77.

I drive home, shaken, wondering how this has splashed back onto Autumn. There’s a cost to coming back. It’s happened repeatedly. Luca might say thought defines reality, and maybe I can extrapolate how my thinking has determined how each cycle has unfolded, but there was no line of thinking about this, about having Autumn forgetting me.

This is punishment. It has to be. For taking my own life.

This is purgatory. Surely.

I try to squelch that thinking, because it’s fatalistic, and fatalism has got me in this mess. Each time I’ve tried to sort it out, I’ve found a new mess. Now I’d give everything up to fix Autumn. The memory of her agitated, of how anxious she became knowing something was wrong rips through me worse than any other pain I’ve felt.

The only solutions I come up with are things I always fall back on:

• • I sit in front of the computer, thinking I’ll be able to write and take my mind off this. I’ve written through depression, through arguments with Lana, through health issues, and despite how flighty and edgy I’ve started, I always lose myself in whatever I’m writing. Not now, though. I can’t find my way through the mania to somewhere constructive.
  • I lay on bed, and try to bring up one of my fantasies to masturbate to, another usually foolproof distraction. But the fantasies don’t form in my head. Nor does an erection.
  • I grab a beer out of the fridge, but just as I’m about to twist the top off, stop myself. I know I won’t stop at one, and it’s likely I’ll do something stupid if I get drunk enough – maybe drive to the hospital to talk to Autumn.

My fallbacks are gone. And they’re not much of fallbacks. So I sit on the couch, flicking through YouTube videos, but everything feels interminable. Every four-minute music clips feels like it might go for one torturous hour. Ads drone endlessly. And, all the while, that anxiousness grows heavier in my chest, as does the certainty that something’s broken in such a way that it’ll never get fixed.

Then the phone rings.

Autumn’s number appears on the face of my phone, but I know it’s not Autumn.

I answer the phone.

Sure enough, not Autumn, but Dennis.

“MRI didn’t show anything,” he says after we exchange all the meaningless preliminaries. “They say sometimes they don’t with strokes.”

“So they think she’s had a stroke?” I say.

“They don’t really know,” Dennis says. “That’s what they thought at first. Then they said it’s possibly this other thing, this Selective Amnesia – people can forget just one thing, like a defence mechanism. I don’t know why that would be you, though. She always liked you.”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” I say, although what I think I’m saying I don’t know to is that why she always liked me.

“She’s been under a lot of stress, though – our separation, work, everyday things. They say stress could be one of the causes, and that’s the biggest problem right now. She’s just so agitated because she doesn’t know why she’s forgotten. They’re going to do more tests, so I’ll keep you informed.”

Once our conversation’s done, I retreat into the study, and start to google “selective amnesia”, but only get as far as “selective am”, because I know this is futile. Maybe selective amnesia, stroke, or some other medical condition is the weapon of choice, but the real cause is the cycle.

I came back and Autumn forgot me.

Because this is where I am.

There’s a price for coming back.

And there’s no answer on Earth to remedy this, so I cut my garden hose, feed one end into the exhaust and the other into my car, sit behind the steering wheel, and start the engine.

The exhaust has this weird rubbery tinge, like it’s staining in the hose’s texture, but it’s not entirely unpleasant, and despite coughing a few times, the coughs themselves grow pleasingly weaker, although the pain in my chest grows stronger, like there’s a hole burning through me from the inside out—

78.

