Play it Again Sam Pt. 06

I took a deep breath.

"Yes."

As Julie curled into a ball and sobbed, I thought back over my decision. I had given some serious thought to maintaining some kind of relationship with my wife. Not as husband and wife. There was no hope of that. Put simply, I had no sexual desire for her anymore. The thought of going to bed with her made me squirm.

Part of that squeamishness was the specter of all the other men she'd fucked while we were married. But the larger problem was that I could never forget why she had strayed. I would always feel like I had to put on a performance if I slept with her again. She'd killed the romance.

I had considered maintaining some kind of friendship with Julie. She been my best friend for a long time. Personality wise, we were still a great fit, and I was sure that if we could put our marriage completely behind us, we could have a great friendship.

But I'd concluded that a friendship wasn't really possible. We would always be in the shadow of our failed relationship. And even if I might be ready to bury our marriage, Julie wasn't there yet. It would be exceedingly painful for her if I maintained contact, but withheld the affection she still craved. That sounded like a terrible situation for both of us.

No, a clean break was best. Julie was young, she'd get over it. And I didn't need to live with the ghost of my past love life.

Julie made a few attempts to sway my decision, but she was playing against a stacked deck. My love for her was gone. I didn't cry, or rage, or waver. She couldn't get any traction when she tried to talk about 'us.'

So, long before our divorce was final, she resigned herself to losing me.

The divorce... The divorce was possibly the most amicable I have ever heard of. There were no lawyers involved. I drew up the paperwork myself, and Julie signed off on it. You can get away with that, so long as the husband and wife can agree on everything.

Our divorce was simple. I took my clothes and personal items, and left everything else to Julie. That wouldn't have worked before the time loop, with all the debt we had built up. But I used some of my day trading money to pay off the house and Julie's car. The only debt I left her was her student loans. With only property taxes to pay, she could afford to stay in our McMansion.

It might seem like I was giving her an extravagant payout for being a cheater, but I think I got off cheap. If we had gone to court, she would have been entitled to another couple million, since I hit it big while we were still married. Julie didn't know exactly how much money I had, but she knew it was a lot, and she could have made a play for it.

Plus, she was involved in saving the lives of millions of New Yorkers... and I never forgot that she took a bullet for me. She deserved something for that. I also gave large cash gifts to Sung and Mi-Sook.

When all the paperwork had been filled out and filed, I packed a U-Haul and got ready to leave New Jersey and my past behind.

Julie and I shared a last hug. I'll admit my eyes misted up. For what could have been and for what never was.

"If you can ever find it in your heart to give me another chance Sam..."

I just smiled sadly. We both knew this was the end.

...

I settled into my new apartment in downtown Manhattan, bordering Central Park. It cost me 1.5 million. Even after paying off Julie's bills and buying a new home, I still had over four million in the bank. Combined with my tax holiday, I was pretty much set for the foreseeable future. With a conservative investment plan I could live off that money for the rest of my life. And since I'd been working in an investment firm since getting out of college...

But I was too young to retire. I had gotten my fill of the carefree retirement life during the time loop. I was looking forward to a new challenge.

Speaking of which, my days at Broadwell & Marx were over.

During my stay at Hotel Fed, I had called off work, using the same excuse I did the first day: marriage troubles. To say they were unsympathetic would be an understatement. The company culture was all cut-throat business. There was no place for allowing one's personal life to interfere with the bottom line.

So I would have been on thin ice if I had decided to return there. Luckily, I never planned on staying. The time loop had killed a lot of my enthusiasm for my profession. I'd spent six years after college reading the financial news like it was a Bible. I was constantly on the hunt for the next big thing, or the opportunity to beat the market, for the company if not myself.

During the loop, it was like I was playing a video game with cheat codes. Making money on the stock market became as easy as breathing. I'd turned twenty thousand dollars into seven million, all for myself. I couldn't muster much enthusiasm for finding Ma and Pa Kettle another 0.3 percent on their mutual fund.

