Chapter 2 Chapter two

Jeff spent the rest of the evening walking the streets of Atlanta, his eyes and ears keen to pick out every nuance of this recurring past.White and colored signs in front of public restrooms, women in hats and gloves, the window of a travel agency with an advertisement for the Queen Mary Cruise to Europe, and almost every man who passed him had a cigarette in his hand.Jeff didn't feel hungry until after eleven o'clock. He casually ate hamburgers and beer in a tavern near the five-star district.He had thought he had a vague memory of the mediocre roast bar twenty-five years ago, where he and Judy would occasionally go for a bite to eat after a movie.But now tired and bewildered by the constant bombardment of sights and places old and new, he was no longer sure he had found them.The appearance of every shop door and the appearance of every stranger who passed by made him feel like deja vu, although he also knew that he could not remember everything he had seen.He has lost the ability to sift false memories from absolutely true ones.

He desperately needs sleep, needs to put everything behind him for a while, maybe wake up and accidentally return to the world he left.What he wanted most was a hotel room, a featureless, timeless hotel with no view of the 1963 sky and no radio or television to remind him of what had happened.But he didn't have enough money on him, and he certainly didn't have a credit card.Jeff took a nap in Piedmont Park and had no choice but to go back to Emery, to his dormitory room.Maybe Martin was asleep. Martin was still up.Jeff's roommate was sitting soberly at his desk flipping through a photocopied copy of High-Fix.When Jeff walked into the room wearily, he gave him a cold look and put down the magazine in his hand.

So, said Martin, what the hell, where have you been? Just wandering around town. So you can't find time to hang out at Dooley's, or even the Fox Theater?We almost missed the opening scene of that damn movie, it's all about waiting for you. Sorry, I'm not in the mood for a movie, at least not tonight. Then you can at least leave me a fucking note.Jesus, you didn't even call Judy.She was cranky all night, worrying about what happened to you. Look at me, I'm really tired.I don't really feel like talking right now, okay? There was no smile in Martin's laugh.You'd better be ready to explain tomorrow if you ever want to see Judy again.When she finds out that you are still alive, she will be extremely upset.

Jeff dreams that he is dying and wakes up in his college dorm.Nothing has changed.Martin was already out, probably to class, but Jeff remembered that it was Saturday morning.Are there classes on weekend mornings?uncertain. Anyway, he was alone in the room now, and he took the opportunity to rummage in the desk and wardrobe for a while.They are all books he is familiar with: "The Outbreak of Nuclear War", "1960 Kennedy's Road to the White House", "Charlie and Me".The records in their new, uncreased, unopened jackets reminded him of the days and nights they had accompanied him, and suddenly all the impressions came back in the form of sensations.Stan.Gates and Joanne.Gibato, Najingo Trio, Jimmy.Witherspoon, and dozens of records, most of which he had lost or worn out long ago.

Jeff turned to the Harman Kardon stereo his parents had given him for Christmas and put in the (Annotation: The famous composer Anthony Carlos Jobim (Antonio Carlos Jobim, 1927︱1994) composed the classic bossa nova.) Then he continued to rummage through the things of his youth: hanging on the hook, the cuffs of the trousers are embroidered with his lettering slacks and a Botney Five Hundred blazer; a souvenir from his tennis win at a boarding school outside Richmond, where he attended Emory before he entered; a set of tall feet wrapped in tissue paper Cup, is Pat in New Orleans.From O'Brien's; neat stacks of Playboy and Hooligan magazines.

He found a box of letters and photographs, dragged it out, and sat on the bed to organize what he found.There are photos of him when he was a child, some photos of girls whose names he can’t remember, a few family photos taken in the automatic photo booth with artificial expressions, and a folder of family photos. Photos around the Christmas tree. Impulsively, he pulled a handful of pennies from his pocket, found a payphone in the lobby, and retrieved his long-forgotten old parents' old phone number from the Orlando directory. Hello?His mother answered the phone with an upset tone that only deepened as the years passed.

mom?he said tentatively. Jeff!Her head is turned away from the microphone, her voice muffled momentarily.Pick up the kitchen phone, honey, it's Jeff!Then the voice became clear again: Now tell me, what is there to ask your mother for help this time?You think you don't call me mommy anymore because your wings have grown hard, don't you? He hasn't called his mother Mommy since he was in his early twenties. You, how are you doing?he asks. It's not the same at home since you left, you know; but we try to keep things busy.Last week we went fishing in Tetusville and your dad caught a thirty pound trevally.I wish I could send some to you, the meat is the most tender.We still have a lot of ice in the refrigerator for you, but the taste is not the same as when it was fresh.