The ascent is slower now, and I see myself as a kid, as a happy little kid, so overly imaginative and chirpy, but as I grow older that’s stretched out and becomes unreliable; there’s that memory my mind always goes to of being in the art class with the teacher after all the other kids had bustled out for recess; but my head doesn’t stay there long, and I see these flittering dark periods enter my life, these moments I struggle to connect with everybody around me, and the only thing that’s of any comfort is the inexplicable melancholy; and then it’s high school, where I feel a progressive demarcation from what should be a normal course for most, even for people damaged, and I don’t know what it is, why it’s become such a wedge for me, and I struggle to reconcile it, struggle to even wrap any logic around it, but there must be some internal feedback, because everything grows worse – the anxiety, the depression, the cameos of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; and then there’s a brief highlight, somehow having an actual film director commission me to write a script, although I have no fucking idea what I’m doing, and all that fuels me is the arrogance of naivety, which must show in the script because the director’s unhappy with it, and that’s my first grasp at a screenwriting career; the next is pitching a project to a company, them asking to see the script, but ultimately rejecting me, only for them to produce something very similar a few years later; maybe they ripped me off, maybe they were working on something similar, and just pilfered choice ideas from me, or maybe it was just humongous coincidence, but it feels like I can’t make this writing gig work, like I can’t make anything work, and there’s a crash in mental health, until I become agoraphobic, and that part of my brain remains oblivious to trying to puzzle this out, and all that remains is the need for survival, but I see how that thins out when I finally stagger back into the world, when I work, and particularly when I hook up with Lana, and the one time it’s not thin is catching up with Autumn, because there’s somebody who believes in me when I don’t believe in myself, and then—

79.

“Well?” Luca says, from where he’s seated at the table.

It’s different now – I’ve carried something over, some Earthly remnant of anger and indignation, some righteous rage that is divine in how it powers me, but it means nothing to Luca: he remains unmoved.

“This is bullshit,” I say. “You changed—”

“I didn’t change anything.”

“Whatever your fucking rules, they changed one thing that mattered.”

“Your relationship with Autumn?”

I’m embarrassed, like admitting that is something I don’t want to face, although I’m unsure why.

“Not your relationship to Lana,” Luca says, “your work, your writing career, your little film crew, none of that – just your friendship with Autumn.”

“Yeah.”

“But it was never your focus. You never went back, never addressed that. How fucking stupid are you?”

“I’ve realised it, okay? Now. Better late than—”

“This is the thing, fuckface: sometimes there is a never.”

“So I get punished? Is that it? Because I didn’t pick it up quick enough? Change it back. If we can keep resetting this fucking thing, surely you have the power to change it.”

“We didn’t change anything—”

“But that’s what you told me – one thing would change.”

“We didn’t change Autumn.”

“Then why doesn’t she remember me?”

Luca rises, and I could throw in all these cliches, like he seems bigger, or has some towering shadow that chills me, or he even counters my anger with his own fury, but he’s the one unchangeable variable in all this. He’s always been here, always been waiting for me, and that diminishes what I feel because none of this makes any difference to him.

“Because, cunt,” he says, “she took her own life. One thing changed when she went back. She forgot you.”

The words are impossible to process. Autumn take her own life? No. Never. She’s motivated me when I’ve been dark. Throughout her own issues, she might’ve had mini meltdowns, like we all do, but she’s always bounced back, always greeted the world with a smile, even when the world didn’t deserve it.

“You’re thinking she wouldn’t,” Luca says. “Aren’t you, dickhead?”

“She wouldn’t. This is bullshit – a lie because you don’t want to admit—”

“This is what you don’t get. I don’t have to admit anything to you. I don’t owe you anything. We’re not all plotting how to fuck you over. You do that well enough.”

“I did this – that’s what you’re telling me?”

“You took a toaster into the shower and electrocuted yourself right in front of her,” Luca says. “She followed you in. She saw you cook. How do you think she coped with that? The guy, the fuckwit, she loves, doing that right in front of her? How do you think she coped when the cops told her you were in a car accident that killed two people, and fled the scene? How do you think she felt realizing her last moments with you were a lie – were a person she thought she knew, only to discover he was a killer?”

“I reset—”

“Yeah, you reset you. She went home, so distraught, so unbelievably despondent, seeing you cook, smelling you cook, the stench of it embedded in her clothes, the discovery that you were a killer, all of it, and it broke her. Do you get that? You think of her as unbreakable. You broke the unbreakable. Good work. She took her own life, talked to somebody like me – albeit somebody a lot sweeter – and decided to go back to try rescue you. But she forgot you. That’s the one thing that changed in her existence. She forgot you. And now she’s sitting in some hospital bed, knowing she’s forgotten you, and feeling this chasm that something wrong’s widening.”

