Kathy climbed out of the hot tub and began toweling herself off. Steam rose from the water, and moved gently around her. Peter found himself looking at her almost with tenderness, something he had not felt in a long time. Then she spoke, and ruined it. “You missed your calling,” she said, rubbing briskly with the towel. “You should have taken up poster-writing. You have a knack for poster profundity. You know, like, I am not in this world to live up to your expect—”
“Enough,” Peter said. “How much blood do you have to draw, damn it?”
Kathy stopped and looked at him. She frowned. “You’re really down, aren’t you?” she said.
Peter stared off at the mountains, and did not bother to reply.
The concern left her voice as quickly as it had come. “Another depression, huh? Drink another beer, why don’t you? Feel sorry for yourself some more. By midnight you’ll have worked yourself up to a good crying jag. Go on.”
“I keep thinking of that match,” Peter said.
“Match?”
“In the nationals,” he said. “Against Chicago. It’s weird, but I keep having this funny feeling, like…like it was right there that it all started to go bad. We had a chance to do something big, something special. But it slipped away from us, and nothing has been right since. A losing variation, Kathy. We picked a losing variation, and we’ve been losing ever since. All of us.”
Kathy sat down on the edge of the tub. “All of you?”
Peter nodded. “Look at us. I failed as a novelist, failed as a journalist, and now I’ve got a failing bookstore. Not to mention a bitch wife. Steve is a drunk who couldn’t even get together enough money to pay his way out here. E.C. is an aging account executive with an indifferent track record, going nowhere. Losers. You said it, in the car.”
She smiled. “Ah, but what about our host? Bunnish lost bigger than any of you, and he seems to have won everything since.”
“Hmmmm,” said Peter. He sipped thoughtfully at his beer. “I wonder. Oh, he’s rich enough, I’ll give you that. But he’s got a chessboard in his living room with the pieces glued into position, so he can stare every day at the place he went wrong in a game played ten years ago. That doesn’t sound like a winner to me.”
She stood up, and shook loose her hair. It was long and auburn and it fell around her shoulders gorgeously, and Peter remembered the sweet lady he had married eight years ago, when he was a bright young writer working hard on his first novel. He smiled. “You look nice,” he said.
Kathy seemed startled. “You are feeling morose,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t have a fever?”
“No fever. Just a memory, and a lot of regrets.”
“Ah,” she said. She walked back toward their bedroom, and snapped the towel at him in passing. “C’mon, captain. Your team is going to be waiting, and all this heavy philosophy has given me quite an appetite.”
THE FOOD WAS FINE, BUT THE DINNER WAS AWFUL.
They ate thick slabs of rare prime rib, with big baked potatoes and lots of fresh vegetables. The wine looked expensive and tasted wonderful. Afterwards, they had their choice of three desserts, plus fresh-ground coffee and several delicious liqueurs. Yet the meal was strained and unpleasant, Peter thought. Steve Delmario was in pretty bad shape even before he came to the table, and while he was there he drank wine as if it were water, getting louder and fuzzier in the process. E.C. Stuart was coldly quiet, his fury barely held in check behind an icy, aloof demeanor. And Bunnish thwarted every one of Peter’s attempts to move conversation to safe neutral ground.
His genial expansiveness was a poor mask for gloating, and he insisted on opening old wounds from their college years. Every time Peter recounted an anecdote that was amusing or harmless, Bunnish smiled and countered with one that stank of hurt and rejection.
Finally, over coffee, E.C. could stand no more of it. “Pus,” he said loudly, interrupting Bunnish. It was about the third word he’d permitted himself the entire meal. “Pus and more pus. Bunnish, what’s the point? You’ve brought us here. You’ve got us trapped here, with you. Why? So you can prove that we treated you shabbily back in college? Is that the idea? If so, fine. You’ve made your point. You were treated shabbily. I am ashamed, I am guilty. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Now let’s end it. It’s over.”
