Ken Grimwood - Replay

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.