Ken Grimwood - Replay

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Ken Grimwood

For my mother and father

ONE

Jeff Winston was on the phone with his wife when he died.

"We need—" she'd said, and he never heard her say just what it was they needed, because something

heavy seemed to slam against his chest, crushing the breath out of him. The phone fell from his hand and

cracked the glass paperweight on his desk.

Just the week before, she'd said something similar, had said, "Do you know what we need, Jeff?" and

there'd been a pause—not infinite, not final, like this mortal pause, but a palpable interim nonetheless.

He'd been sitting at the kitchen table, in what Linda liked to call the "breakfast nook," although it wasn't

really a separate space at all, just a little formica table with two chairs placed awkwardly between the left

side of the refrigerator and the front of the clothes drier. Linda had been chopping onions at the counter

when she said it, and maybe the tears at the corner of her eyes were what had set him thinking, had lent

her question more import than she'd intended.

"Do you know what we need, Jeff?"

And he was supposed to say, "What's that, hon?" was supposed to say it distractedly and without

interest as he read Hugh Sidey's column about the presidency in Time. But Jeff wasn't distracted; he

didn't give a damn about Sidey's ramblings. He was in fact more focused and aware than he had been in

a long, long time.

So he didn't say anything at all for several moments; he just stared at the false tears in Linda's eyes

and thought about the things they needed, he and she.

They needed to get away, for starters, needed to get on a plane going someplace warm and

lush—Jamaica, perhaps, or Barbados. They hadn't had a real vacation since that long-planned but

somehow disappointing tour of Europe five years ago. Jeff didn't count their annual Florida trips to see

his parents in Orlando and Linda's family in Boca Raton; those were visits to an ever-receding past,

nothing more. No, what they needed was a week, a month, on some decadently foreign island: making

love on endless empty beaches, and at night the sound of reggae music in the air like the smell of hot red

flowers.

A decent house would be nice, too, maybe one of those stately old homes on Upper Mountain Road

in Montclair that they'd driven past so many wistful Sundays. Or a place in White Plains, a twelve-room

Tudor on Ridgeway Avenue near the golf courses. Not that he'd want to take up golf; it just seemed that

all those lazy expanses of green, with names like Maple Moor and Westchester Hills, would make for

more pleasant surroundings than did the on ramps to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the glide

path into LaGuardia.

They also needed a child, though Linda probably felt that lack more urgently than he. Jeff always

pictured their never-born child as being eight years old, having skipped all the demands of infancy and

not yet having reached the torments of puberty. A good kid, not overly cute or precocious. Boy, girl, it

didn't matter; just a child, her child and his, who'd ask funny questions and sit too close to the TV set and

show the spark of his or her own developing individuality.

There'd be no child, though; they'd known that was impossible for years, since Linda had gone

through the ectopic pregnancy in 1975. And there wouldn't be any house in Montclair or White Plains,

either; Jeff's position as news director of New York's WFYI all-news radio sounded more prestigious,

more lucrative, than it actually was. Maybe he'd still make the jump to television; but at forty-three, that

was growing increasingly unlikely.

We need, we need … to talk, he thought. To look each other straight in the eye and just say: It didn't

work. None of it, not the romance or the passion or the glorious plans. It all went flat, and there's nobody

to blame. That's simply the way it happened.

But of course they'd never do that. That was the main part of the failure, the fact that they seldom

spoke of deeper needs, never broached the tearing sense of incompletion that stood always between

them.

Linda wiped a meaningless, onion-induced tear away with the back of her hand. "Did you hear me,

Jeff?"

"Yes. I heard you."

"What we need," she said, looking in his direction but not quite at him, "is a new shower curtain."

In all likelihood, that was the level of need she'd been about to express over the phone before he

began to die. "—a dozen eggs," her sentence probably would have ended, or "—a box of coffee filters."

But why was he thinking all this? he wondered. He was dying, for Christ's sake; shouldn't his final

thoughts be of something deeper, more philosophical? Or maybe a fast-speed replay of the highlights of

his life, forty-three years on Betascan. That was what people went through when they drowned, wasn't

it?

