Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  “I’m scarcely a little boy.” He says this sharply, trying to load the tone with implication.

  “Oh, aren’t we?” She even smiles.

  “Not anymore.”

  “We all have our secrets.”

  Charlie takes a careful breath while his heart seems to stop. He looks away.

  He has to get away from her. He lifts his eyebrows, nods, and gets out of the Volkswagen.

  She swallows hard and looks down. Charlie can tell that she is holding herself back.

  Then she turns toward him and smiles with an expression sure and powerful. “Next time, Charlie. Next time.”

  * * *

  Mr. Montini keeps Charlie after class, during the lunch break. The man has the look of a worried dog, as if he has to do something difficult, or something important.

  “Your novella is the finest work I have read in my twenty-two years teaching in this high school.” The man’s broad face radiates a sincerity that Charlie finds a bit embarrassing.

  “Uh, thank you.” Charlie knows what it is like to be a teacher who rarely finds a talented student. He tries to give Montini some sense that he is appreciated. Charlie One would have wanted the same consideration himself. “I learned a lot from your classes.”

  “I want you to think about becoming a writer.”

  Charlie is amazed. Is this how writers start? No trumpets, nobody notices much, just a few words of encouragement.

  “I know that you probably are thinking about law or something practical.”

  Charlie laughs to himself. “No, not really.”

  The tension in Montini’s face vanishes and a broad smile flowers in its place. Charlie can see a plan growing inside the man’s head, just behind his little brown eyes, in a face so beaten down but still warm. “I have a friend who is a published author. I would like you to meet him.”

  Charlie thinks that this may be the oddest turn his second life has taken. A writer?

  * * *

  The friend of Montini’s turns out to be a chain-smoking, fidgety man called Bob Greenway, lanky with a worn face that looks like it was made of dried snakeskin. Montini and Charlie meet him in a nearby diner after school, a long, hollow room with a tinny roof, a worn row of plastic booths framing Formica, a miasma of fryer fat. After they exchange pleasantries, Greenway has a coughing fit. Montini glances at Charlie with some embarrassment. Charlie tries to smile in a reassuring manner, but he knows that he just looks like a nervous kid out of his depth.

  A chunky blond waitress with uneven red lips comes over to take their order. Charlie asks for a Coke. She looks at Greenway quizzically as she chews her gum. Montini shakes his head at her, a bit pensive himself, orders coffee. The woman leaves with a shrug.

  When the hacking stops, Greenway speaks in a voice that has seen too many late nights. “Not bad, for a juvenile work. Amazing, really, the feel for this loser’s life, how he never really connects with his wife.” Greenway taps Charlie’s novella with yellowed scaly fingers, semicircular coffee stains now decorating its cover page.

  Charlie winces at this succinct evaluation. But it is becoming another person’s story in his mind.

  “But look, kid, you don’t really have good visuals. It’s all conversation scenes. Five senses! You don’t get a feeling for the taste, the smell, the touch, of this guy’s world. You don’t feel his hand on this chick’s skin. You aren’t thinking like a good novelist. The reader just can’t get there.”

  Reasonable criticisms, Charlie thinks. He knows he is no Thomas Mann or John Updike. The novella was therapy, an exercise in recovery from whatever this whole experience is.

  Montini breaks in with some irritation. “Listen here, Bob. Charlie has talent. He could go places. You know this story has narrative authority. It feels genuine. Don’t you remember the way you wrote in college?”

  “Sure.” Greenway smooths the hair combed over his bald spot, looking a bit chagrined. “Earnest, crappy. People said I had ‘promise’ to avoid telling me what was wrong.”

  “Right! Bob, he needs a chance. Can’t you get him a magazine commission or something?”

  Greenway laughs unpleasantly, showing off his dingy teeth and yellowing tongue. “At his age, who will want him? He’s a punk.”

  “So don’t tell them his age.”

  “Listen to me, Nono, you don’t understand this business.”

  Montini’s face darkens and his thick chest expands as he jabs a finger at Greenway. “Just give Charlie a damn chance! You owe me, Bob.”

