Ken Grimwood: Replay

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.