Summer Days and Summer Nights (50 page)

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 powerful: 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.

Anyway, if I said something stupid she'd just forget about it tomorrow.

I watched her for a while first. One of the evergreen features of August 4th at Paint Rock Pool was that every day at 2:37 one of the kids playing catch with a tennis ball massively overthrew it, so that it was not only uncatchable but also cleared the fence at the back of the pool, at which point it was essentially unrecoverable, because beyond that fence was a perilously steep and rocky gully, and then beyond that was Route 128. Nothing that went over that fence ever came back.

But not today, because along came Margaret—just casually; I would even say she was
sauntering
—wearing a bikini top and denim shorts and a straw sun hat, and when the kid threw she reached up on her tiptoes—flashing her even paler shaved underarm—and snagged the ball out of the air with one long skinny arm. She didn't even look at it, just pulled it down, flipped it back into the pool, and kept walking.

It was almost like she knew what was coming too. The kid watched her go.

“Thank you,” he said, in a weirdly accurate impression of Apu from
The Simpsons
. “Come again!”

I saw her lips move as she walked: She said it too—“Thank you, come again”—right along with him. It was like she was reading it off the same script. She plopped down on a deck chair and reclined it all the way back, then changed her mind and hiked it back up a notch. I went over and sat down on the deck chair next to hers. Because I'm smooth like that.

“Hi.”

She turned her head, shading her eyes against the sun. Up close she was even prettier and more string-plucking than I'd thought, with a spray of freckles splashed across the bridge of her nose.

“Hi?” she said.

“Hi. I'm Mark.”

“Okay.”

Like she was granting me the point: Yes, fair enough, your name might well be Mark.

“Look, I don't know how to put this exactly,” I said, “but would you happen to be trapped in a temporal anomaly? Like right now? Like there's something wrong with time?”

“I know what a temporal anomaly is.”

Sunlight flashed off sapphire pool-water. People yelled.

“What I mean is—”

“I know what you mean. Yes, it's happening to me too. The thing with the repeating days. Day.”

“Oh. Oh my God!” A massive wave of relief broke over me. I didn't see it coming. I fell back on my deck chair and closed my eyes for a second. I think I actually laughed. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

I think up until that moment I hadn't even understood how deeply freaked out I was, and how alone with that feeling I'd been. I mean, I was having a perfectly fine time, but I was also really starting to think that I was going to be stuck forever in August 4th and that no one but me would ever know it. No one would ever believe it. Now at least somebody else would know.

Though she didn't seem nearly as excited about it as I did. I would almost say she was a little blasé.

I bounced back up.

“I'm Mark,” I said again, forgetting that I'd already said it.

“Margaret.”

I actually shook her hand.

“It's crazy, right? I mean, at first I couldn't believe it. I mean can you seriously believe it?” I was babbling. “How messed up is this? Right? It's like magic or something! Like it seriously doesn't make any sense!”

I took a deep breath.

“Have you met anybody else who knows?”

“Nope.”

“Do you have any idea why this is happening?”

“How would I know?”

“I don't know. I don't know! Sorry, just a little giddy here. I'm just so, so glad you're in this too. I mean not that I'm glad you're trapped in time or anything, but Jesus, I thought I was the only one! Sorry. It's going to take me a second.” Deep breath. “So what have you been doing with yourself this whole time? Besides going to the pool?”

“Watching movies, mostly. And I'm teaching myself to drive. I figure it doesn't matter if I mess up the car because it'll just be fixed in the morning.”

I found her hard to read. It was weird. Granted, I was hysterical, but she was the opposite. Strangely calm. It was almost like she'd been expecting me.

“Have you?” I said. “Messed up the car?”

“Yes, actually. And our mailbox. I still suck at reverse. My mom was pretty pissed off about it, but then the entire universe reset itself that night and she forgot, So. What about you?”

“Reading mostly.”

I told her about my project at the library. And about the curing cancer thing.

“Wow, I didn't even think of that. I guess I've been thinking small.”

“I didn't get very far with it.”

“Still. Points for trying.”

“Maybe I should scale it down and just go after athlete's foot or something.”

“Or pinkeye maybe.”

“Now you're talking.”

We sat in silence for a minute. Here we were, the last boy and girl on earth, and I couldn't think of anything to say. I kept getting distracted by her long legs in those shorts. Her fingernails were plain, but she'd painted her toenails black.

“So you're new, right?” I said. “Did you just move here or something?”

“Couple of months ago. We're in that new development on Tidd Road, across the highway. Technically I think we're not even eligible to come here, but my dad fudged it. Look, I gotta go.”

She stood up. I stood up. That was a thing I would learn about Margaret: Even with an infinity of time available, she always seemed to have to go.

“Can I have your number?” I said. “I mean, I know you don't know me, but I feel like we should probably, you know, stay in touch. Maybe try to figure this thing out. It might go away all by itself. But then again, maybe it won't.”

She thought about that.

“Okay. Give me your number.”

I did. She texted me back so I'd have hers. The text said
it's me
.

*   *   *

I didn't text Margaret for a few days. I got the impression that she liked her personal space, and that she wasn't necessarily overjoyed at the prospect of spending forever with a person of my undeniable dorkiness. I'm not one of your self-hating nerds or anything; I'm comfortable with my place in the social universe. But I get that I'm not everybody's idea of the perfect guy to spend an infinite amount of time with.

I lasted till four in the afternoon on day five A.M. (After Margaret).

Four o'clock was about when the repetitiveness of it all started to get to me. At the library, I watched the same old guy clump up to the circulation desk with his walker. I heard the same library flunky walk by with the same squeaky cart. The same woman with hay fever disputed a late fee while having a sneezing fit. The same four-year-old had an operatic meltdown and got dragged out of the building.

The problem was that it was all starting to seem less and less real—the endless repetition was kind of leaching the realness out of everything. Things were mattering less. It was fun to just do whatever I wanted all the time, with no responsibilities, but the thing was, the people around me were starting to seem slightly less like people with actual thoughts and feelings, which I knew they were, and slightly more like extremely lifelike robots.

So I texted Margaret. Margaret wasn't a robot. She was real, like me. An awake person in a world of sleepwalkers.

Hey! It's Mark. How's it going?

It was about five minutes before she got back to me; by then I'd gone back to reading
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
by Douglas Adams.