Ken Grimwood: Replay

"I can’t believe you’re saying this! How long has this been happening, when did you start this?"

"It’s been almost two years."

"Two years! You’ve been … using me, like I was some kind of inanimate object, like—"

"It wasn’t like that, not at all! We loved each other, you started painting again, went back to school…"

"I don’t care what I did! You seduced me away from my family, you tricked me … and you knew exactly what you were doing, what strings to pull to influence me, to … control me!"

"Pamela, please." He reached for her arm, trying to calm her, make her understand. "You’re twisting everything, you’re—"

"Don’t touch me!" she shouted, backing off the bridge where they’d embraced just moments before. "Just leave me alone and let me die! Let us both die, and get it done with!"

Jeff tried to stop her as she fled, but she was gone. The last hope of his last life was gone, lost on the path that led to Seventy-seventh Street, into the anonymous, devouring city … to death, immutable and certain death.

Jeff Winston died, alone; yet still his dying wasn’t done. He awoke in his office at WFYI, where the first of his many lives had so abruptly ended: Reporters' schedules posted on the wall, framed picture of Linda on his desk, the glass paperweight that had cracked when he had clutched his chest and dropped the phone so long ago. He looked at the digital clock on his bookshelf:

12:57 PM OCT 1988

Nine minutes to live. No time to contemplate anything but the looming pain and nothingness.

His hands began to shake, tears welled in his eyes.

"Hey, Jeff, about this new campaign—" Promotions director Ron Sweeney stood in his open office door, staring at him. "Jesus, you look white as a sheet! What’s the matter?"

Jeff looked back at the clock:

1:02 PM OCT 1988

"Get out of here, Ron."

"Can I get you an Alka-Seltzer or something? Want me to call a doctor?"

"Get the hell out of here!"

"Hey, I’m sorry, I just…" Sweeney shrugged, closed the door behind him.

The tremors in Jeff s hands spread to his shoulders, then to his back. He closed his eyes, bit his upper lip and tasted blood.

The phone rang. He picked it up in his shaking hand, completed the vast cycle that had begun so many lifetimes ago.

"Jeff," Linda said, "We need—"

The invisible hammer slammed into his chest, killing him again.

He woke again, looked in panic at the glowing red numbers across the room:

1:05 PM OCT 1988

He threw the paperweight at the clock, smashed its rectangular plastic face. The phone rang and kept on ringing. Jeff blotted out the sound of it with a scream, a wordless animal bellow, and then he died, and woke with the telephone already in his hand, heard Linda’s words and died again, again, again: waking and dying, awareness and void, alternating almost faster than he could perceive, centered always on the moment of that first heavy agony within his chest.

Jeff’s ravaged mind cried out for some release, but none was granted; it sought escape, whether in madness or oblivion no longer mattered … Yet still he saw and heard and felt, remained alert to all his torment, suspended without surcease in the awful darkness of not-life, not-death: the eternal, paralyzing instant of his dying.

"We need…" he heard Linda say, " … to talk."

There was a pain somewhere. It took him a moment to identify the source of it: his hand, rigid as a claw where he clutched the telephone. Jeff relaxed his grip, and the ache in his sweaty hand eased.

"Jeff? Did you hear what I said?"

He tried to speak, could issue nothing but a guttural sound that was half-moan, half-grunt.

"I said we need to talk," Linda repeated. "We need to sit down together and have an honest discussion about our marriage. I don’t know if it can be salvaged at this point, but I think it’s worth trying."

Jeff opened his eyes, looked at the clock on his bookshelf:

1:07 PM OCT 1988

"Are you going to answer me? Do you understand how important this is for us?"

The numbers on the clock changed silently, advanced to 1:08.

"Yes," he said, forcing the words to form. "I understand. We’ll talk."

She let out a long, slow breath. "It’s overdue, but maybe there’s still time."

"We’ll see."

"Do you think you could get home early today?"

"I’ll try," Jeff told her, his throat dry and constricted.

"See you when you get here," Linda said. "We have a lot to talk about."

Jeff hung up the phone, still staring at the clock. It moved to 1:09.

He touched his chest, felt the steady heartbeat. Alive. He was alive, and time had resumed its natural flow.

Or had it ever ceased? Maybe he had suffered a heart attack, but only a mild one, just bad enough to push him over the edge into hallucination. It wasn’t unheard of; he himself had made the analogy of a drowning man seeing the events of his life played back, had half-expected something like that to happen when the pain first hit him. The brain was capable of prodigious feats of fantasy and time compression or expansion, particularly at a moment of apparent mortal crisis.

Of course, he thought, and mopped his sweating brow with relief. That made perfect sense, much more than believing he’d actually been through all those lives, experienced all those—

Jeff looked back at the phone. There was only one way to know for certain. Feeling slightly foolish, he dialed information for Westchester County.

"What city, please?" the operator asked.

"New Rochelle. A listing for … Robison, Steve or Steven Robison."

There was a pause, a click on the line, and then a computer-synthesized voice read out the number in a dull monotone.

Maybe he’d heard the man’s name someplace, Jeff thought, perhaps in some minor news story. It could have gotten lodged in his mind, to be subtly woven into his delusion weeks or months ' later.

He dialed the number the computer had given him. A young girl’s voice, thick with sinus congestion, answered. "Is, ah, your mother home?" Jeff asked the child. "Just a minute. Mommy! Telephone!"

A woman’s voice came on the line, muffled and distorted, out of breath. "Hello?" she said.

It was hard to tell one way or the other, she was breathing in such quick, shallow gasps. "Is this … Pamela Robison? Pamela Phillips?"

Silence. Even the breathing halted.

"Kimberly," the woman said, "You can hang up the phone now. It’s time for you to take another Contac and some cough medicine."

"Pamela?" Jeff said when the girl had put down her receiver. "This is—"

"I know. Hello, Jeff."

He closed his eyes, took a deep lungful of air, and let it out slowly. "It … happened, then? All of it? Starsea, and Montgomery Creek, and Russell Hedges? You know what I’m talking about?" "Yes. I wasn’t sure myself that it was real, until I heard your voice just now. God, Jeff, I started dying over and over, so fast, it was—"

"I know. The same thing happened to me. But before that, you really do remember all the things we went through, all those lives?"

"Every one of them. I was a doctor, and an artist … you wrote books, we—"

"We soared."

"That, too." He heard her sigh, a long, empty sound full of regret, and weariness, and more. "About that last day, in Central Park—"

"I thought it would be my last time, I thought that you—were gone. Forever. I had to be with you toward the end, even if it was only … a part of you, that didn’t really know me."

She didn’t say anything, and after several seconds the silence hung between them as the lost years once had.

"What do we do now?" Pamela finally asked.

"I don’t know," Jeff said. "I can’t think straight yet, can you?"