To find the love of my life it took me ten thousand years—more, maybe. I lost count. Turned out he’d been going to high school with me the whole time. I should back up.
I was a sophomore at Elsinore High School when I got stuck in a time loop in the library at three minutes after one o’clock on a Thursday. You go through phases when you’re stuck in a really long loop. Sometimes you feel like keeping track of time. Other times you don’t. Mostly I didn’t. Anyway the longest streak of my keeping track of the subjective passage of time lasted nine hundred forty-three years and change. I was going for the millennium but I got distracted and lost count.
My name’s Carter Jason Thomas and I’ve heard all the jokes about having a last name for a first name and a first name for a last. I don’t remember much about those early years, but that first day I promise you I’ll never forget. I’d pulled an all-nighter studying for an AP US History midterm, of all the damn things. I didn’t actually give a shit about US history, but I had this pointless bet with my friend Sarah over who could rack up the most extra credit, which Mrs. Chavez was a notoriously soft touch in giving out. Somehow we’d gotten it into our heads that it would be funny to ace high school ironically, which is how I wound up in the library during study hall trying to memorize every actual fact stated in chapters seven through nine of our American History textbook. I’d made a chart. Look, it’s not important.
The way it started was whenever I tried to leave the library I’d get a kind of cayenne tingle in the back of my brain, and the universe would like sneeze around me and I’d be waking up at the study carrel in the corner. I’ve died more than a few times, and while there’s no way to be sure, I assume that once my body gets removed from the library that’s what triggers the reset in those cases. Not that that matters.
I’m not going to bother trying to explain thousands of years of library life, but there have been some highlights.
I’ve had consensual sex with very nearly every other student in the school. Sometimes―more often than you’d think―this was a simple matter of asking nicely. The hard part once I’d exhausted the available pool of Thursday’s library occupants was figuring out how to dickey with the causal chain using the limited inputs available to make Madison Fursnik or Steve Chen or whoever show up at the library. And then how to approach them or whatever. Sometimes it took months to figure it out, but it was a good game while it lasted.
Ms. Polowski the librarian has blue hair (like electric blue) and a side shave haircut and condoms in her desk drawer that she is delighted to quietly give to any student who asks. Thank God for you, Ms. Polowski.
I guess I once thought of myself as “straight,” but trust me when I say that’s real contingent for most people.
At first the sex was novelty, then it was sport. Finally it became an anodyne to the crushing loneliness.
You start to set yourself challenges when the universe turns into a video game you’re trapped in forever, and even I eventually got tired of sex games. I started setting new goals: Get the school closed. Get the mayor to come to Elsinore High. Get the president to come to Elsinore High. Get on TV. Get on TV twice in one day for different reasons. Start a war. End a war (notably the only challenge I ever gave up on before success). And so on. To extend my causal reach I wound up getting very good at computer programming and generally being a manipulative sonovabitch.
But anyhow eventually you get curious about the universe when you get tired of lying, fucking, and blowing shit up. And after I’d done literally everything I could think of to do, I spent centuries in depressive catatonia. This gradually morphed into a kind of de facto meditation, which is when I started to really break down the problem.
For one thing I my own self was proof that consciousness was special, in some kind of physical way. All the matter in the library and so far as I could tell the universe reverted to its starting state at the beginning of the loop, save the memories of my subjective experience. So there had to be some kind of substrate that bore my consciousness. I didn’t know if that was true for everyone or for just me, but it was definitely true for me. I’d reasoned that much out relatively soon after getting stuck in the loop but it seemed like a completely useless fact—technically true but irrelevant. Not germane to the predicament.
But as it turns out the difference between meta-cognition and meta-meta-cognition is a big deal, and it started with coming back to that technical truth. What was carrying my mind back through time, and how?
My meditation began to focus on the nature of this substrate. At first I would only catch it in fleeting glimpses out of the corner of my mind, right after a reset. But over time―and we are talking about a lot of time here―I learned to linger in that liminal interstice longer and longer before snapping back. In that tiny, widening gap, opening as slowly but inexorably as a tectonic fault, I had the freedom to futz with the stuff of my own immortal mind.
But to be honest even meta-meta-conscious meditation is pretty boring after a while, so every few―I wasn’t counting anymore but it’s safe to call it centuries―I’d return my attention to the library and try to find something new to do.
