Replay

by Ken Grimwood

  The heroin sleep was interrupted with shocking abruptness. Jeff Found himself surrounded on all sides by cascading sheets of white-hot flame, a cylindrical Niagara of milky fire at whose core he was inexplicably suspended. At the same time, his ears were assaulted by the blaring trumpets and exaggerated harmonies of a mariachi band performing, at excruciating volume, "Feliz Navidad."

  Jeff had no memory of having died this time, no recollection of the agony he had always felt with each stopping of his heart. The drug had served its anesthetic purpose, but it allowed him no easy transition from that dullard slumber to this startling and unknown environment. The new young body he now inhabited again had not a trace of the narcotic in its system, and he was forced to come fully awake without a moment’s groggy respite.

  The encircling fire-fall, and the music, besieged his battered senses, held him in a terrifying limbo of disorientation. There was no light in this place, save from that burning cataract around him, but against its brilliant phosphorescence he now perceived the silhouettes of other people: sitting, standing, dancing. He himself was seated, at a small table; there was an icy drink in his shaking hand. He sipped it, tasted the salty bite of a margarita.

  "Damn!" someone shouted in his ear, above the clamor of the music. "Isn’t that a sight? Wonder what it looks like from outside."

  Jeff set the drink down, turned to see who had spoken. In the white glow of the down-rushing flames he could make out the sharp-boned features of Martin Bailey, his roommate from Emory. He looked around again, his eyes growing accustomed to the bizarrely incandescent lighting from all sides of the large room. It was a bar or nightclub; laughing couples sat at dozens of other small tables, the mariachi band next to the dance floor was costumed in outrageous finery, and brightly colored pinatas in the shape of donkeys and bulls hung from the ceiling.

  Mexico City. Christmas vacation, 1964; he’d driven down here with Martin that year, on a spur-of-the-moment trip. Desert roads with mangy cattle roaming in the two-lane highway, mountain passes of blind curves, with Pemex gasoline trucks passing the Chevy in the cottony fog. A whorehouse in the Zona Rosa, the long climb up the stone steps of the Pyramid of the Sun.

  The tumbling radiance outside the windows of this place was a fireworks show, he realized, streams of liquid pyrotechnics pouring from the roof of the hotel atop which the nightclub perched. Martin was right; it must be spectacular from the streets below. The hotel would look like a fiery needle, blazing thirty or forty stories up into the city’s nighttime sky.

  What was this, Christmas Eve, New Year’s? Those were the nights for this sort of display in Mexico. Whichever, it was the end of '64, beginning of '65. He’d lost another fourteen months on this replay; as much, now, as Pamela had on her last one. God knows what that might mean for her this time, and for them.

  Martin grinned, gave him an exuberant, friendly punch on the shoulder. Yeah, they’d had a good time on this trip, Jeff remembered. Nothing had gone sour; it didn’t seem then as if anything ever could go wrong in either of their lives. Good times today, good times ahead—that was how they’d seen it. At least Jeff had managed to prevent his old friend’s suicide each replay, whatever his own circumstances. Even though he couldn’t stop Martin from marrying badly and no longer had a multinational corporation where he could offer his old roommate a lifetime position, he’d always helped Martin avert eventual bankruptcy by setting him up with some excellent stocks early on.

  Which raised the subject of what Jeff was going to do for immediate cash himself; his old standby, the '63 World Series, was in the record books by now, and there weren’t many other bets even approaching the short-term profitability of that one. The pro football season was already over, and they wouldn’t start playing Super Bowls for another two years. If this were New Year’s Eve, he might or might not have time to arrange a bet from Mexico City on Illinois over Washington in the Rose Bowl tomorrow. It was possible that he’d have to be satisfied for the time being with what he could eke out of the basketball schedule now underway, but he’d never be able to get any decent odds on the Boston Celtics, not in their eighth straight NBA championship season.