His mother's words brought back many memories, more or less connected, of summer weekends spent in Atlantic Township on his uncle's boat, of the sun shining on the waxed decks and the dark rows of storm clouds lingering on the horizon. Don't remember Cocoa Beach before the great NASA invasion, and Tetusville, those dilapidated, desolate towns remember the big white refrigerators in their garages full of steaks and fish stacked on top of each other Boxes, filled with his old comic books and Hylaine's sci-fi. Jeff, are you still listening? Oh, it's still with me, sorry Mommy, I just suddenly forgot why I called.Well, baby, you know, you're always welcome to call home, no need

There was a click on the phone line, and then he heard his father's voice. Hey, it really means that Cao Cao and Cao Cao will be here.We're just talking about you, aren't we, honey? No, said Jeff's mother, five minutes ago, I was just saying how long it's been since you called home. Jeff didn't know whether the time in his mother's mouth was a week or a month, and he didn't want to ask.Hi Daddy, he said quickly, I hear you caught a great fish. Hey, you should come along.his father said with a smile.No fish came near Bud's hook all day, and the only catch for Janet was a sunburn.She was still peeling and looked like an overcooked shrimp.

Jeff quickly remembered the names as a couple from his parent's group of friends, but couldn't remember their faces.He was amazed at how alive and energetic both parents sounded.In 1982, my father had an attack of emphysema, and he hardly ever left home.Jeff had a hard time imagining his father at sea holding down a mighty deep-sea fish with a spray-wet cigarette dangling from his mouth.Jeff couldn't think fast enough, and his parents were about his age at this time, or his age yesterday. Oh, said his mother, I met Barbara one day.She had settled in well at Rollins, and she said that Geppy had figured that out.