I’d mostly stopped having relationships. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but after a while it started to feel something between dishonest and coercive. Both of which I’d been, certainly, back in my childish “fuck every person” days. It was sort of impossible to operate on anything like good faith when I had build up a vast information advantage on the object of my dubious affections. So I stopped.
But then after so, so long I fell in love for real.
I’d slept with William before, back in the bad old days—just once, as part of some meaningless streak. But this was different. I was different.
William Eduardo Apodaca, 17, always returned to the Elsinore High library to check out the Haynes manual for the VW Beetle & Karmann Ghia 1954-1979 (All Models). He’d bought a ‘68 Ghia with no engine but a surprisingly rust-free body and was restoring it piecemeal. That was the kind of guy he was.
Point is, I’d just come out of a particularly frustrating period of interstitial meta-cognitive introspection, and ghosted pieces of my self-apparatus were still bobbing flotsam-like in my mind as from my napping-spot at the study table I stood and prepared to make for the library’s front door to trigger a reset and get back in the gap. But then I saw―
like a floater in your vision that lingers and demands your attention over whatever you were actually trying to look at, but the shard was sensorium-encompassing, and through it I saw/heard/tasted/felt William Eduardo Apodaca, but he was older and bearded and smiling, laughing, over a glass of red wine, and the air was warm and sea-salted and
I’d seen and done plenty of weird shit over the centuries. I’d started wars. Murdered, directly and indirectly. Had many psychotic episodes. Spent decades a husk. This wasn’t like any of that. Look, you’re just going to have to take my word for it. This was―well, it wasn’t “real” (whatever that even is) but it was new.
As though from a great distance I realized I was sobbing, and that William and Ms. Polowski were looking at me very strangely. My sobs became giddy laughter. I hadn’t felt anything novel in the library world in hundreds of years.
I walked out and triggered a reset.
In the interstice, the substrate was a mess. Last cycle I’d pried some feedback loops open in a way that at the time had seemed pretty harmless. On the one hand I didn’t want to accidentally corrupt my own consciousness, but on the other it wasn’t as though after millennia I had an enormous amount to lose.
I held the new pattern. It took most of my attention just to keep the interstice from collapsing. What I saw scared me shitless.
Everything I’d experienced in the last loop was jammed all anyhow in the exposed substrate of my consciousness. I’d been an idiot to mess with those loops. Most of the experience just sat there, inert garbage of the sort I constantly had to sweep free. But William Eduardo Apodaca―the memory of him sparked and roiled and thrashed, alive and vivid and urgent.
I thought of the strange flash, which was the same as reaching out to touch the spark and the same as leaning over to sniff the flower, and―his eyes crinkle in a smile and the Shiraz is heady and expensive and we’re toasting us, finally engaged after all these years, Oh Will I adore you―
My meta-metaconcentration collapsed and I woke up in the library at 1:03.
Holy fucking shit.
Over the next several days I played out an elaborate script that left me in the library undisturbed for months―one I’d mastered centuries earlier when I needed for whatever reason to keep a single instance going. It involved an elaborate, trans-media hoax of a dirty bomb terrorist attack in Elsinore. This was the kind of amoral self-serving bullshit I’d tried to leave behind, but—hell, I don’t have an excuse other than I needed the time to think and prepare before I went back into the interstice.
In that time, I thought about William Eduardo Apodaca and little else. I probed the surface of my awareness (which was all that was accessible to me in the world) for cracks. I found little of interest.
I avoided contact with him almost entirely, save for a few brief and wordless encounters. He once looked at me strangely after emerging from the restroom. I glimpsed his face and fell right out of my chair.
This prompted Ms. Polowski to rush over to me. “Carter!” she shouted. I’d been essentially catatonic for weeks, and tended to forget or not notice what was going on around me. They’d stopped trying to get me to leave the library (which was now an emergency shelter—which was part of the trick of extending this particular loop), and after the bomb people had better things to worry about than one wasted kid.
As William Eduardo Apodaca’s face boiled my mind like a glowing ingot quenched in a bucket of water, I staggered out of the library and into the interstice.
My meta-meta-concentration almost collapsed that first pseudo-instant. My apparatus was a disaster. Pieces of William Eduardo Apodaca-experience were scattered/slathered/routed everywhere throughout me. I didn’t touch it this time, instead choosing to see/observe/meditate on the tangle. At length I found a stray loose end. Like a toddler sticking a fork into an electrical outlet, I took it up and I fed it into the nearest open loop.
