Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  Now he can hear what his father is saying. “. . . overrunning American positions all through South Vietnam. We’re taking a lot of casualties. You should see it, Charlie.”

  “Okay, Dad. I’ll be right down.” January 30, the 1968 Tet Offensive. The final nail in the coffin of the Johnson administration. Charlie thinks briefly about all the good things that LBJ managed to accomplish before Vietnam sucked him into rigid anticommunism. Then he gets dressed in jeans and a T-shirt to join his father in front of the TV.

  * * *

  The rest of the week brings the war in Vietnam back to Charlie with a ferocity he had forgotten by 2000, even though he worked for Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign as a volunteer. He spends a week wondering if he should do it again.

  And then a day or so into the Tet Offensive, he sees the defining footage. Again. February 1: A South Vietnamese officer drags a Vietcong prisoner in front of the American cameras and executes him with his pistol. Right there, in front of millions of people. The networks play the scene over and over again, until it becomes part of Charlie’s dream-life, the instant when the victim crumples to the ground, his face locked in a grimace, dead. The man had set off bombs, killing many in an apartment building. There would be no peace in Southeast Asia. The war would go on and on. So many American lives would be lost. We would never give up. All the millions who would die, who did die . . .

  Charlie grows tired of thinking about time in two directions and resolves to think about his past in Washington, DC, as the future. Perhaps even a future that will never happen. Whatever brought him here, catatonic insanity or a cyclic afterlife, he accepts that 1968 is his present.

  4 Charlie goes to a nearby university library to work on how he found himself with a new life. The librarian at the desk is a portly lady in a frilly blue dress who frowns, wondering why a kid is interested in the philosophy of quantum mechanics.

  Charlie shrugs. “I hear kinda odd things about it, want to know.” This seems to do the job. The librarian sniffs skeptically.

  To work. Sitting and plowing through abstruse books, even physics journals, is better than another afternoon with prattling teens at a malt shop.

  He soon discovers that an odd variant to quantum theory envisions other universes created by quantum effects, and so he vectors in on that, reading intently.

  There is even a name for the idea, the Many-Worlds Interpretation—physicists like to capitalize their notions. It seems the core idea is to interpret what the equations of quantum mechanics say about the real world by having the mathematics of the theory itself show the way—rather than tacking on some extra ideas to the math.

  Charlie learns that a guy named Hugh Everett started to do this in 1956, starting from what was called the measurement problem. This riddle had apparently bedeviled physicists since the 1920s. Their question was, how do we get from our theory to the smooth, sure world we live in—what they called the classical world—to the tiny quantum world? Elementary particles like electrons existed in two or more possible states of being. Something called a wave function told physicists how probable a measurement of an electron would be, if they made it. The quantum view was that an electron was a “superposition” of different locations, velocities, and ways its spin pointed.

  Charlie wonders why anybody worries which way a particle points. Who cares? But he plows on.

  It seems that whenever physicists really measured a particle’s properties precisely, down in the microscopic realm, they saw a definite result—just one of the elements of the superposition (that is, of guesses, Charlie supposes). A clean, sharp number, not some vague combination of them. In big objects, say a car, it was either parked or moving, not both. Nothing wishy-washy. No weird superpositions.

  The measurement problem boiled down to a question that Charlie can understand personally: Why does the unique world of solid answers that we see emerge from the alternatives on offer in the superposed quantum world? Physicists use wave functions to represent quantum states—a list of all possible outcomes. Each outcome is equally real, though not equally probable.

  Charlie gets up and walks around the library, wishing he had paid more attention to math in high school. Even the philosophical stuff, which he hoped would be clearer, talks about some Schrödinger equation that shows how a quantum system’s wave function changes through time. No randomness—the wave function evolves smoothly.

  But! When anybody measured the system with a scientific instrument, the wave function collapsed into one choice of the superposition—a sudden jerk into the world we big beings lived in. Jerk—here we are!

  That jerk-collapse had to be added as a postulate, to make quantum mechanics make sense. Messy. Ugly.

