Ken Grimwood - Replay

"Just the way I said it. The movie flopped. It did good business for about a month, and then fell off to nothing. The critics hated it. So did the audiences. Word of mouth was even worse than the reviews, and they were bad enough. Leftover sixties mysticism pretty much summed up the general reaction. Muddled,"incoherent, and pretentious were thrown in there a lot, too. The only reason most people went to see it at all was for the novelty value of the Showscan process and for the computer graphics. Those went over well, but they were just about the only things anybody liked about the film."

There was a long, awkward silence. "I’m sorry," Jeff said finally. Pamela laughed bitterly. "Funny, isn’t it? You refused to have anything more to do with me because you were concerned about the potentially dangerous impact this film might have, the global changes it might set in motion … and the world ended up ignoring it, treating it like a stale joke."

"What went wrong?" he asked with gentleness.

"Part of it was the timing: the Me Generation, discos, cocaine, all that. Nobody wanted any more lectures about the oneness of the universe and the eternal chain of being. They’d had enough of that in the sixties; now all they wanted to do was party. But it was mainly my fault. The critics were right. It was a bad movie. It was too abstract, too esoteric; there was no plot, there were no real characters, no one for an audience to identify with. It was purely a philosophical exercise, a self-indulgent message picture, with no meat to it. People stayed away in droves, and I can’t blame them."

"You’re being kind of hard on yourself, aren’t you?"

She turned her empty mug around in her hands, kept her eyes down. "Just facing facts. It was a painful lesson to learn, but I’ve grown to accept it. Both of us have had to accept a lot. Had to lose a lot."

"I know how much it meant to you, how much you believed in what you were doing. I respect that, even if I disagreed with your methods."

She looked at him, her green eyes softer than he’d ever seen them. "Thank you. That means a lot to me."

Jeff stood up, took his parka from the hook by the door. "Get your coat on," he told her. "I want to show you something."

They stood in fresh snow at the top of the hill where he’d been clearing out the irrigation system the week before he first saw Starsea. The Pit River was clogged with ice now, not salmon, and the trees on Buck Mountain were heavy with their burden of white. In the distance, the majestic conic symmetry of Mount Shasta rose up to meet the clear November sky.

"I used to dream about that mountain," Jeff told her. "Dream it had something of great import to tell me, an explanation for all I’d been through."

"It looks … unreal," she murmured. "Sacred, even. I can understand a vision like that coming to dominate your dreams."

"The Indians around here did consider it holy. Not just because it’s a volcano; some of the other Cascade peaks have been more active, made more of an immediate impact on the environment. But none of them ever had the same allure Shasta did."

"And still does," Pamela whispered, staring at the silent mountain. "There’s a … power there. I can feel it."

Jeff nodded, his eyes fixed, like hers, on the far-off stately slopes. "There’s a cult—white, not Indian—that still worships the mountain. They think it has something to do with Jesus, with resurrection. Others believe there are aliens, or some ancient offshoot race of humans, living in the magma tunnels beneath it. Strange, crazy stuff; Mount Shasta seems to inspire that kind of thinking, somehow."

The wind gusted colder, and Pamela shivered. Reflexively, Jeff put his arm around her shoulders, drew her to his warmth.

"At one time or another," he said, "I’ve imagined just about every possible explanation, no matter how bizarre, for what’s been happening to me—to us. Time warps, black holes, God gone berserk … I mentioned the people who think Mount Shasta is populated by aliens; well, I once had myself convinced this was all some sort of experiment being conducted by an extraterrestrial race. The same idea must have occurred to you once or twice; I could see elements of it in Starsea. And maybe that’s the truth—maybe we’re the sentient rats who have to find our way out of this maze. Or maybe there’s a nuclear holocaust at the end of 1988, and the collective psychic will of all the men and women who have ever lived has chosen this way to keep it from spelling an absolute end to humanity. I don’t know.

"And that’s the point: I can’t know, and I’ve finally grown to accept my inability to understand it, or to change it."

"That doesn’t mean you can’t keep wondering," she said, her face close to his.

"Of course not, and I do. I wonder about it constantly. But I’m no longer consumed by that quest for answers, haven’t been for a long time. Our dilemma, extraordinary though it is, is essentially no different than that faced by everyone who’s ever walked this earth: We’re here, and we don’t know why. We can philosophize all we want, pursue the key to that secret along a thousand different paths, and we’ll never be any closer to unlocking it.

"We’ve been granted an incomparable gift, Pamela; a gift of life, of awareness and potential greater than anyone has ever known before. Why can’t we just accept it for what it is?"

"Someone—Plato, I think—once said, The unexamined life is not worth living. "

"True. But a life too closely scrutinized will lead to madness, if not suicide."

She looked down at their footprints in the otherwise-pristine snow. "Or simply failure," she said quietly.

"You haven’t failed. You made an attempt to draw the world together, and in the process you’ve created magnificent works of art. The effort, the creation—those acts stand on their own."

"Until I die again, perhaps. Until the next replay. Then it all vanishes."

Jeff shook his head, his arm tightly around her shoulders. "Only the products of your work will disappear. The struggle, the devotion you put into your endeavors … That’s where the value truly lies, and will remain: within you."

Her eyes filled with tears. "So much loss, though, so much pain; the children…"

"All life includes loss. It’s taken me many, many years to learn to deal with that, and I don’t expect I’ll ever be fully resigned to it. But that doesn’t mean we have to turn away from the world, or stop striving for the best that we can do and be. We owe that much to ourselves, at least, and we deserve whatever measure of good may come of it."

He kissed her tear-streaked cheeks, then kissed her lightly on the lips. To the west, a pair of hawks circled slowly in the sky above Devil’s Canyon.

"Have you ever been soaring?" Jeff asked.

"You mean in a sailplane, a glider? No. No, I never have."

He put both arms around her waist, hugged her close. "We will," he whispered into the softness of her tawny hair. "We’ll soar together."

Past Revelstoke, the train sped alongside great, somber glaciers as it began its climb into the Rockies. Thick forests of red cedar and hemlock covered the surrounding hillsides, and around one bend a field of heather trapped between two glaciers suddenly came into view. The pink and purple flowers rippled, shimmered in the soft spring breeze, their ephemeral beauty a quiet rebuke to the impassive walls of ice enclosing them.

There was a certain erotic quality about the flowers, Jeff thought: Their fragile, wind-blown caress against the unyielding glacier, their vibrant color so like a woman’s lips, or …

He smiled at Pamela in the seat beside him, rested his hand on her bare knee and let his fingers slide beneath the hem of her skirt. Her cheeks flushed as he tenderly stroked her inner thigh; she glanced around the dome car to see if anyone was looking at them, but the eyes of the other passengers remained fixed on the passing spectacle outside the train.