Loop

Left foot locked in a perfect rhythm, Bill E. Fonda clicked it again.

Too fast, so twice. Which meant it was paused at 00:01, his most favorite moment. It was when the camera finally set itself – set up by him, he always suspected – and then she leans down for the first time. The most tender time – at least, in his opinion. That was why it was his most, most favorite.

This was a rare evening. Just a few dribbles of rain ran down his window. Not a sound disturbing him from above, not from his ceiling fan, its light twirls matching his mind’s own.

It was only his second trip Home that day, and, normally, one this close to the end of the fiscal demanded more. He smirked and recalled March 2, 2007, when he was lowest. He barely mattered then; hadn’t proven himself to anyone, then. They shoved him all the bullshit, and his forearms tired from clicking, clacking, shoveling it all. Sometime, maybe 9:15 AM, maybe 9:16 AM, he CTRLSHIFTNed comfort. For a reprieve of innocent corporate absenteeism. He laughed at his strange trajectory now, because he could not have known or foreseen her precise, shoulder-length hair, or her smile, or her shoulder tattoo. Now, he felt fixed, fixating on them.

Her other leans, at 0:41, 2:25, 2:42, 3:22, and 3:57, approximately, meant everything to him, too. But he had to pick a favorite. He had played them infinitely in his mind, and though her name, profession, and favorite childhood cartoon TV show changed with each viewing, her utterances never did.

“I want this, Bill.”

“Yes, baby, yes.”

“Don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop.”

She called to him from a cold distance; it was an allure numbly acquired, with time. Of course, he did not know on that first day, March 2, 2007. That’s not how these things work. He smiled afterward, and dozed, as usual. But he took a lot of vacations between that day and this one. He had visited others – their apathy or aggression or bygone glances downward sending him back. It was not that they did not embrace him. They did. He let them; they led him. But held by her, he felt the hands come together, clasp, forging him with her and reminding him that here he was, Home – he didn’t need to leave. He didn’t need to go. He knew what it meant to have the comforts of Home – not a cheap, $2.99 fool’s joy.

0:01 was his gold. His buried treasure, just there, right there. He would never mark it; not for himself or for anyone else. Each time he found it, brow and palms sweaty with a first-timer’s apprehension, he knew he had found it for the first time, again.

“I love you, Bill.”

He finished and went to bed.

...

It wasn’t hard to make breakfast. Breakfast was always the same. The steel cut oatmeal, the kind from the Youtube video, was already made and measured. So he took one out, yanked on the microwave handle, and pushed 1.

1 would be lukewarm – perfect. He preferred it. And during the delay he prepared the rest.

A mixture of frozen fruits, blackberries and white grapes equaled, almonds, honey, and half a glass of orange juice. In that order, each time, and as the slight “Beep” yanked back, he was prepared to begin the day.

It was Tuesday. He wasn’t sure what month it was; he checked this on his calendar first. The month no longer mattered. It hadn’t for a while now, or, at least, not since last year. Routinization had overtaken him. The filing cabinet in the corner, pressed against the white wall which repeated itself 14 other times, belonged to the company. As did the greyblack laptop. As did the colored folders, blue against green against yellow against red. As did the crinkly polo – the small bit of uniformity which he permitted, repeatedly, because it made him laugh.

When he approached his boss about working from home, he only had to recite his first argument: “Thanks for meeting with me, Mr. Emery. I think...Well, I know...it would be better for my focus if I could work from home. I appreciate the office, and I appreciate the cult–”

“Well, hell, isn’t this just...the day, huh, Bill! Let me stop you there. Sorry – for interrupting. I was just talking to upstairs and they mentioned moving a few of our programmers offsite. Turns out, we’re running low on cubicles up there. Too many damn cooks, if you ask me, but they never did. But I listened, so let’s get you home!”

He was immensely grateful. Neither small, watercooler talk nor droning meetings, at 10:30 at 11:45 at 12:15, neither 12:20 nor 12:35, engaged him. Small office socializing – he saw the energy it injected in others. Not himself. He learned to grow odd affectations for people in passing; it was the amount of time he felt each earned. He measured and counted the interactions, the small hourglass in his mind flipping itself endlessly up and down and up and then again – again. Precisely enough to remind Henry: Accounting or Gretchen: Marketing that he was Here: Smiling.

So when his plan unpredictably shriveled in this way, he produced that practiced, shallow smirk. This was deserved. He had purchased his freedom with handshakes, smiles, and doughnuts. It looked sweet, which meant that it was. He rewarded himself – he went Home to her 4 times during that first day in his home office.

With breakfast finished, he turned his attention to the papers scattered, unstapled and stacked in a sort of vortex on his favorite oak table. He spent his first 22 minutes reorganizing them. He then responded to 22 emails, with immediacy, before beginning his daily work.