  Smart guys had scratched their heads over this for decades—guys named Bohr, Heisenberg (head of the German A-bomb project, Charlie learns), Schrödinger (and his equation, which Charlie couldn’t fathom at all), and even Einstein. They agreed on a way of thinking about quantum mechanics known as the Copenhagen interpretation—named for where Bohr lived. They had to—quantum mechanics predicted experiments perfectly, including the probability that an experiment would yield a result, like a particle pointing this way, not that. The jerk was real but was not in the equation. Don’t look at the guy behind the curtain. . . .

  Then . . . along came a guy named Everett. In stark contrast, he said the micro- and macroscopic worlds merged. No real difference! No jerk to get the right result, either. But . . .

  Everett made the observing scientists and their instruments part of the system observed. He said there was a universal wave function for a single quantum system—everything! No jerk to go into the classical world where we live.

  Everett asked, What if that wave function continuously evolves, which is not interrupted by measurement? So the Schrödinger equation always applies to everything—objects and observers alike. No elements of superpositions are ever exiled from reality.

  Charlie sits back from reading a description of the paper the guy, Hugh Everett, wrote in the 1950s. Charlie was about five years old then.

  He shakes his head, trying to think. The warm air seems to buzz around his head; the ideas are making him dizzy. There is a flicker. A fluorescent light? No. A flicker again.

  Charlie shakes it off, forcing his mind to reason. So: What would Everett’s world look like to us?

  Everett said that the universal wave function, as he called it split. All possibilities peeled off a whole, goddamn new universe every split second anything happened.

  Charlie rocks back. In all of this he, being a big thing, is an observer, as Everett called it. For Everett, each branch of the ever-spawning universe had its own copy of the observer, who saw just one of the outcomes that quantum mechanics said could happen.

  So . . . Charlie is sitting in one of an infinite number of universes? No wonder he is dizzy.

  Plus—he goes on reading, feeling as though he is in some fantasy abstraction—from a fundamental mathematical property of the Schrödinger equation, the branches, once formed, did not influence one another. Each branch that peeled off embarked on some different future, free of the others.

  He can’t follow the math at all. So he takes it on faith.

  Just how the ever-peeling branches became independent and looked like the classical reality was called decoherence theory, he notices. Meaning that each copy of a person feels he or she is one of a kind? But in the full universal wave function reality, every alternative on the quantum menu happens. Peeling off universes willy-nilly is independent of humans; it is the way the metauniverse is built. (By God, maybe? Or is he the final observer?)

  Anyway, aside from the temptations of theology, this stuff seems to be an accepted part of modern quantum theory. Amazing. Not everyone agreed with Everett’s view that all the branches represent realities that exist.

  Okay, fine. Charlie sighs. Everett broke new ground by making a multiplicity of universes straight out of the equations of quantum mechanics itself. The existence of mult
iple universes came as a consequence of his theory, not an assumption.

  In a big book on this, an essay mentioned that Everett’s thesis had a footnote: “From the viewpoint of the theory, all elements of a superposition (all ‘branches’) are ‘actual,’ none any more ‘real’ than the rest.”

  Charlie stands, stretches his supple spine, feels joints pop easily. “A beginning, maybe,” he whispers to himself. At least some high-powered types thought some kind of other peeled-off universe could exist. But none of them ever talked about moving into the past of another track. Why?

  Time is flexible, maybe—and yes, isn’t there something about space-time? That they are wedded together somehow? Einstein said something like that, right?

  “Plenty more to learn, that’s for damn sure,” he mutters as he leaves, a bit unsteady on his feet. The librarian in the blue dress eyes him skeptically.

  * * *

  After the second history test of the term, in early March, Mr. Owen asks Charlie to stay after class. The test was a cinch, of course; he didn’t even study. Algebra is another matter; it has vanished. Equations are entirely opaque. Charlie wonders if he has revealed too much knowledge in his just-wing-it class essays, but it is one of his few intellectual pleasures now, so he is loath to give it up.

  Lincoln Owen closes the classroom door and turns to face Charlie with his hand still on the handle. It almost looks as if Owen wants to be able to escape quickly.

