“I’m just picturing my dad saying over and over that it’s okay if I’m pregnant, he totally understands, he just wants to talk about it.”
“The Tokyo thing’s going to be the weirdest part. Like, where did that come from?”
“I’m going to say it was your idea,” Margaret said. “You were tired of reading imported manga; you wanted to go straight to the source.”
“It’s cool that you’re so supportive of my enthusiasms.”
We were joking, but I knew—really knew right then—that I was in love with Margaret. I wasn’t joking, I was completely serious. I would have run away to Tokyo with her anyway, like a shot, for no reason at all. But I told myself I wasn’t going to say anything, I wasn’t going to do anything about it, till the time thing was fixed. I didn’t want her to feel like she was stuck with me. I wanted it to count.
Also, yeah, I was terrified. I had never been in love before. I had never wagered this much of my heart before. As badly as I wanted to win, I was even more scared of losing.
Gazing out the car window at the black trees against the light-pollution-gray sky, I thought about how much I would miss August 4th, our day, if this worked. Mark and Margaret Day. The pool, the library, the tiny perfect things. Maybe this was crazy. After all, I had time and I had love. I had it all, I had everything, and I was throwing it away, and for what? For real life? For getting old and dying like everybody else?
But yeah: everybody else. Everybody in the world who wasn’t getting to live their lives. They were getting robbed of everything, every day. My parents, getting up day after day after day and doing the exact same things, over and over again. Having their stupid fight about the car. My sister practicing her Vivaldi and never getting any better. Did it matter, if they didn’t know it? I wanted to think that maybe it didn’t. But I knew that it did.
And I knew that, deep down, I’d had enough of living without consequences too. Low-stakes living, where nothing mattered and all your wounds healed over the next morning, no scars. I needed something more. I was ready to go back to real life. I was ready to go anywhere, if it was with Margaret.
And it would be good to see the moon again.
This late at night the airport was almost empty. We collected our tickets from the kiosks and wandered through security. No lines. 3:50 a.m. is the only time to fly. We had no luggage so we breezed through security and just sat at the gate and waited. Margaret didn’t feel much like talking, but she rested her head on my shoulder. She was tired, she said. And she didn’t like flying.
After a while I went off to find us some Diet Cokes. They called our flight. We shuffled down the jetway with a lot of other tired, disheveled-looking people.
We’d gotten seats together. Margaret seemed more and more out of it, sunk inside herself, staring at the seat back in front of her. She felt far away even though we were sitting right next to each other.
“Are you worried about flying?” I asked. “Because, you know, even if we crash we’ve still got the whole reincarnation thing going. And anyway, if a plane crashed on August 4th we would’ve heard about it by now.”
“Don’t jinx it.”
“You know, in a way I hope this doesn’t work, because if it does we’re going to be out a ton of money. Did you book round-trip?”
I was babbling, like I did the day we met.
“I didn’t even think about that,” she said. “Though, on the bonus side, if it works we’ll have saved the world.”
“At least there’s that.”
I closed my eyes. My numberless mosquito bites itched. We hadn’t had a lot of sleep. I liked the idea of falling asleep next to Margaret.
“Though, what if,” I said, eyes still closed, “what if the world is going to end on August 5th? What if that’s what’s happening here? What if somebody made time start repeating exactly because the world was about to get hit by an asteroid or something, and that person had, in effect, saved the world by stopping time forever—albeit at a terrible cost—and if we break the time loop, then actually we’ll be dooming the Earth to certain destruction?”
She didn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question anyway. When I opened my eyes again some Turkish flight attendants were closing the doors. It took me a second to realize that Margaret wasn’t in her seat anymore. I thought she must have gone to the bathroom, and I even got up to check on her, but I was immediately herded back to my seat by concerned Turkish Airlines employees.
After five minutes I had to admit it to myself: Margaret was no longer on the plane. She must have run out just as the door was closing.
My phone chimed.
I’m sorry Mark but I just can’t I’m sorry
Can’t what? Fly to Tokyo? Fly to Tokyo with me? Leave the time loop? What? I started texting her back, but a Turkish flight attendant told me to please turn off all phones and portable devices or switch them to airline mode. She said it again in Turkish, for emphasis. I shut down my phone.
We taxied to the runway and took off. It was a long flight to Tokyo—fourteen hours. I watched Edge of Tomorrow three times.
* * *
After all that, it didn’t work. I waited in the gate area at Narita—which looks surprisingly similar to all other airports everywhere, except that everything’s in Japanese and the vending machines are more futuristic—until it was midnight in Massachusetts and the cosmic nanny reached out from halfway around the world and put me to bed, back in my house.
When I woke up that morning, I texted Margaret, but she didn’t text me back. She didn’t text me back the next day, either. I called her, but she didn’t answer.
I didn’t know what to think, except that she didn’t want the time loop to end and, whatever the reason was, it had nothing to do with me. My entire world was just the little bubble I shared with her, but her world was bigger than that. Maybe she had someone else, was all I could think of, because of course everything had to be about me. There was somebody else and she didn’t want to leave them behind. To me our life together was a perfect thing, and I couldn’t imagine wanting anything else. But she could.
It hurt. I’d had one glorious glimpse of the third dimension, and now I was banished back to flatness forever.
For the first time I wished I was one of the normal people, the zombies, who forgot everything every morning and just went about their business as if it was all fresh and new and for the first time. Let me go, I thought at the cosmic nanny. Let me forget. Let me be one of them. I don’t want to be one of us anymore. I want to be a robot. But I couldn’t forget.
I went back to my old routine, back to the library. I still had two more Hitchhiker’s Guide books to go, and I was nowhere even near done with the A section—I still had Lloyd Alexander and Piers Anthony to go, and beyond them the great desert of Isaac Asimov stretched out into the distance. I spent all day there, except that I went outside at 11:37:12 to watch the skateboarder nail his combo.
In fact I got into the habit of checking in with a couple of our tiny perfect moments every day, which was easy because, obviously, we had a handy map of them. Sometimes I redrew it; sometimes I just went by memory. I watched the hawk score its fish. I waved to Sean Bean at the corner of Heston and Grand. I watched the little girl make her huge bubble. I always hoped I’d see Margaret at one of them, but I never did. I went anyway. It helped me feel sad, which is maybe part of the process of falling out of love, which it was obviously time for me to do. I was getting good at feeling sad.
Or maybe I was just wallowing in self-pity. It’s a fine line.
I did catch a glimpse of Margaret once, by chance. I knew it would happen sooner or later; it was only a matter of time (or lack thereof). I was driving through the center, on my way to see the Scrabble game, when I spotted a silver VW station wagon turning a corner a block away. The classy and respectful thing to do would have been to let her go, because she obviously wanted nothing to do with me, but I didn’t do the classy thing. I did the other thing. I floored it and made the corner in time to see her turning right on Concord Avenue. I floored it again. Follow that car.