A nod from Charlie is all it takes.
They go into a bathroom together, where Sid efficiently produces a small mirror and lines up the white powder. Charlie takes the coke up his nose with a rolled-up twenty. First his nose burns, prickly and brimming hot, and then the familiar rush sweeps over him, soothing and elevating at the same time. Charlie thanks Sid, proffering the twenty. Sid shakes his head. They both know he will do well from his invitation to Charlie’s party. Charlie’s fix is a gentlemanly commission, appropriate to the occasion and the comfortable contempt that they have for each other. The odd camaraderie of knowing the world differently through each other.
Maybe there is even an idea for a movie in that. A buddy pic. Two guys in a druggie shoot-out at the Hollywood Corral? Charlie likes these bolts of inspiration, coming when he is at a peak from the simmering coke joy. They remind him of his days before valproate. He takes out his notebook and jots down the idea.
Charlie wanders back to the high ceilings of the living room, beaming a smile at all of his guests. Most of them know that he’s high now.
The minutes flow by effortlessly, and he even manages to be friendly toward an East Coast investor, a very bald man with a weight problem and a scotch who rarely comes west, but this time has managed to arrive without his wife. Charlie flicks his head at Chantel, a black semipro whom he casts in his pictures for occasions like this one. Mr. Gruberman will be well taken care of this night, and Chantel should raise excellent money for his latest picture. Pleased with having done everyone a good turn, the definition of momentary sainthood in Hollywood, Charlie slips through the sliding doors to the pool.
A few of the younger couples are softly stroking each other with talk about their upcoming films. Against the water’s pale-blue shimmer, they are dark cutout figures, highlighted by the deep red of the sun that will disappear in a few minutes.
18 On a blurry Sunday morning, his father’s call wakes him.
“Charlie, your mother and I are going to try a separation. To see if we can’t get our heads together for another try at life.”
“Uh . . . another try?”
“I just don’t know, Charlie.” A tired sigh, though it’s morning. “Your mother—well, your mother hasn’t really been herself lately.”
Charlie has already heard from his mother. He recommended that she seek out a psychiatrist for some antidepressants. He has gotten to know the practice of psychiatry well, perhaps too well. But he doesn’t mention this to his father.
“You and Mom aren’t . . . getting along?”
“You know, Charlie, she doesn’t seem to be doing that well.”
More bland phrases trickle by. Somehow Charlie’s father has quit smoking, with Charlie’s enthusiastic support, and has recovered some of the youthful spring that he was never able to regain in Charlie’s previous life. This has filled Charlie with hope that his father won’t die so soon, but for some reason it has left his mother estranged, gray and cool. Charlie suspects that his father is having an affair, though his father hasn’t given him any reason to think so.
He speaks with warm concern. “What are you going to do, Dad?”
“I’ll be getting an apartment closer to the factory. Won’t have to drive as much. That way maybe I’ll have more time to think. Your mother will have the house to herself, now that Cathy’s settled in Wisconsin.”
Thoughts of the strong young woman that Catherine has become fill Charlie with pride. They no longer fight, but they still have yet to become friends as adults. He senses that she suspects that something is odd about him, which makes him wary about disclosing too much in front of her. Or maybe it’s just the usual sort of sibling distance, he thinks.
“Catherine is going to join a pretty big law firm,” Ned Moment says.
“What, Rendum and Devour?”
“Who?”
“Forget it, Dad.”
“Well, James’s mother called to let me know that he is doing better at the VA hospital. He wants to see you. I guess they’ve lowered his dose of tranquilizers. His mother says you’re the first person he’s asked for by name.”
* * *
The flight into Chicago is a welcome relief from Charlie’s work week. The dinosaur picture isn’t going well. The mock-ups of the dinosaur heads keep looking wrong, moving awkwardly, and the computer-generated images aren’t working out. Charlie wonders if he hasn’t tried for something too early. Maybe he should have waited for Apple to develop the new animation software that will dominate the industry in the nineties—or did, in his past life. Not even hiring Spielberg has helped that much. Maybe I should have pulled Crichton in, Charlie thinks. But he can’t stand the guy.
