Ken Grimwood - Replay

He had her full attention now. Her fingers nervously stroked her throat, and her face had lost all hint of any emotion but astonishment.

"Who are you?" Pamela Phillips asked in a low voice. "Who the hell are you?"

"Funny." Jeff smiled. "I’ve been wondering the same thing about you."

Pamela’s house in Topanga Canyon was as isolated and difficult to reach as any home so close to a major city could possibly be, set in the middle of a five-acre plot that had gone wild with vegetation: jacarandas, lemon trees, grape vines, blackberry bushes … all in an undisciplined tangle of unchecked growth. "You ought to trim back some of that," Jeff said as they wound their way toward the house in her Land Rover. She handled the four-wheel-drive vehicle with easy confidence, unaware or uncaring of how incongruous she looked in it, with her smart gray skirt and lacquered fingernails. She’d put her tailored jacket on the back seat and kicked off her shoes to better operate the clutch but otherwise still looked as if she belonged in the boardroom of an insurance company, not driving down a dirt road off an untamed canyon.

"That’s the way it grows." She shrugged. "If I wanted a formal garden, I’d live in Beverly Hills."

"You’ve got a lot of good fruit going to waste, though."

"I get all the fruit I need at the Farmer’s Market." He let the matter drop. She could do whatever she wanted with her land, though it galled Jeff to see such lushness gone to seed. He still didn’t know much about her. After tersely verifying what he’d suspected, that she was a replayer too, she’d insisted on hearing his own story from the beginning, and had frequently interrupted to grill him for more details. He’d left out a lot, of course, particularly some of the episodes with Sharla, and he’d yet to hear anything about her own experiences. Clearly, though, she was a person of many contradictions. Which made perfect sense; so was he. How could either of them be anything else?

The house was plainly but comfortably furnished, with an oak-beamed ceiling and a big picture window on one side that looked over the messy jungle of her property to the ocean far below. As in her office, the walls were hung with framed mandalas of many types: Navajo, Mayan, East Indian. Near the window was a large desk stacked with books and notebooks, and in the center of it sat a bulky, greenish-gray device that incorporated a video screen, a keyboard, and a printer. He frowned quizzically at it. What was she doing with a home computer this early? There was no—

"It’s not a computer," Pamela said. "Wang 1200 word processor, one of the first. No disk drive, just cassettes, but it still beats a typewriter. Want a beer?"

"Sure." He was still a bit startled by her quick recognition of what he’d been thinking as he looked at the machine. It was going to take some time to get used to the idea that, after all these decades, he was in the presence of someone who actually shared his extraordinary frame of reference.

"Refrigerator’s through there," she said, pointing. "Get me one, too, while I get out of this costume." She walked toward the back of the house, shoes in hand. Jeff found the kitchen, opened (two bottles of Beck’s.

He surveyed her shelves of books and records as he waited for her to change. She didn’t seem to read much fiction or listen to a lot of popular music. The books were mostly biography, science, and the business side of the film industry; her records were weighted toward Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi.

Pamela came back into the living room wearing faded jeans and a baggy USC sweat shirt, took the beer from him, and plopped down in an overstuffed recliner. "That thing you told me about the plane, the one that almost crashed; that was stupid, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"At the end of my second cycle, when I realized I might go through it again, I memorized a list of every plane crash since 1963. Hotel fires, too, and railway accidents, earthquakes … all the major disasters."

"I’ve thought of doing the same thing."

"You should have already. Anyway, what happened next? What have you been doing since then?"

"Isn’t this all a bit one-sided? I’m just as curious about you, you know."

"Wrap up your story; then we’ll get to mine."

He settled himself on a sofa across from her and tried to explain his voluntary exile of the last nine years: his ascetic sense of union with things that grew in the earth, his fascination with their eternal symmetry in time—living entities that withered so they might flower, blossoms and green fruits that sprang recurrently to life from the previous year’s shriveled vines.

She nodded thoughtfully, concentrating on one of her intricate mandalas. "Have you read the Hindus?" she asked. "The Rig-Veda, the Upanishads?"

"Only the Bhagavad-Gita. A long, long time ago."

" You and I, Arujna, " she quoted easily, " have lived many lives. I remember them all: You do not remember. " Her eyes lit with intensity. "Sometimes I think our experience is what they were really talking about: not reincarnation over a linear time scale, but little chunks of the entire world’s history occasionally repeated over and over again … until we realize what’s happening and are able to restore the normal flow."

"But we have been aware of it, and it keeps on happening."

"Maybe it continues until everyone has the knowledge," she said quietly.

"I don’t think so; we both knew immediately, and it seems you either recognize it or you don’t. Everybody else just keeps going through the same patterns."

"Except the people whose lives we touch. We can introduce change."

Jeff smiled cynically. "So you and I are the prophets, the saviors?"

She looked out at the ocean. "Perhaps we are."

He sat upright, stared at her. "Wait a minute; that’s not what this movie of yours is all about, is it, setting people up for … ? You’re not planning to—"

"I’m not sure what I’m planning, not yet. Everything’s changed, now that you’ve shown up. I wasn’t expecting that."

"What do you want to do, start some kind of damned cult? Don’t you know what a disaster—"

"I don’t know anything!" she snapped. "I’m as confused as you are, and I just want to make some sense of my life. Do you want to just give up, not even try to figure out what it means? Well, go ahead! Go back to your goddamned farm and vegetate, but don’t tell me how I’m supposed to deal with all this, O.K.?"

"I was only offering my advice. Can you think of anybody else qualified to do that, given the circumstances?"

She scowled at him, her anger not yet cooled. "We can talk about it later. Now, do you want to hear my story or not?"

Jeff sank back into the soft cushions, eyed her warily. "Of course I do," he said in a level tone. There was no telling what might set her off. Well, he could understand what she must have been through; he could make allowances.

She nodded once, brusquely. "I’ll get us another beer."

Pamela Phillips, Jeff learned, had been born in Westport, Connecticut in 1949, daughter of a successful real-estate broker. She’d had a normal childhood, the usual illnesses, the ordinary joys and traumas of adolescence. She’d studied art at Bard College in the late sixties, smoked a lot of dope, marched on Washington, slept around as much as the other young women of her generation. True to form, she’d "gone straight" not long after Nixon resigned; she’d married a lawyer, moved to New Rochelle, had two children, a boy and a girl. Her reading habits veered toward romance novels, she painted as a hobby when she got the chance, did some charity work now and then. She’d fretted about not having a career, sneaked an occasional joint when the kids were in bed, did aerobics to keep her figure in shape.