This felt like drowning, he thought as the expanded seconds passed: the awful pressure, the hopeless

struggle for breath, the sticky wetness that soaked his body as salt sweat streamed down his forehead

and stung his eyes.

Drowning. Dying. No, shit, no, that was an unreal word, applicable to flowers or pets or other

people. Old people, sick people. Unlucky people.

His face dropped to the desk, right cheek pressing flat against the file folder he'd been about to study

when Linda called. The crack in the paperweight was cavernous before his one open eye: a split in the

world itself, a jagged mirror of the ripping agony inside him. Through the broken glass he could see the

glowing red numerals on the digital clock atop his bookshelf:

1:06 PM OCT 1988

And then there was nothing more to avoid thinking about, because the process of thought had ceased.

Jeff couldn't breathe.

Of course he couldn't breathe; he was dead. But if he was dead, why was he aware of not being able

to breathe? Or of anything, for that matter?

He turned his head away from the bunched-up blanket and breathed. Stale, damp air, full of the smell

of his own perspiration.

So he hadn't died. Somehow, the realization didn't thrill him, just as his earlier assumption of death

had failed to strike him with dread.

Maybe he had secretly welcomed the end of his life. Now it would merely continue as before: the

dissatisfaction, the grinding loss of ambition and hope that had either caused or been caused by the failure

of his marriage, he couldn't remember which anymore.

He shoved the blanket away from his face and kicked at the rumpled sheets. There was music playing

somewhere in the darkened room, barely audible. An oldie: "Da Doo Ron Ron," toy one of those Phil

Spector girl groups.

Jeff groped for a lamp switch, thoroughly disoriented. He was either in a hospital bed recovering from

what had happened in the office, or at home waking from a dream that was worse than usual. His hand

found the bedside lamp, turned it on. He was in a small, messy room, clothes and books strewn on the

floor and piled haphazardly on two adjacent desks and chairs. Neither a hospital nor his and Linda's

bedroom, but familiar, somehow.

A naked, smiling woman stared back at him from a large photograph taped to one wall. A Playboy

centerfold, a vintage one. The buxom brunette lay demurely on her stomach, atop an air mattress at the

afterdeck of a boat, her red-and-white polka-dotted bikini tied to the railing. With her jaunty round

sailor's cap, her carefully coiffed and sprayed dark hair, she bore a distinct resemblance to the young

Jackie Kennedy.

The other walls, he saw, were decorated in a similarly dated, juvenile style: bullfight posters, a big

blowup of a red Jaguar XK-E, an old Dave Brubeck album cover. Above one desk was a red, white,

and blue banner that read, in letters made of stars and stripes, "FUCK COMMUNISM." Jeff grinned

when he saw that; he'd ordered one just like it from Paul Krassner's then-shocking little rag, The

Realist, when he was in college, when—

He sat upright abruptly, pulse sounding in his ears.

That old gooseneck lamp on the desk nearest the door had always come loose from its base

whenever he moved it, he recalled. And the rug next to Martin's bed had a big blood-red stain—yes,

right there—from the time Jeff had sneaked Judy Gordon upstairs and she'd started dancing around the

room to the Drifters and knocked over a bottle of Chianti.

The vague confusion Jeff had felt on waking gave way to stark bewilderment. He threw off the

covers, got out of bed, and walked shakily to one of the desks. His desk. He scanned the books stacked

there: Patterns of Culture, Growing Up in Samoa, Statistical Populations. Sociology 101.

Dr … what? Danforth, Sanborn? In a big, musty old hall somewhere on the far side of campus, 8:00

a.m., always had breakfast after class. He picked up the Benedict book, leafed through it; several

portions were heavily underlined, with margin notes in his own handwriting.

" … WQXI pick hit of the week, from the Crystals! Now, this next one goes out to Bobby in

Marietta, from Carol and Paula. Those pretty girls just want to let Bobby know, right along with the

Chiffons, they think 'He's Soooo Fine' … "

Jeff turned off the radio and wiped a film of sweat from his forehead. He noticed uncomfortably that

he had a full erection. How long had it been since he'd gotten that hard without even thinking about sex?