“Over?” said Bunnish, smiling. “Perhaps it is. But you’ve changed, E.C. Back when I was the butt of your jokes, you’d recount them for weeks. Over wasn’t so final then, was it? And what about my game with Vesselere in the nationals? When that was over, did we forget it? Oh, no, we did not. That game was played in December, you’ll recall. I heard about it until I graduated in May. At every meeting. That game was never over for me. Delmario liked to show me a different checkmate every time I saw him. Our dear captain refrained from playing me in any league matches for the rest of the year. And you, E.C., you liked to greet me with, ‘Say, Bunny, lost any big ones lately?’ You even reprinted that game in the club newsletter, and mailed it in to Chess Life. No doubt all this seems like ancient history to you. I have this trick memory, though. I can’t forget things quite so easily. I remember it all. I remember the way Vesselere sat there, with his hands folded on his stomach, never moving, staring at me out of those itty-bitty eyes of his. I remember the way he moved his pieces, very carefully, very daintily, lifting each one between thumb and forefinger. I remember wandering into the halls between moves to get a drink of water, and seeing Norten over by the wall charts, talking to Mavora from the A team. You know what he was saying? He was gesturing with his hands, all worked up, and he was telling him, He’s going to blow it, damn it, he’s going to blow it! Isn’t that right, Peter? And Les looked over at me as I passed, and said, Lose this one and your ass is grass, Bunny! He was another endearing soul. I remember all the people who kept coming to look at my game. I remember Norten standing in the corner with Hal Winslow, the two mighty captains, talking heatedly. Winslow was all rumpled and needed a shave and he had his clipboard, and he was trying to figure out who’d finish where if we won, or tied, or lost. I remember how it felt when I tipped over my king, too. I remember the way Delmario started kicking the wall, the way E.C. shrugged and glanced up at the ceiling, and the way Peter came over and just said Bunnish! and shook his head. You see? My trick memory is as tricky as ever, and I haven’t forgotten a thing. And especially I haven’t forgotten that game. I can recite all the moves to you right now, if you’d like.”
“Shit,” said Steve Delmario. “Only one important move to recite, Bunny. Knight takes pawn, that’s the move you ought to recite. The sac, the winning sac, the one you didn’t play. I forget what kind of feeble thing you did instead.”
Bunnish smiled. “My move was king to knight one,” he said. “To protect my rook pawn. I’d castled long, and Vesselere was threatening to snatch it.”
“Pawn, shmawn,” said Delmario. “You had him busted. The sac would have gutted that whale like nobody’s goddamned business. What a laugh that would have been. The bunny rabbit beating the whale. Old Hal Winslow would have been so shocked he would have dropped his clipboard. But you blew it, guarding some diddly-squat little pawn. You blew it.”
“So you told me,” said Bunnish. “And told me, and told me.”
“Look,” Peter said, “I don’t see the sense in rehashing all of this. Steve is drunk, Bruce. You can see that. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“He knows exactly what he’s saying, Norten,” Bunnish replied. He smiled thinly and removed his glasses. Peter was startled by his eyes. The hatred there was almost tangible, and there was something else as well, something old and bitter and somehow trapped. The eyes passed lightly over Kathy, who was sitting quietly amidst all the old hostility, and touched Steve Delmario, Peter Norten, and E.C. Stuart each in turn, with vast loathing and vast amusement.
“Enough,” Peter said, almost pleadingly.
“NO!” said Delmario. The drink had made him belligerent. “It’s not enough, it’ll nev
er be enough, goddamn it. Get out a set, Bunny! I dare you! We’ll analyze it right now, go over the whole thing again, I’ll show you how you pissed it all away.” He pulled himself to his feet.
“I have a better idea,” said Bunnish. “Sit down, Delmario.”
Delmario blinked uncertainly, and then fell back into his chair.
“Good,” said Bunnish. “We’ll get to my idea in a moment, but first I’m going to tell you all a story. As Archie Bunker once said, revenge is the best way to get even. But it isn’t revenge unless the victim knows. So I’m going to tell you. I’m going to tell you exactly how I’ve ruined your lives.”
