42.

The phone rings.

I almost don’t answer it, because I think it’ll be Lana, launching another salvo – part of me worries she’ll show up on my doorstep to continue this, although she’s only ever done that when she incontrovertibly knows she’s the one who’s fucked up, and wants to be conciliatory.

You can place those visits along with Halley’s Comet.

And my head’s raw. My ears are raw. I’m raw. Like I’m recoiling in expectation of some inexorable, scathing deconstruction of all my inadequacies. I wonder if this is how tortured prisoners, where the expectation now is just as horrifying as the experience itself.

Fuck that.

What I think I should do is buzz Autumn, suggest we catch up like we used to – like we even did last week, before I reset. But there feels like a shameless opportunism in that too, like I’m telling her she was always my second option behind Lana, although that’s not the case. But that’s the way it feels, and the fuckeduppedness about feelings is they can make you – or not make you – do some shitty things, so I don’t text her.

Instead, I leisurely fix myself breakfast, then stand in the shower far, far too long, toying with masturbating but unable to find a stimulating fantasy, before sitting at the computer with no idea what I should be writing.

This is a problem with writing: it takes forever to write something, it takes forever to get responses once you’ve submitted, and in the off chance you’re accepted it takes forever for them to publish the book – it’s not an endeavour that gives you immediate validation, other than that feeling that should come from writing and managing to create something, but I just don’t feel that.

So I game needlessly, feeling the idiocy of spending my time back from beyond doing something so pointless.

I should be looking for something meaningful to do, and start texting friends, but Jay tells me he’s at a soccer match with his kids, Troy’s at a birthday party with his son, and Brett’s picking up his daughters. Stan doesn’t answer me, and because I’m desperate, I even try Dom, but he says he’s at a wedding. Again, it comes down to Autumn, but I don’t because now I feel even worse that she’s the final option.

That leaves Mum.

It’s mid-afternoon when I arrive at the home, but I immediately feel tense again. After I kiss her on the cheek, I don’t try to do anything worthwhile – no wheelchair trip out to the garden or anything like that. I just sit in the bedside chair, not knowing what to do, so I wriggle my back like I’m squirming, trying to stretch the tightness out of my back.

“How’ve you been?” she asks.

It’s a nothing question because all we ever have are nothing conversations. I just don’t know how our dynamic developed like that. It’s something that might’ve always been. I don’t recall coming home from school and talking about homework, or problems, or any of that shit you popularly see on soaps like Neighbours and Home & Away. Those shows played out to me like fantasies, until I started dropping over at friends’ places and seeing that’s exactly how they interacted. Families … talked. What a concept.

Today, though, I decide to go for it because, well, what the fuck?

“I’m good,” I say. “I broke up with Lana.”

“Going out with a woman who has a child,” Mum says. “What were you thinking? None of your cousins got together with a woman who has kids. They had their own kids. Now look at you. You’re the only one alone. When I die, you’ll have nobody.”

“I thought you’d be happy.”

“Because you’re a disappointment?”

“Yes, exactly that – because I’m a disappointment.”

“What did you say?”

“I said you should be happy I’m a disappointment?”

“What?”

“I said … look, never mind.”

“You know my hearing’s not good.”

“I SAID YOU’D BE HAPPY I’M A DISAPPOINTMENT.”

“Why do you visit for if you’re just going to shout?”

I swear, I’m not shouting. I’m just speaking loud because her hearing’s not so good. I tell her that.

“Why do you come for?” she asks.

I have no answer for that, and fish my phone out of my pocket. Nothing from Lana. This early period is when it’s likeliest she’d respond. I realize I just want her gone. This was fucking stupid to make a go of this based on the history we’ve shared, but we’re both fanatical. It’s not her. It’s not me. It’s us. We’re just combustible. That’s why people break up: combustibility.

And us.

Us is the number one cause of break-ups.

“Anyway,” Mum says, “how’ve you been?”

“You just asked me that a few minutes ago,” I say.

“Does it bother you to speak?”

“Only if we’re going over the same stuff again. You asked me. You don’t have to ask me again.”

She waves her hand at me, the way she might’ve indicated when I was a kid that I needed a slapping.

So I sit there for the next hour, neither of us speaking, the tension filled with a cocktail of her ability to guilt me and my remorse that I should’ve handled this better, but not knowing how. It’s times like this that makes me doubt my responses to Lana, but I’m so far all-in now that it no longer matters.

“I’m going,” I say finally, rising, and giving her a kiss on the cheek.

She remains rigid and doesn’t say anything to me when I leave the room, but I immediately feel freer, lighter, once I’ve made my way back to the car.

Then I sit there in the car with no idea what comes next.

