This is no good, Derek thought as he came down from that particular memory trip. I’m reliving the bad stuff, now. I’d better get some advice on how to get control over this drug… learn how to force it to draw out only the memories I want. Maybe I’ll talk to that guy Bettide.
No. This just won’t do at all.
He dreamt that night. Real dreams, not memories. He dreamt about smoke and fire and guilt. And he wept because there was nobody there to hold him this time around.
This is no good, Derek thought as he came down. I’m reliving the bad stuff again. Even down to those awful dreams I had when I first realized the drug was going bad. Maybe Bettide was right after all.
Oh, hell, what am I going to do now?
Things perked up a bit when he played Anton Perceveral in The Minimum Man, though the critics gave most of the credit for its success to the writers of the adaptation, and to Peter Tiersjens, who directed. Derek nursed his jealousy but said nothing. For a long time he was listless except when he was on stage.
The crowds identified with Perceveral, but he just couldn’t.
Melissa nursed him, teased him, cared for him. He let himself be talked into doing Falstaff over the summer, and hated it.
Peter got him the role of the decade—playing Claude Eatherly in Enola Gay. If anything could snap him out of his doldrums, that part should have.
It worked, sort of. He stopped moping and became arrogant. He snapped and lashed out and drank and snorted and smoked. He came home with the scent of other women on his clothes. Derek witnessed himself witnessing it all over again. He writhed within and tried to relive the experience without participating at all.
Yet a glimmer of his present self remained awake to notice things… things he had not seen the first time around. A piece of mail tossed in a corner. A misplaced phone message. A promise forgotten the initial time through, but noted on this passage…
It didn’t seem to make any difference, though. The past was fixed. The mistakes and casual cruelties repeated inerrantly. Derek struggled not to watch, but started taking larger and larger doses of the drug.
On the wall of his little room the legs of the runner approached the finish line…
Derek thought about Sycamore Street, Albany, New York… where his mother would be cooking a Sunday supper, his father would be reading the paper, and his room was a clutter of plastic models, filling the air with the heady scent of glue. He willed himself back to age twelve… back to a place in the warehouse of his cortex where a familiar female voice was about to call out…
“Supper’s ready!”
Derek smiled (foolish smile, the latest Derek thought). It had worked! Those were exactly the words he had willed his mother…
“Come on, Lothario…” Melissa slid the door open and Derek witnessed a former self being surprised, and a still earlier self snarl and curse. As the woman made her decision, and turned to leave, he felt, simultanously:
“Good riddance!”
“Melissa, don’t go!”
And this time added, “Oh, shut up, you fool, can’t you see she’s gone for good?”
“Drink.” Bettide gestured without looking up.
Derek grimaced but drank the supplement. “Have they found any more cases like me, doc?”
Bettide licked his pencil. “A few.”
“As to your problem of sequential memory access,” he went on. “I think we might have a possible solution.”
Derek edged forward to listen.
Derek awoke in a sweat. He shivered as he realized what was happening. The sequential memories were rapidly approaching the present. Soon he would begin recalling memories of recalling memories of recalling memories!
Where would it end?
He lay in the damp bed and wondered for the first time about the nature of his present existence.
He checked his own reality by every test he could devise—from pinching himself to reciting Shaw backward—but none of them proved for certain that he had never been this way before… that he had free will and was not merely reliving another memory at this very moment, in some future self’s Temporin-induced trip.
“I expected something like this might happen, Derek. But you must be stalwart. Remember Anton Perceveral? Stick with it and I think we can get out the other side.”
Derek’s hand shook as he drank the required supplement. He put down the beaker and looked from Bettide to the little black notebook and back. “I’m just an experiment to you,” he accused.
Bettide shrugged. “Partly, perhaps. You are also my patient. And an artist who I would dearly like to return to society. Fortunately all three imperatives make for a common goal. Now, will you agree to coming to the clinic so I can keep you under observation?”
Derek lowered his head into his hands. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’m lost in Time, Doctor. My thoughts and memories are a whirlwind. Nothing stands still anymore!”
For a long moment there was silence in the cubicle, broken only by the muttering of the ventilation system. Then Bettide spoke softly.
Derek looked up and blinked. For a clear moment the shabby office seemed built wholly of crystal—the clocks all halted—and the breath of the Universe held in expectant quiet. Light refracted through the diamond walls.
He knew, right then, that this moment was a new one, whether remembered a thousand times or not… even if witnessed by a hundred thousand versions of himself.
Each instant is itself, and nothing more. Each a heartbeat of Cod.
The epiphany passed with another blink of his eyes. Bettide wiped his glasses and looked at Derek myopically, awaiting an answer.
“I’ll let you know, Doctor,” Derek said quietly as he stood up. “I will be back tomorrow. I promise.”
“AH right, Derek. I’ll tell the receptionist to let you in at any time.”
Derek paused at the door.
“Thank you,” he said softly. Then he went out into the wintry afternoon.
The park was nearly empty. Derek climbed the steps to the Summer Theater. He stood on the stage and looked up at the city for over an hour, not moving or speaking, but nevertheless playing a part.
The ampule gleamed in the light from the torn windowshade. Derek looked at the little glass vial and decided he at last understood Anton Perceveral.
What else have we, he thought, when we have mined ourselves a tunnel all the way to Hell, than the option of digging further and hoping for a world that’s round?
“I saw Realm of Magic on the Late Show last week, Derek. You were very good…”
…the runner on the wall lengthened his stride.
Enola Gay closed before summer…
“The Catskills? Jeeze, Peter, what would I do in the friggin’ Catskills?”
…He had the satisfaction of punching Todd Chestner… but even the groupies drew back after that… He went home alone…
“Mr. Blakeney, you’ve given some young actors an object lesson in the dangers of success…”
“It’s called Time-Jizz… The latest thing from th’ Black Chemists…”