Charlie takes a big breath, as though he is in danger of drowning in all of this. He has heard too much. “Chevalier, are you telling me that you willed yourself to reincarnate into the body of one of your lovers from before your imprisonment?”
The chevalier holds a handkerchief up to his moist eyes. “Yes, dear boy! We were now truly as one, and I was free.”
“So . . .” Charlie hesitates. “What happened to her?”
“I was the dominant mind within our spiritual union, but her presence, her soul, had joined with me. I became delightfully binary.”
“The two cycle-lines were merged,” interjects Albert. “It can happen, though it is difficult.”
Charlie whispers, peering at Casanova, “So she’s . . . in there?”
Casanova’s face tightens. “She is now still with me, as are the traces of the others I have traveled through over the centuries since.”
Charlie’s head swims. “Did you tell your younger self what had happened?”
“Ah, dear boy, there you have me. There is something in me that cannot confront the unconscious—those people unconscious of our cycles of reincarnation—with the flat fact of the eternal cycles.”
Charlie turns to Albert. “You too?”
“I have not had as many times or opportunities.”
Charlie struggles to right his emotions and tries to change the subject. Albert is his refuge. “So are you a . . . a physicist now?”
“I drive a taxi in the Bronx. It soothes me during the day. Maybe when there is little business, I do some calculations. I publish under a pseudonym. At night I come back to the Society and talk with the chevalier, think through some science.”
29 In his hotel room, Charlie throws his clothes at the chair next to the bed, stretches, and goes to the bathroom wearing just his underwear. He stares at his face in the mirror, overcome with the sense of being himself, and himself alone.
The conversation could have gone on all night, but he couldn’t handle it. The two stately gentlemen led him out of the Society building through a gray, cold underground tunnel that reeked of age and dusty stone. For safety’s sake, they said. Some paintings set into the walls seemed to honor members, their faces stiff in the style he recalled from eighteenth-century portraits. A few he recognized but could not place. They let him out through an anonymous wooden door, onto a street two blocks away. He hailed a cab and got back to his hotel, edgy and watching for potential assassins.
Now he has to process what he heard. To figure out if he is in too much danger to pursue this any longer.
He thinks feverishly. Could I move laterally, invade other people’s heads? Will I grow tired of my own life? Could I even manage to leave it? He shakes his head.
He hears a click from outside the bathroom and freezes. I don’t even have a weapon. He stands in a crouch, hands out. The door opens. . . .
Gabriela slinks into the bathroom. She is in more silky black clothes, perfect for her tan flesh, red lips, and glossy hair. She comes up to him and with a sultry smile murmurs, “Learn much?” as she slides her hand in his boxers, kissing his shoulder.
Soon she is on her knees on the bathroom floor, and then within minutes Charlie rolls off her, breathing hard. This turns out to be the preliminary.
Gabriela wastes no time. “How was it, meeting Albert?”
He blinks. She truly knows every goddamn thing. “Interesting. Interesting and sad.”
“Sad?”
He sighs to gain time, to think.
“Chharlee?”
His head swirls still, but he feigns sexual stupor. She will take that as a compliment. He speaks slowly, as if half-awake. “Albert has a sad quality below his joking. He wanted our time to turn out differently. He went to a great deal of trouble to find his way into Einstein’s brain, and then it didn’t work out.”
“Few things do, even when you get second chances.”
Charlie is silent, running his hand through her hair. So easily they slide into ordinary talk about such wildness. He wonders what he would have done, had he been born in Albert’s time, with Albert’s talent for lateral reincarnation. And what conceivable quantum whatsit could cause that.
Charlie shrugs. He doesn’t dare think of what Casanova’s many centuries might have been like. Maybe it’s a miracle the man still seems human.
Gabriela rolls onto her stomach, her eyes brightly questioning. He can see her with a useful distance now, depending on her sensual vortex as a snare. “So, how was my friend the chevalier?”
“I imagine he’s always the same—extravagant, full of himself.” Charlie is growing inclined not to express too much sympathy around Gabriela. She interprets it as weakness.
