“No, a goddamn bomb. Geddouttaere.”
The cop waves him off and Charlie walks away from the still-smoldering car. The stink is ebbing away, but more cops guard the end of the block. Crowds mill beyond the yellow-taped scene perimeter. He slips into the mob to avoid attention and has to work his way around several blocks to get back to his rental car. It’s untouched. He drives slowly away, mind blank. Overload.
The drive seems to take forever. Traffic crawls and his mind wanders. “The world is too much with us.” What poet said that? Wordsworth, yes.
His hotel’s reception area is eerily empty. Still uneasy, he goes up to the clerk behind the registration counter, a string bean with glasses, and asks for any messages.
“Yes, indeed, sir. I have one that I took myself. Here you are, sir.” The man hands over the message. “It was a young woman, sir.” His voice trills with tenor amusement.
“Thank you,” answers Charlie indifferently.
He opens the small envelope as he walks toward the elevators. The acrid smoke smell is still on his clothes. Dinner at top of hotel. 8:30 p.m. He wonders if it is a predatory starlet, trying to get cast in a movie. But then he shakes his head. He could use a drink anyway. At least it would be a familiar distraction, he says to himself. Something to calm me down. The car bomb, Casanova . . . lots to process. Let the unconscious work on it while the body gets distracted.
He has a long, strange moment in his room as he changes shirts and pants, gets a bit fresh. He sinks onto the bed, eyes the ceiling. Casanova told him a lot through indirection. The tossed-off lines, lightning-quick humor—all diversions from the dark, horrid tale. Casanova has been through many lives by now and knows things he will reveal in time. But his first lesson was about the pain. Most of it not physical.
* * *
The restaurant swims in warm shadows, pricked by glowing ivory lights of the taller buildings nearby. Small candles flicker on round tables set in elegant linen. The big room’s quiet comes from draperies, muffling talk from the cloistered tables. The air is cool with a hint of pine. Time slides by in a slow calm. As Charlie approaches the maître d’s station, a woman by the window waves at him. He doesn’t recognize her, but he nods anyway and lets the maître d’ lead him to her table.
She stands as he approaches. He feels somehow older from this gesture. Her lithe body in a conventional little black evening dress leads his eyes upward to her intense, exquisite face, framed by a black bob.
“Gabriela.” She offers her hand delicately.
“Charlie Moment.” Her grip feels firm, warm, pleasant.
They sit down with perfect concordance. To his surprise, Charlie is relaxed, in his element. He has dealt with women like this many times before. They always want something, but who doesn’t?
“Thank you for meeting me for dinner. I know we haven’t been properly introduced.” Gabriela’s face is composed, direct but not challenging.
“Not at all. I’m traveling by myself, so the company is welcome.” Charlie tries one of the more charming smiles in his repertoire, as if sharing an implied joke. But Gabriela does not reciprocate. He notices a cast to her eyes that he finds odd, an analytical appraising look, almost cold. A lawyer? He is instantly on guard.
“I know that you met the chevalier today.”
Charlie’s heart hammers like a snare drum, hard and rattling. Nothing to do with Hollywood. For an instant he feels his life veering out of control, but he reins himself in. Cautious.
“You know . . . you know Casanova, then?”
“Intimately.”
Charlie’s first thought is that she might be one of Casanova’s current lovers. Then he realizes that Casanova probably wouldn’t be so indiscreet with this woman about meeting with Charlie today, so a possible carnal relationship wouldn’t be enough to explain her knowledge. He ventures, “So then. You’re a reincarnate.”
“Of course, Chharlee.” She pulls her hair back on one side, revealing a platinum ring on her marriage finger. No diamond, though. Charlie feels a heady, dark mixture of desire and aversion, head-spinning—this flood of allure and alarm somehow remind him of something that he can’t place. She smiles dryly and says deliberately, slowly, “This is your first time back, isn’t it?”
“Ah . . . yes.” Charlie looks up to catch the attention of a waiter passing by. The bald, paunchy man glides back toward them at speed.
“Cocktail, sir?”
“Glenlivet. A little water, please.” To steady himself. And gain time. “The world is too much with us.”