I still kept a finger in, doing market research for my own investments, but my days of being a corporate drone were over.

As it turns out, Broadwell & Marx wasn't too enamored with me either. I went in already planning to resign, but it soon became clear that upper management was perturbed, nay, pissed the fuck off with me.

I believe I have previously mentioned that the head honchos spied on the personal trading accounts of their underlings. Aggressive personal trading was encouraged.

Well, my rise to riches had not gone unnoticed. My supervisor, Ben, clued me into all the frosty looks and snide remarks I was getting.

"Sam, what the hell did you do? Scratch that. Everyone in the company knows by now what you did. How the hell did you do it? Erickson assigned three guys to dismantle every trade you booked and figure out what formula you used. They've been working on it all week."

Ahh, now I got it. They weren't mad that I had become a millionaire overnight. They were mad that I hadn't shared. And they had absolutely no idea how I'd done it. Talking to Ben some more I got the full picture.

Stock traders were always looking for a mathematical formula that will out-perform the market. The problem is that there is too much human input in the market for a computer to accurately predict stock movements. Humans don't behave predictably, so neither do companies or investors. That doesn't stop math eggheads from trying to create prediction models.

Around Broadwell & Marx there were two theories as to how I became a rainmaker overnight. The first was that I had developed my own formula, but no one really believed that. It was bandied about, but everyone thought the second scenario was much more likely...

That I cheated somehow, gamed the system.

My final trading order had 217 individual stock trades over the course of July 15^th. And not one of them was a loser. I'd progressively made money on every single trade, which was a success rate close enough to impossible to make no difference.

But all the companies and financial products I traded were much too varied for me to have been using inside information, which is the most common form of investment fraud. I seriously doubted that the SEC would give me a second look. In the larger picture, seven million was chump change on Wall Street, and I knew any investigation would turn up nothing. Because there was nothing to find. As far as I know there is no law against using financial information gleaned from time travel.

Of course I couldn't tell Ben, or anyone else how I had done it. He, along with all the other execs at Broadwell & Marx assumed that I had found something, some way to predict stock movement, probably illegal. They didn't care about the legalities of whatever I had done, they were just burning with greed to get their hands on my method.

Well they were doomed to disappointment, and they knew it. They wouldn't have shared either. Not that I could. This just gave me another reason to quit. I had set myself up for unreasonable expectations and sparked envy in my superiors.

So I was unemployed.

I settled into my new apartment and looked for work. I took a page out of Sung's book and started working part time as an interpreter. I worked for the New York court system mostly, but I was also hired by corporations to ease negotiations with foreign companies. I found it to be very enjoyable and surprisingly lucrative. It also allowed me to keep in practice with the languages I had learned, and gave me incentive to keep furthering my linguistic studies.

My interpreter work, along with managing my own portfolio, had my bank balance growing at a steady rate. Enough that I rarely think about money at all these days.

...

My love life was satisfying, if uneventful.

The first woman I attempted to pursue was Mi-Sook. She was athletic, sexy, and dangerous. She was the human equivalent of a panther. Unfortunately, her opinion of me ranked right up there with cat shit on the bottom of her shoe.

I'd hoped that our common interests of hapkido, long walks on the beach, and saving New York from terrorists, would serve to draw us together. Combine that with the opportunity to actually get to know each other over time... Uh, no. I was forced to admit that she would never be a friend, let alone a love interest. I never found out what exactly she had against me. Maybe she was just a miserable bitch.

I had identified a number of possible love interests while I'd been in the loop. It took me a while to work through them all, but I found that there wasn't any real spark with any of the women I had set my sights on.

Not that I didn't enjoy the process. I was quite content as a bachelor, and even if I didn't have "the one" in my life, I had a healthy dating life. I went out with about a dozen women over the next couple years, with relationships ranging from two weeks to six months.

As my thirtieth birthday was approaching, I was starting to feel a little unsettled. I'm a romantic at heart, and up until the end I had greatly enjoyed being married.