“Oh, come off it!” E.C. said.
“You never did like stories, E.C.,” Bunnish said. “Know why? Because when someone tells a story, they become the center of attention. And you always needed to be the center of attention, wherever you were. Now you’re not the center of anything, though. How does it feel to be insignificant?”
E.C. gave a disgusted shake of his head and poured himself more coffee. “Go on, Bunnish,” he said. “Tell your story. You have a captive audience.”
“I do, don’t I?” Bunnish smiled. “All right. It all begins with that game. Me and Vesselere. I did not blow that game. It was never won.”
Delmario made a rude noise.
“I know,” Bunnish continued, unperturbed, “now, but I did not know then. I thought that you were right. I’d thrown it all away, I thought. It ate at me. For years and years, more years than you would believe. Every night I went to sleep replaying that game in my head. That game blighted my entire life. It became an obsession. I wanted only one thing—another chance. I wanted to go back, somehow, to choose another line, to make different moves, to come out a winner. I’d picked the wrong variation, that was all. I knew that if I had another chance, I’d do better. For more than fifty years, I worked toward that end, and that end alone.”
Peter swallowed a mouthful of cold coffee hastily and said, “What? Fifty years? You mean five, don’t you?”
“Fifty,” Bunnish repeated.
“You are insane,” said E.C.
“No,” said Bunnish. “I am a genius. Have you ever heard of time travel, any of you?”
“It doesn’t exist,” said Peter. “The paradoxes…”
Bunnish waved him quiet. “You’re right and you’re wrong, Norten. It exists, but only in a sort of limited fashion. Yet that is enough. I won’t bore you with mathematics none of you can understand. Analogy is easier. Time is said to be the fourth dimension, but it differs from the other three in one conspicuous way—our consciousness moves along it. From past to present only, alas. Time itself does not flow, no more than, say, width can flow. Our minds flicker from one instant of time to the next. This analogy was my starting point. I reasoned that if consciousness can move in one direction, it can move in the other direction as well. It took me fifty years to work out the details, however, and make what I call a flashback possible.
“That was in my first life, gentlemen, a life of failure and ridicule and poverty. I tended my obsession and did what I had to so as to keep myself fed. And I hated you, each of you, for every moment of those fifty years. My bitterness was inflamed as I watched each of you succeed, while I struggled and failed. I met Norten once, twenty years after college, at an autographing party. You were so patronizing. It was then that I determined to ruin you, all of you.
“And I did. What is there to say? I perfected my device at the age of seventy-one. There is no way to move matter through time, but mind, mind is a different issue. My device would send my mind back to any point in my own lifetime that I chose, superimpose my consciousness with all of its memories on the consciousness of my earlier self. I could take nothing with me, of course.” Bunnish smiled and tapped his temple significantly. “But I still had my photographic memory. It was more than enough. I memorized things I would need to know in my new life, and I flashed back to my youth. I was given another chance, a chance to make some different moves in the game of life. I did.”
Steve Delmario blinked. “Your body,” he said blurrily. “What happened to your body, huh?”
“An interesting question. The kick of the flashback kills the would-be time-traveler. The body, that is. The timeline itself goes on, however. At least my equations indicate that it should. I’ve never been around to witness it. Meanwhile, changes in the past create a new, variant timeline.”
“Oh, alternate tracks,” Delmario said. He nodded. “Yeah.”
Kathy laughed. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here listening to all this,” she said. “And that he”—she pointed to Delmario—“is taking it seriously.”
E.C. Stuart had been looking idly at the ceiling, with a disdainful, faintly tolerant smile on his face. Now he straightened. “I agree,” he said to Kathy. “I am not so gullible as you were, Bruce,” he told Bunnish, “and if you are trying to get some laughs by having us swallow this crock of shit, it isn’t going to work.”
Bunnish turned to Peter. “Captain, what’s your vote?”
“Well,” said Peter carefully, “all this is a little hard to credit, Bruce. You spoke of the game becoming an obsession with you, and I think that’s true. I think you ought to be talking to a professional about this, not to us.”
