An Island in the Stream of Time

(0 seconds)

Cucumbers are a wonderfully straightforward piece of food prep. I might get a strange piece of satisfaction out of striping them with the peeler before cutting them into chubby little oversized coins, but the mechanic is just simple repetitive slicing. It’s not like trying to prep broccoli where you are constantly weighing whether you are either cutting too little, leaving a huge jaw-cracking portion for someone to cram into their mouth, or cutting too much, being left with a pile of sad little broccoli crumbs.

Yes, cucumbers are easy, and I’m nearly done with this gargantuan vegetable tray that we’re planning on laying out for today’s party. Just a couple more cucumbers.

They should be back soon with balloons and…

(47 seconds)

That strange sensation when you know that you’ve cut yourself, but it’s more intellectual than physical because your brain seems to shy away from experiencing pain under circumstances like this. Better expressed through a simple shout of “Dammit!”

I find myself cradling the injured thumb, not exactly excited to pull away my hand to see what kind of damage I have managed to inflict upon myself. It could have been worse. The flap of skin that had once been the tip of my thumb was still clinging to the position that it had once held so naturally by a healthy portion of remaining flesh. The observation quick, owing to the ooze of blood that immediately began to roll down my hand as soon as I removed the pressure applied by its uninjured brother.

I reapply the pressure and make my way down the hall to the bathroom. The first aid kit has taken a vacation from its normal wanderings, as I swing open the closet door and find it in plain sight rather than nesting among towels or cowering behind a colony of dietary supplements. Its newfound generous nature does not extend to cooperation with the complicated bit of three-fingered unzipping that is involved in continuing to apply pressure while rooting out an appropriate bandage for this self-inflicted…

(94 seconds)

Wound.

”What. the. hell?” I drop the knife, reflexively shedding the tool that had so recently caused me harm.

I’m back in the kitchen, and there is no blood. My hand is whole, and what in the world just happened? I check myself, patting myself down to make sure I really am all in one piece, stemming not from any physical sensation, but from a complete lack of anything else to do.

The change in setting is a jolt to the system, the kitchen taking on an air of alienness simply by not being the room that I was standing in just moments before. It is otherwise just as I would expect it to be, zip-lock bags of carrots, broccoli, and peppers pushed to the side of the counter awaiting the cucumbers that would soon be joining them.

My gaze shifts to the place where I dropped the knife alongside the cutting board which was currently playing host to the first of three… but hadn’t I just been finishing up the second when I cut myself?

It was hard to be sure, but I could have…

(141 seconds)

Sworn.

There it was again. The knife was back in my hand.

When we talk about all of the things that we take for granted, our thoughts tend to drift toward things like a roof over our heads, food on the table, or health. What we almost never seem to consider is how much we take for granted the relative order of our physical world. Part of me wants to grab onto the counter for fear of floating away even though gravity isn’t the basic building block of my existence that has decided to stop working.

I drop the knife again, slowly backing away from the counter then turning to tear out of the house. I burst through the door gulping fresh air on my front step. When I raise my head to look around, I’m not alone, I see neighbors up and down the street coming out of their homes looking at the world around them like they had never seen it before.

The birds are acting every bit as odd like they were lost in the sky. The feeling of displacement seemed to permeate everything around me. I would be willing to believe that the grass was feeling disoriented by this sudden shift in the status quo.

I raise my hand in preparation to flag down my next-door neighbor when I …

(188 seconds)

Find myself back in my kitchen.

Whirling away from the counter, I make a mad dash for the front door. I am through and flying along the front walk, taking the moderate shortcut of hopping the retaining wall toward my goal of the neighbor’s front door. When I materialize on his front step, it’s as if none of the intervening steps had even happened. My fist rains blows on his front door, the kind of knocking that we partition off in our minds to the worlds of horror stories, and normally wouldn’t dare indulge in polite society.

Maybe polite society had gone out the window along with whatever else this is. I’m fairly certain that polite society spends most of its time propped up on the sill just waiting to head out the window.

In contrast to the sprint over here, the wait at the door seems nearly interminable, but finally, the storm door still rattling in its frame, my neighbor opened the inner door. There was a dazed look on his face, like wherever he had gone, he wasn’t currently residing behind his own eyes.

“What… what’s going on.” The words tumbled from his lips, an act of gravity rather than a force of will.

“I don’t know,” the words escaped in a manic rush. “Look at this. I cut my hand just a minute ago, and look.”

I waved my unharmed hand in front of his still vacant eyes, a hysterical motion that was driving him deeper into his shell if it was evoking any reaction at all.

My head snapped to the side as eruptions of activity burst up and down the block, neighbors shouting themselves hoarse from their front yards, crying out for someone, anyone to fix this thing that had broken.

