REWINDING

“I have a really weird Mandela Effect story.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’ve never heard of anyone else having this memory. If that doesn’t sound too boring to you?”

“No, not at all.”

“I remember there was an American Godzilla movie before the one in 1998. They called it Godzilla: The Big One. He tries to destroy Los Angeles instead of Tokyo. There are shots of him working his way up from the Santa Monica pier, roasting traffic along the 405 in a big blue barbecue. He makes a mess of Beverly Hills and Bel-Air with a bunch of celebrity cameos, before finally arriving downtown after a long stroll through the whole west side. Does any of that sound familiar?”

I couldn’t quite piece together if I had seen this before, or if my mind had fabulated it from her description. “I feel like this is familiar, somehow, but it might just be from having watched so many other disaster movies.”

“The thing in this one is, they don’t have any way to stop Godzilla, and they don’t want to use nuclear weapons in a major city, so they just wait. LA is too big horizontally for him, and he finally gives up on destroying it. He wanders his way north, towards the Valley, but he doesn’t cross the mountains. He lays down, and falls asleep. Then, there’s a cut to ten years later, where everything is mostly rebuilt, and Godzilla's just become one of the city’s hills like any other. His back is covered in wild grasses and a superbloom of bright orange poppies.”

I could feel the shape of the memory, a glimmer on some old cathode-ray screen in a time before the millennium bug, but I knew, deep down, I’d never seen what she’s describing. Even so, I played along. “The last part of the movie is a televised debate about what should be done with Godzilla’s body. They’re worried that seismic activity will eventually wake him back up, unless they can move him into the ocean, though some think it’s better to just leave him there.”

“Yes!” She laughed. “Then, there’s the cut to the news helicopter circling the body, covered in tents for a music festival—”

“—while a wildfire burns in the distance. R.E.M. opens the show with a cover of Blue Oyster Cult’s Godzilla as the credits roll.”

The width of her smile betrayed just as much joy as disbelief. "Holy shit, you’ve actually seen it? You're not fucking with me?”

I’d begun to worry I actually had.