All right, it was time to figure this thing out. Somebody had to be pulling an extremely elaborate joke

on him, but he didn't know anyone who played practical jokes. Even if he had, how could anyone have

gone to this amount of trouble? Those books with his own notes in them had been thrown away years

ago, and no one could have recreated them that precisely.

There was a copy of Newsweek on his desk, with a cover story about the resignation of West

German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The issue was dated May 6, 1963. Jeff stared fixedly at the

numbers, hoping some rational explanation for all this would come to mind. None did.

The door of the room swung open, and the inner knob banged against a bookcase. Just as it always

had.

"Hey, what the hell are you still doing here? It's a quarter to eleven. I thought you had an American Lit

test at ten."

Martin stood in the doorway, a Coke in one hand and a load of textbooks in the other. Martin Bailey,

Jeffs freshman-year roommate; his closest friend through college and for several years thereafter.

Martin had committed suicide in 1981, right after his divorce and subsequent bankruptcy.

"So what're you gonna do," Martin asked, "take an F?"

Jeff looked at his long-dead friend in stunned silence: the thick black hair that had not yet begun to

recede, the unlined face, the bright, adolescent eyes that had seen no pain, to speak of.

"Hey, what's the matter? You O.K., Jeff?"

"I'm … not feeling very well."

Martin laughed and tossed the books on his bed. "Tell me about it! Now I know why my dad warned

me about mixing Scotch and bourbon. Hey, that was some honey you hit on at Manuel's last night; Judy

would've killed you if she'd been there. What's her name?"

"Ahh … "

"Come on, you weren't that drunk. You gonna call her?"

Jeff turned away in mounting panic. There were a thousand things he wanted to say to Martin, but

none of them would have made any more sense than this insane situation itself.

"What's wrong, man? You look really fucked up."

"I, uh, I need to get outside. I need some air."

Martin gave him a puzzled frown. "Yeah, I guess you do."

Jeff grabbed a pair of chinos that had been thrown carelessly on the chair at his desk, then opened the

closet next to his bed and found a Madras shirt and a corduroy jacket.

"Go by the infirmary," Martin said. "Tell 'em you've got the flu. Maybe Garrett'll let you make up that

test."

"Yeah, sure." Jeff dressed hurriedly, slipped on a pair of cordovan loafers. He was on the verge of

hyperventilating, and he forced himself to breathe slowly.

"Don't forget about The Birds tonight, O.K.? Paula and Judy are gonna meet us at Dooley's at seven;

we'll grab a bite first."

"Right. See you." Jeff stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. He found the stairs

and raced down three flights, shouting back a perfunctory "Yo!" as one of the young men he passed

called out his name.

The lobby was as he'd remembered it: TV room on the right, empty now but always packed for

sports events and space shots; a knot of girls giggling among themselves, waiting for their boyfriends at

the base of the stairs they were forbidden to ascend; Coke machines across from the bulletin boards

where students posted notices seeking or selling cars, books, apartments, rides to Macon or Savannah

or Florida.

Outside, the dogwood trees were in full bloom, suffusing the campus with a pink-and-white glow that

seemed to reflect off the clean white marble of the stately Greco-Roman buildings. It was Emory, no

question about that: the South's most studied effort to create a classically Ivy League-style university, one

that the region could call its own. The planned timelessness of the architecture was disorienting; as he

jogged through the quadrangle, past the library and the law building, Jeff realized it could as easily be

1988 as 1963. There were no certain clues, not even in the clothing and short haircuts of the students

who ambled and lounged about the grassy expanses. The youthful fashions of the eighties, aside from the

postapocalyptic punk look, were virtually indistinguishable from those of his own early college days.

God, the times he had spent on this campus, the dreams engendered here that had never been

fulfilled … There was that little bridge that led toward the church school; how many times had he lingered

there with Judy Gordon? And over there, down by the psych building, that was where he'd met Gail

Benson for lunch almost every day during his junior year: his first, and last, truly close platonic friendship

with a woman. Why hadn't he learned more from knowing Gail? How had he drifted so far, in so many

different ways, from the plans and aspirations born in the reassuring calm of these green lawns, these

noble structures?

