Then Again

by Rick Boling

  Millennium Park

  I didn’t tell Aurélie I was almost finished with the rewrites and arrangements for the album, hoping to buy a little extra time before we got into the brain-twisting exercise I knew was coming. But after a week or so of polishing, I sent Jimmy the demo tape and suddenly found myself with nothing to do. Relaxing was out of the question, so I ended up bugging people with meaningless phone calls. I could tell Sam and Jimmy were making an effort not to let on that they were too busy to talk, but Ellie would always make time for me, no matter how trivial my inquiries were. She and Geffen had turned over management of the tour to our old friend Bill Graham, whose resume included the famous Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, and Ellie was now spending the majority of her time directing the foundation’s activities and planning construction of the new operations center.

  “We’re calling it Millennium Park,” she said when I asked for a progress report. “We’re in the process of—hold on a sec.” This was typical of our recent phone conversations. Her work schedule had begun to resemble mine when I was CEO of Blue Note Enterprises, though she handled the multitasking much more efficiency. Like one of those circus performers who keeps dozens of plates spinning on wobbly poles, she juggled phone calls and meetings and snap decisions as if she’d been born for the job.

  “Sorry,” she said when she came back on the line. “Another brush fire. Anyway, I don’t know if Aurie told you, but we’re in the process of buying several thousand acres up there.”

  “Up where?” I said.

  “Up where you are. We’ve already purchased the land bordering yours on the north and west, and we’re in negotiations for several additional tracts. It’s going to be really something. Kind of like the research triangle in North Carolina, only bigger and far more scientifically advanced. Heyoka is generating all the architectural and technical plans, and H2 is supervising development on this end.”

  “H2?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, “I guess you two haven’t met yet. Everything’s been happening so fast. H2 is what we’re calling Heyoka’s counterpart in this dimension—his younger self. We had to give him a different moniker to avoid confusion. He’s cool, by the way. Brainy as hell. Only twenty-seven and he’s already got all these degrees and awards. Not big headed or anything—treats me like an equal. He’s working on the first phase of the lab, and we’ll be moving Sam’s operation up there in a few months so they can get started on the accelerator. They’ve really come a long way with the 3D printing and this quantum computing stuff. You’d be amazed at what they’re able to do.”

  “I’m sure I would,” I said. “This is all news to me. How did I get so far out of the loop?”

  “You didn’t want to be in the loop, remember? Besides, Aurie said she didn’t want you bothered while you were working on your music. She’ll probably be pissed at me for letting it slip. Listen, why don’t you talk to her about all this? I really have to get back to work.”

  Later that evening, I was drinking wine and watching Dan Rather report on Mount St. Helens, when Aurélie materialized in the chair next to me. “Hey there,” she said. “Where’s Cronkite?”

  “Rather’s sitting in,” I grabbed the remote and turned down the volume. “I hear a lot’s been going on since I moved up here. Want to bring me up to date?”

  “Ellie seems to have taken care of that. Against my wishes, I should say.”

  “Wasn’t her fault,” I said. “I asked, she answered. So, when do I get to meet the young Heyoka? From what I gather, we’re going to be neighbors.”

  “That’s true, but the two of you are also going to be busy as hell for a while, and I didn’t think it would be a good idea to bother either of you with unnecessary distractions. Speaking of distractions …” She eyed the half-empty wine bottle I’d left on the table.

  “What?” I said, “You want some? Oh, I forgot, you’re not really here.” The sarcasm was uncalled for, but I wasn’t in the mood to give a damn. We had a little staring contest, which I won when she broke eye contact. “If you want to know what’s really distracting me,” I said, refilling my glass, “it’s the fact that with all your goddamned advanced technology, you can’t seem to come up with a way to—”

  “Stop it, Rix! Just stop it,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion. She stood and walked across the room, then turned to face me. “Don’t you think we’ve tried? Don’t you think Heyoka and I would both be here if we could? Our world is coming apart at the seams right now, and we’re using all our ingenuity and remaining resources to try and survive long enough to help the foundation get off to a solid start. It’s all we have left.”

  I tilted my glass and spun it slowly, coating the inside with a thin film of amber liquid. I felt like screaming, but I managed to reduce the urge to a shake of the head. Up until that moment, I’d hung on to a sliver of hope, but now, not only had that hope been dashed, she was telling me that even the little we had could be coming to an end soon. I felt like I was standing at her death bed, waiting for someone to turn off the machines.

  When it became obvious I wasn’t going to speak, she shuffled around and cleared her throat. “I’ve been thinking about your idea,” she said.

  She seemed to be making some kind of peace offering, so I did my best to swallow my anger and force a smile. “What idea might that be?”

  “You know.” She stared at the floor. “The, uh … the sex thing.” Her hands picked nervously at the bottom of her t-shirt, as if she was trying to work up the nerve to remove it. “I’m not sure what to do, but I’ll do anything you want, Rix. Just please don’t be angry with me.”

  “I’m not angry with you,” I said, “I’m angry at … I don’t know, fate, I guess. Destiny. Life. And just where the hell is the so-called karma in this scenario? You haven’t done a damned thing to deserve what’s happening. If anyone deserves to be in your situation it’s me, yet I’m here with a second chance, and you’re there with no chance at all.”

