Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  Her crisp anger makes him look at her down the long corridor of years he has journeyed. He smiles, to save it in memory.

  20 Charlie turns to Dr. Habib again and gets an increase in his valproate dose along with some benzos. The pain of his two lives clashing has become overwhelming. But once again the drugs help him dull everything.

  It doesn’t take Merrill long to realize that Charlie will be of no use to him until he recovers. Merrill tells Charlie to spend the winter at his cliffside house in Laguna Beach, where the press won’t pay attention. Laguna is an exotic far-off island as far as Hollywood is concerned.

  * * *

  A 405 traffic jam makes Charlie take the Pacific Coast Highway from Long Beach, driving through the barren naval proving grounds, through Huntington Beach, then Newport Beach, until finally the terrain opens up and he zooms alongside the ocean in his Mercedes. Once he’s past the beach houses, it’s up the hill and around the bend to the bohos, artists, and gays of Laguna Beach.

  Merrill’s beach house turns out to be a white modernist structure barely clinging to a cliff, eight bedrooms and enough bathrooms that Charlie finds a new one each day his first week there. The Pacific view is breathtaking, and Charlie can see Catalina Island lazing like a promise on the western horizon when the morning mist clears. It doesn’t take Charlie long to find the cliff walk north of Main Beach. The flowers exhaling scent by the cliff walk make him feel like he has been given a day pass to heaven. But after a few times walking alone, he feels more like he is in purgatory.

  In time he can return, maybe with a little pizzazz, as a prodigal mogul. In time. He has also lost his bag of pills in the move and finds energy returning. For the first few days, he fears a return of the flickering. But it doesn’t come. And now his body is starting to feel resurgent, even without white coke. And Charlie One has come back, with a strange clarity that valproate forestalled for years.

  As he watches the sun set over Catalina Island from his balcony, the clouds meeting the mist in a thick rhapsody of simmering reds and hot oranges, Charlie decides to solve the riddle of his second life. He will find its meaning, or he will make one—something more than making money. He needs to understand what has happened to him. It has become a hunger.

  A new birthday, he thinks.

  * * *

  The memory of his visit to a library in Chicago comes back to Charlie as the fog of medication lifts, his venture into the mysteries of physics. There was one person who piqued his interest, the alternate-worlds guy, Hugh Everett.

  Now Charlie wants to know more. His researcher from Action Pictures finds a library listing that reveals that in August of 1964, Everett started Lambda Corporation, to apply military modeling solutions to various civilian problems. “Responsible for research in mathematical techniques and models; selection; programming,” the report said.

  Charlie has his studio staff make an appointment, and after a train ride from New York, where he has a financials meeting with a team of bland suits, to Washington, DC, a cab takes him to the small suite of Lambda offices on the fifteenth floor of a glass and concrete box. The reception room has an excellent view: the Lincoln Memorial two miles away, the Washington Monument about a mile farther, and the Capitol dome some two miles beyond that. Power on display, Lambda seems to announce.

  Everett looks smart—intense, pudgy, with side-whiskers and a professorial goatee, topped by a high, shining forehead. Charlie introduces himself using the Hollywood producer credential his staff played to get him this appointment. He brings up the many-worlds model, and Everett says, “One night in 1954, after a slosh or two of sherry, me and my Princeton classmate Charles Misner were making jokes about the ridiculous implications of quantum mechanics.”

  Everett’s face lights up. “That’s when I had the basic idea behind my theory. So I began developing it into a dissertation.”

  Everett launches himself toward a bookshelf, then plops down a dog-eared manuscript. Charlie notes the big, bold letters—“Thesis submitted to Princeton University, March 1, 1957, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD degree”—with signatures by physicists below.

  Everett talks fast, voice flat and clipped. “When I was twelve, I wrote letters to Albert Einstein raising the question of whether it was something random or unifying that held the universe together. I mean at the basic theory level. Einstein was kind enough to answer.”

