and he can hear his heart pounding raggedly. His skin is clammy with sweat. A tight fear clamps his chest.

  Reason returns in slow pulses. The car. The truck. Where am I? Hospital room? No. My apartment. A nightmare.

  Dark silence all around him. The fear eases, loses its grip, and his legs relax, so his feet can touch the bottom sheet of the bed. He makes his fists unclench.

  But something isn’t right. His body feels wrong. His hands look for his gut—and find it gone. Where his comfortable paunch and frizzy mat of hair were, he finds smooth skin and taut muscle.

  Faster than thought he grabs for his genitals. Still there, limp. He is still a man and himself. He starts to relax again, his breathing slower. He slowly runs his hands over his body, discovering hard, smooth surfaces that are strange yet oddly familiar.

  He reaches for his jaw with both hands. The beard is gone. Am I dreaming? Charlie wonders. He chuckles. What a joke—first I die, and then I have my teenage body. Still dreaming. Charlie swings his legs out of the bed and sits up quickly. I’m moving so fast in this dream, he thinks. He rubs the side of his head and finds long, wavy hair, slightly greasy.

  He sniffs his hand. The hair smells of smoke. No, not cigarette smoke. Dope.

  He laughs to himself, a dry chuckle, then reaches for the dim outline of a lamp. He finds its switch with fingers that seem to know where it is. The room bursts with light, and he flinches. A multicolored blur greets him.

  Ah. Right, I’m still myopic in my dream. His hands explore the bedside table and find wire-rimmed glasses. He puts them on and his vision is perfect.

  There is a poster of Jimi Hendrix in a surrealistic painted silk jacket, flanked by Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, all three sporting Afros and wild looks. Beside it is a poster of Cream, Eric Clapton in a dated bomber jacket. Just like the poster he had on his bedroom wall in high school . . .

  This bedroom wall. And this bedroom. He feels a cool prickling at the back of his neck.

  Then Charlie notices a Garrard record player stacked on top of a Marantz receiver. His Marantz receiver. He reaches out and touches the large volume button on the Marantz. The feeling of the cool metal terrifies him. I’ve never had such detailed sensation in a dream before.

  He turns to look around and sees the full-length mirror on the door. He sees himself at sixteen, long hair, smooth face, large dark eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses, hairless chest with its swelling pectoral muscles.

  Charlie sits down on the bed and begins to cry.

  I’ve lost it. My second divorce and my dead-end career at GWU and I’ve lost it. I’m insane. They probably have me on drugs up to my gills, and I’m wearing a straitjacket in the loony bin.

  This is how insanity feels. Not like those movies with special effects. S
harp and clear and still crazy.

  He flops back onto the bed. It is just too confusing, too much—dying, and then this. His young body finishes its sobbing; the tears ebb away. Who needs self-pity? I’m forty-eight years old and I will survive this, too. They’ll keep me on the staff in Social Studies. I have tenure—that must cover even psychotic breakdown. Who else will teach those first-years American Government 101? Nobody else is willing.

  He sits up again and looks down at his naked body. He notices a thick leather band around his right wrist. It has a peace sign emblazoned on it. Charlie snorts. What a detailed hallucination!

  He looks at himself in the mirror again, hesitantly at first, and then with a smile. Long brown hair, dead white skin, pug nose, and large eyes. Dude, you’re in the sixties! No HIV, no Moral Majority, the best music, no heartburn—and . . . Charlie looks down. Energy flows through his muscles as his heart speeds up, a sensation he has not felt for decades. Maybe I can get something out of this hallucination.

  He looks around the room again. A stack of textbooks on a chair, with two three-ring binders below them, stuffed with paper. His chest of drawers has a red T-shirt hanging on a handle, with another peace symbol silk-screened on it in black. A pair of blue jeans crumpled on the floor by the door.