“The old bastard. You know, he wanted to do me.”
“Well, who wouldn’t?”
“I can’t believe it doesn’t bother you.”
Charlie pauses. “Hey, I’m from Hollywood.”
She laughs. He knows he should be cagey around her, but he needs to talk to someone about all of this. Hollywood has trained him to think out loud, because that’s how movies get worked through. Block it out in talk, then leave it to the writer. “It’s hard for me to know just how to react to the Society. I’m not even sure about you.”
A cloud passes across the brightness of Gabriela’s face, but she shakes her head to banish it.
* * *
The next day Charlie and Gabriela go to the Metropolitan Museum. Charlie wants to see the ancient Egypt exhibit again, to get the feel of what a culture based on an early idea of reincarnation looked like. The heavy stone offers him little clarity or inspiration. So many, many hieroglyphics, signifiers that he knows he will never take the time to decipher. Gabriela struts about in a short skirt and strappy thin heels, her quick steps rap-rap-rapping out her impatience as he tries to find some connection with the long-dead culture. Dispirited, Charlie gives up. They go to the museum lunchroom, Gabriela in the lead. Her fast walking irritates him. As they settle down to their thin sandwiches, Gabriela spears Charlie with a curt declamation. “You could make a difference, you know.”
“Sure. Like how?” Charlie has learned to ask questions of Gabriela, rather than give answers. Questions are safer, so long as they aren’t too personal.
“Wasn’t it a shame the way the sixties turned out? All the promise, and then Nixon coming in and shutting down the revolution.”
“Such as it was. It wasn’t really going to be a revolution.”
“Oh, there you’re wrong.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Really.”
“What if Nixon had been shot in 1969?”
“We would have got Spiro Agnew.”
“Who couldn’t have been reelected. Such a slimeball.”
“So?”
“If Nixon hadn’t ridden in like he was some kind of peacemaker, endorsed by the Kennedys and even Johnson . . . Think about it, Chharlee.”
Something sparks a quiver of apprehension in Charlie, but the momentum of Gabriela’s words overcomes the prickling apprehension. He seizes on her plan like a raft in an ocean. Could I . . . ? “But it’s already happened. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“No, no, Chharlee. You have already seen how your film Dick changed the Nixon administration. Such a small thing—but it altered the seventies for the better.”
“Fewer died, anyway.”
“Ah yes, but—since then the world has rested comfortably under the yoke of the Establishment. Too comfortably! Fine for your movie career, that people just stopped caring about politics.”
He grimaces, ego wounded. “I’d like to think I did more—”
“But think, mi amor. What if they went on caring? What if all that idealism from the sixties didn’t die? If the goddamn national unity movement hadn’t papered over our civil rights?”
Gabriela’s nails dig into his bicep.
Huskily she whispers in his ear, “We might have let Vietnam be for the Vietnamese. We never would have taken over Cambodia
. Think, Chharlee!”
She imagines she has won him over, but the leaden weight in Charlie’s belly tells him she has not. He will not kill. She, plainly, will. She has. And she wants accomplices. Now he knows what she is. And what he is not. He is going to get away from her, despite the allure she can unleash with a single lowered eyebrow, a sullen glance.
30 “Albert,” Charlie says, “I’m really glad you decided to come out.”
The deep eyes crinkle with mirth. “I am more of an American now, my friend. How could I resist a trip to Hollywood? And possibly to change history in a good way.”
They are riding in the back of a limousine, edging off the freeway to Studio City. Albert peers skeptically at the humming, flashing metal river of cars rushing by them. Food is placed before them on a low table with indentations for glasses.
“Glad you feel that way. Look, I brought you here straight from the airport for a reason. I got the heads-up on this pitch session just this morning, too late to change my schedule.”
“I have my work to keep me occupied.” Al shows a lined pad with equations on it in a big, sprawling hand, black ink. “I have had some new ideas. You stimulated me to renew my quest.”
“You do math in ink?”