  He thrusts a photocopy at Charlie, who reads the letter dated June 11, 1943:

  Dear Hugh:

  There is no such thing like an irresistible force and immovable body. But there seems to be a very stubborn boy who has forced his way victoriously through strange difficulties created by himself for this purpose.

  Sincerely yours,

  A. Einstein

  Charlie has to admit he’s impressed. “Wow, he answered kids?”

  “Yeah, and I met him once. Pretty old then. He couldn’t follow my theory at all. I told him there was a substantive parallel between my relative state and Einstein’s relativity. See, quantum mechanics had this observer who supposedly collapses a wave function, chooses one outcome. Nonsense! There’s no theory of collapse, none at all. See, the external observer comes in just the way that Einstein had to defeat, when he showed there was no privileged inertial frame.”

  Charlie doesn’t know relativity and this is getting way above him. He manages, “Einstein couldn’t see that?”

  Everett smirks, lights a Camel with a steel lighter. “Bohr couldn’t either.”

  “But what does it mean in, say, our lives? If—”

  “Look, physicists themselves are obliged to be their own epistemologists. Die Welt ist bizarr, as the Germans say.”

  “But we can’t prove your theory, right?”

  “My view is falsifiable, sure—if quantum mechanics proves wrong.”

  I wonder what he’d say if I told him about my life, Charlie thinks, and decides not to. It would mean a quick rejection. Everett must have met others who—ah.

  “Have you met anyone who claimed to come from some alternate time track?”

  “Huh? No, but I get plenty of objections from people who think I’ve made the universe—get this!—too big.” He laughs, shakes his head.

  Charlie smiles, nods, leading him on. “That must freak people out.”

  “You bet.” Everett grins. “They feel tiny and insignificant and think that nothing matters in this world. Look, that makes no more sense than getting depressed when you find out that cows are bigger than you. What’s the goddamn big deal about bigness? A cow is much bigger than you, but it is a ridiculous animal and you are a valuable person. You know it’s a cow. It doesn’t know anything. It just stands there eating grass and mooing. And if it were bigger, that would only make it more ridiculous. Then we eat it.”

  “I guess no one has any idea how to reach these other universes of yours?”

  “Nope, nothing in the theory about that. People in all branches of the wave function were equally real.”

  “So there are more of you? And me?”

  A shrug, as if all of this is obvious. “Gotta be. The number of branches of the universal wave function—it’s an uncountable infinity.” Everett sucks in smoke and expels a plume with relish.

  “Does human consciousness play a role in all this?”

  Everett smiles, shakes his head. “Nope, to think we humans have any say in the particular quantum world we’re in would require an idea Einstein hated—‘spooky action at a distance,’ entanglement.”

  “Couldn’t these worlds get entangled through the human mind?” Charlie is desperate to connect Everett’s ideas to his double life.

  Everett waves this away. “Look, why care? I’m guaranteed immortality already! My consciousness is bound at each branching, after all. My other selves will follow whatever path does not lead to death—and so on ad infinitum.”

  “So you don’t care about this world?”

  Everett laughs, belly shaking, and pounds the table.
“Love me, love my wave function!”

  A digital alarm clock plays a short synthesized tune. “Hey, time’s up. At eleven thirty every morning, everybody here has to drop whatever they’re doing and eat. Beats the lunch crowd.” Everett stands and waves a hand at Charlie. “It’s fun to get back to my old ideas.” Then he adds ruefully, “Seems most physicists have turned against them.”

  21 Sid has arranged for the private investigator to come down to Laguna Beach. A rainy November Tuesday, and the man is more than an hour late.

  When Charlie answers the door, he faces a middle-aged man with little hair, a damp plaid suit, and a studiedly bland expression hanging like a shawl over his face. “Mr. Moment?” A flat voice, too. Jack Webb objectivity. Charlie nods. Rain patters down into the silence. A beat passes as they eye each other in the gray light.

  “Frank Flangetti. Mr. Field said you would be expecting me.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  They shake hands formally, Flangetti withdrawing his hand quickly, guiltily. “Sorry I was so late.”

  Charlie lures the man into his living room by backing away from him. Flangetti moves forward, guardedly examining his environment. It is like a status dance. “Nice place you have here.”