  The fire-fall outside the windows trickled to a sputtering halt, and the dim lights of the nightclub came back up as the band broke into "Cielito Lindo." Martin was checking out a svelte blonde a couple of tables over, and he raised an eyebrow to ask if Jeff had any interest in her red-haired friend. The girls were tourists from the Netherlands, Jeff recalled; he and Martin wouldn’t score, but they’d spend—had spent—a pleasant enough evening drinking and dancing with the Dutch girls. Sure, he shrugged to Martin; why not?

  As far as the money problem went, well, money didn’t matter that much to him anyway, not at this point. All he needed was enough to keep him going for … however long it took until Pamela showed up. From here on out, it was just a waiting game.

  Pam was stoned; she was flat-out wrecked. This was really some killer weed Peter and Ellen had come up with, the best she’d smoked since the stuff that guy had given her at the Electric Circus last month, and that had probably seemed better than it actually was because of all the strobes and the music and the fire eaters on the dance floor and everything. The music was great right now, too, she thought as Clapton started that dynamite riff going into "Sunshine of Your Love"; she just wished the little portable stereo could play it louder, that was all.

  She curled her bare feet up under her thighs, leaned back against the big Peter Max poster that covered the wall behind her bed, and got into the back cover of the "Disraeli Gears" album.

  That eye was really something, with the flowers growing right out of its lashes, and the names of the songs just barely visible over the white part and the iris … and, God, there was another eye. The more you looked it seemed like there was nothing but eyes; that was all you noticed. Even the flowers looked like they had eyes, slanted, like a cat’s eyes, or an Oriental’s …

  "Hey, check this out!" Peter called. She glanced up; he and Ellen were watching Lawrence Welk with the sound turned down. Pam stared at the black-and-white scene of old couples dancing, a polka or something, and sure enough, it looked just like they were moving in time to the record. Then the picture switched to Welk waving his little baton up and down, and she started laughing; Welk was keeping right to the beat, as if the old fart were conducting Cream on "Dance the Night Away."

  "Come on, you guys, let’s go down the road," Ellen insisted, bored with the television. "Everybody’s gonna be there tonight." She’d been trying to get them motivated to get out of the room and make the trek to Adolph’s for the past hour. She was right: It would be a good night at the college bar; there was a lot to celebrate. Earlier in the week, Eugene McCarthy had damn near beat Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, and just today, Bobby Kennedy had announced that he’d changed his mind, he was going to run for the Democratic nomination after all.

  Pam put on her boots, grabbed a thick wool scarf and her old navy surplus pea jacket from the hook on the door. Ellen took her time negotiating the circular staircase leading down to the lobby; she’d started tripping off on the old mansion-turned-dorm’s being Tara, from Gone With the Wind. By the time they got outside, Peter had joined in the game. He wandered off into the adjoining formal garden and started declaiming lines real and imagined from the movie in a heavy mock-southern accent. But the March night was too biting to keep up the playful stoned pretense for long, and soon the three of them were crunching through the snow toward the warmly inviting wooden building at the edge of campus, across from the Annandale post office.

  Adolph’s was packed with the usual Saturday-night crowd. Everybody who hadn’t gone to New York for the weekend ended up here sooner or later; it was the only bar within walking distance of the school, and the only one on this side of the Hudson where the shaggy, unconventionally dressed Bard students could relax and feel totally welcome. There was a serious town-gown conflict in the generally conservative region north of Poughkeepsie;
the permanent residents, young and old, despised the flamboyant nonconformity of the Bard students' appearance and behavior, and told tales—many of them truer than they could ever imagine, Pam thought with amusement—of rampant drug use and sexual promiscuity on campus.

  Sometimes the young townie guys would come into Adolph’s, drunk, trying to pick up "hippie chicks." There weren’t any townies in evidence tonight, Pam noted with relief, except for that one weird guy who’d been hanging around campus all year, but he seemed O.K. He was a loner and very quiet; he’d never given anybody any trouble. Sometimes she felt as if he were watching her, not quite following her around or anything, but purposely showing up a couple of times a week in some place where she’d probably be: the library, the gallery at the art department, here … He’d never bothered her, though, never even spoke to her. Sometimes he’d smile and nod, and she’d kind of smile back a little, just enough to acknowledge that they recognized each other. Yeah, he was O.K.; he’d even be attractive if he let his hair grow.

