Ken Grimwood - Replay

Jeff cautiously turned left onto the highway heading back toward Madison. "I’m afraid we have to," he said. "We have to just accept it."

"How can you accept something like that!" she snapped. "Innocent people dying, being murdered by this maniac, when we know in advance that he’s going to do it!"

"We’ve always accepted it, from the very beginning: Manson, Berkowitz, Gacey, Buono and Bianchi … that sort of aimless savagery is part of this time period. We’ve become inured to it. I don’t even remember half the names of all the serial killers who’ll crop up over the next twenty years, do you?"

Pamela was silent, her eyes red from crying, her teeth tightly clenched.

"We haven’t tried to intervene in all those other murders, have we?" Jeff asked. "It’s never even occurred to us to do so, except that first time when I tried to stop the Kennedy assassination, and that was something of a very different order. We—not just you and me, but everyone in this society—we live with brutality, with haphazard death. We almost ignore it, except when it seems to threaten us directly. Worse, some people even find it entertaining, a vicarious thrill. That’s eighty percent, at least, of what the news business is all about: supplying America with its daily fix of tragedy, of other people’s blood and torment.

"We are the Antareans of Stuart McCowan’s demented fantasies. He and all the other subhuman butchers out there are indeed performers on a stage, but the gore-hungry audience is right here, not somewhere in outer space. And there’s nothing you or I can ever do to change that or to stem even the smallest trickle of that blood tide. We simply do what we’ve always done and always will: accept it, put it out of our minds as best we can, and go on with the rest of life. Get used to it, just as we do with all the other hopeless, inescapable pain."

The ad continued to draw responses, though none bore fruit. In 1970, they cut back on the number of publications in which it appeared; by the middle of the decade it was being printed only once a month, in fewer than a dozen of the largest-circulation newspapers and magazines.

Their apartment on Bank Street, in the west Village, came to be dominated by rows of filing cabinets. Jeff and Pamela saved even the most vaguely promising replies to the ad, along with clippings from the voluminous stacks of periodicals they pored over daily in search of potential anachronisms that might indicate the handiwork of another replayer somewhere in the world. It was frequently hard to be certain, one way or the other, about whether some minor event or product or artwork had or had not existed in the previous replays; they had never before focused so intently on such minutiae. Many times they contacted inventors or entrepreneurs whose indifferently publicized creations were unfamiliar to them; without exception, the apparent leads proved false.

In March of 1979, Jeff and Pamela found this story in the Chicago Tribune:

WISCONSIN KILLER FREED; "SANE," SAY DOCS

Crossfield, Wise. (AP) Admitted mass murderer Stuart McCowan, declared not guilty by reason of insanity in the 1966 slayings of four young college women at a sorority house in Madison, was released today from the private mental institution where he had been held for the past twelve years. Dr. Joel Pfeiffer, director of the Crossfield Home, said McCowan "is fully recovered from his patterns of delusion, and presents no threat to society at this point."

McCowan was accused in the mutilation-killings of the four coeds after a witness identified his car as the one seen leaving the parking lot of the Kappa Gamma sorority house in the early morning hours of February 6th, 1966, the day the bodies were discovered. Wisconsin State Police apprehended McCowan later that same day, outside the town of Chippewa Falls. They found a blood-stained ice pick, hacksaw, and other implements of torture in the trunk of his automobile.

McCowan freely admitted having murdered the young women, and claimed to have been instructed to do so by extraterrestrial beings. He further claimed to believe that he had been reincarnated a number of times and had carried out other killings in each of his "previous lives."

He was named as a suspect in similar multiple slayings in Minnesota and Idaho in 1964 and 1965, but his connection to those crimes was never established. On May 11, 1966, McCowan was judged incompetent to stand trial and was committed to the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He was transferred at his own expense to the Crossfield Home in March 1967.

Pamela pulled the rubber tubing tighter around Jeff’s arm, showed him which vein to hit and how to slide the hypodermic needle in with the bevel upward and the slender shaft parallel and lateral to the vein.

"What about psychological addiction, though?" he asked. "I know our bodies will be free of it when we come back, but won’t we still crave the sensation?"

She shook her head as she watched him make the practice injection, the harmless saline solution flowing smoothly into the bulging blue vein in the crook of his elbow. "Not if we only use it a couple of times," she said. "Wait until the morning of the eighteenth; just do enough to keep you sedated. Then double the dosage to the amount I showed you and inject that a few minutes before one o’clock. You should be unconscious by the time … cardiac arrest occurs."

Jeff emptied the syringe into his arm, waited a beat before he withdrew the needle. He tossed the hypodermic into the wastebasket, swabbed the injection site with a wad of cotton soaked in alcohol. Two matching leather kits lay on the coffee table; each contained a supply of fresh sterile needles and syringes, a coiled length of rubber tubing, a small bottle of alcohol, a box of cotton wads, and four glass vials filled with pharmaceutical-quality heroin. It hadn’t been difficult to obtain the drug and the equipment with which to use it; Jeff’s stockbroker had recommended a reliable cocaine dealer, and the dealer was equally well stocked for the growing upper-middle-class heroin trade.

Jeff stared at the expensively tooled death kits, looked up at Pamela’s face. There was a delicate tracery of fine lines across her forehead. The last time he’d known her at this age, the tiny wrinkles had been at the corners of her mouth and eyes; her forehead had been as smooth as when she was a girl. The difference between a lifetime of happiness and one of almost unrelieved anxiety was etched into the patterns of her skin.

"We didn’t do a very good job of it, did we?" he said glumly.

She tried to smile, faltered, gave it up. "No. I guess we didn’t."

"Next time…" he began, and his voice trailed off. Pamela reached out to him, and they squeezed each other’s hand.

"Next time," she said, "we’ll pay more attention to our own needs, day to day."

He nodded. "We kind of lost control this time, just let it slip away."

"I got carried away with the search for other replayers. It was kind of you to indulge me so, but—"

"I wanted to succeed in that as much as you did," he interrupted, bringing her hand to his lips. "It was something we had to do; it’s no one’s fault it turned out the way it did."

"I suppose not … but looking back, those years seem so stagnant, so passive. We seldom even left New York, for fear of missing the contact we kept waiting for."

Jeff pulled her to him, put his arms around her. "Next time we take charge again," he promised. "We’ll be the ones who make things happen—For us."

They rocked together gently on the sofa, neither saying what was most deeply on their minds: that they had no way of knowing how long it would be before Pamela would rejoin him after this new death … or even if the next replay would enable them to be together again at all.