Full Scene Replay at Table Nine

Deja vu is supposed to be a spark. Mine, at my sister-in-law's fortieth, was a broadcast.

Somewhere between the starters and the toast, the feeling clicked on and stayed on — three minutes minimum, I checked afterwards against the videos people took. Everything that happened at that long table, I had the sensation of having already sat through: not vaguely, but shot for shot, line for line.

Uncle Reza stood and tapped his glass and I knew his toast would begin 'I promised not to tell the pony story' and then be entirely the pony story. It was. My nephew dropped his fork and dived under the table, and I knew he would surface wearing somebody's napkin as a bandana. He did. The waiter, refilling glasses, would say 'careful, this vintage is older than the birthday girl — barely,' and the table would groan; I mouthed 'barely' with him. My wife noticed that. Her face changed, and part of me registered even that change as remembered.

And I knew the wine would go over. I watched my brother's elbow drift toward his glass for a full ten seconds — remembered drift, remembered glass, remembered arc onto Aunt Lidia's cream sleeve — and I said nothing. I have asked myself why ever since. Some of it was the paralysis of the chess-players and the fatalists: it had, in some sense, already happened. But some of it, honestly, was curiosity — a horrible, cold little wish to see whether the recording could be wrong.

It could not. Elbow, glass, arc, sleeve, Lidia's shriek, the exact joke her husband made about baptism.

Then it ended, mid-laugh, like a hand lifted off my shoulder, and the rest of the evening was just an evening, unknown, one second at a time.

My wife asked me in the car how I had done the thing with the waiter's line. I said I remembered it. From when, she asked. I still owe her an answer.