Jeff had run over a mile by the time he came to the main campus entrance, and he expected to be out

of breath, but wasn't. He stood on the low rise below Glenn Memorial Church, looking down at North

Decatur Road and Emory Village, the little business district that served the campus.

The row of clothing shops and bookstores looked more-or-less familiar. One spot in particular,

Horton's Drugs, brought back a wave of memories: He could see in his mind the magazine racks, the long

white soda fountain, the red-leather booths with individual stereo jukeboxes. He could see Judy

Gordon's fresh young face across a table in one of those booths, could smell her clean blond hair.

He shook his head and concentrated on the scene before him. Again, there was no way to tell for

sure what year it was; he hadn't been to Atlanta since an Associated Press conference on Terrorism and

the Media in 1983, and he hadn't been back to the Emory campus since … Jesus, probably a year or

two after he'd graduated. He had no way of knowing whether all those shops down there had remained

the same or had been replaced by high-rises, maybe a mall.

The cars, that was one thing; now that he noticed, he realized there wasn't a Nissan or Toyota in sight

down there on the street. Nothing but older models, most of them big, gas-hungry, Detroit machines.

And "older," he saw, didn't mean just early-sixties designs. There were plenty of monster-finned beasts

cruising past that dated well back into the fifties, but of course there'd be as many six- and eight-year-old

cars on the streets in 1963 as there were in 1988.

Still nothing conclusive, though; he was even beginning to wonder whether that brief encounter with

Martin in the dorm room had been no more than an unusually realistic dream after all, one he'd woken up

in the middle of. There was no questioning the fact that he was wide awake now, and in Atlanta. Maybe

he'd gotten smashed trying to forget about the dreary mess his life had become, and had flown down here

on some spur-of-the-moment midnight flight of nostalgia. The preponderance of old cars could easily be

coincidence. Any moment now, somebody would drive past in one of those little Japanese boxes he'd

grown so used to seeing everywhere.

There was a simple way to settle this once and for all. He loped down the hill toward the cab stand

on Decatur Road and got into the first of the three blue-and-white taxis lined up there. The driver was

young, maybe a grad student.

"Where to, fella?"

"Peachtree Plaza Hotel," Jeff told him.

"Say again?"

"The Peachtree Plaza, downtown."

"I don't think I know that one. You got an address?"

Christ, taxi drivers these days. Weren't they supposed to take some kind of test, memorize city maps

and landmarks?

"You know where the Regency is, right? The Hyatt House?"

"Oh, yeah, yeah. That where you want to go?"

"Close enough."

"You got it, fella."

The driver headed south a few blocks and took a right on Ponce De Leon Avenue. Jeff reached for

his hip pocket, suddenly aware that he might not have any money in these unfamiliar pants, but there was

a worn brown wallet there, not his.

At least there was money inside it—two twenties, a five, and some ones—so he wouldn't have to

worry about the cab fare.

He'd reimburse whomever it belonged to when he returned the wallet, along with these old clothes

he'd picked up from … where? Who?

He opened one of the small compartments of the wallet, looking for answers. He found an Emory

University Student ID card in the name of Jeffrey L. Winston. A library card from Emory, also in his

name. A receipt from a dry cleaner's in Decatur. A folded cocktail napkin with a girl's name, Cindy, and

a phone number. A photograph of his parents standing outside the old house in Orlando, the one they'd

lived in before his father had gotten so sick. A color snapshot of Judy Gordon laughing and throwing a

snowball, her achingly young and jubilant face framed by a white fur collar upturned against the cold. And

a Florida driver's license for Jeffrey Lamar Winston, with an expiration date of February 27, 1965.