His limo driver picks him up at O’Hare and whisks him to the VA hospital.
When they get there, the lawns are patchy, brown, with crabgrass and scrawny trees. His breath blows thick fog as he walks toward the hospital, each step heavy.
Inside the foyer are three black men in wheelchairs, one of them slumped over. Is he dead? Charlie wonders. Probably just sleeping, he reassures himself.
He asks for the long-term psych ward. In the elevator there is an old white man on a gurney, no attendant. The man talks to himself with eyes closed, incoherent muttering, troubled but without panic. There are restraints at the man’s wrists and ankles. Why no attendant? Charlie asks himself. The elevator door opens on Charlie’s floor, and he leaves the man on the gurney to go on riding up and down, alone, babbling.
Back down . . . back up and down in time, maybe. Or maybe that’s just a delusion, going back in time. Big unknowns he has ceased to entertain for more than such glancing moments.
He has to sign in with a fat security guard sitting in front of a steel mesh gate. Charlie’s hand trembles with the cheap pen.
“Name of patient?”
“James Weston.”
The guard stands up with no display of interest, unlocking the gate in slow motion. Once Charlie is through, the guard snaps the locks shut. Charlie wonders what the man would do if Charlie got into trouble. He pushes the thought away and goes through an open area with a loud television. Dazed men in bathrobes watch a game show. One has a trickle of drool running off his chin. Charlie nods but none of them look in his direction.
Down a hallway smelling of feces, looking in the doorways at beds occupied by unrecognizable lumps, he comes to a bedroom where an older pale man sits at a desk and James gets up to greet him. Charlie straightens his back. James looks twice his years, his blond hair now a white fringe around his pate, skin like parchment.
“Charlie!” James’s smile animates the wrinkles around his eyes, a spider’s web over dark hollows.
Charlie almost tears up, but controls himself and offers James his hand.
“So Mom contacted your father?”
Charlie nods, his throat choked. He is back in his past life, when his father told him that James had killed himself.
But James seems happy now. “Great of you to visit. I don’t see many people. Sit down! Take my chair—I’ll sit on the bed.”
Charlie hesitantly sits down on the unsteady chair, while James swings easily onto the bed. “How’d you get here?” James asks, and Charlie avoids mentioning the corporate jet. “How is Hollywood?”
Charlie clears his throat and croaks, “Great.”
“Good. Good.” James becomes pensive, his smile fading. “Have you told anyone else?”
“About . . .”
Suddenly Charlie sees they both know what they are talking about, but Charlie can’t say it.
“About your reincarnation.”
So James has put together Charlie’s huge success, straight from high school, with that one moment when he revealed himself. He hoped the dope would fog that all away.
He plays it straight, stiff lipped. “No. Well, sort of. I tried once, with a girl. But she just thought I was crazy. Then the shrinks figured that I have epilepsy.”
“Just a bit crazy, like they see me.”
�
�But you had shell shock after Nam.”
“That just opened my eyes, Charlie. I began to see what it was all about, see? You coming back in time to see me.” James sits up, pale eyes peering at Charlie. “The messages in your movies. Don’t think I haven’t seen them, because I have, boyo. Don’t miss a single one.”
“I’m just making movies.”
“No, you are the Messenger.” Charlie can hear the capital.
“Maybe I was confused about what was happening to me in high school. Even between seizures, you aren’t necessarily normal with my type of epilepsy.”
James shakes his head, exasperated. He jerks up onto his feet, lips pressed white, and looks out the bedroom’s tiny window, through a soldered metal grille. He’s in a prison. “No, you have a mission. You have come back in time to warn us.”
“Hey, please.”
“No, I should have seen it when we went in for our induction physicals. Everything you said to the recruiting sergeant. About the future, about Vietnam, about Nixon.”