  “Young man, you have really blossomed in this class.” Owen pauses, the canted mouth uneasy, perhaps to give Charlie a chance to reply to this compliment.

  But Charlie is uncertain about the appropriate response of a teenager, so he just glances at the teacher awkwardly, then ducks his head and hides behind his long hair. He didn’t know Owen that well, last time around. Owen was the distant inspiration for Charlie’s sixties-style radicalism, not a personal mentor.

  Somewhat embarrassed by Charlie’s silence, Owen blurts, “That essay was the best I’ve ever seen from a student. Truly.”

  An awkward pause.

  “Well, I was thinking that a young person of your obvious intellectual depth might appreciate the company of people who think as deeply as you do.”

  Charlie scoops up his books to go.

  “I mean . . . I mean . . . ,” Owen stutters. “There is a group, an organization, that you might be interested in joining. Someone there—our cell leader, actually—she wants to meet you.”

  Charlie realizes that he has to speak up or this exchange will be interminable. “Some kind of youth thing?”

  “Exactly.” Owen pauses with evident relief, eyebrows rising, to pat his forehead, which has sweat beading on it. “There is a Chicago-area student rights organization. I know the organizers quite well—very well, in fact. They are very interested in meeting you. Very.”

  Owen’s voice trails off into silence. Charlie realizes that this time his chance to get involved in politics will come a few months earlier, well before the summer of 1968. In a flash he decides to embrace this alteration in his path. Maybe it will bring him greater happiness, just as Trudy did.

  “I would like that very much, Mr. Owen.”

  Without thinking it through, he has decided to change Charlie Two’s life. Somehow.

  * * *

  One of the teachers that Charlie forgot about is Mr. Montini, who coached the baseball team and taught English the last time around. Now Charlie Two finds him stimulating. Montini is the most enthusiastic of Charlie’s teachers, a broad-chested shorter man with an oily face. Charlie hardly noticed him before. Charlie makes the mistake of sitting in the front row of Montini’s class when the teacher is discussing Shakespeare’s Italian plays. By the end of the class, Charlie has been hit by the spittle of the man’s animated hyperbole several times. When Montini is at the blackboard with his back to the class, Charlie puts on a show of wiping the spit off his face, making his classmates laugh. Without hesitating, Montini spins around and melodramatically winks at Charlie, then returns to writing with the chalk.

  One sign of Montini’s impractical joy in teaching is that he gives his students the choice of writing essays on novels and plays, or doing some creative writing of their own. The first time through, Charlie had little interest in creative writing. In that fevered Charlie One youth, he had no time for things that weren’t serious, political, or analytical. But now his youth isn’t being wasted on a young mind. He has lived, fought, loved, failed, and somehow survived it all, even his own death. Now he has plenty of things to write about, burdens to drop on the page, where they might do him less harm.

  Charlie decides to write about his marriage to Gwen, the girl who was everything to him but nothing to herself. He describes the ardent romance in their late twenties. Passion is hard to describe, so he just skips it, working the edges with dialogue. He was frustrated by her lack of arousal. Gwen never had an orgasm, not in the years that Charlie knew her. Charlie could yearn for her all he liked, kiss her over and over, cover her in flower petals, work hard with all his antennae out—but in the end her vagina would still be dry and her physical desire only simulated. Charlie would take what pleasure he could, but their life as husband and wife was hollow.

  Each day she went off to her job at the bank, and he went to the University of Minnesota library to write his thesis. In the evening when she came home, he would cook for her while she read magazines and listened intently to Carly Simon’s melancholy lyrics. He now realizes that maybe he should have taken a hint from “You’re So Vain,” Simon’s sardonic big hit. Certainly a later Simon hit Charlie recalls, “Nobody Does It Better,” didn’t fit their marriage.

