It put things in perspective. Note to self: Do not waste entire life being angry about stupid things.
As for the rest of the day, my strategies for occupying myself for all eternity were mostly (a) going to the library, and (b) going to the pool.
Generally I chose option (a). The library was probably the place in Lexington where I felt the most at home, and that’s not excluding my actual home, the one where I slept at night. It was quiet at the library. It was air-conditioned. It was calm. Books don’t practice violin. Or fight about mufflers.
Plus they smell really good. This is why I’m not much of a supporter of the glorious e-book revolution. E-books don’t smell like anything.
With an apparently infinite amount of time at my disposal, I could afford to think big, and I did: I decided to read through the entire fantasy and science fiction section, book by book, in alphabetical order. At the time, that was pretty much my definition of happiness. (That definition was about to change, in a big way, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) At the point where this story starts it had been August 4th for I would say approximately a month, give or take, and I was up to Flatland, which is by a guy named, no kidding, Edwin Abbott Abbott.
Flatland was published in 1884, and it’s about the adventures of a Square and a Sphere. The idea is that the Square is a flat, two-dimensional shape, and the Sphere is a round, three-dimensional shape, so when they meet the Sphere has to explain to this flat Square what the third dimension is. Like what it means to have height in addition to length and width. His whole life, the Square has lived on one plane and never looked up, and now he does for the first time and, needless to say, his flat little mind is pretty much blown.
Then the Sphere and the Square hit the road together and visit a one-dimensional world, where everybody is a near-infinitely thin Line, and then a zero-dimensional world, which is inhabited by a single infinitely small Point who sits there singing to himself forever. He has no idea anybody or anything else exists.
After that they try to figure out what the fourth dimension would be like, at which point my brain broke and I decided to go to the pool instead.
You might jump in at this point and say: Hey. Guy. (It’s Mark.) Okay, Mark. If the same day is repeating over and over again, if every morning it just goes back to the beginning automatically, with everything exactly the way it was, then you could basically do whatever you want, am I right? I mean, sure, you could go to the library, but you could go to the library naked and it wouldn’t even matter, because it would all be erased the next day like a shaken Etch A Sketch. You could, I don’t know, rob a bank or hop a freight train or tell everybody what you really think of them. You could do anything you wanted.
Which was, yes, theoretically true. But honestly, in this heat, who has the energy? What I wanted was to sit on my ass somewhere air-conditioned and read books.
Plus, you know, there was always the super-slight chance that that one time it wouldn’t work, that the spell would go away as suddenly and mysteriously as it had arrived, and I would wake up on August 5th and have to deal with the consequences of whatever crazy thing I just did.
I mean, for the time being I was living without consequences. But you can’t hold back consequences forever.
* * *
Like I was saying, I went to the pool. This is important because it’s where I met Margaret, and that’s important because after I met her everything changed.
Our neighborhood pool is called Paint Rock Pool. It has a lap area and a kids’ area and a waterslide that sometimes actually works and a whole lot of deck chairs where the parents lie around sunning themselves like beached walruses. (Or walri. Why not walri? These were the kinds of things I had time to think about.) The pool itself is made out of this incredibly rough old concrete that, I’m not kidding, will take your whole skin off if you fall on it.
Seriously. I grew up here and have fallen down on it several thousand times. That shit will flay you.
The whole place is sheltered by huge pine trees, and therefore is sprinkled with pine needles and a very fine dust of canary-yellow pine pollen, which if you think about it is pine trees having sex. I try not to think about it.
I noticed Margaret because she was out of place.
I mean, first I noticed her because she didn’t look like anybody else. Most of the people who go to Paint Rock Pool are regulars from the neighborhood, but I’d never seen her before. She was tall, tall as me, five-foot-ten maybe, skinny and very pale, with a long neck and a small round face and lots of kinky black hair. She wasn’t conventionally pretty, I guess, in the sense that you would never see anybody who looked like her on TV or in a movie. But you know how there’s a certain kind of person—and it’s different for everyone—but suddenly when you see them your eye just snags on them, you get caught and you can’t look away, and you’re ten times more awake than you were a moment ago, and it’s like you’re a harp string and somebody just plucked you?
For me, Margaret was that kind of person.
And there was something else, too, even beyond that, which was that she was out of place.
Rule number one of the time loop was that everybody behaved exactly the same way every day unless I interacted with them and affected their behavior. Everybody made exactly the same choices and said and did exactly the same things. This went for inanimate objects too: Every ball bounced, every drop splashed, every coin flipped exactly the same. This probably breaks some fundamental law of quantum randomness, but hey, you can’t argue with results.
So every time I showed up at the pool at, say, two o’clock, I could count on everybody being in exactly the same place, doing exactly the same thing, every time. It was reassuring in a way. No surprises. It actually made me feel kind of powerfuclass="underline" I literally knew the future. I, god-emperor of the kingdom of August 4th, knew exactly what everybody was going to do before they did it!
Which was why I would have noticed Margaret anyway, even if she hadn’t been Margaret: She’d never been there before. She was a new element. Actually, the first time I saw her I couldn’t quite believe it. I thought maybe something I’d done earlier that day had set off some kind of butterfly-wing chain of events that caused this person to come to the pool when she never had before, but I couldn’t think what. I couldn’t decide whether or not to say anything to her, and by the time I decided I should, she’d already left. She wasn’t there the next day. Or the next.
After a while I let it go. I mean, I had my own life to live. Things to do. I had a lot of ice cream to eat and not get fat from. Also I had this idea that, with an infinite amount of time to play with, maybe I could find a cure for cancer, though after a few days on that I started to think maybe I didn’t have sufficient resources to cure cancer, even given an infinity of time.
Also I’m not smart enough by a factor of like a hundred. Anyway I could always come back to that one.
But when Margaret came back a second time, I wasn’t going to let her get away. By this time I’d seen the same day play out at the pool about twenty times, and it was getting a little monotonous. Heavy lies the head that wears the god-emperor’s crown. I was ready for something unexpected. Talking to strange beautiful girls is not something I excel at particularly, but this seemed important.