  “Back off, Nono.” His voice is small. “Uh, I’ll do what I can.”

  A considered pause, his mouth twisting. “Do you like the movies, kid?”

  7 Trudy and Charlie end up at that same diner for their usual Saturday-night dinner date. Charlie is starting to like the greasy charm of it as he listens to Trudy go over her rivalries at school, how Jeanette stole Trudy’s favorite gold circle pin when she tried it on her blouse, the spate of gossip about the prom queen. He gives her just enough attention to seem to be listening.

  Almost brazen, he finally breaks into her monologue. “I think I’m going to become a writer.”

  She blinks. “Charlie Moment, you’ll do no such thing.” She frowns severely. “You’re going to the University of Chicago and become a lawyer.”

  Charlie had no idea that Trudy was already mapping out his life. He knows that women think that way, but he didn’t realize that it started as early as seventeen. And . . . a lawyer?

  His mind whirls and the clinking sounds of the diner recede. The light around him flickers. Maybe this is how schizophrenia feels from the inside? Whirring, dizzy fog in the mind? He thought it would be easy to live life as a teenager with an adult’s experience, but it isn’t.

  The same chunky waitress comes up to them. She gives Charlie an amused look, maybe a touch of a leer in the downward dip of her scarlet lip. “You lovebirds ready to order?”

  * * *

  Bob Greenway’s apartment is a study in gray drab and nicotine. Charlie can hardly breathe, but his excitement overrides any need for oxygen. Greenway leads him into the dark cranny that serves as dining and living space. Greenway has been reading Charlie’s second manuscript for a week, and Charlie is eager to hear his comments.

  Greenway pushes a plate of ancient egg yolk and cigarette butts to one side, and drops the thick manuscript down on the wood veneer of the stained plastic table. He absently waves at a chair for Charlie and pulls up one for himself.

  “It’s not bad, kid.” A hoarse breath. “The way you sketch this bitch of a woman! I’ve been there, let me tell you. Plenty of times! But . . .”

  Greenway pauses to look for a pack of cigarettes. Finds one, gets out a Camel but doesn’t light it, just holding it in his fingers as he gestures with his hands.

  “It’s really more like a diary. You just assume that your reader knows what it’s like to live in DC. What I kept wanting was something about the streets, the traffic, the food these people eat. Five senses, y’know.”

  “But does the dialogue work?”

  “Sure—crisp stuff always works. I liked those lines where the gal keeps pressing him and he gives one-word answers. Great!”

  Charlie knows enough to just let him run. Greenway’s face twists, eyes narrow. “Yeah, I know every fucking thing this broad says. But then the prose, it doesn’t go deep. You don’t go inside.”

  Charlie fidgets while Greenway lights up. He loathes the tightening in his lungs from the smoke, the stink of the place. But his need for Greenway’s comments is much greater than his discomfort. He tries to breathe better air by turning away from the table and looking around the room. A battered television, probably black-and-white, in the corner with some small photos on top of it. Greenway’s family, Charlie guesses. What happened to them? he wonders.

  “Look, I don’t think you have it to write fiction. You have a feel for narrative, dialogue, sure—but their inner life is simply not there, see? You only report events and not
people’s gut-check times.”

  Greenway rubs his hands together very slowly, without disturbing the length of ash on the cigarette. Then he puffs and takes a deep drag and seems to be making his mind up. “Look, I have this buddy in Hollywood. He needs people to read scripts for him. People who can do dialogue, know if it feels right.”

  Charlie flinches. “Hollywood?” He didn’t see this coming at all.

  “Your strengths are screenwriting ones—dialogue, plot. Maybe you could take on a few of the assignments that I don’t have time for? We’ll see if you can’t learn more about writing from seeing how other people do it.” Greenway laughs bitterly, looking at something in the air near his kitchen. “And do it not very well, at that.”