“And does madam need something more?”
A glance from Gabriela’s eyes chills Charlie. “No, thank you, Frankleen. The martini is excellent, as always.”
The waiter looks somewhat flustered, but he bows slightly and turns with a flourish to get Charlie his drink.
“Do you enjoy it, Chharlee?”
“Reincarnation? Sometimes. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. But I’m new to it.” He pauses, looking first at his fingers, then at her fingers, then in her eyes. “How many times has it been for you?”
“I may have lost count.” Gabriela’s smile is dazzling, her teeth gleaming like pearls caught between her lips—lips wide and thick with red and sardonic mirth. Charlie feels dizzy again. He looks away from her—from the eyes that echo with lives led, Charlie knows, at the edges of the human condition. Down long corridors he cannot guess.
When confused, go literary. He learned that trick in Hollywood. “Are we devils, fallen angels, ghosts perhaps, or demons?” he asks.
Gabriela chuckles, a strangely deep musical sound. “Maybe all of those things. I am not one for definitions.”
His scotch arrives. He brings it toward his mouth with relief. “Cheers!”
Gabriela slowly raises her almost-empty martini glass to the level of their faces, then abruptly taps his glass with hers. “To eternity.”
Charlie smiles, making an effort to wrest some sympathy from Gabriela, so young looking but reeking with the lilies of many funerals.
“Let’s go to your room, Chharlee.” Direct, unblinking.
He considers, then sees that they do not want to discuss this in public. At the back of his mind plays the memory of the car bomb slamming him into the glass.
As they enter his suite, she slides by him swiftly in the narrow vestibule, her rich breasts rubbing against his arm in succession. She stands beside the bed and puts her arms over her shoulders to reach the back of her dress. It comes off in a swirl of black fabric and tan flesh, ending up on a chair nearby. The rest of her attire is well prepared—silky black lace, stockings, and spiked mules. Classic. Timeless. Perfect for an immortal.
Charlie feels the old familiar surge. But it does not leach away his apprehension. His temples pound with alarm.
She raises her arms to her sides, presenting herself. “I know you’re afraid of me, Chharlee. But that’s only because I am the first woman who really knows what you are. You will find that my knowledge is a good thing.”
“I hope so.” Charlie takes off his jacket and begins to unknot his tie, looking out at the Manhattan skyline, away from Gabriela.
She comes toward him, her hands meeting his back and then sliding around to his chest. He can feel the nails of her fingers raking him like surgical instruments. Her hands expertly undo his belt, unzip him, then pull down his underwear and everything else with them.
She spins his body toward her, laughing. The playground of the immortals . . . at the sport made to carry life forward. Taking him into her mouth, she artfully shows centuries of practice. Time sweeps him up, twirls him about, and Charlie finds himself on the bed, straddled, ridden, spun, teased. Then in swift hurricane bliss there comes sweat on her skin, his face knotted, his thighs pumping, her knees gripping his thighs, sweet long oblivion—until a wave of pleasure drowns all thought.
Gabriela pulls him down to lay his head between her breasts. “There, there, Chharlee boy. See, you don’t have to fear me. I want only
good things for you. Many, many good things.”
“Mmm. Did you come?” Charlie is barely thinking. And thankful to be so.
“Not yet, honey. But don’t worry. I will.”
* * *
The nightmare comes back. Or is Charlie awake? He finds himself sitting on his side of the bed, clutching the edge of the mattress with both hands. Panic. Raw, searing horror.
He is staggering up a hill, hard rock and hot sand, the heat of his body rising up inside, darkness floating all around him, even as the sun burns his scalp.
He turns and finds Gabriela lying on her side, facing him, her eyes luminous. Gabriela, or Elspeth. They are the same. The feeling of their tight, strong bodies riding him—colliding memories fret and tingle. Their faces so hard, eyes glowering as they come, slapping his thighs rhythmically, sometimes his feet.