For lunch: strawberry salad with homemade vinaigrette. Afterward, he went Home to see her, but only briefly, for around 3 minutes and 35 seconds. 30 or so more emails, and more work.

For dinner:  ham and cheese omelet, a side of toast, and peach cobbler for dessert.

He watched his favorite show, a little-known British comedy, and laughed at the family’s cacophonously absurd existence. He had attempted to finish the series, but usually settled on the same eight or nine episodes, in rotation. The title was sheer understatement; a backwards hyperbole he loved. These were the drunks and vagabonds, the collected destructions, from his youth, all filtered through an impregnable accent. Each lilt of speech made him smile; the abuse of life from this distance, in such a different tongue – he found it hilarious. He could only stomach it for its familiarities and, his life now decidedly what it wasn’t years ago, its stark contrasts. He loved them both equally, and watched it, constantly, his mind’s careful balance waving the smiles forward.

Before closing his eyes, he bathed in his Home’s whiteyellow glow and said goodnight to her. Another rarity – he said goodnight in just under 2:42. Near the end, he noticed a sort of yellowwhite hamper in the corner of the bedroom. It spilled its black and white contents from all sides, and he realized that tomorrow was laundry day.

Looking down, he thanked her for the reminder, and went to bed.

...

The table in his bedroom, that which grasped his computer and his work, was circular. It felt complete to him. He took pride in its care and maintenance; after he took possession, nothing had ever scratched it. He came across the table while wandering his new neighborhood, during the first week he lived there. Not by mere chance – he knew later – the table beckoned him up the driveway, held its finger and slowly curled it – straight to the wife and husband who sold it to him.

He bargained down to $156, which was, to his silent pride, important. This was a pure oak table and chair set – “a steal,” his boss would have declared. But it contained the colors and character of home, long ago. It was where everything happened for their family, while they had one. When the wood’s pattern should have swirled, it sped across, cutting contrasts which jumped toward the edges. Instead of inlaid patterns and terraces guiding gently down its edge, the table set a precipice. It was where Bill completed his mathematics homework after school, alone with the lights off.

The husband told him that two of the chairs were “Completely unused,” that no one else lived there.

It was where he and his father shared silent meals approximately 2 hours and 33 minutes after mathematics was finished. It was where Bill wondered, aloud, “Where’s mom? Isn’t she coming?” A wonder with no answer. Never an answer. Then, once, it arrived: Mom wasn’t coming.

He paid two movers to fit it a week later. Some sensible addition, he calculated. The two men, quite obviously his negation, asked him where he wanted it, so he told them: “In the bedroom, please. Over by the window. You’ll see it.” Their eyes exchanged a bit of confusion; a bit of mockery. What assumptions they made, Bill couldn’t understand, so he inquired: “Is that an issue? Won’t it fit through the door?”

“No, no, we just...Uhh...We just don’t put many kitchen tables in bedrooms, ya know? Make no difference to us. By the window, ya said?”

“No matter, ain’t no difference,” murmured the second.

And then they grasped and grunted, balancing his circular future. He winced. Each boot skid, each depression pushing down the carpet, was memorized at once. A glance down taught him that the man near the balcony was a 10.5, while the taller man near Bill was a 12. He traced the steps ahead to later, when, vacuum cable flipping and flopping about, he would cover them both up.

On their way out, Bill offered them some ice water. They accepted, and attempted conversation. They discussed work, Bill barely suppressing the irony of its tedium now invading his apartment, and he asked them how often they moved tables, to which he endured a few more shrugs and knowing glances. One of the men, 10.5, placed his elbow upon a small, wrinkleless envelope which rested on the top of Bill’s mail stack. “Oops, sorry, mustbe yours. Didn’t mean ta. Say, hey, looks exciting. What’s, ‘The  Trace Ital–‘”

Instead of loading a response, Bill smiled, ushered, and locked the door.

...

After leaving the office, after obtaining the table, after coming Home – Bill’s life spun itself flawlessly. If he wasn’t marveling at its simplicity and honesty, he was daydreaming. Sometimes sitting, sometimes laying, but always bathed in a glow. Bill tolerated a minimum of technology - it did allow her to follow him. Its various incarnations, the tablets and phones and computers, were an assurance that he wasn’t alone. He set them all to vibrate. They pulsed with life – her life.

During one aside, during one Fall afternoon, Bill noticed a poster at Home, which then became the only poster in his. He failed to replicate the exact same spot; his estimations placed Home’s rectangular walls at around 15 feet, 6 inches, 7 millimeters. An atrocious approximation, and he felt constantly taunted. He loathed the give and take of millimeters an immeasurable distance away.

The poster, he learned, was exactly 36 inches by 24 inches; he called to make assurances before purchasing it online. In school, Bill had skipped all foreign language classes. The letters on the poster he grasped delicately enough: “A...B...D...S...,” but the words, “A Bout De Souffle...,” he had long abandoned. Whatever film they belonged to, whatever its plot machinations or clever close ups – he never bothered to examine them.