  * * *

  Days stream by, their small incidents and dreams poignant. Charlie is seeing through the lens of time, aware that these ripe 1968 days are a pivotal age. Beyond the clashes of 1968 lies the fracturing of the American people into factions. Divisions over what Vietnam proves will echo into wars in the Middle East. Nixon’s War on Drugs will send millions to jail and lower drug use not a bit. Charlie decides he will not go to Chicago to fight cops with teenage fervor, at the Democratic National Convention that anointed the loser Hubert Humphrey. Instead he reads books he should’ve before—War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, As I Lay Dying, A Farewell to Arms, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. A passage from Fitzgerald’s essay on his own 1936 crack-up strikes Charlie: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” I’m keeping two times in my head, Charlie thinks. But I’m no first-rater.

  He makes himself write steadily, and soon the years he spent writing dry social science drone-prose in front of a screen fade. He loves the smackety-smack of keys on a platen, and the ding! at the end of the line.

  * * *

  Charlie is lying in Elspeth’s bed while Elspeth listens to the chattering radio. It’s April 11 and the riots have already started.

  “. . . and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy said that the marchers were going on to Washington, DC, to present their grievances to the president and Congress.”

  Charlie yawns. Charlie One was fixated on 1968’s cascade of horrors, but now he finds it tedious in its inching detail, like rereading a whodunit.

  “Local sheriff’s deputies say that they have already taken down eyewitness reports about the shooting. Dr. King was apparently standing on a balcony when—”

  Elspeth abruptly snaps the sound off. “They’re not going to catch the shooter. The pigs probably shot him themselves—bastards. Now they’ll find some redneck loser with a gun and a psychiatric record and pin it on him.”

  Charlie clears his throat quietly and rolls toward her. She is dead-on about the eventual arrest. “Don’t you think King was the perfect target for a middle-aged white schizophrenic, like one with paranoid tendencies?”

  “Don’t go all psychiatric on me.”

  “I’ll also bet that the guy who shot RFK last week, that Delgado, was a nutcase too,” says Charlie. “And not a very good shot, for which I’m grateful.”

  “What the fuck do you know, Charlie? Kennedy is one of the Establishment. You’ve just been suckered in by his pretty face and the whole Camelot thing. That fat-cat family is a bunch of fascists. You’re a middle-class white kid from the suburbs of Chicago. You can’t even vote.”

  Elspeth reaches over his body to get her cigarettes, her right breast pushing against his chin. She keeps talking and he lets the words slide by. He wonders how much longer he can revisit his sexual obsession with Elspeth. He still carries the loathing from his past life with her.

  “When are you going to come back to the meetings? McCarthy has a good chance of being the nominee.”

  “I’m not that interested, Elspeth.”

  She rolls her eyes and smiles scornfully. “Whoa, the worm turns. Char-lee boy, you’re mad.” There is a twist to her voice, like an affected accent. Elspeth is delighted, and turns to him with a big smile, her cigarette-wielding arm swinging wide, her breasts peeking out over the sheets.

  “It’s over, Elspeth.”

  “We’ll see, Char-lee boy.”

  * * *

  It’s a good time for Charlie and his mother, sitting together in the dining room, his father still at work and his sister off gossiping with her friends. His mother is reading his latest manuscript, a series of scenes about an older woman and a young man who comes to understand the world even as she is dying. Charlie has taken the story of Harold and Maude and made something sweeter, less morbid, less sexual. It isn’t quite a screenplay, but the scenes are short and effective. Charlie’s images reflect the depth of his forty-eight years, together with the perspectives of coming back to life, young and fit and deeply confused.

  Near the end of the reading, she starts to cry. Charlie freezes. He doesn’t know what to do. Memory thrusts him backward to the crying, helpless woman facing the disintegration of memory and continuity that would be her Alzheimer’s days. He feels on the edge of tears himself.

  “Charlie, you’re so good, so good.” She smiles at him and takes his hand in both of hers, the lines around her eyes a latticework of devotion mixed with sadness. “Charlie, you’re going to be a great writer. Everybody will know who you are. You are everything a mother could want in a son.”

  This is too much for him. He looks down with great concentration and tries to control his emotions. She takes this as a gesture of humility.

