I was well into my third drink of an only mildly stimulating happy hour on an otherwise unexemplary day. He had just said that he was just about done—not literally, but colloquially—with War and Peace, that he had thought Anna Karenina was overrated but engaging enough, but that War and Peace had started out as a masterpiece yet was becoming more and more tedious and forgettable as it went on. He brought this up out of nowhere, after a brief lull into a period of the conversation when, already all caught up, we were now just freestyling different tangents between the increasing silences. I thought it was odd. He was super bright and well educated, but he had never made it evident in his interactions with me that he was a reader of books, and you would think that you would know if someone you saw almost every day had already embarked on the task of reading what had the reputation of being the longest book in the world. I thought he might be setting up a joke—he had an absurd yet completely deadpan sense of whimsy and would often say random bits of nonsense to test how gullible I was, how adept I was at seamlessly joining him on his surreal flights of fancy.

It’s not because I thought he was joking that I started to choke, though. It wasn’t a laugh gone wrong. Rather, I felt the urge to sneeze, and, with a mouth quite full of well-chewed food, I didn’t want to spew tiny particles of shrimp all over the bar. In the sudden challenge of holding in my sneeze while holding onto my dinner, I felt something lodge, tried to discharge it, and thought—quite thoroughly and with hypervigilance—that this was the life-threatening task I would now have only a few seconds to navigate. I had never choked before, not for real like this, at least not that I could remember.

He was cool about it, though. Graceful. Before the bartender or most of the other people around had even noticed, he had put down his napkin, sidled up behind my barstool, shepherded me to a standing position, and with astonishing confidence and gentleness applied the Heimlich. I mean, my chest hurt afterward, but the whole affair was quite smooth and painless, and I could breathe again.

The others at the bar had noticed now, and the bartender expressed his concerns until it was clear we were all ready to move on.

“That was heroic as hell, man,” I said. “Have you done that before? How’d you learn how to do that with such ease?”

He pointed toward the poster with illustrated instructions that hung behind the bar—the same poster with the odd-looking expressionless male and female couple that had hung in every restaurant for years.

“The instructions are right there.”

“Yeah, I know. But I’ve never, like, had the chance to practice it. I’m not sure I could actually even do it, at least not as smoothly as you did. Or is it something that just kicks in when you need it?”

“Like the mother lifting the bus off the baby?”

“Yeah. Is that what it was like?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t you have to learn in middle school? We learned in gym class. In seventh grade, I think.”

“But that was so long ago,” I insisted, “and I don’t think we even practiced the Heimlich! Just CPR on the little dummy.”

“‘Annie, Annie, are you okay?’” he cried, and we both laughed.

I took a big, death-quenching swallow of my beer. I had ordered a fourth from the bartender. We reflected. I was thinking of CPR lessons decades ago. I kinda still remembered what to do—the basics, at least.

“I had two younger sisters,” he said into his beer. “When I was little, I don’t know, I got it in my head that I might have to save them one day. I was always looking after them by myself when my mom was at work, you know, after school . . . I guess I paid attention to how to, like, handle emergency situations, I suppose.”

It was deep, and I wasn’t sure how to respond. To keep praising and legendizing what he considered a fairly routine skill that all decent, responsible people should have—well, it made me feel pretty small and stupid. Why hadn’t I paid better attention to such things? If I’d been alone, where the hell would I be now? Dead?

The awkward silence was brief, but then his tone was perky, back to business as usual. “No, I’m just kidding,” he said. “Actually, I’ve been living in a time loop for probably seven years or so.”

We laughed.

“I’ve saved your life so many times now.” He was cheesing.

“Like a Groundhog Day situation?”

“Exactly, that’s what people tell me. I’ll have to watch it one of these days; I’ve still never seen it.”

“Well, thanks for your diligence,” I said. “I’m sorry I keep choking every day.”

“Oh, no worries,” he said. “It’s not every day.”

“Sometimes you flake and just go straight home after work?”

“Yeah.” He mimicked himself on such days, evoking a mundane exhaustion: “Man, I can’t deal with the choking again. Not tonight!”

“Rather just crawl into bed, cozy up with War and Peace,” I said, adopting the same voice.

His eyes trailed for a second. I thought we would resume the conversation about his reading that I’d interrupted—a nice save, I thought. But instead he sipped his beer. He was still on the Groundhog Day thing. “You died one of the first times,” he said, grinning strangely.

It was a bit darker than his humor usually went, though not completely out of character. I remembered that I’d almost just died.

“Thanks again,” I said. “For real.”

“Yeah, of course,” he said, and then we talked about Bill Murray’s latest movie.

I know in post-traumatic stress disorder you fixate on the traumatic event. You visualize it crisply in that split second when you realized everything had just gone wrong, a snapshot flashing through your mind, intruding unexpectedly. I’d been in a car accident as a kid, and for days I kept reliving the moment before the crash, seeing it again and again as though that exact same moment of sudden death was crashing into my life all over again. But it’s not the choking I fixate on, though I remember it well enough. He handled everything so quickly that that wasn’t even a trauma for me.

No, I couldn’t stop thinking about that conversation.

Because a couple weeks later, I brought it up again. We had quite a repertoire of inside jokes, built from past conversations over happy hour drinks. He had predicted something I was going to say—something pretty specific and what I considered rather unpredictable, even though it was based on an old joke of ours—and his prediction made me remember that he’d told me he was stuck in a time loop, neglecting that this was a different day and therefore, extrapolating from the speculative physics of our joke, that he was probably not in a time loop anymore. Nevertheless, I said, “Well, you are in Groundhog Day, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.”

He smiled, not getting it. “What, like I can predict when spring’s coming?”

“No, like the movie. You’ve been living the same day over and over for seven years.”

“Oh,” he said, like it was the first time we’d discussed this. “I never saw it.”

“Seriously?” I said. His face was blank. “Well, you have to see it immediately. It’s so good! I’ve seen it probably ten times.”

He nodded, not all that interested, and I wondered why he couldn’t remember that after he’d casually saved my life, he had joked about being stuck in a movie that now he seemed to know almost nothing about.

We sipped our beers, and I studied the choking poster.