About that time, my building got a new tenant.

The top floor of the building I lived in had four apartments, all around 2300 square feet. I had the northeast corner, facing Central Park. The unit next to me had been vacant for a couple weeks, since an elderly dentist and his wife left for warmer climes.

I was relaxing on my balcony when I got a call from Fred, the building manager.

"Mr. Watley, sorry to inconvenience you, but would you be available to do some translating this afternoon?"

"Fred, I told you to call me Sam. And sure, I can help. What do you got, another Guatemalan plumber?"

I'd become the building's go to guy whenever someone ran into a language barrier. I was now fluent in seven languages, with a smattering of four more, with an emphasis on the tongues most commonly heard in the Big AppIe. So I could usually help. I didn't mind, it was a great way to get to know my neighbors.

"No, Mr. Watley, not a contractor this time. I scheduled a viewing of the unit next to you with Jean Fournier, a real estate broker. Jean helps foreign clients, mostly French and German, find housing in the city. Unfortunately, he's had some kind of family emergency and can't make it today. But his client doesn't want to reschedule. I've got three more buyers scheduled to look this week and they don't want to miss their window."

"So, this client, does he speak French or German?"

"She. And she speaks French. Jean says she speaks passable English, but hey, if our resident language expert is right next door... This could be your new next door neighbor, so if you get a crazy cat lady vibe give me the high sign and we'll bum rush her."

I laughed. "Sure thing Fred. Send me a text when she gets here and I'll meet you at the unit."

Well, Ivette was not a cat woman, unless you meant in the Michelle Pfeifer sense of the word.

I was basically useless as an interpreter that day because I kept getting tongue tied around her, which was a problem I hadn't had since college. Luckily, her English was more than just "passable," so my services weren't really required.

Rather than acting as interpreter, I followed her around the apartment like a love struck puppy. I'm surprised she wasn't freaked out by the creep who lived next door. I must have made a better impression than I thought, because when she left that day, she had an agreement to rent the unit, and a date with me.

The... "spark" that had been missing with all the other women I'd dated, was a roaring inferno with Ivette. We just clicked right from the beginning. She was smart. She was funny. And she was drop dead gorgeous. In fact, objectively, I would have to say that she was out of my league. But apparently she was feeling the same attraction that I was, and for that I thanked my lucky stars.

We had so much in common it was scary. We were both former white collar professionals who had struck it rich. Me in the stock market, and she in the lottery, which she was semi-embarrassed about. I had no judgements, it's not like I'd achieved my own wealth through hard work. I was more surprised that they had a lottery in France.

We'd both left our jobs, in finance and marketing respectively, to pursue careers in our hobbies. I'd turned my love of languages into a job as an interpreter, and Ivette was pursuing a career as a classical musician.

She was even a kick ass martial artist!

When she found out I was a regular at Sung's dojo, she invited herself along and put on a show. She shared my background in krav maga, and she also practiced savate, which is basically French kickboxing. If I'm honest, she was better than me, and only my size advantage made us equal sparring partners.

When we made love, I felt like I'd only experienced a pale imitation compared to the bliss I found with Ivette.

She moved in with me six months later when her lease was up, and I was contemplating proposing to her. There was only one thing standing in the way- we were both hiding something.

In my case, it was obvious: the loop. The time loop was the singular most formative experience in my life. I felt like I couldn't hide it from Ivette if I planned to spend the rest of my life with her. Plus, being unable to tell people about the loop left gaps in my life story. I had a bunch of skills, with little to no backstory. And I had made a killing in the stock market overnight, with no way to explain it.

I had 6-7 year void in my life, since I no longer had any contact with former friends or colleagues. All my current friends were recent additions.

New home, wealth, friends, job... I was a man of mystery, and Ivette couldn't help but notice that I was hiding something.

Likewise, I could tell that Ivette was holding something back. I'd chatted with her folks back in Paris over Skype a couple times, and there were awkward pauses and things left unsaid. It was remarkably similar to interactions we'd had with my parents.