  “I know I’m only your mother, but I’ve spoken with Mr. Montini. He loves your work. He says you are the best student he has ever had, Charlie. He can help you. He has told me that he has introduced you to his writer friend.”

  “Bob Greenway.”

  “Yes, and your father and I have been talking. We want you to enroll in that creative writing program they have at the University of Minnesota. You could write the next great American novel.” She takes his chin by her hand and lifts his face up toward her. Her love washes over him with a cleansing wave. No, she isn’t dead by her own hand in 1998. That didn’t happen, Charlie declares to himself. It won’t happen. I’ll make her happy. Dad can quit smoking.

  “Bob thinks that I’m not suited to writing novels.”

  “What does he know?”

  * * *

  Driving the Dodge Dart, Charlie pulls away from a stop sign and glimpses a Ford pickup coming at him. He slams on his brakes and the Ford screeches sideways, then zooms by his hood an inch away, its driver a big blond woman leaning on her blaring horn.

  He stops the car and sits, feeling fear and memory flickering. Then the flickering stops.

  His death can come back at him, just like that. This is the worst yet. He breathes in long sighs.

  * * *

  James and Charlie are stoned way far out of their minds, watching silent televised images of the riots while listening to “A Day in the Life” from Sgt. Pepper’s. As the long final chord fades out in the room, Charlie’s mind seems to expand to fill all space and time.

  “You know, I’m from the future.”

  “Fucking right. Like, ‘I don’t live today, maybe tomorrow.’ ”

  “No, I died on my birthday, January 2000.”

  The needle clicks in the end groove, once every two seconds. James doesn’t say anything.

  “Are you okay, James?”

  James starts to whimper. Then he stops to speak. “Don’t try any more of that weird stuff on me, okay? I have it hard enough, okay? Hard enough.”

  Charlie’s mind expands around him, spinning the long, snaky coils of his two lives out into the timescape. It is like he is being made one with something far greater. Everything around him seems to go still. The room drifts away.

  But then he pulls himself back. James comes into focus, facing down on the sofa. Charlie realizes he can’t let his first life capsize the people around him. He has to focus on this life, even if it is a
rewrite.

  8 Charlie is sweating, groaning, tasting the hot breath of her, thrusting into Trudy below him on the backseat of her father’s Cadillac. With the extra room, their sex is less clumsy. Charlie is more comfortable going for longer before coming. This teenage body, he has learned, can be tamed. He takes Trudy’s hand and pulls it down. Her soft flesh is a pillow from heaven. Her eyes widen at the idea.

  When she starts to gasp, slick and sweating like him, moaning intensely, he speeds up and, with a sweet, jerky drive, comes himself. His shuddering gasps she echoes below. Trudy grabs his buttock hard with her free hand and pulls him harder into her.

  Afterward Charlie hears the spring crickets like tiny voices chirrup in the park around them. Nature’s chorus, never ending.

  “That was sooo good, Charlie,” she sighs softly. “I . . . I just want to do it with you every night. Sometimes I can’t study in my bedroom, just thinking about you . . . you—you inside me like that.”

  Trudy sits up and pulls her panties up her legs. Charlie wonders how their sex life could have been so narrow the last time, so quick and functional. Hurried, dull. They both were so different, in his first life.

  Trudy finishes dressing, moving faster as she recovers from the stupefaction of orgasm. She looks at Charlie with a little impatience. “Get dressed, silly! The police are sure to come around to check out a big white Cadillac parked here.”

  “I think they have more important things to do, these days.”

  “Let’s not talk about politics, Charlie. Richard Nixon will save the country.”

  “If he doesn’t turn the United States into an armed camp first.”

  Trudy shrugs with exasperation. “Charlie, can’t you just accept that Republicans might be right sometimes? Even the president and the Kennedys are supporting Mr. Nixon now.”

  She frowns and he recalls that she hates it when he patronizes her. She likes the way he has become so much more understanding—mature, she said once—but he makes her feel like he doesn’t take her opinions seriously.

  “You’ll cut your hair and grow up. With your brain, you’ll have no trouble getting into a good law school.”