Ken Grimwood - Replay

Sylla guided him inside her, and he grew hard automatically. Her wet inner flesh was like something ancient, something protohuman; receptive yang to his vital yin, together the creators of these endlessly regenerating cycles, these—

Jeff opened his eyes and the girl’s face changed shape again. It had become Gretchen’s face. He was fucking Gretchen, fucking his daughter: she to whom he had given life, yet who had never been.

He withdrew from her with instant revulsion.

"Awwrr!" the girl cried in frustration and reached for his limp penis, stroking it. "C’mon, luv, c’mon!"

The waves within his mind no longer soothed; they battered his emotions with a vicious impact. Cycles, wheels … within that universal chain there was no place for him, no pattern that would fit his mutant existence out of time.

The girl parted her blood-red lips and bent to suck him. He pushed her face away toward the pulsing wall, tried to shut out what he had seen in her.

"Mind if we join the party?" Sharla stood in the open doorway, naked. Behind her was a skinny young man with long, straggly hair and a pitted face. Sylla frowned uncertainly at the newcomers, then relaxed and let fall the sheet she had pulled up to cover her breasts.

"Might’s well," Sylla said. "Acid didn’t seem to agree with your mate, here."

"Acid?" the young man said excitedly. "You got some with you?"

Sylla nodded, reached for the purse she’d brought downstairs.

"Here, give us a couple hits, willya?" he said. Then, to Sharla: "You ever fuck on acid? It’s tremendous!"

They were on the bed, all of them, Sharla stroking Sylla’s hair, Gretchen’s hair—or was it Linda doing that?—and then the stranger became Martin Bailey, blood from the self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head spewing across the sheets, soaking the naked bodies of Jeff’s wife and daughter, they were dead all of them dead except for him and he couldn’t die no matter how many times he died. He was the wheel; he was the cycle.

Sharla tapped her foot impatiently as they waited in the first class lounge at San Francisco International. Her face was ghostly pale, after the latest mode, framed in the sleek straightness of her black hair. Her eyebrows were bleached to near-invisibility, her lipstick like a streak of chalk. The crazily zebra-patterned op-art print dress and white tights she wore completed the utter lack of color.

"How much longer now?" she asked curtly.

Jeff glanced at his watch. "Should be boarding any minute."

"And then how long till we get there?"

"It’s a four-and-a-half hour flight." He sighed. "We’ve been through this before."

"I don’t know why we’re doing this, anyway. I thought you were sick of the goddamned tropics. That’s exactly what you said before we left Brazil. Why do we have to go to Hawaii all of a sudden?"

"I want some quiet time in the sun, nobody else around for a change. I want some time to think, O.K.? And we’ve been through this before, too."

She shot him a cynical look. "Yeah, well, you just think you’ve been through everything before, don’t you?"

He stared back at her, incredulous. "What do you mean by that?"

"All that crap about living your life over again, all that reincarnation shit or whatever."

Jeff turned in the uncomfortable seat, grasped her tightly by the wrist. "Where did you hear anything like that? I never—"

"Let go of me," she said, shaking her hand loose from his. "Jesus Christ, you can’t get it up for one little dolly bird, you freak out on acid, and all of a sudden you want to run away, you start grabbing at me—"

"Shut up, Sharla. Just tell me what you heard, and where."

"Mireille told me all about it last year. Said you tried to lay some kind of mystical trip on her, told her you’d died and come back again. What a crock!"

The revelation struck Jeff with almost physical force. Of all the people he had known in any of his lives, there’d been some sense of empathy and understanding in Mireille alone that had led him to share his secret with her. He’d thought she wouldn’t make judgments about what he told her, would keep it as private as it must be kept …

"Why—" His voice cracked. "Why did she tell you?"

"'Cause she thought it was funny. We all did; everybody we knew in Paris was laughing behind your back for months."

He put his head in his hands, trying to absorb the implication of what she was telling him. "I trusted Mireille," he said softly.

Sharla snorted with derision. "Right, your special little girlfriend, uh-huh. I made it with her first, you know; who do you think told her to go hop in bed with you, get you out of that stupid moody funk you were in half the time? I was getting sick of you. I just wanted to have a good time and get laid. Mireille would have fucked a goddamn monkey if Jean-Claude and I told her to, so we did. Weren’t you the lucky one?"

A woman’s disembodied voice called their flight. Jeff made his way to the gate in a stupor of disbelief, Sharla beside him, a tight, satisfied smile on her face. They found their seats on the right side of the still-new Boeing 707, just behind the wing. Neither spoke as they stowed their carry-on luggage and fastened their seat belts. A stewardess came by, offering candy and gum; Jeff mutely declined. Sharla took a piece of orange hard candy, sucked at it with relish.

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome aboard Pan American World Airways Flight 843 from San Francisco to Honolulu. Your pilot today is Captain Charles Kimes, and with him in the cockpit are First Officer Fred Miller, Second Officer Max Webb, and Flight Engineer Fitch Robertson. We’ll be flying at an altitude of approximately…"

Jeff stared out the window at the drab gray tarmac rolling slowly past.

In truth, he had no one to blame but himself. He had set the tone for this heedless, sybaritic replay when he’d gone to Las Vegas with the express purpose of seeking out Sharla.

"… be serving lunch about thirty minutes after we take off. Please observe the No Smoking and the Fasten Seat Belts signs when they are lit, and for your comfort…"

What should he feel now, he wondered—anger, defeat? Neither emotion would do him any good; the damage had been done. Obviously, no one—not even Mireille—had believed what he’d told her in St. Tropez. At least the deception that she and Sharla had perpetrated didn’t present any threat to him; all it really did was leave him more alone than before.

The jet sped down the runway, lifted gracefully. He glanced toward the front of the cabin. No movie screen, of course; TWA still had exclusive rights to in-flight motion pictures. Too bad. He would have welcomed the distraction.

Jeff looked out the window as the jet climbed over the busy Bayshore Freeway. He should have brought along a book. Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-Colored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby had just been published; he wouldn’t have minded rereading—

The big plane shuddered heavily, rocked by a dull explosion. As Jeff watched in horror, the right outboard engine tore loose from its mounting and ripped a jagged hole in the wing as it fell away toward the city beneath them. Kerosene spurted from the wing-tip tank, then burst into a curling white flame that spat shards of molten metal.

"Look, the wing is on fire!" someone behind him shouted. The cabin filled with screams and the wails of children.

The outer third of the burning wing fell off, and the plane yawed crazily to the right. Jeff saw homes nestled in the pass between the hills, then the blue water of the Pacific, not more than a thousand feet below.

Sharla clutched at his left hand. He squeezed hers back, rancor and regret forgotten in the face of this appalling moment.

Only two years into this wasted replay, he thought with dread; would he return from a death so early, so violent? For all he’d cursed his repeated lives, he desperately wished now for life to continue.