Loop (14 page)

LOOP

We die only once, and for such a long time!

Molière

…
and then I was falling again.

The first time it happened, I remember, I screamed for the first few minutes of that endless gut-wrenching drop. I waved my arms and legs around in the darkness, reaching out, trying to catch hold of something, to touch something … anything. To find some kind of bearings in the black emptiness all around me.

And I waited for the sickening impact at the end of the fall, for the moment of searing pain and the end of everything.

I tried screaming, but no sound came. I tried thinking, but all that I could bring to mind was an old and very sick joke.

Question: What's the last thing that goes through a fly's mind when it hits the windscreen of a semitrailer?

Answer: Its backside.

Don't blame me; it was Jason's joke. Of course, he didn't say ‘backside', but I'm dictating this report for Bernie
–
Doctor Fleischmann
–
and he'll probably play it for my olds, even though I told him I didn't want them to hear it, so it's probably not a good idea to use the word that Jason used. They're upset enough as it is.

I guess there was a loose sort of connection between the joke and what was happening to me
–
the brain is a really strange and devious machine
–
but it was maddening. One part of my mind was scared out of its … mind, while the other part was telling itself sick jokes.

And I couldn't stop it.

Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to know that you're about to die
–
that they're about to use a spatula to scrape what's left of you up off the bottom of whatever bottomless pit it is you've tumbled into
–
and you can't even control what's going on inside your own brain? So much for your whole life flashing before your eyes!

But that was only the first time.

As you might have gathered, I didn't die. Not that time, or any of the other times it's happened. I'm not even sure that when I'm ‘falling' I really fall at all. It's just the nearest I can come to explaining what it feels like when it does happen. I mean, there in the Black there isn't really any sensation at all; no wind squalling past your face, no rushing sound in your ears. Nothing but an eerie silence and that sickening emptiness you feel in the pit of your stomach, like when the lift suddenly starts hurtling down forty five storeys and all your internal organs finish up somewhere in your throat.

I'm not even sure how long the ‘fall' takes.

Sometimes it feels like hours, but it might be only moments. Maybe it happens outside of Time altogether. Considering where
–
and when
–
I end up each time I stop falling, that's probably the most lively explanation. But it's really no explanation at all.

How do you explain the fact that every time I stop falling I'm back where I started.

And not just where
…

Every time the fall ends and the darkness disappears … No, I guess even that's saying it backwards, darkness can't ‘disappear' … Every time the world reappears I'm back in my room at home, staring at the poster of Kobe Bryant – frozen in the act of slamming a basketball through a defenceless orange hoop
–
on the wall at the bottom of my bed.

He's been hanging therefor the best part of two years. I know how he feels.

It's really like I'm frozen in Time. Or rather like they've captured my life on a kind of Twilight Zone home-video, and they keep replaying the same bit over and over and over.

You see, every time I stop falling I'm back in my room, in my bed, and it's seven-thirty in the morning on Wednesday the twenty-fifth of August. Never a moment earlier or a moment later.

And I have to go through it all over again
…

The darkness shreds and trails away in wisps, like fog in the path of a sudden windgust, and Barry sits up.

He rubs the gritty remnants of the night's sleep from the corners of both eyes. He does it carefully, with the tip of the smallest finger on his left hand. Sometimes, if you aren't gentle, or you rub the wrong way, a bit can end up caught in under the lid, scratching the crap out of your eyeball.

He uses words like ‘crap' and ‘damn' all the time, in the silent conversations he holds with himself.

That is, when he isn't surrounded by other people, who all seem to have the strange compulsion to force him to have conversations with them. Even his own parents, who should know better after fifteen years of sharing a life with him.

But, if anything, they are the worst – always asking questions they already know the answers to. Like:
Who left the lid off the peanut butter
? or
Who walked through here with mud on their shoes
? or
Did you hear what I said
?

And always trying to find ways to draw him into conversation or conflict, but never quite succeeding.

He drags his legs out of the covers and swings his feet around onto the carpet, searching with unseeing toes for the slippers that he kicked off the previous evening, somewhere in the general direction of the bed.

The radio is grumbling away quietly in the background. It turned itself on a few minutes ago, triggering the morning ritual, but it is only now, as the day begins to slip into focus, that he really hears it.

The announcer is trying to make the best of a dismal weather forecast, when he is cut off in mid-sentence by an imperious tap on the snooze-button.

Barry's fingertips rest lightly on the body of the radio as he stares at the green digits.

7:34.

Winds, gusting from the south
… the man was saying when he was suddenly cut off.

‘… and late morning thunderstorms on the coast, moving inland to Liverpool and the Blue Mountains by early afternoon …'

Barry speaks the words aloud, before trailing off as he realises what he is saying. Without listening to the guy, he knows precisely what the forecast would have been. He knows exactly the words the announcer would use, and he feels that familiar sinking sensation in his stomach.

Déjà vu,
they call it – the feeling that you've been here, done it all before; the feeling that you know what's about to happen, who's going to say what, before it happens, before a word is spoken. And …

And it's all a load of crap!

Just a slight malfunction of the memory circuits, that's all it is.

They had an article on it once in
Omni.
He read it in the waiting-room at the dentist's surgery. You feel as if you remember the whole thing happening before, when actually you are just having a sort of memory ‘feedback', experiencing and remembering the same thing at almost the same moment. Or so the article claimed.

Whatever the explanation, Barry feels uncomfortable, and he stands for a moment longer, staring at the radio and wondering …

The really frustrating thing about the whole set-up is that you're never even aware that it's happening. At least, not while it's happening.

Apart from the odd feeling that what you're experiencing is strangely familiar, you have no idea how bizarre the whole thing really is.

Seven-thirty a.m., August twenty-fifth. Why that time, that date?