  Sly and the Family Stone were on the jukebox, "Dance to the Music," and the dance floor in the front room was packed. Pam and Ellen and Peter squirmed their way through the crowd, looking for a place to sit.

  Pam was still stoned. They’d smoked another joint on the walk down from campus, and the colorfully raucous scene in the bar suddenly struck her as a painting, or a series of paintings. To highlight a twirling fringed vest here, a swirl of long black hair there, the faces and the bodies and the music and noise … yes, she’d like to try to capture on canvas the sound of this pleasantly familiar place, translate it visually, the way that synesthetic transformation so often happened in her mind when she was this stoned. She looked around the bar, picking out people and details of scenes, and her eyes focused on that strange guy she was always running into.

  "Hey," she said, nudging Ellen, "you know who I’d like to paint?"

  "Who?"

  "That guy over there."

  Ellen looked in the direction Pam had discreetly indicated. "Which one? You don’t mean that straight guy, do you? The townie?"

  "Yeah, him. There’s something about his eyes; they’re … I don’t know, it’s like they’re ancient or something, like he’s way older than he really is, and has seen so much…"

  "Sure," Ellen said with pointed sarcasm. "He’s probably some ex-Marine, and he’s seen lots of dead babies and women he shot in Vietnam."

  "You talking about the Tet offensive again?" Peter asked.

  "No, Pam’s got the hots for some townie."

  "Kinky." Peter laughed.

  Pam blushed angrily. "I never said any such thing. I just said he had interesting eyes and I’d like to paint them."

  "Dock of the Bay" came on the jukebox, and most of the dancers found their way back to their tables. Pam wondered who had played the mournfully contemplative Otis Redding tune, such an ironic self-epitaph of the singer, who had died before the record was released. Maybe it was that guy with the strange eyes. It seemed like the kind of music he might be into.

  "Wastin' tiiime…" Peter sang along with the record, then grinned mischievously. He took off his watch, dropped it into the half-full pitcher of beer with a theatrical flourish. "We drown time!" he declared, and raised his glass, clinked it against the others'.

  "I hear Bobby’s a head," Ellen commented, apropos of nothing, when they had drunk the toast. "Gets his grass from the same dealer who supplies the Stones when they’re over here."

  They were on one of Peter’s favorite topics now. "They say R. J. Reynolds has secretly … what’s the word, patented? All the good brand names."

  "Trademarked."

  "Right, right, trademarked. Acapulco Gold, Panama Red … the cigarette people have got all the good names, just in case." Pam listened to the familiar rumors, nodded with interest. "I wonder what the packs would look like, and the ads."

  "Paisley cartons," Ellen said with a smile.

  "Get Hendrix to do the TV commercials." Peter put in. They started cracking up, getting into one of those endless communal stoned laughing jags that Pam loved so much. She was laughing so hard the tears were coming to her eyes, she was getting giddy, hyperventilating, she—

  Where the hell was she this time, Pamela wondered, and why was she so dizzy? She blinked away an inexplicable film of tears, took in the new environment. Jesus Christ, it was Adolph’s.

  "Pam?" Ellen asked, suddenly noticing that her friend had stopped laughing. "You O.K.?"

  "I’m fine," Pamela said, taking a long, slow breath. "You’re not freaking out or anything?"

  "No." She closed her eyes, tried to concentrate, but her mind wouldn’t stay still; it kept drifting. The music was extremely loud, and this place, even her clothes, reeked of—She was stoned, she realized. Usually had been when she went to Adolph’s, "down the road," they used to call it, ease on down, ease on down …

  "Have another beer," Peter said, concern in his voice. "You look weird; you sure you’re all right?"

  "I’m positive." She hadn’t become friends with Peter and Ellen until after winter field period of her freshman year. Peter had graduated, and Ellen had dropped out and moved to London with him, when Pamela was a sophomore; that meant this had to be 1968 or 1969.

