by Ken Grimwood
"That must have been horrible," Jeff said sympathetically.
"It was, but somehow I managed. I had no choice. I became … I forced myself to become a young girl again, tried to forget everything I’d been through in my first life: college, marriage … children."
She paused, looked down at the floor. Jeff thought of Gretchen, and reached out to put his hand on Pamela’s shoulder. She shrank from his touch, and he withdrew the gesture.
"Anyway," she went on, "after a few weeks—a couple of months—that first existence seemed to recede in my mind, as if it had been a long dream. I went back to school, started learning everything all over again, as if I’d never studied any of it before. I became very shy, bookish; totally unlike the way I’d been the first time. Never went out on dates, stopped hanging around with the crowd of kids I’d known. I couldn’t stand having these memories, or visions, of the adults my friends would become in the years ahead. I wanted to blank all that out, pretend to myself that I didn’t have that kind of awareness."
"Did you ever … tell anyone?"
She took a sip of beer, nodded. "Right after the screaming episode when I first came back, my parents sent me to a psychiatrist. After a few sessions I thought I could trust her, so I started trying to explain what I’d been through. She’d smile and make little encouraging sounds and act very understanding, but I knew she thought it was all a fantasy. Of course that’s what I wanted to believe, too … so that’s what it became. Until I told her about the Kennedy thing a week before it happened.
"That unnerved her completely. She got very angry and refused to see me any more. She couldn’t deal with the fact that I’d described the assassination in such detail, that this fantasy of mine had suddenly become a reality in the most awful, devastating way imaginable."
Pamela looked at Jeff for a moment, silent. "It scared me, too," she went on. "Not just that I’d known he was going to be shot, but because I was so sure that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who’d done it. I’d never heard of this Nelson Bennett person—of course, I had no idea you’d gone to Dallas and interfered the way you did—and after that my whole sense of reality changed. It was as if one minute I seemed to know everything about the future, and then all of a sudden I knew absolutely nothing. I was in a different world, with different rules. Anything might happen—my parents might die, there could be a nuclear war … or, at the simplest level, I could become an entirely different person than the one I’d been, or maybe imagined myself to have been. "I went to Columbia instead of Bard, majored in biology, then went on to med school. It was tough going. I’d never cared much for science before; my whole training had been in art the first time around. But, by the same token, that made it far more interesting, because I wasn’t just repeating something I’d studied before. I was learning an entire new field, a new world, to go with my new existence.
"I didn’t have much time for socializing, but during my residency at Columbia Presbyterian I met a young orthopedist who … well, he didn’t really remind me of my first husband, but he had a similar intensity, the same sort of drive. Only this time it was something we had in common, a shared devotion to medicine. Before, I’d hardly even known what my husband did every day, and he’d just assumed I wouldn’t care about it, so he never discussed his legal work with me. But with David—that was the orthopedist—it was just the opposite. We could talk about everything."
Jeff gave her an inquisitive look. "You don’t mean—"
"No, no; I never told him what had happened to me. He would’ve thought I was insane. I was still trying to put it out of my own mind. I wanted to bury all those memories and pretend they’d never happened.
"David and I got married as soon as I’d finished my residency. He was from Chicago, and we moved back there; he went into private practice, and I worked in the intensive care unit at Children’s Memorial Hospital. After having lost my own children irretrievably—well, you know what that’s like—I kept putting off having another, but in the meantime I had a whole hospital full of surrogate sons and daughters, and they needed me so desperately, they … Anyway, it was an extremely rewarding career. I was doing exactly the sort of thing I’d dreamed of when I was a frustrated housewife in New Rochelle: using my mind, making a positive difference in the world, saving lives…" Her voice trailed off. She cleared her throat and closed her eyes. "And then you died," Jeff said gently.
"Yes. I died, again. And was fourteen years old again, and totally helpless to change a goddamned thing."
He wanted to tell her how thoroughly he understood, that he knew the deepest hurt had been her knowledge that the sick and dying children she had tended were then destined to go through their suffering once more, her efforts to help them having been obliterated; but no words were needed. The pain was all there on her face, and he was the only person on earth who could comprehend the depth of her loss.
"Why don’t we take a break," Jeff suggested, "get a bite to eat someplace? You can tell me the rest of your story after dinner."
"All right," she said, grateful for the interruption. "I can fix us something here."
"You don’t have to do that. Let’s just go to one of those little seafood places we passed down on the Pacific Coast Highway.
"I don’t mind cooking, really—"
Jeff shook his head. "I insist. Dinner’s on me."
"Well … I’ll have to change again."
"Jeans are fine. Just put on a pair of shoes, if you feel like going formal."
For the first time since he’d met her, Pamela smiled.
They ate at a secluded table on an outside deck, overlooking the surf. When they’d finished and were sipping coffee with Grand Marnier, the moon rose above the Pacific. Its reflection in the tall glass windows at the back of the restaurant seemed to meld the white orb with the blackness of the ocean.