“To keep me honest. If I am wrong, I go back and cannot erase. I must do it all over.”
Charlie blinks; he stimulated Einstein? He hunches forward earnestly and peers into Albert’s eyes. “Here’s the trick. I want you in on this pitch. So I’ve got to go in there and sell these guys on my idea, see? The one I asked for help on? I was going to show you around, but—”
“Movies are decided on in this way?”
Charlie laughs. It is a pleasure to puzzle Einstein.
It occurs to Charlie that Einstein’s “spooky action” occurs in the past, rather than “at a distance.” This is the only thought that seems original, or at least frames an interesting misunderstanding of his.
“So why is it that we die and go into the past? Not the future?” Charlie asks, cutting into a veal sausage. The velvety texture is bliss, chased down by a Sancerre.
“The past has been created,” Einstein says. “The future, not yet. That is all the choice the great Quantum Mechanic in the sky”—his eyebrows shoot upward comically—“has on his holy quantum menu.”
“Look, I don’t know a differential equation from a differential gear shift. What’s this guy Everett—who seems to get some respect, whom I met—got to do with what’s happened to us?”
Einstein smacks his lips at the sausage, dabs it with mustard. Maybe Casanova has made him more of a sensualist? “This Everett fellow was a mensch to point out—with some scorn, I gather—that the collapse of the quantum wave function into one outcome had no physics behind it. None! Zilch! Bohr, that likable fraud, treated it as magic—a wave of the hands. Or else an observing mind, I suppose Bohr’s, forced the quantum choices to implode down to one. But does that mean that all these ensuing branches of the universe are equally real? If so, then they are uncountably infinite.”
“You’re not a fan of infinities.”
Einstein sniffs, raises the eyebrows with a sly wink. “Not appealing, nein. I prefer some constraint on multiplying infinities. God cannot have such a budget, I once said! Infinities, they are a sure sign of wrong physics—as with these black holes, I once thought. I always opposed the idea of them. So I was wrong there. But not about Everett, eh?” A trick of glinting mirth in the eyes.
Charlie shrugs. “When I met the guy, he was damn sure he would last forever, in some parallel world.”
Albert raps the limo’s side table with a knuckle, knocking over the mustard. “Everett’s error was to think the wave functions would go on splitting forever, amassing endless variations. The universe’s system cannot go on acquiring more information, exfoliating space-times like shedding leaves. That violates thermodynamics—no getting something for nothing! The entire universe, all particles in it, everything, will erase the earlier of these leaves, to conserve memory space.”
“So other space-times get edited away?”
“They must. So their world lines terminate.”
“And the people on them?”
“We all die eventually.” Einstein chuckles merrily. “As we always suspected. This solves the problem of the bloated ontology this Everett imagines.”
Charlie doesn’t know where to go with this. Snuffed-out universes? “Everett, people after him—they have plenty of equations—”
Al has lost his patience. “You und ich, we know the experience, yes? We are doing the experiment. These equations . . .” He bursts out in exasperation, “Das ist nicht Mathematik. Das ist Theologie.”
Yes, Charlie thinks. Not dry mathematics. Theology. But . . . what god of quantum mechanics should be worshipped?
* * *
An hour later, after some coffee and quick coaching by Charlie, he and Al are on the studio lot. It has taken just two weeks to shape up Charlie’s ideas for the new movie and skate them across the Hollywood landscape. He used agents, mouthpieces in the LA Times (WHAT’S MOMENT WORKING ON? the headline read), and the always available gossip network. He’s been gone a while and that works for him too. Plus, Action has had an expensive flop, and that always makes a studio desperate.
Albert looks wonderingly around at the midfifties beach bungalow on the Action Pictures production lot. Casual rattan furniture slouches beneath movie posters of the studio’s past triumphs. Showbiz magazines are lit by sunlight that cuts like a blade across the reception room. There’s even a surfboard leaning against the wall. Albert is still puzzled. “You . . . audition . . . the concept? Like a sort of seminar?”