Jeff sat alone at a table for two in the UFO-shaped Polaris bar atop the Hyatt Regency, watching the

denuded Atlanta skyline rotate past him every forty-five minutes. The cab driver hadn't been ignorant,

after all: The seventy-story cylinder of the Peachtree Plaza didn't exist. Gone, too, were the towers of the

Omni International, the grey stone bulk of the Georgia Pacific Building, and Equitable's great black box.

The most commanding structure in all of downtown Atlanta was this one, with its widely copied atrium

lobby. A brief conversation with the waitress, though, had made it clear that the hotel was new and as yet

unique.

The hardest moment had come when Jeff had looked into the mirror behind the bar. He'd done so

purposefully, knowing full well by then what he would see, but still he was shocked to confront his own

pale, lanky, eighteen-year-old reflection.

Objectively, the boy in the mirror looked somewhat more mature than that; he'd seldom had

problems being served liquor at that age, as with the waitress just now, but Jeff knew that was merely an

illusion caused by his height and his deep-set eyes. To his own mind, the image in the mirror was of an

untried and unscarred youth.

And that youth was himself. Not in memory, but here, now: these unlined hands with which he held his

drink, these sharply focused eyes with which he saw. "You ready for another one yet, honey?"

The waitress smiled prettily at him, lips bright red beneath her heavily mascaraed eyes and antiquated

beehive hairdo. She wore a "futuristic" costume, an iridescent blue mini-dress of the sort that would be

worn by young women everywhere in another two or three years.

Two or three years from now. The early sixties.

Jesus Christ.

He could no longer deny what had happened, couldn't hope to rationalize it away. He had been dying

of a heart attack, but had survived; he had been in his office, in 1988, and now was … here. Atlanta,

1963.

Jeff groped without success for an explanation, something that would make even the vaguest sort of

sense. He'd read a fair amount of science fiction as an adolescent, but his current situation bore no

resemblance to any of the time-travel scenarios he'd ever encountered. There was no machine, no

scientist, mad or otherwise; and, unlike the characters in the stories he'd read so eagerly, his own body

had regenerated to its youthful state. It was as if his mind alone had made the leap across the years,

obliterating his earlier consciousness to inhabit the brain of his own eighteen-year-old self.

Had he escaped death, then, or merely sidestepped it? In some alternate stream of future time was his

lifeless body lying in a New York mortuary, being sliced and dissected by a pathologist's scalpel?

Maybe he was in a coma: hopelessness twisted into an imaginary new life, at the behest of a ravaged,

dying brain. And yet, and yet—

"Honey?" the waitress asked. "You want me to freshen that up or not?"

"I, uh, I think I'll have a cup of coffee instead, if that's all right." "Sure thing. Maybe an Irish coffee?"

"No, just plain. A little cream, no sugar."

The girl from the past brought his coffee, and Jeff stared out at the scattered lights of the half-built city

as they came on beneath the fading sky. The sun had disappeared beyond the red-clay hills that stretched

toward Alabama, toward the years of sweeping and chaotic change, of tragedy and dreams.

The steaming coffee burned his lips, and he cooled them with a sip of ice water. The world beyond

those windows was no dream; it was as solid as it was innocent, as real as it was blindly optimistic.

Spring 1963.

There were so many choices to be made.

TWO

Jeff spent the rest of the evening walking the streets of downtown Atlanta, his eyes and ears attuned

to every nuance of the recreated past: "White" and "Colored" signs on public rest rooms, women wearing

hats and gloves, an ad in a travel-agency window for the Queen Mary to Europe, a cigarette in the hand

of almost every man he passed. Jeff didn't get hungry until after eleven, and then he grabbed a burger and

a beer at a little joint near Five Points. He thought he vaguely remembered the nondescript bar and grill

from twenty-five years ago, as someplace he and Judy had occasionally gone for an after-movie snack;

but by now he was so confused, so exhausted by the unending flood of new/old sights and places, that he

could no longer be sure. Each storefront, each passing stranger's face, had begun to seem disturbingly

familiar, though he knew he couldn't possibly have a recollection of everything he saw. He had lost the

ability to sort false memories from those that were undoubtedly real.