Jeff vaguely remembered Sabara as the girl he dated in high school, but the name Geppy was out of his mind now. Thanks, Jeff said, next time you see her, tell her for me, I'm glad to hear that. Are you still dating Judy?mother asked.She is so beautiful in the picture you sent us, we can't wait to meet her.How is she? very good.He muddles through and begins to wish secretly that he hadn't made the call. How's your Chevrolet doing?His father chimed in.Still the same fuel consumption? God, how many years has Jeff not thought of that old car. It's in good shape, Daddy.Jeff guessed, he didn't even know where the car was parked.His parents gave him a high school graduation present, the smoking old one, and he drove it to the end of his life in his hands, his senior year at Emory. Are you doing your homework?That report you complained about, the one you know, the one you told us last week that you weren't doing well.What report is that? last week?Yes, that historical report.I'm done writing and I haven't gotten my grades yet. No, no, not history.You said it was about English literature, what report was that? Suddenly, a child's excited chirping voice came from the microphone.Jeff suddenly realized that it was his sister.His sister had been divorced twice, and his daughter had just started high school.Hearing her exuberant nine-year-old voice moved Jeff deeply.He seemed to hear the lost innocence and the time of farewell from his sister's voice. Talking to family members becomes increasingly depressing and uncomfortably unsettling.He quickly ended the conversation, promising they would call home again in a few days.When he hung up the phone, there was cold sweat on his forehead and his throat was dry.He went downstairs to the dormitory hall, bought a can of Coke with a quarter, and drank it in three gulps.Someone in the audio-visual room was watching Sky King. Jeff reached into another pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys.One of the six keys was the bedroom key, which he had used to get into the bedroom yesterday, the other three he didn't recognize, and the remaining two were obviously a set of GM keys, one used to start the car and the other a Trunk keys. He went outside and blinked in the bright Georgia sun.Jeff immediately felt the weekend atmosphere permeating the campus, which was extraordinarily lazy and peaceful.He knew that in the fraternity house, the active members of the community would clean up the place, hang up the ribbons, and prepare to throw a few parties on the weekend nights. Girls in the Harris Pavilion and in the as-yet-unnamed new all-girls dorm would hang around in brightly colored shorts and sandals, waiting for the boys on their afternoon dates to pick them up in their cars and take them for a drive to Soap Creek or Stone Mountain.There was a sound to Jeff's left, the monotonous cadence of Air Force Reserve Officer Training Camp training, serious enough that there was no room for mischief.No one was playing frisbee on the grass, and there was no smell of marijuana in the air.Students here can't imagine how the world will change. He scanned the parking lot in front of the Long Street building, looking for his blue-and-white 1958 Chevrolet.Did not see the car.He went down Pierce Road, then made a wide detour on Acquaint Road, past Dobbs House, and up to the back of another boys dormitory block, and the car wasn't there. As he made his way to Clifton Road, Jeff heard the shouted commands and mechanical responses from Air Force training camp again.The sound reminded him of something, and he turned left and crossed a small bridge over the post office, then trudged up the road past Peach Medical Fraternity.This was the end of the campus boundary, and he found the car a block further down.He's still a freshman and won't get a parking pass until next fall, so he'll have to park off campus his first year.Still, there was a sheet clipped to the windshield.Judging by the time on the sign, he should have driven away this morning. He sat behind the wheel, dazzled by a chaotic reaction to the smell and feel of the car.He'd spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours in this shitty seat: drive-ins or drive-thru's with Judy, drives with Martin, friends, or by himself, all over Chicago, Florida, and once All the way to Mexico City.More than any dorm room, apartment or city, this car has seen him grow from adolescence to adulthood.He made love in it, got very drunk, drove it to the funeral of his beloved uncle who died young, and used its moody but powerful V8 to express anger, joy, frustration, boredom and remorse.He'd never named a car and felt like a kid doing it, but now he understands what the car meant to him, how his identity used to be with this volatile old Chevrolet Inseparable. Jeff put the key in the car and started the car.The engine backfired once, then roared to life.He turned around and turned right on Clifton Road, past the large construction site for the Communicable Disease Center, which was halfway through.People still called it CDC in the 1980s, but CDC stood for Centers for Disease Control (Centers for Disease Control). . The world that is about to unfold in front of your eyes includes: appalling plagues, the sexual revolution and its failures, the triumphs and tragedies of human space activities, punks with empty eyes, wearing leather chains all over their bodies, and combing pink thorn dragon heads in the streets. Infested, polluted and dying Earth is surrounded by dead rays.Jesus, Jeff shuddered. From this point of view, his world seemed like the scariest science fiction come true.In many ways, the world he took for granted was even closer to a film like Blade Runner than to the optimistic and naive early 1963. He turned on the radio, only to find AM broadcasts with poor reception and mono, not even an FM band.Ruby and the Romantics were crooning "Hope For Tomorrow" to him. Ruby & the Romantics' only chart-topper.), Jeff laughs. He turned left on Brill Street and wandered aimlessly through the secluded neighborhood of residential neighborhoods to the west side of campus.A short time later, the street became Moreland Avenue, and he drove on, passing Inman Park and Al.Capone's sentence at the federal prison.The city signs were gone, and he was on the Macon Highway, heading south. The radio played the Beatles' pre-pop hits non-stop, and the music accompanied him, "Surfing America", "I'll Follow Him", "Smoky Dragon".Jeff hummed along to each song, pretending to be listening to a radio station dedicated to old songs.At the touch of a button, he told himself, he could hear Springsteen or Prince, or play Pat.Jazz radio with the latest songs from Metheny.But when the signal light went out, it also ended his fantasy.He couldn't find anything on the channel controller except more of the same kind of outdated music.Even country music stations don't hear Willie or Waylon. Ernest.Tubbs and Hank.Williams, a rebel country tune No wind tunes. Outside Madonov, he passed a roadside stand selling peaches and watermelons.He and Martin often drove to Florida and stopped at a roadside stand like this one, because the fruit was sold by