"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 alclass="underline" 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.
She’d died of a heart attack when she was thirty-nine. In October 1988.
"What day?" Jeff asked.
"The eighteenth. Same day it happened to you, but at 1:15."
"Nine minutes later." He grinned. "You’ve seen the future. More of it than I have."
That almost brought a smile to her lips. "It was a dull nine minutes," she said. "Except for dying."
"Where were you when you woke up?"
"In the rec room of my parents' house. The television was on, a rerun of My Little Margie. I was fourteen."
"Jesus, what did you—Were they home?"
"My mother was out shopping. My father was still at work. I spent an hour walking around the house in a daze, looking at the clothes in my closet, flipping through the diary that I’d lost when I went to college … looking at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t stop crying. I still thought I was dead, and this was some bizarre way God had of giving me one last glimpse of my time on earth. I was terrified of the front door; I really believed that if I walked through it I’d be in Heaven, or Hell, or Limbo, or whatever."
"You were Catholic?"
"No, my mind was just swirling with all these vague images and fears. Oblivion, that’s a better word; that was what I really expected to find when I went outside. Mist, nothingness … just death. Then my mother came home, walked in through that door I was so frightened of. I thought she was some kind of disguised apparition come to drag me off to doom, and I started screaming.
"It took her a long time to quiet me down. She called the family doctor, he came over, gave me an injection—Demerol, probably—and I passed out. When I woke up again my father was there, standing over the bed, looking very worried, and I guess that was when I first began to realize I wasn’t really dead. He didn’t want me to get up, but I went running downstairs and opened the front door, walked out in the yard in my nightgown … and of course everything was perfectly normal. The neighborhood was just the way I’d remembered it. The dog from next door came bounding over and started licking my hand, and for some reason that set me off crying again.
"I stayed home from school for the next week, lay around my room pretending to be sick, and just thought … Tried at first to figure out what had happened, but it didn’t take me long to decide that was a hopeless task. Then, as the days went on and nothing changed, I started trying to figure out what I was going to do.