"Look," Jeff said, indicating the illusion. "It’s just like—"
"—the poster for Starsea. I know. Where do you think I got the idea for the artwork?"
"Great minds." Jeff smiled, raising his liqueur glass in a toast. Pamela hesitated, then lifted her own glass, clinked it briefly against his.
"Did you really like the movie?" she asked. "Or was that just a ploy to find out who I was?"
"You don’t need to ask that question," he said sincerely. "You know how good the film is. I was as moved by it as anyone, though I’m sure no one else was so shocked to see it appear."
"Now you know how I felt that first time, when somebody I’d never heard of killed President Kennedy. What do you think that meant? Why did the assassination still happen, after what you did to prevent it?"
Jeff shrugged. "Two possibilities. One, maybe there really was a massive conspiracy to murder Kennedy, and Oswald was a minor, expendable figure. Whoever planned it had Bennett waiting in the wings in case something went wrong, and probably more backups besides. Everything was thoroughly arranged in advance, right down to having Jack Ruby kill whoever took the fall. Eliminating Oswald from the picture was no more than a trivial inconvenience for the people who were behind it all.
Kennedy would have died no matter what I did, because they were just too strongly organized for anyone or anything to stop them, whoever they were.
"That’s one possibility. The other is less specific, but it has much deeper implications for you and me, and it’s the one I tend to believe."
"And that is?"
"That it’s impossible for us to use our foreknowledge to effect any major change in history. There are limits to what we can do; I don’t know what those limits are, or how they’re imposed, but I think they’re there."
"But you created an international conglomerate. You owned major companies that had never before been linked…"
"None of that really affected the overall course of things," Jeff said. "The companies existed as they always had, turning out the same products, employing the same people. All I did was rechannel the flow of profits a bit, in my direction. The changes in my own life
were extreme, but in the larger scheme of things, what I did was insignificant. Outside the financial community, most people—you included—didn’t even know I existed."
Pamela twisted her napkin pensively. "What about Starsea, though? Half the population of the planet knows about that. I’ve introduced a new concept, a new way for humanity to view itself in relation to the universe."
"Arthur Knight in Variety, right?"
She blushed, raised her hand to hide it.
"I looked up all the reviews before I came to see you. It’s a wonderful movie, I grant you that, but it’s still essentially a piece of entertainment, nothing more."
Her eyes flashed moonlight back at him, beams of anger and hurt pride. "It could be much more. It could be the beginning of—" She stopped, composed herself. "Never mind. I don’t share your pessimism about our capabilities; let’s leave it at that. Now, do you want to hear about my second … 'replay'—that’s what you call the cycles, isn’t it?"
"That’s how I’ve come to think of them. It’s as good a name as any other. Do you feel like continuing?"
"You’ve told me your experiences. I might as well bring you up to date on mine."
"And then?"
"I don’t know," she said. "We seem to have very different attitudes about this."
"But there’s no one else we can discuss it with, is there?"
"Just let me finish what I was telling you, all right?" She’d shredded the paper napkin into strips, which she now crumpled and piled into the ashtray.
"Go ahead," Jeff told her. "Want another drink? Or another napkin?"
She looked at him sharply, searching for sarcasm in his face. She found none, nodded once. Jeff made a circular motion with his hand in the air, signaling the waitress for another round of Grand Marnier.
"The second time I died," Pamela began, "I was more infuriated than anything else. As soon as I came to, in my parents' house, fourteen years old again, I knew exactly what was happening, if not why. And I just wanted to smash something. I wanted to scream with rage, not fear. The way you said you felt on your third … replay. It all seemed such a waste: medical school, the hospital, all the children I had treated … pointless, all of it.
"I became extremely rebellious, vicious, even, with my family. I’d spent more years as an adult than my mother and father put together, had been married twice, had a career as a physician. And here I was legally a child, with no rights or options whatsoever. I stole some money from my parents, ran away from home. But it was dreadful—nobody would rent me an apartment, I couldn’t get a job … There’s nothing a girl that age can do on her own, other than go on the streets, and I wasn’t about to put myself through that kind of hell. So I crawled back to Westport, devastated, incredibly alone. Went back to school, despising every moment of it, flunking half my classes because I just couldn’t stand to memorize the same damned algebra formulas for the third time.
"They sent me to the psychiatrist I’d seen before, the one who’d gotten so upset when I knew about the Kennedy assassination. This time I didn’t tell her anything real about myself. I’d studied most of the standard texts on child development and psychology myself by then, so I just fed her the answers I knew would make me come across as a mildly screwed-up adolescent going through a phase, well within the normal range."
She paused while the waitress set down their drinks, waited until the girl was well away from the table before she resumed her narrative.
"To keep at least some of my sanity intact, I went back to my first love, painting. My parents bought me whatever materials I asked for, and I asked for the works. But they were proud of my art; it was the one thing I was doing that they could recognize as constructive. Never mind that I was sneaking gin from their liquor cabinet, staying out half the night with guys in their twenties, and being put on academic probation every semester. They’d just about given up trying to control me. They could see there was something too strong and willful behind my misbehavior for them to cope with. But I had my talent; it was quite real, and I worked at it as hard as I had worked at being a doctor. They couldn’t ignore that; no one could.