Charlie lurches up, groaning with fear. He staggers to the washroom, and there he finds a strange man’s face in the mirror—dusky, worn, a full bristly mustache. Panic seizes him. He slaps his face hard, fast. His cheek blooms red. He remembers turning sixteen a second time, standing next to his father in the garage, the cool Chicago morning, a new Dodge Dart. Then his mother’s face—slack and despairing in the hospital in 1996; brimming with contented joy at the dining room table in 1968; lips pursed, eyes agog, reading his manuscript. Squealing brakes. The truck runs over him again. A red-pain pressure sweeps him into dark unconsciousness.
* * *
Gabriela shakes Charlie. “Tocayo?” she asks.
“Yes, I hear you, Gabriela.” So tired. So tired. “I . . . just . . . don’t feel like opening my eyes.”
She sighs slowly, coldly. Her hands let go of him. “Chingado. I guess not.”
Tired of time.
27 In the morning Gabriela is gone. She must have been quiet and quick not to have woken Charlie. He is bleary and hungover from his claustrophobic dreams, from the hammering waves of lust and fear that consumed him through the night.
He doesn’t have the energy to think about where she might be now. Somehow, trickling up from his unconscious, he has the feeling that reincarnates—Casanova’s word— must go in and out of one another’s lives in ways quite different from the normals. This allows him to turn his mind away from the mysteries of Gabriela, crawling back away from the edge of the precipice he seems to have found in his sleep. For the first time he regrets no longer being on valproate.
Carelessness and inattention, rely on them, he says to himself.
Where did I hear that, he asks, or did I read it? This life, or the last? Does it matter? Will the flickering come back? It was worse than the dreams.
He rises slowly from the bed, grunting with the effort, every muscle complaining. Shakily he works through washing and shaving. Dressing takes careful attention as he struggles with the previous day’s injuries, aggravated by the rut with Gabriela.
Thinking of her again brings a pulsing anxiety that has no focus but skitters across his mind. After a while he recalls Casanova’s expressive face, centuries of watching life’s triumphs and tragedies. Seeing Casanova will help, he thinks. He only has to make it back to the Society building, to the chevalier’s calm recitations of reincarnation as a practical matter. But Charlie’s problem is getting through the day.
The cover of the hotel magazine catches his eye. It’s the Met’s new exhibit, something about turn-of-the-century interior decoration in New York City. The article talks about the designs of William Morris, and Charlie remembers the chintz of the den at the Society. The chevalier doesn’t like Morris, Charlie recalls with a tincture of amusement. He decides that it will be the perfect distraction, wallowing in the past at the Metropolitan Museum, especially a past he hasn’t had to live through, not even once.
Certainly not twice. Distraction beats abstraction, every time. Let the unconscious deal with it.
First: a New York deli breakfast. He can find fatty refuge in a fragrant pastrami omelet.
* * *
His cobwebs, nightmares, and inertia get dispelled by the shadowy end of an afternoon at the Met. Charlie feels better as he again walks toward 42. The explosion lives on only in acrid burns marring the pavement and stinging his nose. Brown soot still clings to the corners of the head shop. He abstractly notices that the glass is shattered farther along from where he hit his head. It was a damn near thing. The car carcass is completely gone.
He wonders if the explosion had something to do with the Society as he starts up the steps to the door.
Somehow he is eerily calm, ready to face the mysteries of being a reincarnate. Whatever his newfound understanding will yield, he is ready to embrace it. What has he got to lose? Not life, not anymore.
Life will surely be more complex now, he realizes. But he has the example of Casanova’s resilience, his serene embrace of the life reincarnate, to guide him.
* * *
A second meal with the chevalier must be a matter of course at the Society. The new initiate’s return, each one shaken or transformed in his or her own way, and so needing some deft touch of ritual. Charlie wonders briefly about all the people Phelps must have seen in the entrance hall. And how old is this address, number 42, anyway? When was the Manhattan grid, with the numbered streets, set up? Nineteenth century, certainly, but . . . Charlie fails to place the decade in his memories of American history.
Phelps is clearly not in a chatty mood as he leads Charlie back to the dining room. At the table Charlie sees the chevalier seated next to a nondescript man of perhaps fifty, jowly and deep eyed, dressed in a ratty sweater. The chevalier talks animatedly, but his companion is paying less attention, so the sad eyes catch sight of Charlie first. The man purses his lips enigmatically and his eyelids lower, owlish and intense.