(235 seconds)

And suddenly silence. The silence was jarring, like a power outage where life is going along at full speed until suddenly everything stops. The knife is in my hand, but the abrupt change in stimuli has knocked me off-kilter. I find myself swaying on the spot for just a moment until my brain decides that it has rebooted.

I lay the knife down again, certain that I am in no state at the moment to be wielding a sharp object, no matter how quickly an unfortunate accident might be corrected.

This is a time loop, I try to decide whether a life filled with utopian science fiction and Bill Murray movies has made what is happening more or less believable. I come to the conclusion that it is probably a wash, then decide to move on to something more pressing like… I actually don’t know. This is so far outside of my reference for the possible that normal categories like “why” and “what now” seem out of reach. I haven’t been given a prologue painting me as a despicable person in need of redemption, or a basket full of technobabble that will allow me to pull a god out of a box.

(282 seconds)

And here I am with that damn knife back in my hand again. The effect of being reset was significantly diminished this time around, hardly any shock to the system at all, just the press of the knife in my hand without reaching to pick it up. If I am going to think, being stationary is probably the best bet. My consciousness seems to be continuous within the loop, it’s just the physical that slams back into place every time we reset.

It is we. It definitely isn’t just me. The whole neighborhood as far as I could see was bubbling with chaos the last time I was out there.

It hits me like a ton of bricks and suddenly I’m the biggest asshole on the face of the Earth.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been caught in this loop, but it is far too long to have failed to spare a single thought for my family, and how this has to be affecting them as well. I’m a grown man by himself in his own home and I’ve been freaking out. I can’t imagine what my kids must be thinking, this has to be terrifying for them, and my wife doesn’t have the luxury of simply taking care of herself.

I reach for my phone in the corner and quickly tap my way to my wife’s spot on my contact list. It’s late in the cycle, so we may not get a chance to talk, but I can’t not try to get through.

It immediately connects.

“You have reached the voicemail of…

(329 seconds)

My attention is yanked from the voicemail recording and the cell phone is replaced once again by the knife in my hand. I feel a brief bubbling of rage beginning to stir in my chest, but I don’t have time to entertain it. I take a deep breath and press it down, latching onto a temporary false calm that is going to push me through these next few moments.

My hand darts once again for my phone in the corner, wishing for just a moment that the paranoid weirdo who turned off the voice controls on my phone would have seen fit to hand me back these couple seconds. My shaky hands manage to botch the thumb scanner on the first try, but also manage not to dash the phone against a wall after doing so… and I’m in. A pair of swipes and three taps has the phone reaching out again… ringing this time.

“Come on, pick up, pick up.” I find myself chanting it to myself as it rings once, twice, three times, and voicemail again.

That’s too soon. I may avoid phone calls like the plague, but I know her phone doesn’t go to voicemail that quickly. I hang up and redial.

Voicemail.

Again.

Nothing.

“You have reached the voicemail of…”

(376 seconds)

The reset.

I lay down the knife and set to pacing.

The motion isn’t manic, at least I hope it isn’t, just contemplative.

Under what circumstances would a phone go straight to voicemail?

The phone was destroyed in a terrible accident and my whole family is dead.

This whole thing is really stressful and she just turned the phone off.

My call distracted her at a crucial moment causing her to get into a horrific accident.

I’ve killed my family… but if that’s true it only happened that last time.

Bad cell phone coverage.

Dead battery.

What kind of effect does a time loop even have on technology like a cell phone?

This is wishful thinking. I have no reason to think that they are okay, and while I have no concrete evidence that something has happened to them, I have every reason to believe that they are in danger. I’ve been thrown off balance just bouncing back to my kitchen, if they are in the car driving, there is every chance that the roads have turned into an absolute meat grinder.

My imagination starts feeding me worst-case scenarios and is refusing to provide me with anything that might resemble a thought that could debunk any of them. I have no way of knowing, and I was right before when it occurred to me that trying to make contact might only make things worse.

I slump to the counter, head in my hands…

(423 seconds)

But immediately, I find myself upright again, standing stupidly over a cutting board playing host to a half-dismembered cucumber.

I’m not exactly sure what takes me over, maybe just a craving for normalcy, maybe I’m simply running from all of the possible implications of what may have just happened, but I start cutting the cucumbers again. Quickly polishing off the first, then removing the ends of the second, I found myself rushing through it, threatening to cut myself again.

I push aside the finished, though somewhat mangled remains of the second cucumber and move to the third. With quick jerky motions, I slice the ends off of this last cucumber, when…

(470 seconds)

Time resets again and the same job lies before me.

I rush right back into it again, convincing myself that these cucumbers are the hurdle I must clear to set the world right again.

