Ken Grimwood - Replay

Judy frowned, started to speak, but he shushed her. She leaned over the bed to kiss him, and her hand was trembling as it found his.

"Come home soon," she whispered against his face. "We haven’t even started yet."

It happened a little over an hour after Judy had left the room to get lunch in the hospital cafeteria. Jeff was glad she wasn’t there to see it.

Even through his pain he could see the astonishment on the nurse’s face as the EKG went berserk; but she behaved with complete professionalism, didn’t delay calling the Code Blue for an instant. Within seconds Jeff was surrounded by a full medical team, shouting instructions and status reports as they worked over him:

"Epi, one cc!"

"Bicarb two amps? Gimme three-sixty joules!"

"Stand back…" WHUMP!

"V-tach! Blood pressure eighty palpable; two hundred watt seconds, lidocaine seventy-five milligrams IV, stat!"

"Take a look—V-Fib."

"Repeat epi and bicarb, defib at three-sixty; stand back…" WHUMP!

On and on, their voices fading with the light. Jeff tried to scream in anger because it wasn’t fair; he’d been totally prepared this time. But he couldn’t scream, he couldn’t even cry, he couldn’t do a goddamned thing but die again.

And wake again, in the back seat of Martin Bailey’s Corvair with Judy beside him. Judy at eighteen, Judy in 1963 before they ever fell in love and married and built their lives together.

"Stop the car!"

"Hang on, buddy," Martin said. "We’re almost back to the girls' dorm. We’ll—"

"I said stop the car! Stop it now!"

Shaking his head in bewilderment, Martin pulled the car to a halt on Kilgo Circle, behind the history building. Judy put her hand on Jeff’s arm, trying to calm him, but he jerked away from her and shoved the car door open.

"Jesus, what the hell are you doing?" Martin yelled, but Jeff was out of the car and running, running hard in whatever direction it was; it didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered.

He raced through the quadrangle, past the chemistry and psych buildings, his strong young heart pounding in his chest as if it had not betrayed him minutes ago and twenty-five years in the future. His legs carried him past the biology building, across the corner of Pierce and Arkwright drives. He finally stumbled and fell to his knees in the middle of the soccer field, looking up at the stars through blurry eyes.

"Fuck you!" He screamed at the impassive sky, screamed with all the force and despair he’d been unable to express from that terminal hospital bed. "Fuck you! Why … are … you … DOING THIS TO ME!"

Jeff just didn’t much give a shit after that. He’d done all he could, achieved everything a man could ever hope to—materially, romantically, paternally—and still it came to nothing, still he was left alone and powerless, with empty hands and heart. Back to the beginning; yet why begin at all, if his best efforts would inevitably prove futile?

He couldn’t bring himself to see Judy again. This sweet-faced adolescent girl was not the woman he had loved, but merely a blank slate with the potential to become that woman. It would be pointless, even masochistic, to repeat by rote that process of mutual becoming, when he knew too well the emotional and spiritual death to which it all would lead.

He went back to that anonymous bar he’d found so long ago on North Druid Hills Road, and started drinking. When the time came, he again went through the charade of convincing Frank Maddock to place the bet on the Kentucky Derby. As soon as the money came in he flew to Las Vegas, alone.

After three days of wandering the hotels and casinos he finally found her, sitting at a dollar-minimum blackjack table at the Sands. Same black hair, same perfect body, even the same red dress he’d once ripped in a moment of shared impatient lust on the living-room sofa of her little duplex.

"Hi," he said. "My name’s Jeff Winston."

She smiled her familiar seductive smile. "Sharla Baker."

"Right. How’d you like to go to Paris?"

Sharla gave him a bemused stare. "Mind if I finish this hand first?"

"There’s a plane to New York in three hours. It makes a direct connection with Air France. That gives you time to pack."

She took a hit on sixteen, busted.

"Are you for real, or what?" she asked.

"I’m for real. You ready to go?"

Sharla shrugged, scooped the few chips she had left into her purse. "Sure. Why not?"

"Exactly," Jeff said. "Why not?"

The sweetly harsh scent of a hundred smoldering Gauloises and Gitanes cigarettes hung in the air of the club like a rancid fog. Through the haze, Jeff could see Sharla dancing alone in a corner, eyes closed, drunk. She seemed to drink more this time around than he’d remembered; or maybe it was just that she was keeping pace with him, and he was drinking more now than he ever had. At least the liquor made him gregarious; there were half a dozen people at his table tonight, most of them ostensibly "students" of one sort or another, but all more interested in the city’s never-ending night life than in their books.

"You have these clubs in U.S., hein?" Jean-Claude asked. Jeff shook his head. The Caveau de la Huchette was a Parisian jazz cavern in the classic mold, a rock-walled dungeon full of music as smoky and pungent as the cigarettes everyone here seemed to exist on. Unlike the newer discothèques, it was a style that would never catch on in the States.

Mireille, Jean-Claude’s petite red-haired girlfriend, gave a wry and lazy smile. "C’est dommage," she said. "The blacks, no one likes them in their home country, so they must come here for to play their music."

Jeff made a noncommittal gesture, poured himself another glass of red wine. America’s present racial troubles were a major topic of conversation in France right now, but he had no interest in getting involved in that discussion. Nothing serious, nothing that would make him think or remember, held any interest for him now.

"You must to visit l’Afrique," Mireille said. "There is much of beauty there, much to understand."

She and Jean-Claude had recently returned from a month in Morocco. Jeff kindly didn’t mention France’s recent debacle in Algeria.

"Attention, attention, s’il vous plaît!" The owner of the club stood on its tiny stage, leaning close to the microphone. "Mesdames et messieurs, copains et copines … Le Caveau de la Huchette a le plaisir extraordinaire de vous présenter le blues hot … avec le maître du blues, personne d’autre que—Monsieur Sidney … Bechet!"

There was wild applause as the old expatriate musician took the stage, clarinet in hand. He kicked things off with a rouser, "Blues in the Cave," and followed that with a soulfully sexy version of "Frankie and Johnny." Sharla continued her solo dance in the corner, her body undulating with the visceral thrust of the music. Jeff emptied the wine bottle, signaled for another.

The old blues man grinned and nodded as the second number ended and the young crowd roared its appreciation of his alien art form. "Mercy, mercy, mercy!" Bechet exclaimed. "Mon français n’est pas très bon," he said with a thick black-American accent, "So I just gots to say in my own way that I can tell y’all knows the blues. You heah me?"

At least half the audience understood enough English to answer enthusiastically. "Mais oui!" they cheered, "Bien sûr!" Jeff gulped his fresh glass of wine, waited for the music to carry him away again, to wipe out all the memories.

"Well, all right!" Bechet said from the stage, wiping the mouthpiece of his clarinet. "Now, this next one is really what the blues is most about. You see, there’s some blues for folks ain’t never had a thing, and that’s a sad blues … but the saddest kind of blues is for them that’s had everything they ever wanted and has lost it, and knows it won’t come back no more. Ain’t no sufferin' in this world worse than that; and that’s the blues we call I Had It But It’s All Gone Now. "