  I could see by her sagging shoulders that my words had cut deep. None of this was her fault, and I’d stupidly made it sound like I was blaming her. “Hey,” I said, “Forget all that, okay? I’m just frustrated. It didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  A flash on the silent TV drew our attention, and we both turned to watch a video replay of the explosion that obliterated the north face of Mount St. Helens. Was that fate? Destiny? Maybe the eruption itself, but not the deaths. The nearby residents had been warned and were given ample time to evacuate. Even so, many chose to stay. It was choice, not fate that killed them.

  Aurie must have been on the same wavelength. “Some things are inevitable,” she said. “Even if we know about them beforehand, certain outcomes can’t be altered. In our dimension, the warning signs were there, but the world refused to heed them until it was too late. Or maybe we just didn’t see them in time. In any case, we all share some level of guilt.”

  “Not really,” I said. “It was the greed and stupidity of people in power—billionaires, dictators, plutocrats, religious fanatics—that caused all the problems. You and thousands of other scientists and environmentalists did everything you could.”

  “Not everything,” she said. “More could have been done if only we’d known exactly what to do—if we hadn’t been so caught up in our own research, trying to come up with incremental scientific advancements instead of concentrating on the big picture. That’s why we’ve been working so hard to figure out how to deal effectively with the situation here. And one thing we’ve learned is that the solution cannot be found in gadgets or innovations, it has to come from broad, unhurried intervention that will alter societal attitudes over the long term. We can’t worry about saving individual lives or even populations. We have to focus on halting society’s relentless march toward that tipping point our world passed long ago.”

  She seemed to have forgotten all about the sex bit, which was fine with me. I knew it was something she was having a hard time with, so I wanted to forget it
anyway. I was about to say as much when she turned to face me, and with a shy smile, reached back and pulled the t-shirt over her head. “I hate to contradict myself,” she said, holding the wadded shirt against her chest, “but with all this doomsday talk, I’m thinking you could probably use some distraction right now.”

  “Wait!” I said.

  She looked at me and frowned, then loosened her grip, letting the wrinkles fall out of the shirt until it covered her from shoulders to waist. “But I thought … I mean, I don’t know exactly what you—”

  “I changed my mind.” For a split second, I’d considered letting her continue. After all, giving my most cherished sexual fantasy a virtual life was something I’d dreamt about for years. But the last thing I wanted to do was make her any more uncomfortable than I already had. “You know,” I said, hoping to change the subject, “that’s the same Lebowski t-shirt you were wearing the first time I saw you at the Villa. I never saw the movie, so why don’t you put the shirt back on and tell me about it?”

  “I never saw it either,” she said, turning around and slipping the shirt over her head. “I picked this up at a consignment shop in Lyon. I’ve been a Jeff Bridges fan ever since I saw him and Karen Allen in a rerun of Starman on TV. But The Big Lebowski got such horrible early reviews, I gave it a pass. I never was much of a movie goer anyway. What’s wrong, Rix? I can handle this. I’m a little skittish about it is all.”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Aurie. I just know it’s something you don’t want to do. I feel like a dirtbag for even suggesting it, so let’s drop the subject. We’ve got a lot more important stuff to take care of.”

  She turned back, but couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye. “I love you,” she whispered.

  When I tried to answer, the words caught in my throat.

  The next few weeks were not what I’d expected. Our conversations were more philosophical than technical, and I was surprised at how easy the themes were to follow. Much of the material I’d read had seemed incomprehensible, but some of it must have lodged in my subconscious because I was able to easily grasp the concepts she espoused and understand her sometimes-complex answers to my questions. By the second week, I was jotting down thoughts on a legal pad as we talked. It was as if the process had opened a conduit to an intellectual alter ego I never knew existed.

  After those initial discussions, she suggested we explore several holographic models similar to the one she’d shown me before, the difference being that the events would be identified so I could better understand the relationships between them. We would also be able to test various interventions to demonstrate that what seemed to be the most logical action—eliminating a dictator, destroying the profits of a corrupt corporation, introducing a new technology—would often end up causing more problems than it remedied. During these experiments, I was surprised to find my brain silently churning out bits and pieces of what I felt sure would one day become the songs she wanted me to compose.

  Our forays through the labyrinths of space-time eventually became almost like hallucinatory drug trips, during which I was able to envision a sweeping panorama of human evolution as it moved from the past through the present and into the future. This brought to mind Heyoka’s stories of his early vision quests, and as I recalled his descriptions, I felt my ties to the temporal world dissolve, allowing me to step away and observe the universe in its entirety. And when I began to hear—or maybe imagine—the cosmic symphony he had spoken of as the music or harmony of the spheres, I started to wonder if Aurélie’s ideas concerning the importance of music throughout history might not have been so far-fetched after all.