  His alarm clock says 4:32, and the dark hallway outside is leaden, scented with a faint flower aroma. Something Mom used to spray . . . A fresh calendar shows that it’s January 1968, the days blocked out beneath a naked girl draped over a motorcycle. 1968. Every day is crossed out before January 14, and that day is outlined in black, with Birthday! written inside.

  This is, this was, my birthday, Charlie thinks. Thirty-two years ago. I’m sixteen. Hah! Sixteen, ready to go, no back taxes, no alimony, no backache. He looks in the mirror again and puts his hand on his stomach. He looks at his strong, young chest and sighs.

  The sharp, lancing shriek of the truck crushing the life out of him briefly comes back, but he pushes it away with a shudder. Maybe I’m in heavy sedation during surgery, he thinks. The image of an operating room, bright lights, green-coated surgeons, and white-clad nurses hovering over his illuminated body comes to him. But it doesn’t stay. This world does.

  Screw it! Let’s see how long I last in 1968. My parents are still alive, probably down the hall. My little sister, Catherine, had, has, the bedroom next to them, thirteen-year-old terror that she is, baiting me about girls, Trudy especially, every chance she gets. But I know she dreamed about Paul McCartney, like every other pubescent girl on the block. Dreams, he corrects himself. Let’s do this right.

  His young body is fully energized, so Charlie goes over the contents of the room, his hands carelessly moving over his youthful diversions. There are my albums; those were—are—my paperbacks: Hesse, Castaneda, Marx, Huxley, Orwell, Chandler, Hemingway, crisp Heinlein, obtuse Marcuse, wild Lafferty, Greenway. Greenway? I don’t remember Greenway. Is there a glitch in my hallucination?

  He opens each drawer in his chest of drawers, inspecting the clothing, carefully cleaned and folded by his mother. Even his underwear, uniformly white. Did they have colored underwear in 1968? No memory of that.

  Charlie lies back on his bed, letting the outer world slip away, breathing easy, and . . . recalls. He can remember all his academic history, his doctoral thesis, troubles with women along the way. But below that lies a whole plane of teenage Charlie, sharp and clear and somehow more immediate. A layer of life led. That time he was afraid he’d drown in Lake Alice, the late-summer water dragging at him like syrup. His F in ninth-grade science. The heavy, damp smell of the boys’ locker room. For a long while he lies there, mind spinning.

  2 When dawn comes, Charlie is dressed in his red T-shirt and jeans, staring out the window. A thin layer of snow covers the brown grass of his suburban Chicagoland home. The large houses, bare trees standing silent black vigil, waiting for the spring. The sky the color of a curate’s egg, he thinks. Curate’s egg? Charlie reproves himself—not a phrase that a teenager would use.

  The question of hallucination or insanity or surgical coma has faded. This is real. Or real enough, anyway. He thinks about how to get through this experience, however long it is going to last, and whatever it is.

  A knock at the door. “Charles, can I come in?” It’s his father’s voice, all baritone certainty, thanks to lungs already starting to hollow from smoking.

  “Uh, sure, Dad.” Charlie’s voice is a bit higher than he remembers.

  His father comes in, wearing his dressing gown over pajamas. He holds out his hand, the sour smell of his first cigarette starting up Charlie’s nose. “Congratulations on sixteen years, son.”

  Charlie faces his father, who died in 1992 at the age of sixty-six, an agonized victim of lung cancer and the inability to imagine his own death. Now his father is just forty-two, still with some hair on the top of his head and a firm handshake.

  Charlie looks away, swallows hard, and looks back into his father’s eyes. Charlie tries to hide the compassion welling up in him, but he fears that his face is betraying him anyway.

  “A big day, I know, Charlie.” His father’s smile creases his smoker’s face. The wrinkles are all kind. “I wanted to get you up before everybody else, but I see you’re already awake.”

  Charlie nods and looks down. He is grateful that his long hair hides his face. His throat is tight and he cannot speak.

  “Come on, son. Something to show you.” A wink.