He desperately needed to get some sleep, to shut all this off for a little while and perhaps, against all

hope, awake to the world he'd left. What he wanted most of all was an anonymous, timeless hotel room

with no view of the altered skyline, no radio or television to remind him of what had happened; but he

didn't have enough money, and of course he had no credit cards. Short of sleeping in Piedmont Park, Jeff

had no choice but to return to Emory, back to the dorm room. Maybe Martin would be asleep.

He wasn't. Jeff's roommate was wide awake, sitting at his desk, thumbing through a copy of High

Fidelity. He looked up coolly, put down the magazine as Jeff let himself into the room.

"So," Martin said. "Where the hell have you been?"

"Downtown. Just wandering around."

"You couldn't find time to just wander by Dooley's, huh? Or maybe even wander by the Fox

Theater? We almost missed the first part of the goddamned movie, waiting for you."

"I'm sorry, I … wasn't feeling up to it. Not tonight."

"The least you could've done was to leave me a fucking note, or something. You didn't even call Judy,

for Christ's sake. She was going out of her mind, worrying about what had happened to you."

"Look, I'm really wiped out. I don't much feel like talking, O.K.?"

Martin laughed without humor. "You'd better be ready to talk tomorrow, if you want to see Judy

again. She's gonna be pissed as all hell when she finds out you aren't dead."

Jeff dreamed of dying, and woke to find himself still in that college dorm room. Nothing had changed.

Martin was gone, probably to class; but it was Saturday morning, Jeff remembered. Had there been

Saturday classes? He wasn't sure.

In any event, he was alone in the room, and he took advantage of the privacy to poke at random

through his desk and closet. The books were all familiar: Fail-Safe, The Making of the President—

1960, Travels with Charley. The record albums, in their new, unfaded, and unwarped sleeves, conjured

up a hundred multi-sensual images of the days and nights he had spent listening to that music: Stan Getz

andjoao Gilberto, the Kingston Trio, Jimmy Wither-spoon, dozens more, most of which he'd long since

lost or worn out.

Jeff turned on the Harman-Kardon stereo his parents had given him one Christmas, put on

"Desafinado," and continued to rummage through the belongings of his youth: hangers draped with cuffed

h.i.s. slacks and Botany 500 sports jackets, a tennis trophy from the boarding school outside Richmond

that he'd gone to before Emory, a tissue-wrapped collection of Hurricane glasses from Pat O'Brien's in

New Orleans, neatly ordered stacks of Playboy and Rogue.

He found a box of letters and photographs, hauled it out, and sat on the bed to sort through the

contents. There were pictures of himself as a child, snapshots of girls whose names he couldn't recall, a

couple of hamming-it-up photo-booth strips … and a small folder full of family pictures, his mother and

father and younger sister at a picnic, on a beach, around a Christmas tree.

On impulse, he dug a handful of change from his pocket, found the pay phone in the hall, and got his

parents' long-forgotten old number from information in Orlando.

"Hello?" his mother said, with the distracted tone that had only increased as the years had passed.

"Mother?" he said tentatively.

"Jeff!" Her voice was muffled for a moment as she turned away from the mouthpiece. "Honey, pick

up in the kitchen. It's Jeff!" Then, clear and distinct again: "Now, what's this 'Mother' business? Think

you're getting too old to call me 'Mom,' is that it?"

He hadn't called his mother that since he was in his early twenties.

"How—how've you been?" he asked.

"Not the same since you left, you know that; but we're keeping busy. We went fishing off Titusville

last week. Your father caught a thirty-pound pompano. I wish I could send you some of it; it's just the

tenderest you've ever tasted. We've got plenty left in the freezer for you, but it won't be the same as it

was fresh."

Her words brought back a rush of memories, all tenuously related: summer weekends on his uncle's

boat in the Atlantic, the sun bright on the polished deck as a dark line of thunderheads hovered on the

horizon … the ramshackle little towns of Titusville and Cocoa Beach before the great NASA

invasion … the big white freezer in their garage at home full of steaks and fish, and above it shelves of

boxes stuffed with all his old comic books and Heinlein novels …

"Jeff? You still there?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm sorry … Mom. I just forgot what I called about for a minute, there."