The twist-glittering geometry of William snapped ur-taut as it ribboned into the apparatus of my mind. And I was
Living
A
Life
With
Him
The glance he’d given me at 8:24 on day eighteen of the last streak was ripped apart into constituent sensory tracks and then each track separated into pulses or atoms or bits and at the vibrating end of time I saw that William Eduardo Apodaca and I, Carter Jason Thomas the Immortal, were made of the same stuff, that I’d copied pieces of him into me and taken them into this lonely place, and that if I kept doing this, kept stealing glances and smiles and bits of conversations, I could eventually assemble a complete version of him here. I would no longer be alone.
Oh! How I wanted a life with him.
I devised a new routine. I would engineer an interaction with William Eduardo Apodaca―a study hour, a lunch, a conversation about Mrs. Chavez’s history class―and I would memorize every detail of him. Every eyebrow twitch, every unselfconscious flash of his crooked left incisor, every phoneme of every word of every southern inland California drawl-inflected sentence. And I took my memories with me into the interstice and instead of assembling the pieces into a new Eduardo, I extrapolated the experiences into the memories of a life we had never lived. I was certain that when that it was done, I could assemble him again outside of time.
We were married after he finished grad school at USC. We adopted a daughter. Her name was Gabby. We remodeled our home. We went to movies every Friday night in his beautiful Karmann Ghia.
And when he was 43 and I was 42, I was unfaithful.
I could never know exactly what memories would be generated from a given input, and once the calculation was done, it was done. I may as well have stood before a chalkboard and demonstrated an inarguable geometric proof. Given the life we would lead together, I would stray from all the promises I had made him. It would happen. It had already happened. It was fact.
In the library I arranged for solitude. I had centuries of memories. So much data collected over so much time. I knew so much about so many, and I knew exactly with what kind of person I would break my vows to William. I knew exactly how long it would take me to do it. I knew how I would feel before, during, and after. There was no if.
I was tormented by my need for absolution. How would he feel if he found out? What would he do? I was horrified by the prospect of discovering the answer, but the need for an answer burned. Would he forgive me? I had to tell him. I could not bear to tell him. I did not know what to do. And my plan to bring him here with me—How dare I even consider ensnaring the love of my lives as I myself was ensnared. In my predicament I had become a liar and a criminal thousands of times over. Would I compound my crimes by dooming someone else as I had been doomed?
In the end the lure of novel unknowable experience won. I wanted to know how my life with William Carlos Apodaca would go. And so I continued the simulation, unsure of what I would do when our life was done.
With each trip to the interstice and back I learned a little more of how the mind-medium worked. I began to understand the architecture of my consciousness. I felt as though I was approaching some new understanding, but the conclusion remained elusive.
We went from one adopted child to three. Our home was noisy and beautiful. We fought and reconciled and loved more deeply than before. I cared for him and for our family more than I cared for myself; in ten thousand years of iteration of learning that I was the only thing in the universe that mattered, his open smile undid even the firmest of my self-important convictions. And we were old, and then it was over. I would outlive William by a few years. If I may believe his words and actions, I made him happy. I never told him of my infidelity.
My knowledge was complete. I returned to the library for what I knew would be the last time. I sat there at the desk for a few minutes, watching the clock tick from 1:03 to 1:14. I imagined the movements of everyone around me. I didn’t have to go and look. I’d seen it all before.
Then I stood and walked out and the universe spasmed again. I perceived the whole of my pattern and perceived my perceiving it. I saw the pieces that I could assemble into a new William. I could build him here and confess my infidelity and ask his forgiveness, but I wouldn’t. He was always a little unknowable, like an irrational number: No matter how well I knew him there was always more to know, another digit to calculate, and I would not insult the ineffability of our joy by solving him, nor burden him with my weakness.
I looked back. I saw myself frozen in the library. I created a new version of Carter Jason Thomas, the version of myself I knew to be better than all the others because he made another happy—this version untainted by millennia of monotony and amoral narcissism. The one who had learned to love William Eduardo Apodaca. The one who would be unfaithful. I left that Carter behind to return to the library, and then I laced my million fingers into the stuff of the interstice and untangled the knot-of-knots. I knew how, now.
I transformed, inverted, unfolded, and slipped through the opening. I emerged. The new here teemed. I saw everything. There were so many. I was in the medium. I was the medium. I was nothing at all and it was over.