“Don’t forget. I was wrong about Nixon getting that war-waging bill passed. He never had to take over the country the way I said he would. None of that happened.”
James turns, fists clenched. “But only because you did that movie. So people started to love the guy. He didn’t turn out so bad after all. You know—the country really rallied, man. We beat the commies because of you.”
A long pause. “I . . . I never wanted any of that to happen.”
“But it did.” James steps toward him, hands grasping the air.
“My psychiatrist says it was all a delusion, all that past-life stuff.” Charlie feels dark bile flowing up into his throat, all the questions he has suppressed for years in the neon Hollywood glare, with the helpful cloak of medication, with therapy persuading him that he could have had delusions. “Maybe you’re the only one who still believes it? Maybe I don’t, anymore.” Charlie reaches out to James, but James flinches. He still doesn’t like to be touched.
James retreats to the rumpled, stale-smelling bed. “I’d believe you, maybe”—a sudden rush of words and flashing eye-energy—“if it wasn’t for that movie you did about going back in time to the fifties, man. Where the guy could have been a crooner but decided to sell appliances for his father? And there were all those babes that he didn’t do the first time, but he gets around to the second time.”
Damn, was he that transparent? “Yeah. Back to the Five-and-Dime.”
It made far more cash than the one Charlie One knew, mostly because he had the balls to give a lead to Barbra Strident, as she was known in Hollywood. She added zip to the whole thing, demanding script changes and adding funny lines, too.
“That wasn’t just a movie, man. That was real. That was you, you coming back and fucking Trudy, like you never did before.”
“Well, actually, I did before, James.”
“But not like that. Man, you owned her pussy.”
Charlie reddens, which surprises him. He looks down at the stained linoleum floor. Some of the stains look like dried blood.
James twists his lips in earnest agony. “You were telling me in your movies that it was all true. You were telling me that it was all right, that what I was going to go through would mean something.” James is winding up, muscles straining, thick cords bulging from his neck. “Like the whole thing with my platoon getting blown down, burned meat, the smell—it would all mean something, Charlie. My life would . . . mean something.”
Charlie edges toward the door. “Where’s the washroom, James?”
James’s eyes fill with tears. “Down the hall, off the playroom.”
Charlie hurries off to find the guard, running away from his double life, from the force of his friend’s paranoid disintegration, from the corrosive pressure of time past, time present, and time future.
19 “Hello?”
It’s Charlie’s father, and it isn’t good news. Charlie stands rooted, face frozen.
James has died. The funeral will be in three days. Charlie doesn’t need to ask how it happened, and his father doesn’t elaborate. They say good-bye with tenderness, their voices resonant with things best unsaid. Maybe because they both know that it could have been Charlie awaiting burial, if Charlie had caught any of James’s bad luck.
* * *
Charlie’s father greets him at O’Hare with a hug. The two men share small talk. Charlie’s father remarks that his son seems younger, but Charlie doesn’t comment. There are some things that straight men still don’t share, like grooming tips.
Illinois doesn’t do them any favors, the sky gray and the grass dying around them, the leaves gone from the skeleton trees. Like a Bergman setup shot, Charlie thinks automatically. “Is Mom coming?”
His father hesitates. “She phoned to tell me she is.”
His father’s voice sounds brighter, and he’s no longer smoking. Could his father have a new woman in his life? Charlie wonders if that might be the thing that is pulling his father out of the downward spiral that killed him the last time. If so, he will embrace it. Survival is more important than marriage.
“I understand, Dad.”
“Catherine will be there. The two of you can catch up with each other.”
* * *
The group around the grave site is painfully small. Charlie is grateful to his sister for coming, though he recalls that she didn’t know James that well. Few did. Catherine probably came to check up on the suddenly rocky family she’s in.
There is a familiar overweight woman there with three children and a barrel-chested, bearded husband. Charlie dimly remembers James dating her a few times, though not her name, and idly wonders if James was able to overcome his aversion to touch.
