65.

The one thing I note now is the reappearance of certain memories – being held back by the teacher during recess, the inexplicable bouts of melancholy as a child, being a pariah as a teenager as anxiety compromised so much of my life socially, and then there’s something new, something dark, and I can’t unearth it, I can’t remember it, but it sits behind these things, a secret pulse that has beat all my life and gotten buried under more and more and more shit; and then it’s little things that I’ve dismissed, like bartending early in my twenties and a handful of short, unfulfilling relationships, and then the agoraphobia; it’s asphyxiation to even try get out and about, then such a torrid time of meds that I consider trying to file a suit against the manufacturer (and then find that they’ve already endured a couple of civil suits, yet the antidepressant remains on the market); then it’s Lana, and how such hope and joy slowly warp into tentativeness, then dread; then Autumn, her weathering my outbursts and enduring my idiotsyncrasies (which are worse than idiosyncrasies), her constant assurance and our deepening friendship; Lana’s jealous rages that shook the world around me until everybody backed off; the hopefulness in my writing withering to hopelessness, yet the habit existing because when everything else has tapered to nothing, this has remained, overriding even futility; and then it’s Autumn again, because I remember in my first cycle – in my life – she told me she missed catching up, and now I reconcile it with her sitting on the couch with me, consoling me, comforting me, assuring me, because she always has, and I think that usurping my writing is this one unassailable truth that I have, indeed, tried to assail repeatedly, and it’s something that overrides everything else, even my writing, because it’s the only true thing that remains, regardless of its form, and in that truth I realise it’s the only thing I have.

66.

Luca’s waiting, sitting back in his chair, feet up on the table. He has a hole in the sole of his right shoe. The left shoe is a different altogether – newer. I’ve never noticed that. It looks like one of those shoes they give you at the bowling alley.

“You must like it here,” he says. “Wanker.”

Standing here, in this nondescript little room, I – again – don’t feel any weight come in from the world. No physical pains, no regrets or lamentations, nothing but this clearness that makes me want to go back to try better things, but I’ve done this enough now to know how things change, and what I’ll face.

“You didn’t tell me all the rules,” I say.

“Ha!” Luca brings his right foot down with a big clomp, and then his left follows it similarly. “Rules!” He rises. “I told you the rules from the start. What do you think I haven’t—”

“I tried to book a holiday,” I said. “I couldn’t do it. Computers went down at travel agents. I tried to drive—”

“I told you, dickhead. Thought defines reality.”

I take a step, planning to advance threateningly, but he matches me and meets me halfway.

“Then is this real at all?” I ask. “Because it seems I’m hallucinating—”

“If you’re hallucinating life down there, then this place wouldn’t be excluded, would it? You could be hallucinating all this – locked away in some room in some mental institution butting your head against a padded wall while you imagine this whole scenario.”

“Am I?”

“Think this through, moron. If you were, then you’d be imagining asking me – imagining the answer I give you.”

And he’s fucking right. I went through this when I was younger – this rippling fear that at some point, I couldn’t define reality, because if just one thing was a delusion, that meant everything could be a delusion.

“Take a door, dickhead,” Luca says.

“Then two people will be dead,” I say. “Unless you’re telling me to take the door because they’re not dead – because none of this is real.”

“You can’t get past this, can you, fuckface?”

“I want to know why I couldn’t book a holiday,” I say. “What is the point of going back if I have no free will? If you’re limiting what I can do.”

“I’m not limiting what you can do,” Luca says. Then he lifts a hand, and winds his index finger in a circle. “We’re not limiting you, Cuntabulous. But, well, address what you can. You don’t do that by running away.”

“You never told me that before—”

“Works different with everybody,” Luca says.

“You never told me that before either—”

“You never told me that before either,” Luca mimics me.

“It feels like this is all closing in on me,” I say. “Like no matter what I try, it ends in futility, that either I’m ill-equipped to deal with something new, or restricted from going for it.”

“Welcome to life, fuckwit. Maybe it is caving in on you – like your life’s a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy … well, you know what I mean.” Luca sits back down at the table. “I told you this.”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” I say, because I really can’t remember it.

“As riveting as our chats are,” Luca says, “you’re back at choice time, cockhead. Take a door or go back.”

If I was still living, I’m sure I’d choose a door, but again, there’s none of the lament here. Here, everything feels new and possible, but then that makes me think about the times I’ve felt that while I’ve been alive – those spectacular cameos where I believe everything’s possible. Like with the film. That became real, albeit far too briefly because other things impacted it.

“I saw one friend give another a blowjob,” I say. “It’s the most unlikely pairing you’d ever imagine. Was that real?”

“I keep telling you, thought defines reality.”

“That’s a copout so you don’t have to give me a straight answer.”

“I told you, it’s choice time – go back or pick a door.”

“And if I don’t choose?”

“You committed to going back – that’s your default now. You don’t choose, we’ll keep sending you back.”

I’ve gotten no answers that I want, or need, but the defining truth of my choice now is the people I’ve killed in the accident – I want to reset them, although that’s more to abrogate myself of guilt and responsibility, rather than anything else.