"Well, honey, you know you never need a reason to—" There was a click on the line, and he heard

his father's voice.

"Well, speak of the devil! We were just talking about you, weren't we, hon?"

"That's right," Jeffs mother said. "Not five minutes ago, I was saying how long it'd been since you

called."

Jeff had no idea whether that meant a week or a month, and he didn't want to ask. "Hi, Dad," he said

quickly. "I hear you bagged a prize pompano."

"Hey, you should've been there." His father laughed. "Bud didn't get a nibble all day, and the only

thing Janet came up with was a sunburn. She's still peeling—looks like an overcooked shrimp!"

Jeff hazily remembered the names as belonging to one of the couples his parents had been friends

with, but he couldn't put faces to them. He was struck by how vital and full of energy his mother and

father both sounded. His father had come down with emphysema in 1982, and seldom left the house

anymore. Only with difficulty could Jeff picture him out on the ocean, besting a powerful deep-sea fish,

the Pall Mall in the corner of his mouth soggy with spray. In fact, Jeff thought numbly, his parents were

now almost exactly his own age—or the age he had been this time yesterday.

"Oh," his mother said, "I ran into Barbara the other day. She's doing just fine at Rollins, and she said

to tell you Gappy got that problem all straightened out."

Barbara, Jeff dimly recalled, was a girl he'd dated in high school; but the name Gappy meant nothing

to him now.

"Thanks," Jeff said. "Next time you see her, tell Barbara I'm real glad to hear that."

"Are you still going out with that little Judy?" his mother asked. "That was such a darling picture you

sent of her, we can't wait to meet her. How is she?"

"She's fine," he said evasively, beginning to wish he hadn't made this call.

"How's the Chevy doing?" his father interjected. "Still burning oil like it was?"

Jesus; Jeff hadn't thought about that old car in years.

"Car's O.K., Dad." That was a guess. He didn't even know where it might be parked. The smoky old

beast had been a graduation present from his parents, and he'd driven it until it finally died on him during

his senior year at Emory.

"How about the grades? That paper you were griping about, the one on … You know, the one you

told us last week you were having some trouble with. What was that, anyway?"

"Last week? Yeah, the … history paper. I finished that. Haven't gotten the grade yet."

"No, no, it wasn't for history. You said it was some English Lit thing, what was it?"

A child's voice suddenly came on the line, babbling excitedly. Jeff realized with a jolt that the child

was his sister—a woman who'd been through two divorces, who had a daughter of her own just entering

high school. Hearing her nine-year-old's exuberance, Jeff was touched. His sister's voice seemed the very

embodiment of lost innocence, of time turned poignantly back upon itself.

The conversation with his family had grown stifling, uncomfortably disturbing. He cut it short,

promised to call again in a few days. When he hung up, his forehead was damp with chill sweat, his

throat dry. He took the stairs down to the lobby, bought a Coke for a quarter, drained it in three long

gulps. Someone was in the TV room, watching "Sky King."

Jeff dug in his other pocket, fished out a key ring. One of the six keys was for the dorm room, he'd

used that to let himself back m last night; there were three others he didn't recognize, and two that were

clearly a set of General Motors ignition and trunk keys.

He walked outside, blinked at the bright Georgia sunshine. There was a weekend feel to the campus,

a distinctive lazy quietude that Jeff recognized instantly. On fraternity row, he knew, captive squads of

pledges would be mopping the houses clean and hanging papier-mâche decorations for the

Saturday-night round of parties; the girls in Harris Hall and the unnamed new women's dorm would be

lounging about in Bermuda shorts and sandals, waiting for their afternoon dates to pick them up for a

drive to Soap Creek or Stone Mountain. Off to his left, Jeff could hear the chanted cadences of the Air

Force ROTC drill, being conducted without irony or protest. No one was playing Frisbee on the grass;

no odor of marijuana hung in the air. The students here could not conceive of the changes the world was

about to endure.