“But she knows the rules, so surely … well, surely that helps her understand why she’s forgot—”

“She’s forgotten you, idiot. What she knows is her brain’s faulty. Being her first cycle, she’s probably thinking she imagined,” Luca throws his arms out wide, “all this.”

“If I go back—”

“She’ll still be who she is,” Luca says.

“If she resets—”

“It stays the same.” Luca gestures at the door behind him.

“If I reset—”

“It stays the same.” Luca says.

“This is fucked – why didn’t you tell—”

“I did.”

“But you didn’t—”

“I did,” Luca says, quieter now. Then he smiles this leering, condescending smile, enjoying how much I’ve fucked this up. “Your problem is you think everything’s about you. You’re not special, though. Just about every fucktard thinks like that..”

“Is this going to be some sort of—”

“God speech? Universe speech? Fuck you speech? Option three, dickhead.”

“Why’re you so angry at me?”

“Because you are,” Luca says, stepping up to me. “Fuckwit. Cunt.”

“Am I meant to learn some less—”

“Again, moron, you’re not that important. Take the fucking door. End this.”

I keep searching for the grander lesson, and can draw nothing from this, other than recognize the futility in me trying to salvage something, and bugging out when it’s gotten hard. It’s an easy exit, but going back has just made it harder each time. And what’s there to go back to now but the struggle and the impossible rescue of Autumn?

“Well?” Luca says.

I don’t know what to tell him.

“Take. The. Door. Dick. Head.”

I’m tempted to, and even take a step in that direction, but then something else occurs to me: Autumn will have to live with my suicide. She’ll have to live knowing that after I snuck into the hospital to see her, I went home and took my own life.

And maybe that’s best – she’ll be done with me.

Of course, while her not knowing me will cushion the shock, how will she respond? If she took this trip, too, if she accepts it’s real, she might consider resetting and try to fix it. Although maybe now that she doesn’t know me, she’ll be spared that imperative. She can just go on, try navigate her way somewhere better.

But then I wonder about the proliferation of me in her life. She forgot me, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t exist in her life. Work proved that – Melody and the others trying to convince her that she knew me. What happens when she’s cleared to return to work? My desk is there. My authors talk to her. I’m everywhere there.

What has she squirreled away at home? Birthday gifts from me? I gave her feedback on her novel. Will she open that and see my ungainly scribbles? How does she react to all that? Can she dismiss it? Or is it all evidence of something she wants to remember, needs to remember, but never will, and what will the terror of her inability to do so do to her?

“I want to go back,” I say.

“You haven’t finished causing damage?”

“I can fix this,” I say.

“How?”

“I’ll … You said it – some things can be re-discoverable. We can rediscover our friendship.”

“And when it doesn’t work, you’re back here?”

I almost nod again, but I can’t do that. Everything compounds. I don’t know what happens after I leave. For some insane reason, I believed the world stopped once I left it. But it doesn’t. I stopped. Everybody kept living. The solution would be to do that myself, no matter how fucked it is, because there’s always that hope, no matter how small.

“Well?” Luca says.

I’ve been trying to live for me, trying to right my world, oblivious to the ramifications that ripple through everybody. But maybe I can try something different. Fuck Lana. Fuck my job. Fuck writing (although this declaration isn’t as absolute as other two, some tendril clinging to that insane, improbable hope). The thing I cling to now is …

“Maybe it doesn’t have to be my story,” I say.

Luca’s face hardens, like he’s going to counter with yet another salvo, but then he laughs – chortles, really, although it’s rueful.

“This may … never … work,” he says.

“Well, I’m gonna try for her,” I say.

“So you want to go back.”

I nod. “Right.”

“No matter what?”

“No matt—”

THE END