Ken Grimwood: Replay

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.

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.