  They go down to the garage, padding lightly on their feet to avoid waking up Charlie’s mother and sister. Charlie’s father opens the door from the kitchen to the garage.

  There stands the Dodge Dart that he got for his sixteenth birthday, his father’s old car, before his father got the Cadillac.

  “It’s yours, son. I signed the papers on a Cadillac yesterday. Pass your driver’s test, and you’re a grown man.”

  Memories of the car descend on Charlie—hanging out in the bright neon drive-ins with James, the sparkling beers in their brown bottles, caressing Trudy’s body when they parked in the dark. His eyes fill with tears.

  His father puts his arm on Charlie’s shoulders. “I know it’s a shock, son, but you’ve been a good boy—mostly. It’s time you get a little freedom.”

  Charlie looks straight ahead at the Dodge Dart, tears making his vision watery, and says in a voice that shakes only slightly, “Thank you, Dad.”

  He sits in the car after Dad goes back in to get coffee started. The vinyl scent startles him. Indeed, everything in this refreshed world seems sharp, clear, vital.

  He snaps on the car radio, a plastic knob. “All You Need Is Love” soars from the grille, the Beatles at the end of their middle period. He turns the dial and “Brown Eyed Girl” eases into the air, Van Morrison waxing nostalgic in rich tones. He twirls again, finds “Ruby Tuesday,” by the Stones, swarming into the close, sultry space, sad and wry. Another turn gets some country stuff, and then another brings him the roar of “I Can See for Miles,” by the Who. He leans back and lets it wash over him.

  * * *

  That day Charlie and his family had gone to the tennis club for lunch, so they are going to do it all over again. He can’t remember this part as well.

  Riding in his mother’s crisp two-tone Ford Galaxie 500, his father driving, Charlie contemplates his sister, Catherine, with the interest of an entomologist looking at a brightly colored caterpillar. She wears a powder-blue parka with a trim of fake white fur, her blond hair pulled back, eyes darting. Her breath condenses on the window as she stares dreamily at the Sunday-morning streets passing by.

  “Mom, Charlie is getting weird again.” Her voice is a whine in the key of C minor.

  “Now, Cath, you know it’s Charlie’s birthday. He has a lot to think about.”

  If they but knew . . .

  “Tell him to think about it without looking at me.”

  His mother expels a voluminous sigh. “Let’s have a nice day, okay?”

  Catherine pointed
ly crosses her arms and stares out the window again, in full sulk.

  Charlie looks down at his young hands sticking out of the sleeves of his dark-green parka. They feel slightly cool because the car’s heater can’t quite warm up the backseat without toasting the driver. Charlie still can’t get over how good his body feels.

  They sit down for lunch at the club, his father already changed into his tennis whites. He will only drink a Pepsi. Charlie can see the veins in his father’s neck clearly, the blood pressure already creeping up. It will cause the postoperative stroke when they extract the cancerous lobe from his left lung. Or it did. Charlie shakes his head from the confusion.

  “Trouble, honey?” his mother says. Her face crinkles warmly, though it still has its customary shadows. She will commit suicide in the early stages of Alzheimer’s in 1998, at seventy. Or she did, Charlie thinks. He looks at his mother, then looks away and tries to hide his emotion. His mouth wobbles, eyes go blurred.

  “Charlie’s getting weird again,” says Catherine. “It’s drugs!”

  Ned Moment cuffs the back of his daughter’s head, quickly but gently. “Leave your brother alone.”

  Catherine crosses her arms and looks away, kicking a table leg with quick feet. Some soda spills from Charlie’s untouched Pepsi.

  His mother looks at Catherine steadily. “I think you need to get changed for your tennis lesson, young lady. You obviously aren’t interested in lunch.”

  There is a quiet pause while Catherine’s brow furrows, and then she stomps off to the ladies’ locker room.

  Charlie had forgotten how irritating she could be. Ned laughs, reaches for his squash racket, kisses his wife, and is gone.

  Charlie is left alone with his mother. Will she see through him?