  A new record started playing on the jukebox, Linda Ronstadt singing "Different Drum." No, Pamela thought, not just Linda Ronstadt, the Stone Poneys. Keep it all straight, she told herself, reacclimate slowly, don’t let the marijuana in your brain make this more difficult than it already is. Don’t try to make any decisions or even talk too much right now. Wait’ll you come down, wait until—

  There he was, my God, sitting not twenty feet away, looking right at her. Pamela gaped in disbelief at the incongruous, impossibly wonderful sight of Jeff Winston sitting quietly amid the youthful din of her old college hangout. She saw him register the change in her eyes, and he smiled a warm, slow smile of welcome and assurance.

  "Hey, Pam?" Ellen said. "How come you’re crying? Listen, maybe we better go back to the dorm."

  Pamela shook her head, put a reassuring hand on her friend’s arm. Then she stood from the table and walked across the room, across the years, into Jeff’s waiting embrace.

  "Tattooed lady." Jeff chuckled, kissing the pink rose on her inner thigh. "I don’t remember that being there before."

  "It’s not a tattoo, it’s a decal. They wash off."

  "Do they lick off?" he asked, looking up at her with a wicked gleam.

  She smiled. "You’re welcome to try."

  "Maybe later," he said, sliding up to prop himself beside her on the pillows. "I kind of enjoy you as a flower child."

  "You would," she said, and poked him in the ribs. "Pour us some more champagne."

  He reached for the bottle of Mumm’s on the bedside table, refilled their glasses.

  "How did you know when I’d start replaying?" Pamela asked.

  "I didn’t. I’ve been watching you for months; I rented the house here in Rhinebeck at the beginning of the school year, and I’ve been waiting ever since. It was frustrating, and I was starting to get impatient; but the time here helped me come to terms with some old memories. I used to live just up the river, in one of the old estates, when I was with Diane … and my daughter Gretchen. I always thought I’d never be able to come back here, but you gave me a reason to, and I’m glad I did. Besides which, I enjoyed seeing you the way you really were in this time, originally."

  She grimaced. "I was a college hippie. Leather fringe and tie dye. I hope you never listened to me talking to my friends; I probably said far out a lot."

  Jeff kissed the tip of her nose. "You were cute. Are cute," he corrected, brushing her long, straight hair away from her face. "But I couldn’t help imagining all these kids fifteen years from now, wearing three-piece suits and driving BMW’s to the office."

  "Not all of them," she said. "Bard turned out a lot of writers, actors, musicians … and," she added with a rueful grin, "my husband and I didn’t have a BMW; we
drove an Audi and a Mazda."

  "Point granted." He smiled, and took a sip of champagne. They lay together contentedly, but Jeff could see the gravity beneath her cheerful expression.

  "Seventeen months," he said.

  "What?"

  "I lost seventeen months this time. That’s what you were wondering, wasn’t it?"

  "I’d been wanting to ask," she conceded. "I couldn’t help but wonder. My skew is up to … This is March, you said? '68?"

  Jeff nodded. "Three and a half years."

  "Counting from last time. It’s five years off from the first few replays. Jesus. Next time I could—"

  He put a finger to her lips. "We were going to concentrate on this time, remember?"

  "Of course I do," she said, snuggling closer to him beneath the covers.

  "And I’ve been thinking about that," he told her. "I’ve had awhile to consider it, and I think I’ve come up with a plan, of sorts."

  She pulled her head back, looked at him with an interested frown. "What do you mean?"

  "Well, first I thought about approaching the scientific community with all this—the National Science Foundation, some private research organization … whatever group might seem most appropriate, maybe the physics department at Princeton or MIT, somebody doing research on the nature of time."

  "They’d never believe us."

  "Exactly. That’s been the stumbling block all along. And yet we’ve done our part to maintain that obstacle, by remaining so secretive each time."

  "We’ve had to be discreet. People would think we were insane. Look at Stuart McCowan; he—"

  "McCowan is insane—he’s a killer. But it’s no crime to make predictions of events; nobody would lock us up for doing that. And once the things we predict have actually happened, we’ll have proven our knowledge of the future. They’d have to listen to us. They’d know something real—unexplained, but real—was going on."