Ken Grimwood (41 page)

Jeff looked up and saw his own reflection in the dark smoked glass of his bookshelves: flecks of gray in his hair, faint puffy bags beneath his eyes, thin lines beginning to crease his forehead. They'd never be smoothed out again, those marks of age; they would only deepen and proliferate, new hieroglyphs of lost youth written ineradicably across his face and body with each passing year.

And yet, he mused, the years themselves would all be fresh and new, an ever-changing panoply of unforeseen events and sensations that had been denied him until now. New films and plays, new technological developments, new music—Christ, how he , yearned to hear a song, any song, that he had never heard before!

The unfathomable cycle in which he and Pamela had been caught had proved to be a form of confinement, not release. They had let themselves be trapped in the deceptive luxury of focusing always on future options; just as Lydia Randall, in the blind hopefulness of her youth, had assumed life's choices would forever be available to her. "We have so
much
time," Jeff heard her say, and then his own repeated words to Pamela echoed anew in his brain: "Next time … next time."

Now everything was different. This wasn't "next time," and there would be no more of that; there was only
this
time, this sole finite time of whose direction and outcome Jeff knew absolutely nothing. He would not waste, or take for granted, a single moment of it.

Jeff stood up and walked out of his office into the busy newsroom. There was a large, U-shaped central desk at which Gene Collins, the midday editor, sat surrounded by computer terminals flashing the moment-by-moment output of AP, UPI, and Reuters, television monitors tuned to CNN and all three networks, a communications console linked to the station's reporters in the field and their own network's correspondents in Los Angeles, Beirut, Tokyo …

Jeff felt it flow through him, the electric freshness of the once more unpredictable world out there.

One of the news writers hurried past, rushing a green bulletin sheet into the air booth. Something important had happened—perhaps something disastrous, perhaps some discovery of surpassing wonder and benefit to humankind. Whatever it was, Jeff knew that it would be as new to him as it would be to everyone else.

He'd talk to Linda tonight. Though he wasn't sure what he might say, he owed her, and himself, at least that much. He wasn't sure of anything anymore, and that realization thrilled him with anticipation. He might try again with Linda, might someday rejoin Pamela, might change careers. The only thing that mattered was that the quarter century or so he had remaining would be
his
life, to live out as he chose and in his own best interests. Nothing took precedence over that: not work, not friendships, not relationships with women. Those were all components of his life, and valuable ones, but they did not define it or control it. That was up to him, and him alone.

The possibilities, Jeff knew, were endless.

Peter Skjøren woke, a memory of shock and excruciating pain fresh in his mind. He had been in the Bantu Republic on business, was having lunch with a Deputy Trade Minister in Mandela City, when—when he had
died.
Keeled forward right at the table, spilling his drink on the government official's trousers—he had noticed that, was embarrassed by it, even through the crushing pressure in his chest … and then the red-rimmed darkness, then nothing.

Until now. Here in the shop in Karijohansgate, back home in Oslo, where he'd first learned his mercantile skills, where he'd first found his calling in the world of commerce.

The shop that had been razed for an apartment block, twenty years ago.

Peter opened the ledger on his desk, saw the date, looked at his hands and saw young, smooth hands, no wedding band.

None of it had happened yet. Not the avalanche in Switzerland that had taken his son Edvard from him, not the nights of brooding melancholy that had driven his wife Signe into her hopeless downward spiral of alcoholism. He had no son, no wife; he had only a bright new future, whose pitfalls and opportunities he knew intimately, and could avoid or seize as the occasion demanded. Those years, those familiar and long-past years from 1988 to 2017, were his to live again, knowing the mistakes he'd made before. This time, Peter Skjøren vowed, he would do it right.

Scan Notes:

[07 aug 2003—scanned by Erick12]

[21 jul 2003—proofed by Escaped Chicken Spirits (ECS)]