Ken Grimwood (30 page)
Authors: Replay
Sly and the Family Stone were on the jukebox, "Dance to the Music," and the dance floor in the front room was packed. Pam and Ellen and Peter squirmed their way through the crowd, looking for a place to sit.
Pam was still stoned. They'd smoked another joint on the walk down from campus, and the colorfully raucous scene in the bar suddenly struck her as a painting, or a series of paintings. To highlight a twirling fringed vest here, a swirl of long black hair there, the faces and the bodies and the music and noise … yes, she'd like to try to capture on canvas the
sound
of this pleasantly familiar place, translate it visually, the way that synesthetic transformation so often happened in her mind when she was this stoned.
She looked around the bar, picking out people and details of scenes, and her eyes focused on that strange guy she was always running into.
"Hey," she said, nudging Ellen, "you know who I'd like to paint?"
"Who?"
"That guy over there."
Ellen looked in the direction Pam had discreetly indicated. "Which one? You don't mean that straight guy, do you? The townie?"
"Yeah, him. There's something about his eyes; they're … I don't know, it's like they're ancient or something, like he's way older than he really is, and has seen so much … "
"Sure," Ellen said with pointed sarcasm. "He's probably some ex-Marine, and he's seen lots of dead babies and women he shot in Vietnam."
"You talking about the Tet offensive again?" Peter asked.
"No, Pam's got the hots for some townie."
"Kinky." Peter laughed.
Pam blushed angrily. "I never said any such thing. I just said he had interesting eyes and I'd like to paint them."
"Dock of the Bay" came on the jukebox, and most of the dancers found their way back to their tables. Pam wondered who had played the mournfully contemplative Otis Redding tune, such an ironic self-epitaph of the singer, who had died before the record was released. Maybe it was that guy with the strange eyes. It seemed like the kind of music he might be into.
"Wastin' tiiime … " Peter sang along with the record, then grinned mischievously. He took off his watch, dropped it into the half-full pitcher of beer with a theatrical flourish. "We drown time!" he declared, and raised his glass, clinked it against the others'.
"I hear Bobby's a head," Ellen commented, apropos of nothing, when they had drunk the toast. "Gets his grass from the same dealer who supplies the Stones when they're over here."
They were on one of Peter's favorite topics now. "They say R. J. Reynolds has secretly … what's the word, patented? All the good brand names."
"Trademarked."
"Right, right, trademarked. 'Acapulco Gold,' 'Panama Red' … the cigarette people have got all the good names, just in case." Pam listened to the familiar rumors, nodded with interest. "I wonder what the packs would look like, and the ads."
"Paisley cartons," Ellen said with a smile.
"Get Hendrix to do the TV commercials." Peter put in. They started cracking up, getting into one of those endless communal stoned laughing jags that Pam loved so much. She was laughing so hard the tears were coming to her eyes, she was getting giddy, hyperventilating, she—
Where the hell was she this time, Pamela wondered, and why was she so dizzy? She blinked away an inexplicable film of tears, took in the new environment. Jesus Christ, it was Adolph's.
"Pam?" Ellen asked, suddenly noticing that her friend had stopped laughing. "You O.K.?"
"I'm fine," Pamela said, taking a long, slow breath. "You're not freaking out or anything?"
"No." She closed her eyes, tried to concentrate, but her mind wouldn't stay still; it kept drifting. The music was extremely loud, and this place, even her clothes, reeked of—She was stoned, she realized.
Usually had been when she went to Adolph's, "down the road," they used to call it, ease on down, ease on down …
"Have another beer," Peter said, concern in his voice. "You look weird; you sure you're all right?"
"I'm positive." She hadn't become friends with Peter and Ellen until after winter field period of her freshman year. Peter had graduated, and Ellen had dropped out and moved to London with him, when Pamela was a sophomore; that meant this had to be 1968 or 1969.
A new record started playing on the jukebox, Linda Ronstadt singing "Different Drum." No, Pamela thought, not just Linda Ronstadt, the Stone Poneys. Keep it all straight, she told herself, reacclimate slowly, don't let the marijuana in your brain make this more difficult than it already is. Don't try to make any decisions or even talk too much right now. Wait'll you come down, wait until—
There he was, my God, sitting not twenty feet away, looking right at her. Pamela gaped in disbelief at the incongruous, impossibly wonderful sight of Jeff Winston sitting quietly amid the youthful din of her old college hangout. She saw him register the change in her eyes, and he smiled a warm, slow smile of welcome and assurance.
"Hey, Pam?" Ellen said. "How come you're crying? Listen, maybe we better go back to the dorm."
Pamela shook her head, put a reassuring hand on her friend's arm. Then she stood from the table and walked across the room, across the years, into Jeff's waiting embrace.
"Tattooed lady." Jeff chuckled, kissing the pink rose on her inner thigh. "I don't remember that being there before."
"It's not a tattoo, it's a decal. They wash off."
"Do they lick off?" he asked, looking up at her with a wicked gleam.
She smiled. "You're welcome to try."
"Maybe later," he said, sliding up to prop himself beside her on the pillows. "I kind of enjoy you as a flower child."
"You would," she said, and poked him in the ribs. "Pour us some more champagne."
He reached for the bottle of Mumm's on the bedside table, refilled their glasses.
"How did you know when I'd start replaying?" Pamela asked.
"I didn't. I've been watching you for months; I rented the house here in Rhinebeck at the beginning of the school year, and I've been waiting ever since. It was frustrating, and I was starting to get impatient; but the time here helped me come to terms with some old memories. I used to live just up the river, in one of the old estates, when I was with Diane … and my daughter Gretchen. I always thought I'd never be able to come back here, but you gave me a reason to, and I'm glad I did. Besides which, I enjoyed seeing you the way you really were in this time, originally."