“A professional what?” Bunnish said.
Peter fidgeted uncomfortably. “You know. A shrink or a counselor.”
Bunnish chuckled. “Failure hasn’t made you any less patronizing,” he said. “You were just as bad in the bookstore, in that line where you turned out to be a successful novelist.”
Peter sighed, “Bruce, can’t you see how pathetic these delusions of yours are? I mean, you’ve obviously been quite a success, and none of us have done as well, but even that wasn’t enough for you, so you’ve constructed all these elaborate fantasies about how you have been the one behind our various failures. Vicarious, imaginary revenge.”
“Neither vicarious nor imaginary, Norten,” Bunnish snapped. “I can tell you exactly how I did it.”
“Let him tell his stories, Peter,” E.C. said. “Then maybe he’ll let us out of this funny farm.”
“Why, thank you, E.C.,” Bunnish said. He looked around the table with smug satisfaction, like a man about to live out a dream he has cherished for a long, long time. Finally he fastened on Steve Delmario. “I’ll start with you,” he said, “because in fact, I did start with you. You were easy to destroy, Delmario, because you were always so limited. In the original timeline, you were as wealthy as I am in this one. While I spent my life perfecting my flashback device, you made vast fortunes in the wide world out there. Electronic games at first, later more basic stuff, home computers, that sort of thing. You were born for that, and you were the best in the business, inspired and ingenious.
“When I flashed back, I simply took your place. Before using my device, I studied all your early little games, your cleverest ideas, the basic patents that came later and made you so rich. And I memorized all of them, along with the dates on which you’d come up with each and every one. Back in the past, armed with all this foreknowledge, it was child’s play to beat you to the punch. Again and again. In those early years, Delmario, didn’t it ever strike you as strange the way I anticipated every one of your small brainstorms? I’m living your life, Delmario.”
Delmario’s hand had begun to tremble as he listened. His face looked dead. “God damn you,” he said. “God damn you.”
“Don’t let him get to you, Steve,” E.C. put in. “He’s just making this up to see us squirm. It’s all too absurd for words.”
“But it’s true,” Delmario wailed, looking from E.C. to Bunnish and then, helpless, at Peter. Behind the thick lenses his eyes seemed wild. “Peter, what he said—all my ideas—he was always ahead of me, he, he, I told you, he—”
“Yes,” Peter said firmly, “and you told Bruce too, when we were talking earlier. Now he’s just using your fears against you.”
Delmario opened his mouth,
but no words came out.
“Have another drink,” Bunnish suggested.
Delmario stared at Bunnish as if he were about to leap up and strangle him. Peter tensed himself to intervene. But then, instead, Delmario reached out for a half-empty wine bottle, and filled his glass sloppily.
“This is contemptible, Bruce,” E.C. said.
Bunnish turned to face him. “Delmario’s ruin was easy and dramatic,” he said. “You were more difficult, Stuart. He had nothing to live for but his work, you see, and when I took that away from him, he just collapsed. I only had to anticipate him a half-dozen times before all of his belief in himself was gone, and he did the rest himself. But you, E.C., you had more resources.”
“Go on with the fairy tale, Bunnish,” E.C. said in a put-upon tone.
“Delmario’s ideas had made me rich,” Bunnish said. “I used the money against you. Your fall was less satisfying and less resounding than Delmario’s. He went from the heights to the pits. You were only a moderate success to begin with, and I had to settle for turning you into a moderate failure. But I managed. I pulled strings behind the scenes to lose you a number of large accounts. When you were with Foote, Cone I made sure another agency hired away a copywriter named Allerd, just before he came up with a campaign that would have rebounded to your credit. And remember when you left that position to take a better-paying slot at a brand-new agency? Remember how quickly that agency folded, leaving you without an income? That was me. I’ve given your career twenty or thirty little shoves like that. Haven’t you ever wondered at how infallibly wrong most of your professional moves have been, Stuart? At your bad luck?”