My thoughts were that perhaps she had gone through some kind of trauma, an abusive relationship or something of that ilk. So I didn't pry, and Ivette didn't pry into the gaps in my life... But I think we were both itching to open up fully to each other.

Finally, one night as we preparing for bed, Ivette turned to me.

"Sam, I love you. I think we both want the same things from this relationship-"

"Well, not quite." I said, and brought both hands up to chest level and made the "honking" gesture.

Ivette chuckled, but got right back on track.

"Stop it, you dork. I'm being serious here. I've never felt this way about anyone, including my ex-husband. But for this relationship to last... I can't have secrets from you."

It was kind of her not to say "we can't have secrets," but it was implied. And as it happened, I agreed with her.

"You're right." I sighed. "I think we've both got something to tell each other. I'll admit I've been putting this off. My story... it's going to sound crazy. I've got some people who could verify it, but..."

"Ha! I'll bet after you hear what I have to tell you, you won't be so quick to throw around the word crazy! My story is nuttier than squirrel turds."

I burst out laughing. It was always shocking to hear Ivette, in her cultured French accent, use crass southern idioms. I think she looked them up on the internet and threw them into conversation just to get a rise out of me. Well, she had effectively broken the tension.

"I'll go first." She said. "Before I lose my nerve. Here, it will be easier if you watch something first."

Ivette had her laptop next to the bed. After we both got comfortable, leaning back against the headboard, she started a video that she queued up.

What I saw was a montage of security cam footage. It was taken in a museum, during some kind of hostage situation. Masked men, some with guns, and others with machetes, were standing guard over several civilians sitting in the museums galleries.

As I watched, I realized I had seen some of this footage before. It was another terrorist attack, this time by Muslim extremists. It had taken place around the same time as my own run in with terrorists.

I remembered it now. Several of the terrorists had been wearing bomb vests. When the police raided the building, they found that several local business people, who were there on their lunch hour, had incapacitated most of the terrorists, including all the ones with bombs.

As I watched, the woman who had done most of the fighting started mowing down the hostage takers. This woman, in sensible business attire, and frankly, kinda sexy, took out five terrorists. She took the first two down with a flurry of kicks and punches, before using a gun she took off one to dispatch the others. The press had dubbed her Fleur-de-Lis, after the DC comic book heroine. It had been a couple years since last I had seen this footage, but this time I was paying much more rapt attention.

Because the woman on screen was sitting beside me.

The playback ended, and there were several moments of silence as I tried to comprehend what I had just seen. This was one fucking gigantic coincidence. And I wasn't sure if I believed in those anymore.

"Well? Aren't you going to say anything?"

Ivette had been holding my arm while we watched. Her grip had been steadily tightening as my silence got to her. I was stunned, but Ivette couldn't know why. Maybe she had been hurt before by men who were star struck or intimidated.

I put up a hand in a calming gesture.

"Wait here a moment, baby. I've got to get something, then we can have this conversation."

I got up and went to the closet. I pulled away a board in the floor, revealing a small safe that Ivette didn't know about. Inside was some paperwork, a flash drive, and an I-pad. I grabbed the I-pad and took it over to the bed, plugged it in, and turned it on.

"Here," I said. "There's something that you should see."

I sat back down beside her, and played her the last ten minutes of the video the North Koreans had shot, ending with the triumphant entry of yours truly. My part was over in less than two minutes, but the rest was to establish exactly what had been going down.

By the end, Ivette's hands were gripping my arm so tightly that I was afraid that I was losing circulation in my hand.

"Sam... when did this happen?"

"A few years ago. I didn't make the news like you. The terrorist attack did, but it was downplayed considerably, and my identity was left out entirely."

"You should be thankful for that. I was quite famous for a while, but I started getting death threats immediately. With the number of Middle Eastern refugees streaming into Europe, and my fame in that world... I was tired of not feeling safe, so I changed my name and moved here."

I wrapped her up in a hug.