  Charlie thinks that Flangetti has ex-cop written all over him—modest background, deference to wealth but inside a suspicion of it, almost a resentment. Or maybe Charlie has made too many cop movies.

  “Me and the boys, at least my guys when I was still with the OC Sheriff’s Department, we really liked that film you did with the bomber.”

  “Speed.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. A bomb in a bus. That bad guy was so realistic.”

  “Did you mind that he was an ex-cop?”

  A shrug. “I’ve known some bad ones, in my time.”

  Charlie has Flangetti sit down but remains standing himself. Silent.

  “You want me to find someone, Mr. Moment?”

  “Yes, in a way, I do.”

  Flangetti takes out a small spiral notebook and a pencil. “Name? Last known location?” He looks up expectantly.

  “I’m afraid a name will be hard.”

  “Can you describe her?”

  Charlie frowns. “It’s not one person. It’s a group of people.”

  “An organization?”

  “Maybe.”

  A shadow of exasperation darkens Flangetti’s face. “Do you have any leads to share with me?”

  “Yes.” Charlie finally sits down and looks up at the ceiling, scratching at his beard with his left hand. “I am after people who know about certain things.”

  “Is this a blackmail case?” There is a note of pleasure in Flangetti’s voice.

  Charlie laughs grimly, almost with derision. “No, not at all, Frank. This is a case unlike any you’ve had before.”

  “Okay.” Flangetti’s forehead is a field of curving furrows.

  “I can’t tell you what my goal is, but I can supply you with a lot of leads.”

  “All right. I’ve had some tough projects before. You don’t work in vice for eleven years without seeing more than your fair share.”

  Charlie has no more time for prevarication. He stands up and begins pacing, barking instructions at Flangetti. “Here are your leads. Time travel. Monica Lewinsky. Reincarnation. Twelve Monkeys. Yahoo.com—”

  “Yoo-hoo come?”

  “I’ll spell it.”

  Over the next half hour, Charlie spells out miscellaneous names and details from the late 1990s, anything that no one could know after Ford’s second successful presidential campaign. He ignores the expressions that pass over Flangetti’s face. He doesn’t even look at the man. He directs him to small ads near the backs of magazines, personal messages in the classifieds, short ads on radio stations. Then he ushers Flangetti out without further explanation. Go.

  * * *

  Despite the morning’s foggy rain, the afternoon clears. Sunlight sparkles off the high waves booming below Charlie’s cliff house. He flips through an overwritten script sent by messenger from the studio and snorts. More and more, Hollywood’s basic rule is the law of thermodramatics. To get more audience, turn up the heat. Go back to the pulps, use a touch of wit, do the Lucas-Spielberg scrub, and presto! The land of megabucks. He scrawls REWRITE! across it. Muttering, he tosses the script into a corner and tries to forget it.

  Then it occurs: rewrite is exactly what he’s doing to his life. This is a chance to rewrite a previous draft of Opus Charlie. And who in humanity wouldn’t want that?

  He is listening to “Time Out of Mind” from Steely Dan’s Gaucho LP when the thought occurs to him that he doesn’t need to act older anymore, setting off on a new life within a new life, with the swelling from the abandoned medication coming down. He can be himself—whoever that might be. Charlie Rewrite.

  He goes to the bathroom and ransacks the cupboards for a shaver. His beard is too thick to be cut with a small blade. With scissors from the kitchen, he hacks away at the beard. A few cuts and a lot of shaving cream later, his bare face stares back at him, a face he hardly knows. It strikes him as juvenile at first. But after a few theatrical frowns and smiles, mugging at himself in the mirror, he makes a connection between the young face and himself. New Charlie. Not even Charlie Two anymore. Just New.

  His suntanned nose and forehead look odd, framed by virginal white skin around his mouth and below his cheekbones. He puts some lotion on the tanned areas, and the contrasting colors of his skin look a bit less severe. Charlie decides to tan the rest of his face before going out during the day, so that he won’t look like some freak staggering up from the town beach.

