by Karter Mycroft
I wake up at 9:45 in the morning, fifteen minutes late for my call with the Undersecretary. Fifteen minutes! I leap out of bed. Last night’s sweatpants, socks, and t-shirt are piled on the floor. I throw them back on. I pop an Atenolol, take a sip of vodka from the bottle under the bed, and open the bedroom door.
I wake up. I was dreaming I was late, the classic symptom of being late. Sure enough my phone reads 9:45 AM. There’s a text from the Undersecretary asking when I plan to join the meeting. That’s terrible. I spring out of bed, into my clothes, and yank open the door.
I wake up. I’m scared. I open the door.
I’m awake now. It’s a quarter to ten. I forgot to set my alarm and my circadian clock missed by fifteen minutes. And there were these awful dreams. There’s a pile of clothes on the floor, but only time to pull on a t-shirt and rush to my call. I open the door.
I wake up. Don’t I? When I was a teenager, I became involved with the online oneironaut community. They taught me to write dates, symbols, phrases on my wrists and study them before going to sleep, so that I would notice the absence of them and thereby gain control over the dream, entering the lucid state. Once or twice I may have experienced something like conscious awareness while still in the midst of REM sleep. This, whatever I’m experiencing now, doesn’t feel like that at all. My phone reads 9:45. As an experiment I decide to do something that would wake me up from any dream. Instead of getting dressed I take off my underwear and piss on the floor. Nothing happens. Still dribbling, I open the door.
I wake up. I slither out of bed. It’s 9:45. The hardwood is clean and dry. I’m beginning to realize something. I open the door.
I wake up. I go straight to my bedroom window. Outside is the usual sky, a pair of pigeons on the neighbors’ roof, a cluster of planters below. I decide to take my chances with the two-story drop. I undo the latches, slide the pane over, and pull out the screen.
I wake up. I watch my phone until it switches to 9:46. 9:47. 10:15. I call the Undersecretary. Where the hell am I? I’m uh yeah funny thing about that one second I’ll be right there. I call my mom. I tell her I don’t know why I’m calling. I tell her I love you, bye. I call 9-1-1. Forty minutes later there’s a loud bang, footsteps on the stairs, a man’s voice outside the bedroom door. Yes I’m in here, try breaking it open! Please!
I wake up. I scream as loud as I can. I take an Atenolol. I chase the Atenolol with vodka. I open the door with my teeth.
I wake up. It’s 9:45. I decide to research the spacetime continuum. I chug some vodka and sift through punishingly technical wikis about microscopic and macroscopic causality, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, light cones and timelike curves. I watch videos where indignant Germans argue over the implications of quantum mechanics. Some of them interpret wavefunction collapse as a fundamental roll of the cosmic dice, while others see it as a selection of one among many possible worlds. I decide to open the door a hundred times in exactly the same way.
I wake up at 9:45. Unless I’ve miscounted, I have now tried leaving my bedroom 109 times. I’m thinking about the specifics of my very first attempt. Theory: this situation began due to some inability of the causal chain to resolve. There was a glitch, some mistake or impossibility in the original sequence of events, which must be corrected before time can resume flowing normally. For sanity’s sake, I’ll assume the glitch was caused by my own freely-willed choices, and not by deterministic physical laws beyond my control. That first loop included five choices between waking up and opening the door: I put on my sweatpants, I put on my socks, I put on my t-shirt, I took a beta blocker, I drank some vodka. I’ll assume each of those is a binary variable, and “unlocking” the door requires the correct mixture of 0’s and 1’s. This means there are 25 = 32 possibilities, which is reasonable enough for a brute-force approach. I open the door.
I wake up at thirty-two 9:45s. I perform thirty-two unique combinations of tasks, each ending with an opening of the door.
I wake up at 9:45. My theory is now proven false, or at least incomplete. Either the idea of solving the loop through a specific set of choices is wrong, or the “lock” is more intricate than I’d hoped. For example, the solution could require a precise order of choices rather than a simple combination (this nearly quadruples the number of trials, and since anything I write down is erased upon reawakening, there’s no reliable way to keep track of so many options). It could also be that rather than a padlock, I’m dealing with a missing key: some choice I was supposed to make initially, but failed to because it didn’t occur to me. This is an awful proposition. If the solution lies within the near-infinite set of actions-not-taken, there might as well be no solution at all. Defeated, I open the door.
9:45. Assuming an average of 5 minutes spent in each loop, I have been trapped in my bedroom for nearly 12 hours. Interestingly, this does not appear to have taken a toll on my physical body, which arises each time in the exact same state. There is a growing disconnect between my body and mind: I haven’t grown hungry or drunk or exhausted, yet my mind has been active for hours on end. I can’t keep this up forever. Or maybe I can. Which would be worse? I open the door for no reason.
I wake up. It’s 9:45. I wait. I tell work I’m sick, tell anyone who texts that I’m fine, scroll my phone and don’t think about anything until it’s 9:45 at night. Now hunger arrives, and more, bodily needs progressing with the untruncated arrow of time. I defile a corner of my closet, in a kind of hypomania that tells me this must be the path, that what we have here is a test of fortitude, a Jobian trial of patience and faith under the supervision of some wounded God. The way out will reveal itself if I can just steel myself and wait. The thirst sneaks in with the moonrise and takes over everything. They say you can go three weeks without food but only a few days without water. All I have is vodka and a little flat LaCroix. Now it’s 9:45 tomorrow. In theory, I could start ripping out drywall and hope there’s a water pipe somewhere. That might sustain this final experiment a couple of miserable weeks. I take a screwdriver and stab the wall, but I misjudge the thickness, and for a split second as I draw it back I can see through this thin dusty orifice into the hallway.
I wake up. I put on my clothes. I take an Atenolol. I drink the entire bottle of vodka. I throw up on the sheets. I jump out the window. Glass bites deep into my skin.
I wake up at 9:45. The vodka is back in the bottle. I drink it again. I set the bedroom door on fire.
I wake up at 9:45. I open the door.
I wake up at 9:45. You know, there’s obviously one way out of this. I open the door instead.
I wake up at 9:45. I imagine the most plush, luscious bedroom in the world: walls of purple velvet, a heart-shaped waterbed, an aquarium ceiling with eels and gentle crabs, a doorway with no door installed. I imagine a reverse bedroom with comforter walls and a hardwood bed. I imagine sharing a bedroom with myself. I imagine sharing a bedroom with 145 people. I imagine a bedroom so big the whole country sleeps in it. I imagine a bedroom that is a perfect homeomorphism of the topology of my body and one cubic centimeter greater in volume. I open the door.
I wake up at 9:45. Fifteen minutes late. There’s a text from the Undersecretary asking when I’ll join the meeting. I drink all the vodka and eat all the Atenolol. I lie back down in bed. It doesn’t feel bad. After a while I’m not scared anymore.
I wake up.
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Karter Mycroft is an author, musician, and fisheries scientist from Los Angeles. His short fiction has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dark Matter Magazine, and elsewhere.
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