James’s adoptive mother is grim, in a black wool overcoat obviously purchased for the occasion. She and her sister, who never liked Charlie, send beams of heavy-lidded coldness his way, making him wonder how much James said to them. Perhaps they blame me, Charlie thinks, for James’s eventual insanity. They don’t know that it happened to him anyway, in another life, even without the visitor from the future. Charlie’s head spins with thoughts of his two pasts, and the two lives that James had, both so unfortunate. Briefly he fears a flickering episode and freezes. But it doesn’t happen, so he relaxes a bit. Maybe I have grown past all that, he wonders, even without the medication.
The others are faces dimly recalled from his high school yearbook. The intoning Episcopalian minister hurries through the burial service. Charlie stands in front of his parents, his sister beside him. In the middle of the burial incantation, Catherine puts her gloved hand in his, her first solid gesture of affection in two decades. Charlie’s eyes tear, the burial scene becoming a blur of blacks and fading green.
* * *
Catherine corners Charlie at the reception in the house that James grew up in. Catherine’s eyes search his, strangely friendly and predatory at the same time. He can smell vodka on her breath. She could never hold the stuff.
“James told me about you.”
“About what?”
“Coming back from the future.”
He attempts a shrug, despite a tremor in his chest. “You didn’t believe him, surely?”
“Not when he first told me.” Her flat, factual words send a shock up his spine, a snaking of fear. Forcefully she whispers, “Now maybe I do.”
She glares. “How else can I understand how my geek of a brother could become, like, one of the most successful people in Hollywood?” Catherine’s hands cut the air as she makes her case. “Then you just turned around and became, like, this totally creative guy. Where do all those ideas come from, Charlie? Don’t tell me there’s anything normal about you, okay, ’cause I sure won’t believe you.”
“I—I—it’s not what—I . . .” Charlie realizes he is babbling and that he has to get his sister away from the rest of the party. He grabs her arm and leads her, almost shoves her, out the front door of the house.
Without their coats, the Novem
ber air bites, but they barely notice.
Catherine turns on him, eyes wild. “So James wasn’t crazy. You were telling him all that weird stuff. You were! Then he would phone me up and practically sob into the mouthpiece about you.”
A wave of remorse sweeps over him and his face crumples up. Yes, with that one conversation he drove James toward oblivion, even if Vietnam finished the job. Now the tears run down and he tastes their sorrow.
“I’m so sorry, Catherine. I had no idea.”
“Well, isn’t it about time that you tell me about it?”
Catherine stands firm, challenging him with every line on her face, the crook of her elbows, the angle of her bare knees.
Charlie takes a deep breath of cold air and launches into an explanation. How he already lived a complete life, until middle age at least, then died in a car accident only to wake up on his birthday in 1968, knowing all about the next thirty-two years. Only it hasn’t turned out quite how he expected. He made the film about Nixon, which changed the man, changed the way people saw him, anyway, and then there was no martial law, no circling of wagons with the Cold War Democrats, no hardening of democracy into something resembling imperial Rome, Democrats and Republicans joyfully throttling the world together—the Pax Americanum, they would call it, once the Soviet Union had disintegrated under Chernenko and China had collapsed from starvation and disease.
“You mean, none of your movies are actually original? You stole all those ideas?”
He gives her a wrecked smile, thin and ironic. “Well, I had to write them out again, really. I couldn’t remember all the details, so Bob Greenway and I invented a lot of stuff as we went along.”
“Is there anything about you that I can trust?”
“Do you believe me, about this life?”
“No. I don’t believe it.” Her mouth works, sags. “And I do believe it, some damn how. It’s the only way to make sense of you going off to Hollywood just out of high school and succeeding, when you were such a dork.”
“Thanks, sis.” Charlie smiles ruefully, but with some relief.
“I’m not sure I can forgive you keeping this secret from me for all these years. Whether it’s true or not.”
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