“Uh, yes.” Charlie eyes the new receptionist, a statuesque blonde artfully considering her fingernails. She presents a half profile to the reception room, in case somebody important is there. “These investment guys get a dozen ideas a day, choose maybe a few a year. It’s a numbers game.”
“You . . . pitch . . . then . . .”
“There’s an old Hollywood saying, like in baseball. The guy who can pitch usually can’t hit. But I’ve got a reputation around here for spotting good movie ideas early, then developing them.” For fun, he raises his voice to startle the receptionist. “Stars can make a movie finally happen, but I can make it start.”
Einstein nods, still a bit dazzled by this small island of surfer decor among the mammoth stage sets and fake big-city streets of the studio wonderland. The receptionist looks up and gives them a plastic smile. “Mr. Spielberg will see you now.”
Showtime. Charlie leads Albert in and they go through the ritual handshakes. Spielberg studies Albert, trying to place the face, and Charlie hastily explains that this is a new assistant. Big in the European film community. Instantly all interest in Albert fades. Status is always in play, the only real Hollywood currency. You’re only as good as your last picture, Charlie reminds himself. But he steadies himself with the knowledge that he is off his medication and in better shape than he has been in years.
The crowded long table has a mixture of middle-aged investment pool guys together with younger producers in their midthirties. Charlie knows enough of the perpetual pursuit of fashion to recognize that the younger men are Los Feliz/Silver Lake hipsters this season, jeans and black shirts, carefully maintained two-day stubble giving their smooth skin a certain rugged authenticity. Only five years ago they probably had two roommates and toward the end of the month ate cereal for dinner. They had started hustling scripts when they were buying jug red wine, driving beat-up Toyotas, and hanging out in Sunset bars to “network” and incidentally case the tribes of aspiring actresses who were their natural prey. Most come from backgrounds in film studies or journalism, and few are women, still. Now they hide behind dark glasses, style victims of hipitude. Despite their lounging back on sofas, some wearing the baseball caps and jeans Steven Spielberg has made into a uniform, this is Hollywood red in tooth and claw.
After the ritual offering of coffee, C
harlie starts his pitch. It helps that he is outlining a movie he can now recall well from the world of Charlie One, then a 1985 science fiction–comedy film directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Steven Spielberg. Thanks to Charlie, Action now has Spielberg in its stable of directors, and he is peering intently at Charlie.
With quick images and plot turns, Charlie holds them firmly for ten minutes. Outlining the story. Highlighting the nostalgia for a simple, better America. Delivering crisp one-sentence summaries of the characters. “I call it something,” he finishes, “that gives the audience the idea right away: Back to the Future.”
Sid Sheinberg, a savvy Spielberg adviser, has been lounging at the end of the rattan table, eyes lowered. Now he jerks up. “This Professor Brown guy,” he says, “I want that changed to Doc Brown, makes it more folksy.”
Charlie readily agrees, suddenly recalling that that was how the Charlie One universe had it. This guy must have made the call then. His head swirls a little, wondering at the convergence of ideas. Sheinberg goes on, “Second, the title should be changed to something like Space Zombies from Pluto. That’ll tie in with the Marty McFly–as–alien jokes, see?”
Spielberg looks askance and Sheinberg goes on. “So then Marty, who’s gotta convince his father to take Marty’s mother to the prom, does this shtick dressing up as Darth Vader from the planet Pluto. Sight gag, see? The audience gets it but Marty’s mother doesn’t.”
Charlie knows this is dead wrong, but Spielberg takes care of this, shaking his head. “Sid, Sid,” Spielberg says, “I’m as fond of those old fifties crap movies as you are, but . . .” Spielberg raises his eyebrows and tilts his head, sign enough.
A long moment passes, or maybe it’s just Charlie’s heart pumping faster. Nobody speaks. Edgy eyes behind the dark glasses.
Then Sid smiles. “Okay, maybe I’m being a little down-market, just joking around some.” Obviously Sid is too proud to admit he was serious, so he nods, lets the title stand.
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