She grimaced. "I was a college hippie. Leather fringe and tie dye. I hope you never listened to me talking to my friends; I probably said 'far out' a lot."
Jeff kissed the tip of her nose. "You were cute.
Are
cute," he corrected, brushing her long, straight hair away from her face. "But I couldn't help imagining all these kids fifteen years from now, wearing three-piece suits and driving BMW's to the office."
"Not all of them," she said. "Bard turned out a lot of writers, actors, musicians … and," she added with a rueful grin, "my husband and I didn't have a BMW; we drove an Audi and a Mazda."
"Point granted." He smiled, and took a sip of champagne. They lay together contentedly, but Jeff could see the gravity beneath her cheerful expression.
"Seventeen months," he said.
"What?"
"I lost seventeen months this time. That's what you were wondering, wasn't it?"
"I'd been wanting to ask," she conceded. "I couldn't help but wonder. My skew is up to … This is March, you said? '68?"
Jeff nodded. "Three and a half years."
"Counting from last time. It's five years off from the first few replays. Jesus. Next time I could—"
He put a finger to her lips. "We were going to concentrate on
this
time, remember?"
"Of course I do," she said, snuggling closer to him beneath the covers.
"And I've been thinking about that," he told her. "I've had awhile to consider it, and I think I've come up with a plan, of sorts."
She pulled her head back, looked at him with an interested frown. "What do you mean?"
"Well, first I thought about approaching the scientific community with all this—the National Science Foundation, some private research organization … whatever group might seem most appropriate, maybe the physics department at Princeton or MIT, somebody doing research on the nature of time."
"They'd never believe us."
"Exactly. That's been the stumbling block all along. And yet we've done our part to maintain that obstacle, by remaining so secretive each time."
"We've had to be discreet. People would think we were insane. Look at Stuart McCowan; he—"
"McCowan is insane—he's a killer. But it's no crime to make predictions of events; nobody would lock us up for doing that. And once the things we predict have actually happened, we'll have proven our knowledge of the future. They'd have to listen to us. They'd know something real—unexplained, but real—was going on."
"How would we get in the front door to begin with, though?" Pamela objected. "No one at a place like MIT would even bother looking at any list of predictions we gave them. They'd lump us in with the UFO fanatics and the psychics the minute we told them what we had in mind."
"That's just the point. We don't approach them; they come to us."
"Why should—You're not making sense," Pamela said, shaking her head in confusion.
"We go public," Jeff explained.
SIXTEEN
This time there was no need for the global-saturation coverage they had employed with their previous ad, the small one with which they had hoped to attract the attention only of other replayers. Also, both the ambiguity and anonymity of that first notice were unnecessary for their present purpose.
The
New York Times
refused to carry the one-time-only, full-page ad, but it ran in the
New York
Daily News,
the
Chicago Tribune,
and the
Los Angeles Times.
DURING THE NEXT TWELVE MONTHS:
•
Scorpion
will be lost at sea in late May.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
We will have no further comment to make on these statements until May 1, 1969. We will meet with the news media on that date, at a location to be announced one year from today.
Jeff Winston & Pamela Phillips
New York, N.Y., April 19, 1968
Every seat of the large conference room they had rented at the New York Hilton was occupied, and those who could not find a chair milled impatiently in the aisles or at the sides of the room, trying to keep their feet from becoming entangled in the snaking microphone and television cables.
At 3:00 P.M. precisely, Jeff and Pamela came into the room and stood together on the speaker's platform. She smiled nervously as the blinding lights for the TV cameras came on, and Jeff gave her hand an encouraging, unseen squeeze. From the moment they'd walked in, the room was a hubbub of shouted questions, the reporters all vying at once for their attention. Jeff called several times for silence, finally got the level of noise down to a dim roar.
"We'll answer all your questions," he told the assembled journalists, "but let's establish some kind of order here. Why don't we take the back row first, one question per person, left to right. Then we'll move to the next row, in the same order."
"What about the people who don't have seats?" cried one of the men at the side of the room.
"Latecomers take their turns last, left side of the room first, back to front. Now," Jeff said, pointing,
"we'll take the first question from the lady in the blue dress. No need to identify yourselves; just ask anything you like."
The woman stood, pen and pad in hand. "The most obvious: How were you able to make such accurate predictions about such a wide range of events? Are you claiming to have psychic powers?"
Jeff took a deep breath, spoke as calmly as possible. "One question at a time, please, but I'll answer both of those this once. No, we do not pretend to be psychic, as that term is commonly understood.
Both Miss Phillips and I have been the beneficiaries—or the victims—of a recurring phenomenon that we initially found as difficult to believe as you undoubtedly will today. In brief, we are each reliving our own lives, or certain portions of them. We both died—will die—in October 1988 and have returned to life and subsequently died again, several times over."
The noise that had greeted them as they entered the room was nothing compared to the pandemonium that ensued at this statement, and the overall derisive tone of the cacophony was unmistakable. One television crew shut off its lights and began packing away its equipment, and several reporters stalked out of the room in an insulted huff, but there were many others eager to take the vacated seats. Jeff signaled for quiet again, pointed to the next journalist in line for a question.
"This one's obvious, too," the portly, scowling man said. "How the hell do you expect any of us to believe that crap?"
Jeff maintained his composure, smiled reassuringly at Pamela and calmly addressed the scornful crowd. "I told you before that what we have to say will seem barely credible. I can only point to the complete validity of the 'predictions' we published a year ago—which were already memories, to us—and ask that you reserve judgment until you've heard us out."