"I dropped out of high school when I was seventeen, and my parents found an art institute in Boston that was willing to take me on the basis of my portfolio, despite my terrible record in school. There I blossomed; I could finally start living as an adult again. I shared a loft with one of the older girls from the school, started dating my composition instructor, painted day and night. My work was full of bizarre, sometimes brutal images: maimed children falling down a black vortex, photorealistic close-ups of ants crawling out of surgical incisions … strong stuff, as unschoolgirlish as you could imagine. Nobody knew what to make of me.
"I had my first show in New York when I was twenty. That’s where I met Dustin. He bought two of my canvases, and then, after the gallery closed, we went out for a drink. He told me he’d—"
"Dustin?" Jeff interrupted.
"Dustin Hoffman."
"The actor?"
"Yes. Anyway, he liked my paintings, and I’d always been impressed with his work—Midnight Cowboy had just come out that year, and I had to keep reminding myself not to say anything to him about Kramer vs. Kramer or Tootsie. We hit it off right away. We started seeing each other whenever he was in New York. We got married a year later."
Jeff couldn’t hide his amused surprise. "You married Dustin Hoffman?"
"In one version of his life, yes," she said with a trace of annoyance. "He’s a very nice man, very bright. Now, of course, he knows me only as a writer and producer; he has no idea we spent seven years together. I ran into him at a party just last month. It’s strange, seeing such a complete lack of recognition in someone you’ve been that intimate with, shared that much time with.
"Anyway, it was a good marriage, by and large; we respected each other, supported our separate goals … I continued to paint, had some modest success with it. My best-known work was a triptych called Echoes of Selves Past and Future. It was—"
"My God, yes! I saw that at the Whitney, on a trip to New York with my third wife, Judy! She liked it all right, but she couldn’t understand why I was so thoroughly taken with it. Hell, I bought a print of it, had it framed over the desk in my den! That’s where I’d heard your name before."
"Well, that was my last major work. Somehow I just … dried up after that, I don’t know. There was so much I wanted to express, but I either didn’t dare to or I couldn’t capture it all on canvas any longer. I don’t know whether my art failed me or the other way around, but I essentially stopped painting around 1975. That was the same year Dustin and I separated. No major blowup; it was just over, and we both knew it. Like my painting.
"I guess it had something to do with the fact that I was halfway through that replay, and knew that everything I was achieving would be wiped out again in a few years. So I just became a sort of butterfly, roaming around the world and hanging out with people like Roman Polanski and Lauren Hutton and Sam She-pard. With them, there was a sense of … transient community, a network of interesting friendships that never grew too close and could be stopped or started again at any time, depending on your mood and what country you were in at the time. It didn’t really matter."
"Nothing matters, "Jeff said. "I’ve felt that way myself, more than once."
"It’s a depressing way to live," Pamela said. "You have an illusion of freedom and openness, but after a while everything just blurs together. People, cities, ideas, faces … they’re all part of some shifting reality that never comes into any clear focus and never leads anywhere."
"I know what you mean," Jeff said, thinking of the years of random, transitory sex he and Sharla had gone through together. "It seems appropriate to our circumstances—but only in theory. The reality doesn’t work out too well."
"No. Anyway, I drifted like that for several years, and when the time came I rented a quiet, isolated little house on Majorca. I was there alone for a month, just waiting to die. A
nd I promised myself … I decided, during that month, that next time, this time, things would be different. That I had to make an impact on the world, change things."
Jeff looked at her skeptically. "You did that when you were a doctor. And when the next replay began, the children you had treated were doomed to go through their pain all over again. Nothing had changed."
She shook her head impatiently. "That’s a false analogy. In the hospital, I was doing patchwork repairs on a few individuals. Purely physical work, and limited in scope. It was well intentioned, but meaningless."
"And now you want to save the whole world’s collective soul, is that it?"
"I want to awaken humanity to what’s taking place. I want to teach them to be aware of these cycles, just as you and I are conscious of them. That’s the only way we—any of us, all of us—can ever break out of the pattern, don’t you see?"
"No." Jeff sighed. "I don’t see. What makes you think people can be taught to carry over that awareness from one replay to the next? You and I have been through this thing three times now, and we’ve known from the beginning that it was happening to us. Nobody had to tell us."
"I believe we were meant to lead the others. At least I believe that about myself; I never expected you to show up. Can’t you understand what an important task we’ve been entrusted with?"
"By whom, or what? God? This whole experience has made me agree even more with Camus: If there is a God, I despise him."
"Call it God, call it the Atman, call it whatever you like. You know the Gita:
The recollected mind is awake
In the knowledge of the Atman
Which is dark night to the ignorant:
The ignorant are awake in their sense-life
Which they think is daylight:
To the seer it is darkness.
"We can illuminate that darkness," she said with unexpected fervor. "We can—"