He scanned the parking lot in front of Longstreet Hall, searching for his blue-and-white '58 Chevy. It

was nowhere in sight. He walked down Pierce Drive, then made a wide circle on Arkwright past Dobbs

Hall and up behind the other cluster of men's dorms; the car wasn't there either.

As he walked toward Clifton Road Jeff could again hear the barked commands and rote responses

from the ROTC field. The sound made something click in his mind, and he turned left over a small bridge

across from the post office, then trudged up a road past the Phi Chi medical fraternity. The campus

property ended there, and a block farther on he found his car. He was a freshman, so he couldn't get a

parking sticker until next fall; he'd had to park off campus that first year. Even so, there was a ticket on

the windshield. He should've moved the car that morning, according to the hours posted on a sign above

him.

He sat behind the wheel, and the feel and smell of the car evoked a dizzying jumble of responses.

He'd spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours in this tattered seat: at drive-in movies and restaurants

with Judy, on road trips with Martin or other friends or by himself—to Chicago, Florida, once all the way

to Mexico City. He had grown from adolescence to adulthood in this car, more so than in any dorm

room or apartment or city. He'd made love in it, gotten drunk in it, driven it to his favorite uncle's untimely

funeral, used its temperamental yet powerful V-8 engine to express anger, jubilation, depression,

boredom, remorse.

He'd never given the car a name, had considered the idea of doing so juvenile; but now he realized

how much the machine had meant to him, how thoroughly his own identity had been meshed with the

quirky personality of that old Chevy.

Jeff put the key in the ignition, started it up. The engine backfired once, then rumbled to life. He

turned the car around, took a right on Clifton Road past the half-constructed bulk of the Communicable

Disease Center. They'd still call it the CDC in the eighties, but by then the initials would stand for Centers

for Disease Control, and the place would be world-renowned for its studies of such panic-inducing

scourges of the future as Legionnaire's Disease and AIDS.

The future: hideous plagues, a revolution in sexual attitudes achieved and then reversed, triumph and

tragedy in space, city streets haunted by null-eyed punks in leather and chains and spiked pink hair,

death-beams in orbit around the polluted, choking earth … Christ, Jeff thought with a shudder, from this

viewpoint his world sounded like the most nightmarish of science fiction. In many ways, the reality he'd

grown used to had more in common with movies like Blade Runner than it did with the sunny naïveté of

early 1963.

He turned on the radio: crackling, monaural AM, no FM band on the dial at all. "Our Day Will

Come," Ruby and the Romantics crooned at him, and Jeff laughed aloud.

At Briarcliff Road he turned left, drove aimlessly through the shaded residential neighborhoods to the

west of the campus. The street became Moreland Avenue after a ways, and he kept on driving, past

Inman Park, past the Federal Penitentiary where Al Capone had served his time. The city street signs

disappeared, and he was on the Macon Highway, heading south.

The radio kept him company with its unending stream of pre-Beatle hits: "Surfin' USA," "I Will Follow

Him," "Puff, the Magic Dragon." Jeff sang along with all of them, pretended he was listening to an oldies

station. All he had to do was hit another button, he told himself, and he'd hear Springsteen or Prince,

maybe a jazz station playing the latest Pat Metheny on a compact disc. Finally the signal faded, and so

did his fantasy. He could find nothing across the dial except more of the same antiquated music. Even the

country stations had never heard of Willie or Waylon; it was all Ernest Tubbs and Hank Williams, not an

outlaw in the pack.

Outside McDonough he passed a roadside stand selling peaches and watermelons. He and Martin

had stopped at a stand just like that on one of their Florida drives, mainly because of the long-legged

farm girl in white shorts who'd been selling the fruit. She'd had a big German Shepherd with her, and after

some pointless city-boy/country-girl banter, he and Martin had bought a whole bushel basket full of

peaches from her. They hadn't even wanted the damned things, got sick of smelling them after thirty miles

or so, and started using them for target practice on road signs, whooping with inane glee at the "Splat—

Kerblang!" that resulted from a successful toss.

That had been, what, the summer of '64 or '65? A year or two from now. As of today, he and Martin

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