And the truth is I want to see Autumn, and tell her it’s okay.

“All right—”

67.

I sit in front of the computer, staring at words that might be glass fragments so shattered it’s impossible to guess what they formed when they were whole. When was the last time I thought about what I was writing? I have a memory, but can’t assign it to which loop – I think it was my first life.

Lana.

That’s where I am – she’s coming with pizza; I recoil because I don’t want to go through some explosive deconstruction of our relationship, why I’m such a fuck-up, and everything that my arguments with Lana incorporate.

I pick up my phone. Call her.

“Hey,” she says, after just one ring.

My heart’s beating hard. In writing, you’re not meant to use cliches, but I have no idea how else to tell you that my heart’s thumping with these rapid heavy beats that feel like something worse than anxiousness, but that’s how anxiousness feels – so much worse than you’d expect that you naturally assume something else must be going on.

“This isn’t working,” I say. “I know we planned to get together tonight, but this isn’t working.”

“What’s triggered this?” Lana asks.

“It’s not you,” I say, although it is, but in fairness as much as she’s an issue for me, I have also been for her. But the amounts to another incontrovertible truth. “It’s us,” I go on. “There’s too many arguments, to many things that have broken down, too many things that have happened and built up that they’ve …”

“They’ve what?”

Coming out of her divorce, she said too many arguments would kill the love. I would assure her that wouldn’t happen with us, and for a while it was true. But somewhere, we went from one of us being reasonable to neither of us being reasonable, sparring verbally, sometimes even daring a reaction, and here we are – strangers to whatever first brought us together.

“They’ve killed our relationship,” I say. “We’ve tried to get back there, but we can’t. I don’t even think we’re the same people anymore.”

I hear a car pull up in the drive – it’s her. It’ll have to be her. Every time I return, it’s just minutes from her arrival. She’d be sitting in the driver’s seat, debating whether to get out and to escalate this. The pizzas would be sitting on the passenger seat, all nice and warm. I don’t know why, but I feel worse for the pizzas, that they had one function in this existence, and now they’re sitting there, getting cold.

“You there?” I say, getting up.

She’ll ring the doorbell any minute – oh no, wait. The door’s been left unlocked, so she could let herself in. Now I think about the pizzas again: would she bring them in, or leave them in the car while we had it out, like children she didn’t want to witness our argument.

Hurrying into the living room, I press myself against the front door and reach for the lock, but then the guilt hits me. That’s so petty. If she wants to come in and argue this out, she has that right – she deserves that satisfaction, as painful as it’ll be.

I’ve had four goes to do the ring thing – well, as right as I can in the circumstances. She’s living this like it’s the first time. In the past, we’ve always had our break-ups following big arguments – instigators that have made it easy to walk away, but which always qualify the remorse that we come back.

Her door opens – I hear it. She’s going to come in. I look at my phone. She’s hung up – I don’t know when. But now that I’m looking at my phone, I focus on the time. One minute goes by. This is unlike her, too. I’d expected her to storm in and for this to become the biggest shouting match imaginable. Another minute goes by.

Then I hear her door close.

The car start.

The headlights flash across my living room window as she reverses out of the drive.

Now I do feel like the biggest dick, like I’d given our relationship hope when I should’ve just ended it. But I think she also lived that delusion, idealizing that we could be something, that I was something I wasn’t, and whenever we were together the façade would invariably collapse and she’d be dissatisfied with what she found.

Me.

I sit on my couch, waiting for whatever comes next, because I really don’t know. This is new to me, and in that newness is something exciting, something hopeful I haven’t felt since … well, when Autumn sat with me? When Rachel showed up at speed dating? These were new experiences in my loops. I fucked up both. This one feels different – maybe because I got it right?

There’s something to invest in: that things haven’t worked out previously because I keep getting them wrong. There were minor victories, but I was never around long enough to explore them.

Maybe this is what it’s all about, and why I keep coming back here: getting this right.

I make myself a sandwich, watch a movie – M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass – then go to bed, thinking about how to tackle the usual route of things this weekend.

Dom. I don’t need to do lunch with Dom. There’s another holdover to the past that doesn’t make sense, but my mum … I toy with not visiting her, but what piques my interest is how she almost seemed to know last time how I was in these loops. That’s something to explore.

Drinks with Stan? I’m agnostic about that, but maybe I try to pursue something with Rachel – not because of any especial romantic interest (although she’s obviously gorgeous), but just because maybe there’s a better way to handle it than I did the last two times.

Yes, that’s definitely a possibility.

I have my Words shots (the letters are P, R, R, U, I, E, S), then close my eyes with some enthusiasm for tomorrow.

When I wake and drag my phone over from the bedside drawer, I see that Lana’s sent me this long diatribe. I only skim it, seeing she’s highlighted my inadequacies, that she really tried, and that she never wants to hear from me again. There’s more, but I know how this goes – I knew how this went before the loops.

I delete the message.

Then get out of bed, and prepare to face the day.