Good thing.
I thought that brought things to a nice, rounded conclusion, and I wasn’t expecting anything more, but after another minute I got the three burbling dots that meant she was typing again.
You at the library?
Yup.
I’ll swing by. 10 mins.
Needless to say, this outcome greatly exceeded my expectations. I waited for her out on the front steps. She drove up in a silver VW station wagon with a scrape of orange paint on the passenger-side door.
I was so glad to see her I wanted to hug her. It took me by surprise again. It was just such a relief not to have to pretend anymore—that I didn’t know what was coming next, that it hadn’t all happened before, that I wasn’t clinging to a sense that things mattered by my absolute fingernails. Probably falling in love is always a little like that: You discover that one other person who understands what no one else seems to, which is that the world is broken and can never, ever be fixed. You can stop pretending, at least for a little while. You can both admit it, if only to each other.
Or maybe it’s not always like that. I don’t know. I’ve only done it once. Margaret got out and sat down next to me.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I said.
“So. Read any good books lately?”
“As it happens I have, but hang on. Wait. Watch this.”
The collision happened every day, right here on this spot. I’d seen it at least five times. Guy staring at his phone versus other guy staring at his phone and walking his dog, a little dachshund. The leash catches the first guy right in the ankles and he has to windmill his arms and do a little hopping dance to keep from falling over, which gets him even more wrapped up in the leash. The dog goes nuts.
It went perfectly, the way it always did. Margaret snorted with laughter. It was the first time I’d seen her laugh.
“Does he ever actually fall over?”
“I’ve never seen it happen. Once I yelled at them—like, Watch out! Sausage dog! Incoming! And the guy looked at me like, Come on, of course I saw the guy with the dog. That would never happen in a million years. So now I just let them do it. Besides, I think the dog enjoys it.”
We watched the traffic.
“Wanna drive around for a while?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I played hard to get. Because I’m smooth like that. “You don’t make it sound like the world’s safest activity.”
“What can I tell you? Life’s full of surprises.” Margaret was already walking to the car. “I mean, not our lives. But life generally.”
We got into the station wagon. It smelled like Margaret, only more so. We cruised past the many olde-timey shops of Lexington Center.
“Anyway,” she said, “if we die in a heap of hot screaming metal, we’ll probably just be reincarnated in the morning.”
“Probably. See, it’s the probably part that worries me.”
“Actually I’ve been thinking about that, and I’m pretty sure we’d come back. Other people do. I mean, think about how many people in the world die every day. If they didn’t all come back, then all those people would turn up dead in the morning when the world reset. Or they’d be vanished or Raptured or something. Either way, somebody would have noticed by now. Ergo, they must get resurrected.”
“And then die again. Jesus, people must be having to die over and over again. I wonder how many.”
“One hundred fifty thousand,” she said. “I looked it up. That’s how many people die every day, on average.”
I tried to picture them. A thousand people standing in a line, all marching off a cliff. And then a hundred fifty of those lines.
“God, imagine if you had a really painful death,” I said. “Or even just a really shitty day, like you’re sick and suffering. Or you get fired. Or somebody dumps you. You’d get dumped over and over again. That would be horrible. Seriously, we have to fix this.”
She didn’t seem interested in pursuing this line of inquiry. In fact, she went stone-faced when I said it, and it occurred to me for the first time to wonder whether August 4th might be not as simple a day for her as it was for me.
“Sorry, that was getting a little depressing,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Probably lots of good things are happening over and over again, too.”
“That’s the spirit.”
We’d reached the edge of town. It’s not a big town. Margaret took an on-ramp onto Route 2.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Nowhere special.”
It was, as always, a blazing hot afternoon, and the highway was clogged with rush hour traffic.
“I used to listen to the radio,” she said, “but I’m already sick of all the songs.”
“I wonder how far this thing goes. Like, is it just Lexington that’s in the time loop, or is it the entire planet that’s stuck like this? Or is it the entire universe? Wouldn’t it have to be the entire universe? Black holes and quasars and exoplanets, all resetting themselves every day, with us in the middle of it? And we’re the only beings in the whole universe who know about it?”
“That’s kinda egocentric, don’t you think?” she said. “Probably there are a couple of aliens out there who know about it too.”
“Probably.”
“Actually I was thinking, if it is just a local thing, maybe if we went far enough we’d get outside the field or zone or whatever it is and time would go forward again.”
“It’s worth a try,” I said. “Like, just get in the station wagon and floor it and see what happens.”
“I was more thinking of getting on an airplane.”
“Right.”
Though to be honest at that moment I was enjoying just riding in Margaret’s car so much that I wasn’t sure I wanted time to start working again quite yet. I would’ve been happy to repeat these five minutes a few hundred times. She turned off the highway.
“I lied before. About where we’re going. I want to show you something.”
She turned into a sandy parking lot. Gravel crackled under the tires. I knew where we were: It was the parking lot for the Wachusett Reservoir. My dad took me here all the time when I was little and he was teaching me how to fish. It’s stocked with zillions of pumpkinseed sunfish. Though once I passed puberty I developed empathy with the fish and refused to do it anymore.
Margaret checked her watch.
“Shit. Come on, we’re going to miss it.”
She actually took off running through the thin pine woods around the reservoir. She was fast—those long legs—and I didn’t catch up with her till she stopped suddenly a few yards short of the brown sandy beach. She put a hand on my arm. It was the first time she ever touched me. I remember what she was wearing: a T-shirt, orange washed to a pale sherbet peach, with an old summer camp logo on it. Her fingers were unexpectedly cool.
“Look.”
The water was glittering with beads of molten gold in the late afternoon. The air was still, though you could hear the drone of the highway in the background.
“I don’t—”
“Wait. Here it comes.”
It came. A hawk swooped down out of the air, a dense, dangerous bundle of dark feathers. It hit the water hard, back-winged frantically for a second, spraying jeweled droplets everywhere, then beat furiously back into the sky with a flashing, wriggly pumpkinseed sunfish twisting in its claws and was gone.
The hot, dusty afternoon was as still and empty as before. The whole thing had taken maybe twenty seconds. It was the kind of thing that reminded you that a day you’d already lived through fifty times could still surprise you. Margaret turned to me.
“Well?”
“Well? That was amazing!”
“Wasn’t it?” Her smile could have stopped time all on its own. “I saw it just by chance the other day. I mean today, but you know. The other today.”
“Thank you for showing it to me. It happens every time?”