Ken Grimwood (2 page)

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 He had no way of knowing whether all those shops down there had remained the same or had been replaced by high-rises, maybe a mall.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?"