The phone rings.

I pick it up out of the change compartment. Flip it over to see the name on the face.

Autumn.

I answer the phone: “Hey.”

“Hi, it’s me, Dennis.”

Not Autumn, but her husband, who I’ve only ever had brief exchanges with at the occasional Christmas party. He regards me like I’m some loon who’s an office buffoon causing issues in his wife’s job, while I see him as a bit of a dick because of stuff that Autumn tells me, but the truth is neither of us really know one another, so all we’re left with are preconceptions.

But him ringing me on Autumn’s phone, his subdued tone, immediately conveys to me this is bad news.

“Autumn died,” he said.

The clichés abound in my head when it comes to receiving bad news: it was like a blow; a wave of disbelief swept over me; the room (although I’m in my car) span; and I try to push myself further afield, to find a way that does what I’m feeling justice, but the truth is that language is a crude tool in articulating emotions that are too big to be captured, and if I had to describe one thing it would be the shift that until this call, although everything’s fucked in the world (or my world), there was something okay, and that almost made everything else okay, and now that’s gone.

“Car accident this morning,” Dennis says. “She lost control of the car and … drove over an embankment.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

And loathe myself.

So pedestrian. I’m sorry. And so inadequate. But it then again goes back to there being nothing worthwhile to say. These phrases exist more so that people can feel that they’ve offered something, that perhaps they’ve even done their bit and now they’re excused of any further involvement.

But all we’re left are labels that we stick on situations, and although they’re woefully, criminal inadequate, ultimately that’s all we have.

“I don’t know what to say,” I tell him.

Dennis smirks. “It’s okay. What do you say? I just …”

He trails off, but I feel the heaviness in him – he wants to unload something, wants to tell somebody probably not so close to him.

“We were having problems,” he says. “Did she tell you?”

“Not really. Not like that.”

“We were on a trial break. I don’t know what would’ve happened but … if we were together … if …”

“It’s not your fault, mate,” I say. “It’s just something senseless.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Anyway, I’ve got more calls to make.”

“If you need anything—”

“Thanks.”

He hangs up.

43.

I sit in my car, and the first thought that hits me is that Autumn was dying as I was having a stupid argument with Lana.

Then it’s that once Lana was gone, I thought about contacting Autumn to catch up, but I didn’t. I contacted everybody else but Autumn. If I had contacted her, would she still be here?

And then it occurs to me that last week, before I reset, Autum and I caught up. She lived through the last Saturday, but died this time. Me not catching up with her changed her schedule – put her in a place and time where she died in this car accident.

This is my fault.

I drive home, then clamber into my bed. (No, no masturbation.) Bed’s a refuge. Of sorts. And I just don’t know what to do. Climbing into bed is like clambering back into the womb, and sleeping would be like escaping this consciousness, this reality.

Everything’s growing number, like externally everything has to sink through layers of disbelief to get to me, while my mind slows, until it feels it’s trying to work through some sedative torpor. The obvious choice would be to take my own life. Reset again. That would fix everything.

But then I curse myself for thinking that. Luca said I would reset to the moment I thought about taking my life. Last time, that was that Friday night. Now, though, I’ve just thought it. Does that change the schedule? If I die, would I be reset to just this moment?

No, surely, a reset would be a reset to some earlier point, but it’s all circular logic. It might just be this point. That’s earlier. The word “that’s” in that previous sentence is earlier than the word “that” in this sentence. So I don’t know how the logic works.

Does it matter? There’s something else that occurs to me. I have to try. If I reset to now, so be it. But then my next worry is what might change. Like forgetting Peta. What if I forgot something more important? And then, what about the dinner I had with my mentee Quinn instead of Ethan? That changed regardless – things reshaped.

These probabilities scare me until I’m thinking there’s no reset, but just the conceit of the reset, and what’s happening is that this is my own private hell. That’s cliché in itself, even if it is a theology often attached to suiciders: damnation. I’m being damned. That makes sense. That explains this fucking week.

I want to think that I can change everything for the better, but shit with Lana still unraveled spectacularly; when I visited my mum (last week) and grabbed a wheelchair so I could take her into the garden, she ripped into me; Melody cunted me out even worse even when I tried to be more diplomatic; and I still argued with Regina.

And Autumn died.

What worked? The meeting with Dom, Gillian, Zach, and whatshername?

What is resetting fucks things worse?

But that brings something else: I could just take my own life and be done with it, although that must mean that this reality stays the way it is. Autumn stays dead. And there’s so much she wanted to do in life.

I want to do it, want to take the risk, but also don’t want to risk something worse, which means what? I do it again?

This is fucked.

44.

I don’t know what comes next, so I stay in bed and try and sleep.