  Her strange anger at him was a puzzle he never figured out. The marriage was a death-in-life happiness for him, and it slowly wore down during the years it took him to get his doctorate. They divorced over his first job, a temporary position teaching at Amherst College, in Massachusetts—too far from her family in Saint Paul, she said firmly with down-turned lips. Gwen was too dependent on her parents to go off with him, and he knew too well that he had only been a resting stage before she found somebody who could stir passion in her. She married a successful attorney three years later. Charlie received a wedding announcement, safely after the ceremony had taken place. He had already taken up his tenure-track job at George Washington.

  Charlie types his story out on his little electric typewriter, a thousand words of tap-tap-tap each night. It is a form of therapy for him, replaying his past life. It takes him only two weeks. He corrects the manuscript using Wite-Out, so it looks fairly messy by the standards of the word-processor age. He has moments of wishing for the easy speed of a computer, but the sound of slamming keys has a manual feel he likes, a taste from his college years. Charlie is more comfortable now with his anachronistic life, so he isn’t too bothered that he can’t print out a flawless manuscript. It ends up a novella, about twenty thousand words.

  Charlie hands his novella in with two brads holding it together, just like a screenplay. He used to read screenplays as part of a screenwriting course he took for fun in 1996. He even wrote a genuinely lousy action-hero screenplay as part of the course work. Now the brads are just an amusing affectation.

  He expects Montini to wonder how a teenager would know about thirtysomething disappointment. Charlie realizes he has grown sloppy in his renewed life. No one has found him out yet, and he is remembering more about his teenage existence every day. His lack of caring about that doesn’t bother him. Maybe a symptom of even more sloppy thinking? As he settles into this bright world, striding through it in his effortlessly springy body, he sees that nobody is going to catch on to him. His truth is secure because it is quite beyond belief.

  5 After class on Monday, Mr. Owen invites Charlie to a meeting of the Youth Progressives. It will be held the night of the New Hampshire primary, Tuesday, March 12. Charlie knows what is going to happen—Johnson repudiated, McCarthy damn nearly beating a sitting president in the first primary—and the unleashing
of forces that will ricochet through all of 1968 and so into the awful political swamp that will follow.

  At the address he finds an older brick warehouse off a side road, the parking lot wet with muddy puddles. At first he feels some dismay at the grungy industrial site, but then he reminds himself that this is his second life, and he can be brave now. You’ve already died once. Sixties radicals aren’t going to intimidate him now. After all, he was one once himself.

  The door into the warehouse is slightly ajar and leads directly to a stairway. The steps smell of damp sawdust. Fine particles float in the air, lit by a naked lightbulb at the top of the stairwell. As he rises, loud voices come from above.

  A battered green door lets him into the room. A large table fills most of it, with papers and books scattered in messy piles. On the wall are large Soviet posters of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and of course Che—all drawn in profile, each face a study in cartoon courage.

  He feels dizzy, suppresses a laugh. Don’t these clowns realize they’re feeling advanced and radical about a crushing tyranny? The Soviet monster was dead by the early 1990s, and Charlie forgot how gullible people were as recently as the 1960s. Never has he felt the warp of time so severely. This he took seriously?

  There are six or seven people there—a few earnestly nodding hippies with sweat-stained headbands, a bald man with a mustache in a dark suit keeping to the shadows, Mr. Owen improbably wearing a black leather jacket and beret, and the only woman in the room:

  Elspeth.

  Right there in 1968, looking so fresh and sultry, her pert little breasts pushing aggressively through her clothing, the sleek curves of her hips, her dirty-blond hair, the wire-rimmed glasses riding on her peculiarly sharp, prominent nose. Not the hard, lined visage from the first divorce trial in 1998. Now Elspeth’s face has a round softness even as she barks out dogma to the passive hippies.

  Charlie stands in the doorway, unable to move. But we don’t meet until I come to George Washington in 1982, he thinks. When she already had tenure, a rising female star in political studies, the flame that his mothy wings beat toward, the woman who dominated him completely, owning his body and soul for years. Until she discarded him and moved to Harvard, divorcing him as a minor afterthought to her years climbing up the academic and media ladders in DC. He knows that she was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago when he was still in high school. But their paths never crossed in Illinois.