a long-legged farm girl in white shorts.She had a big German Shepherd by her side, and after some silly banter about city boys and country girls, he and Martin bought her a bunch of peaches.They don't want to eat the goddamn thing, and after thirty miles, the smell of peaches starts to turn your stomach, so they use it as a target for street signs, and every time they hear the crackle and boom of the mark, they yell Yelling, the idiots were in a ball of joy. When did that happen?The summer of 1964 and 1965?One or two years from now.None of that happened today, and he and Martin didn't take that trip, buy those peaches, and use peaches to stain and dent the speed limit signs halfway from here to Fodosta.What do these represent now?If that June came again, and Jeff was still caught up in this mysterious re-enactment, he would take the same trip, make the same jokes with Martin, and throw the same bullets at the same street signs. Ripe peaches?What if he didn't, what if he chose to stay in Atlanta that week, or if he just drove past the long-legged peach seller without pausing to stop his memory of this episode of his life?Where does it come from and what happens? In a sense, he seems to live it all over again, like a video tape rewinding and replaying.But it doesn't look like he's bound by what happened in the past, at least not completely bound.What is certain so far is that he has returned to this point in his life again, and all the circumstances have remained intact, including entering Emory University, becoming roommates with Martin, and taking twenty-five pre-semesters. But in the twenty-four hours since he woke up in his dormitory, he had subtly deviated from the path he had followed. Breaking out with Judy last night was the biggest and most noticeable change, though it didn't necessarily affect anything in the long run.He remembered that he and Judy only dated for half a year or eight months, and then it was over around next Christmas.She left him for some more grown-up man, with a smile on his face as he remembered a senior who was going to Tulane to go to medical school after graduation.Jeff's heart was broken, he was depressed for a few weeks, and then he started a string of dates with other girls.For a while it was with a skinny brunette named Margaret, then another brunette whose name started with a D or an A, and then a blonde who had a way of tying cherry stems in knots with her tongue.He hadn't met Linda then, the woman he married and met when he was working at a radio station in West Palm Beach after graduation.She was a student at Florida Atlantic University when they met on the beach in Boca Raton. God, where is Linda now?She was two years younger than him, so she was still in high school and living with her parents.He had a sudden urge to call her, or drive further south to Boca Raton to see her, to meet her.He shouldn't be like this, it's too abrupt.Dangerous derailments can take place, leading one into horrific paradoxes. is that so?Does he really have to worry about the time paradox, the corny idea of ​​killing his own grandfather?Maybe not at all.He was not an outsider wandering about lest he run into his younger self, he was that young self, he belonged to the world, he was part of it.Only his heart comes from the future, and the future exists only in his heart. Jeff had to pull over to the side of the road for a few minutes, putting his head in his hands, trying to make sense of the incident.He once wondered if he had hallucinations to imagine this past existence.But what if it wasn't an illusion, what if he really went back in time, what if the complex world situation in the next twenty-five years, from the fall of Saigon to the popularity of new wave rock music and the invention of the personal computer, everything became a plot A mature fiction emerged from his mind overnight, but he never left the real world in 1963, the place where this fiction appeared, so what should we do?Compared with explanations such as time travel, afterlife, and spatial dimension confusion, this reason is even more plausible. Jeff started the Chevrolet again, and returned to the desolate and sleepy town in the remote area of ​​the two-lane Route 23 state, like a movie scene in the Great Depression era.Perhaps, he thought, what had driven him on this aimless wandering was this: the undisturbed countryside beyond Atlanta, devoid of any clue as to what year AD it was or what year it was.The words “Jesus is the Savior” were painted in huge fonts on the weather-beaten barn, and the abandoned billboards of Berma shaving cream appeared on the bumpy and difficult road every once in a while. A black man is leading a donkey. Even Atlanta in 1963 looks like it's from the future. At Pope Ferry, just north of McCoun, Jeff pulls into a small gas station with a store attached.There are no self-service fuel guns and no unleaded gasoline.A gallon of Gulf Premium was thirty-three cents, and standard was twenty-seven cents.He told the boy standing outside to add Gulf Extra, or two quarts if the oil was low. He bought a few packs of Skinny's jerky and a can of Pabster beer at the store, and after digging at the beer can for a while without success, he suddenly realized that there was no pull ring on it. You must be thirsty, dear.The old woman behind the counter giggled.I even wanted to open it with my hands! Jeff smiled sheepishly.The old woman pointed to the can opener hanging on the rope next to the cash register. He used it to punch two small holes in the top of the beer can.And now the boy was yelling from the gas pump into the battered screen door of the store: You'll need three quarts of gas, sir! Add as much as you need.Check the fan belt for me too, will you?He also called back. Jeff took a swig of his beer and took a magazine from the shelf.There's an article on the new pop art movement, Lichtenstein's large-scale comic strips, and Oldenburg's gigantic squishy hamburger made out of polyethylene.Interesting, he originally thought this trend would come later, around 1965 or 1966.Did he find an inconsistency?This world is already slightly different from the world he thought he knew? He has to find someone to talk to.Martin would just take it as a super joke, and his parents would worry about his mental state.Maybe that's the problem, maybe he should go to a psychiatric clinic.The doctor will at least listen to you and keep the conversation private.But doing that is tantamount to tacitly presupposing that I have mental troubles and a desire to be healed. No, he couldn't find anyone to discuss, he couldn't talk openly.But he can't go on avoiding things for fear of exposure, which is more outlandish than the anachronisms he might inadvertently reveal in his speech.And damn it, he was starting to feel lonely.Even if he doesn't tell the truth, or what he knows, he still needs the reassurance of a companion after all he's been through. Can I have some change and call?Jeff asked the woman at the register, and handed her a five-dollar bill. Is it okay in one piece? I want to hit Atlanta. She nodded, pressed the change button, and took some coins out of the drawer.A dollar is enough, my dear.