Something about that face . . .
The chevalier turns to find Charlie and rises quickly with a hand curl. “Charlie, dear boy!” He extends his arm toward his companion with a courtly flourish. “This is Herr Doktor Professor Einstein!”
Rising slowly, Einstein seems slightly distracted. “More correctly, I was Einstein, for a while. But I am now just Al, please.”
Al? Al Einstein?! Charlie looks from one man to the other, but this is not a joke. Not even the Al part.
Einstein has a little remaining hair, now graying a bit. His clothes are simple, informal, and rumpled. But above those ride twinkling eyes, a tilted smile. Yes, this could be the great man. Something matches.
Charlie shakes Albert’s hand awkwardly, then sits at the head of the table, where his place is set. Dinner with Einstein. What do you say?
Einstein leans forward and pats Charlie’s hand. “I am a thorough American now, unlike before, when I merely lived here.” And indeed, he has nearly lost the heavy German accent. He is even wearing loafers. “So is why I chose to go by Al. The American habit of shortening everything, you see.”
Charlie tries to make conversation and somehow gets through it, knowing he is not doing a good job of it. What should he say? Hey, what’s up with that relativity thing of yours, Al?
Oblivious to the unease of his companions, the chevalier is delighted with his dinner of lamb chops and aromatic mushrooms, signaling Phelps to bring out something to imbibe. The porter rolls in an elaborate wine trolley with several freshly uncorked bottles, their corks standing at attention beside the bottles for the obligatory sniff of the connoisseur. Phelps pours them a robust Zinfandel. Casanova speaks calmly, left eyebrow rising slightly: “I must warn you that the explosion that greeted you on your last visit may imply bad news.”
Charlie stops a glass of aromatic wine halfway to his lips. “How do you know?”
“I have agents here and there—even among the police, my traditional enemies. They found a radio relay in the car ruins. Someone was waiting for you and triggered the bomb. Their timing was a bit off, I suspect.”
“Why would anyone want to kill me?”
“I have suspicions, but there are too many possibilities.” Casanova waves h
is hand in dismissal. “It depends on what others suspect you may do.”
Einstein shakes his head. “These people, they would profit from thinking before they act.”
Casanova smiles wanly. “You were always averse to violent solutions, as am I. Loving your enemy is always more, as the Americans say, fun. But we reincarnates suffer from a certain amount of, so to speak, fratricide.” His smile turns rueful.
Einstein nods. “In the 1930s I spoke out in favor of conscientious objectors to war and said that if even two percent of the men refused service, governments could not make war at all. People wore lapel buttons with ‘2%’ on them.” He laughs. “Then many thought it was a campaign for two-percent beer! So much for idealism.”
Charlie laughs dryly and pushes the conversation backward. “So that bomb, it’s about the Society.”
“Alas, yes. They lay in wait for you. I shall take measures to insure your safety here, have no worry.”
Charlie hesitates, realizing that there is a lot more here that he should know. Why didn’t the mysterious “they” try to kill him today as well? “How so?”
“Some wish to prevent you from altering their, well, their world. Once you understand the Society, you may use your knowledge of the present future to change time past and thus that future.” Casanova shrugs wryly, gesturing toward Albert. “It is all very complicated and must be learned, as I did, from experience. Even a genius”—a nod toward Einstein—“cannot convey in a learned lecture the lessons of multiple lives.”
“Hey, this is my life they’re . . .” Charlie stops, realizing that this is not just about him.
“I am afraid you will find us of less help than you might hope, Mr. Moment.” Albert smiles as if he is frowning.
“But you’re the smartest guy who ever lived! And call me Charlie, uh, Al.”
“I have had to adjust my preconceptions, Charlie.” Einstein pronounces the name delicately, as if it is in a foreign language, and of course it is. Charlie isn’t sure what Albert, the former Einstein, is talking about. The man’s eyes hold a deep quality like sorrow, but the mouth smiles easily and there is an air of submerged mirth.
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