  Lying out on his capacious sunlit balcony, Charlie lets the warmth of the sun bake some of the tension out of his body. He needs to stop being a slob. The medication made his belly soft again. A wheeze to his breath, a heaviness in muscle and bone. Not as bad as forty-eight-year-old Charlie One after his slack, joyless decades back east. But not good.

  He can get that fit body back. He will unravel the riddle of his existence. He will enjoy life more. He will let go.

  * * *

  The ersatz French restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway amuses Charlie, the vintage junk masquerading as antiques, the colorized black-and-white photos in the john pretending to be hand-colored photogravure from the nineteenth century.

  The gay waiter is very nice to him, nicer than Charlie is used to in brittle Hollywood. He’s not a celeb here, either. Then he realizes that he must look a lot cuter without the beard, less manly. He still feels self-conscious about the stylish short haircut, even with the mousse and gel washed out a few hours after he left the salon. The little spikes made Charlie feel like an absolute idiot, leaving aside the creepy sensation of the goo against his scalp. Charlie One never tried anything of the sort. But maybe the waiter’s interest is some kind of positive review of his new appearance.

  Feeling much better about himself, he pays his bill in cash and wanders out onto the evening street. Looking both ways, he decides to cross over to the sidewalk closer to the beach.

  He looks into the windows of the shops as he walks by. The lit-up storefronts of the Laguna Beach antique shops impress him with their window displays of genuine medieval furniture, dark carved wood almost shimmering with age. The past is always with us. In his case, he is in a past avenue veering far from that of his first life. But little details of the past of Charlie One do not match this time. That Nixon and the Republicans would actually get some love along with respect amazes him, and he still wonders if his Dick film was the cause. And he has never found any trace of Bob Greenway in his memories of the last life.

  22 Phil Dick leans forward, eyes piercing. “See, damn near all my work starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one single, objective reality. Cannot.”

  Charlie leans back and nods, putting on his pondering face, as he has learned to do with Phil. The man is wearing baggy trousers and a worn shirt, a Berkeley bohemian with wrinkled
clothes, stringy gray hair, dirty fingernails, an apparent indifference to shaving. Not Hollywood, no.

  Charlie can see the throat muscles straining as Phil’s reedy voice squeezes out, “So y’see, I really want a last scene, toward the end. When we’ve overthrown the Nazis, and their leaders—including Adolf!—get tried for their war crimes. The führer’s last words are Deutsche, hier steh’ ich—which means, ‘Germans, here I stand.’ Damn powerful stuff.”

  “That takes the movie pretty far afield—” Charlie begins.

  “Look, one major theme of my stories asks the question, What constitutes the authentic human being? So this movie, the universe where the Axis won, it’s only shadows in our universe.”

  “Uh, yeah . . .”

  “I want to have Hitler not get hanged, but fade away, kinda evaporate, to suggest that it’s not necessarily real. See?”

  “Isn’t that something like ending it with ‘it was all a dream’?”

  Phil stands, pumped with energy, scowling. “Hell no! That’s not what I mean at all.”

  Charlie stares at Phil. Getting through the script phase is always tough, with lots of notes and bright, new dumb ideas from the usual suspects. But Phil keeps showing up here, at his home, waving a copy of the latest revision. It is 6:00 p.m. on a Friday, usually Charlie’s time to take a dive into the Laguna Beach scene—bars with ocean curlers crashing white nearby, overpriced beers, cocky Ray-Bans, carefully tuned tans, perfect hair. But he didn’t want to turn Phil out and risk pushing the man into some lurching act-out scene at the studio. No, better to let him spout his steam here. Writers! he thinks. I’m one, but sure as hell not like this.

  With careful calm he says, “I’ll take this new slant up with the studio guys. Kick it around a little. New idea for an ending.”

  “Those pikers don’t know an ending from their own ass!”

  “Um, well, y’know, Phil, I have to work within the studio system—”

  “That’s your mistake. You should be an independent. Monumental Pictures—get it? Your name, Moment, is sort of in the name.”