I keep searching for a reason, as if the situation is logical and there has to be a reason. It's only when I'm ‘falling' that I'm even aware that there is a situation, and alone in the Dark there isn't a hell of a lot I can do to sort out what's going on.

At least, that's how it was up until now.

This time, it's different.

It didn't start off any different. I still woke up to the sound of the radio and that dismal weather forecast. But this time, for some reason, I switched the radio off. And I began remembering.

I don't know how often it has happened: ‘falling', then waking up and living through the whole loop again, then ‘falling' and waking up and … You get the picture.

And it was never exactly the same twice. There were different words, slightly different actions. But in all the many times it happened, I never once remember switching off the damn weather forecast.

Or remembering
…

This time, it was like the wider awareness I always had in the Dark had somehow sneaked through into the real world, and I knew everything that was going to happen.

Well, almost everything. Through all those endless hours of ‘falling', once the initial shock had worn off, and I was able to control the frustration that always overtook me when I realised that it was happening again, I'd always
–
eventually
–
been able to go over in my mind just what had happened this time and how it might have differed from previous experiences.

The basic events were always pretty similar, and other people behaved in basically the same way, except where they were reacting to something that I did differently.

But this time I wasn't in the Dark- I switched off the radio and I knew what the guy was going to say. And I remembered all the other times he'd said those same words, all the other times I'd stood there in my slippers thinking Damn! and hoping that the rain would hold off until three-thirty, because it was sports day and we were playing Westfields. I really wanted to beat them – just once – and I didn't want the game called off because of rain.

So I stood there with my hand resting on the radio and my brain racing, knowing that this time it was different, and hoping that this time the endless cycle might finally be broken.

Dr Fleischmann is a big man, not tall, but powerfully built. And there is no trace of the German accent that his name – and a hundred Hollywood clichés – might lead a kid to expect. In fact, he looks like an impostor as he leans back in his black leather swivel-recliner office chair and chews on the well-shredded end of his favourite pencil.

More like a football player,
Barry decides,
than a shrink.

And having decided that, Barry sits back in his own chair – which isn't leather, and neither reclines nor swivels – and waits. It's a kind of game they play sometimes, ‘psycho-chicken', where you sit there silently and wait to see who'll break first.

This time it's the man behind the desk.

‘So, Barry. Any flashes for me today?'

His tone is light-hearted, but Barry can sense the serious intent beneath the words. In three weeks, Bernie – his immigrant parents christened him Bernhardt, but that doesn't suit him any more than ‘Dr Fleischmann' does, so Bernie he has become – has moved from an attitude of professional scepticism to a kind of guarded excitement, and Barry has picked up the subtle change.

His own status has changed, from a delusional teenager to something deeper. He is now an unknown quantity, a mystery to be plumbed and understood.

‘What did you have in mind?' He holds the psychologist's gaze for a moment longer, then smiles and stands up, moving across to the window and looking out. ‘Saints by seven points. Hornby lands two field goals and they score a try a minute from the end. You know, you could make a packet if you put a few bucks on some of these tips.' He turns and looks back across the room, but Bernie just shrugs, so he continues, ‘I know. Professional integrity.'

‘Not really, Barry. I've just never been a gambler.'

‘But it's not gambling. It's only gambling if you don't know who's going to win. This is investing.'

The young psychologist smiles, tosses the pencil onto the desk and sits forward, leaning on his elbows and watching the young boy's face. ‘More like insider trading, I'd say.'

Now it's Barry who shrugs. ‘You're just too honest, Bernie.'

‘And you're a puzzle. Tell me about the Dark.'

‘What, again? I feel like a broken record. Don't you want to hear about my sex-life, or why I hate my father, or what I used to do in the bath when I was five years old?'

‘Not unless you have a burning desire to tell me.' He pauses for a moment. ‘I think you watch too many movies. You can't expect me to run around doing Sigmund Freud imitations for your benefit. What can you tell me about ‘falling' that you haven't already told me?'

‘Did you play the tape for the olds?'

‘Your parents, you mean? I said I wouldn't, didn't I?'

‘Yeah, and Mum said you were a ‘counsellor', not a shrink. You're all pathological liars.'

‘I'm not a pathological liar, Barry. And I'm not a ‘shrink'. If I said I'd keep it confidential, I will.'

Barry returns to the seat and sits down, leaning forward and placing his hands between his knees, as if they are cold and he is warming them.

‘I'm not crazy, you know. I'm quite sane.'

‘I never thought you were. Crazy, that is.'

‘Well, hold that thought, because there are a few people out there who wouldn't agree with you.'

HOW MANY CYCLES?

TWENTY-SEVEN … FIVE MORE THAN We've EVER TRIED BEFORE, BUT …

YOU THINK HE'S REACHNG OVERLOAD?

WHAT DO
YOU
THINK? LOOK AT THE PSI READOUT. THE CUMULATIVE MEMORY PATTERNS ARE INTRUDING. UNTIL LOOP TWENTY-FOUR HE PROGRESSED NORMALLY, OR RATHER AT THE TOP END OF THE RANGE.

HOW SO?

FROM THE TIME HE WAS PLACED IN THE LOOP, THERE WAS A STEADY PROGRESSION FROM SIMPLE RECALL/RE-EXPERIENCE, THROUGH INDEPENDENT AWARENESS, TO A QUITE SOPHISTICATED AND SUBSTANTIAL PSYCHO-MANIPULATION OF THE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT – AMAZING IN SUCH A PRIMITIVE SUBJECT – HE HAS EVEN CREATED A COPING MECHANISM FROM ONE OF THE STOCK CHARACTERS. A ‘SHRINK', I BELIEVE HE TERMS IT. IT MAY BE INTERESTING TO INTRODUCE —