I feel like the pixelated avatar in an old video game who, having worked through all of the logical ways to work through a puzzle, has resorted to stupid things that can’t possibly be the solution. In those worlds, sometimes the stupid thing works after all, and aren’t I little more than an infinitely respawning avatar at this point?

The cut, but not particularly presentable, cucumbers sit in front of me and I stare at them with a misguided satisfaction that would rival that of a toddler who has just completed a crayon masterpiece all over the living room wall.

(517 seconds)

A moment of disorientation, then rage.

My arm pulls back and flings the knife across the kitchen and through the dining room where it deflects off the window and clatters to the floor.

Okay, I lost it there for a second.

The adrenaline dumped into my system after that outburst has my whole body shaking on the spot. I find myself pacing the kitchen just to burn off some of the nervous energy. The anxiety that had at least temporarily hidden itself under the veneer of the calm and reason that I preferred to bring to the situation had ridden the anger to take control of the situation, and like the idiot son of the owner who has now become your boss, it had no business being in charge of anything.

I was in no condition to figure how long I had been trapped in this loop, but some optimistic part of my spirit seemed to think that I had done well to make it this far before I cracked.

(564 seconds)

And just like that, nearly all of my panic dissipated. I had the knife in my hand again, but the impulse to chuck it at things had passed. The cycle had reset and with it, the internal chemistry of my body had returned to its baseline. I’m not ready to call it a happy side-effect of the time loop, but it is kind of nice that I’m not even now struggling to bring myself down from a runaway rage.

It has been a little while since I have stuck my head outside, at least in a relative sense when time literally has ceased to have any meaning. The urgency has leaked out of my movements as I drift through the house to the front door. Where I was rushing with abandon just minutes ago… it seems impossible that only minutes have passed, I am seeking now to merely get a taste of what is going on outside of my own walls.

Standing on my front step, it could hardly be any more different from how it was the last time I had ventured outdoors. Where chaos threatened to tear the neighborhood apart then, the current scene was the picture of serenity. The quiet calm of what met me at the door was every bit as unsettling as the panic in the air before.

I stood there allowing the barrenness of the landscape to envelope me, the realization of what it all meant sinking in…

(611 seconds)

As the knife reappeared in my hand, and I was once again encased in the walls of my kitchen.

I was going to have to see what happened, and something told me that once that decision was made, it was going to keep being made… over and over again.

But not right now. That was not a bandaid that I was going to be able to immediately pull off. I would do it next time. Next time I would have my head together enough to do it.

I backpedaled and sagged into the opposite corner of the kitchen next to the stove, just a few seconds to pull myself together, and then I would do it.

It wasn’t really necessary, was it? If I knew, had worked it out in my head, I didn’t have to actually experience it, right?

There are certainly much worse situations to deceive yourself about. What would I gain, really? I would have the lay of the land, but how much could that matter? I have no capability of existing in that land, how could the lay of it matter?

This was silly. I would do it.

(658 seconds)

And just like that, the time had come.

I calmly set the knife back down on the counter and moved with a measured determined pace back through the living room to the front door. The confrontation of the doorway led to the slightest of hesitations, but I pushed through and retook my place on the front step.

The first thing I saw was the birds. If I am being honest with myself, I knew it would be. A sick part of me has to stifle a laugh as the lyrics to an old Cake song decide to surface in my head. The birds were falling from the sky like stones or small loaves of bread, but not one of them made the decision to halt their descent with a last-minute flutter of their wings.

I’m pulled out of my inappropriate indulgence in popular cultural irony when I hear the first pop on the horizon. That first one is far off, but it’s not unexpected, and if I continue to be right, it is about to be joined by others.

The far-off ones remain pops, but they are accompanied by closer bangs and, my stomach falls, a crash three doors down. The quiet returns and all that I can do is allow it to press in on me until I feel like I am almost suffocated by it. I can’t help but to give in to it and allow it to do with me what it will for the eternity of seconds that remain until I return to the beginning again.

(705 seconds)

It doesn’t let go. Tears begin to stream down my face and I collapse onto the cool tile floor.

My body has decided to fight back against that silence with loud out of controlling sobbing, and there is no pulling myself back together. My hot tears fight a separate war against the cold ceramic against my cheek and there is not enough of my conscious mind present to care who wins.

(752 seconds)

And time loops and I do it all over again.

(799 seconds)

And again.

(846 seconds)

And there is every possibility that this will never stop.

How do you get past a horror that is always present?

Is it even worth getting past if nothing can possibly matter anymore?

The anguish just feeds on itself as that thought reminds me that every one of those pops, bangs, and crashes was a person who had reached that conclusion just a little quicker than I had.

If I had the means, I would probably join them, dying a handful of seconds at a time, but I will have to suffice with my tears.

I will offer my grief to eternity and pour it out fresh every time it fills itself back up.

(893 seconds)

Like now.