  In one sense, it seemed, the universe was speaking my language. And, I thought, if I could learn to influence that vast concerto in some small way, it was possible that my contribution to the Grand Plan would be more significant than I’d previously imagined. Aurie had been adamant about maintaining a balance when it came to any kind of intervention, and I could now see a musical correlative to that balance in its similarity to melodic harmony. Whether this was a manifestation of my overactive imagination, or there really was some sort of orchestral score guiding our journey through space-time, didn’t really matter; what mattered was that I suddenly saw with clarity what my role would be and how to attack it. As if to reinforce that realization, I began to hear melody lines—fragments of tunes I knew would eventually accompany the lyrics that came to mind as we observed the long-term consequences of mankind’s foibles.

  As I abandoned my vantage point and reentered the maelstrom of space-time, there was a sensation of unconditional acceptance, of instantly being absorbed into the marrow of the universe. My conversion from skeptic to believer happened so fast I felt like one of those gullible penitents being slapped on the head by a tent-show healer. A fundamentalist Christian would probably describe the experience as being born again, and even my agnosticism couldn’t stop me from thinking of it as a kind of spiritual awakening.

  I often came out of these trance-like states so overwhelmed with ideas I would have to shush Aurie so I could scribble them down while they were still fresh in my mind. At first, she tried to read my sloppy shorthand, but there was no context or flow to what I wrote, only random snippets—scattered, unrelated thoughts in no particular order that even I would need days to sort through and decipher. Eventually I put together a few verses and compiled a couple of rough lyric sets, and when I let her see them she seemed duly impressed.

  As I became more and more absorbed in the writing process, Aurie gradually realized that her input was no longer required, and she started making excuses to leave me alone for prolonged periods. What I didn’t know at the time was that these absences were the harbinger of approaching disaster.

  I’d become almost manically obsessed with the project, working all hours of the day and night, often ignoring the phone and forgetting to eat. When I did manage a few hours of sleep, I was plagued by convoluted dreams; streams of consciousness that started out with creative ideas, then devolved into ominous warnings and nightmare visions of failure. It was 3:00 in the afternoon when I awoke from one of these dreams to find Ellie staring at me. She had apparently been slapping my face, and when I finally opened my eyes she seemed shocked, as if I’d risen from the dead.

  “What the hell?” I mumbled.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I thought you might have had a stroke or something. I’ve got some bad news. Are you awake enough to listen?”

  I scratched my stubbled chin and looked at her through bleary eyes. “Maybe,” I said. “Can’t really tell yet. What’s up?”

  “We haven’t heard from Aurélie or Heyoka now for over a week. Have you?”

  I took her hand and she helped pull me up. “Don’t know,” I said, swinging my legs over to sit on the edge of the bed. “What day is it?”

  “It’s Saturday. How long have you been out?”

  “If you mean asleep, not long. Haven’t been sleeping much lately. Been working, writing stuff for Aurie.”

  “Try to think,” she said. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  I rubbed sleep from my eyes then looked at my feet and tried to focus. “I guess it’s been a few days. What’s going on?”

  “I was afraid of that.” She rubbed the back of my neck. “I think it’s over, Dad. Last time we saw her, she was in the middle of a sentence when she started to flicker and disappear. That was a week ago, and we haven’t heard from either of them since. Then on Sunday morning, all the data transmissions stopped, including a set of instructions going directly to the printer. And that was really gross.”

  My brain was slowly coming back to life, and when I glanced up I saw that Ellie was trying to hold back tears. “What do you mean, ‘gross?’”

  “They’ve been sending instructions to print more complex organic stuff,” she said. “You know, plants and insects and the like? They’d decided to move up to small mammals, but something must have gone wrong, because they sent instructions for a marmoset,
and it was halfway done printing when things went berserk. You can’t imagine … God, it was horrible.”

  The implications were beginning to sink in. If the connection was lost, that obviously meant things had shut-down on their end. Aurie had tried to forewarn me, but I was concentrating so hard on the writing process I hadn’t paid much attention. “I need a drink,” I said.

  “No you don’t!” she cried, smacking the back of my head. “That’s the last thing you need right now. I know how hard this is for you, Dad. Hell, it’s going to be hard on all of us. But we’re on our own, now, and we have to start dealing with that reality as best we can. H2 will take over the scientific end, and Sam’s got the computer division cranked up to near the point where theirs was. We’ve cataloged thousands of instruction sets, and we’re doing our own modeling projections, so it’s not like we’ll be starting from scratch. This won’t do anything to slow the development of Millennium Park or alter any of our other plans. What you need to do is concentrate on getting your album recorded and preparing for the concert.”

  The Message

  I tried to convince Ellie that I would be okay, that all I needed was a little time to get my head straight. But she didn’t buy it. “We’re still deciphering the last few digital transmissions,” she said, “so I have to meet with Sam and go over them. But I’ll be back to check on you, and I’m going to call every day. If you want to honor Aurélie’s legacy, you have to follow through with the plan.”

  “You can call,” I said, “but don’t expect me to answer. I need some time to process all this, and I can’t do that sitting here waiting for the phone to ring. If you want to talk, your best bet would be to look for me down at the stream. If I’m not there, I’ll probably be somewhere in the woods, and your chances of finding me will be slim-to-none. As for my contribution to the Grand Plan, you can forget about that. You know as well I do it was bullshit anyway.”