Her glance. It isn’t disgust, Bill decided at once. Curiosity, brimming with intent. He never questioned why she positioned it just over her shoulder – two glances, more than he deserved. All eyes prodding in malicious encouragement. He had to have it. He fell, and went down, all the way down, just like the man in the poster was intending. Bill knew where the man in the poster was pointing his gun.

He just needed a piece of Home.

Established, Bill began new rituals. He would go Home at 9:03 PM, perhaps linger until 9:06 PM, and then look toward his table’s edges, their ends nonexistent and blending with the darkness. He felt weightless, as though he’d leapt from them. He had become whole and perfect and dark and alone.

...

Bill believed victuals to be a funny word, something needless and obscure, but each Sunday at approximately 11:23 AM, he shopped for them.

There was nothing circuitous about his route; a mental map would be a metaphor of disservice, something too coarse, too sketched. This was a timed distance, an exactitude of Bill’s mind. All 26 minutes and 8 seconds accounted for. He made sure all four wheels spun flawlessly before setting off.

Bill knew the risks. His dependency on a machine, yes, of counted cans and low wage workers and display, all display – something to which he contributed and owed and, on a particular day, of which he knew nothing. Of the dispenses he witnessed there, of price or product or person, he believed none were beyond immediate correction. A discount gone, a brand substituted.

Bill sustained.

Yet, one day, he became undone. First, by the heat. Then, by the flood.

He began, again, with the frigid control of vegetables and fruit; nature kept to human specifications. He would wait for the tick of the watering hose before moving from cilantro to green pepper. He would check all six sides of the baby spinach; a single ruinous wilt restarting the process, the selection. He would measure each apple, inspect each rivet of depressed, discolored skin, accepting only wax without blemish – nature, perfected.

This day, though, he crossed the automatic threshold to the welcome of nothing – of sweltering absence. Outside had come in: a beginning at last.

Sliding across the fresh floor, singing its chemical cleanliness, Bill reached his produce in heat. Something was wrong, and broken. He looked toward the hoses and saw famine. The cilantro was beyond repair. The green peppers broken, malfunctioning to a default of blackbrown rot. He found a bland polo; he made his inquiries.

“Sir, we are so sorry, but our air conditioner broke last night. Again, so sorry...Man, think about how bad it is for us, huh? I’ve been here since –”

This was not a time for incalculable distractions, so Bill moved on. He knew he could skip produce, and he could skip meat, too – a substitution of containers meant little. He knew the contents and had counted, and prepared.

Reek grabbed him, then and first, just as he was preparing to leave produce. A child had puked behind him – and suddenly, else Bill would have definitely planned an alternate route. The machine produced a part to begin mopping it up, and Bill heard the polo proclaim: “How disgusting!” But by then she had him, next, and he was Home – and so immeasurably beyond it.

She was holding celery. He tried to process this, the plain with the exquisite, two finalities of his calculated existence colliding in this way. His brain ran its connections, as a failsafe. As in collapse.

The waterfall he once saw on the nature documentary. Right around 34:42. The waterfall in Canadian ice. A defiance, of self.

The child at the park, holding a melting ice cream cone. The moment just before the drips slash the child’s arm. The perfect twist of it, the gravity of regret.

The grace of an envelope’s fold. Blemishes finished without showing. A whiteness, so perfect, so consuming.

He left in seconds; he failed to count them. He offered a cursory glance before being welcomed to the asphalt, to his own faults, yet it yielded nothing he did not already comprehend. That was her. Hair approximately 3 milimeters longer than expected, than measured. Shoulder tattoo slightly sharper, edges clear and marching themselves dutifully, completely positioned. Clothes he had never seen, those he had placed in her countless times before. The kind of dream felt, and worried over, before waking. A night’s haunt – right to his marrow.

He checked both blind spots, twice, before leaving the parking lot. He didn’t use his blinker.

...

When Bill returned home, he knew that Home was away. Gone, a distance viewed with fascination and lust, only. A painting.

The moment was an entropy, all at once. Something immeasurable across all screens – across all specifications. And he tried. The laptop placed approximately 2 inches farther left than normal; the table hugging the wall with a breath’s allowance; the folders rearranged, the red touching green, and the green on blue, and the blue on red.

Her voice contained an angle, a truth, that undid all dimensions. The old encouragements, of love, and trust, and passion, all became buried under a prism of complexities. He felt himself falling, become a void; his purpose lost. Often, he hesitated at old familiarities, at 2:25 or 3:57. Pattering in the dark. Head turned, and ears perked. With a tingle, they whispered to him: nothing.

He recalled, oddly, his 6th grade social studies teacher; not his 12th. She spoke of empires vanished; of languages forgotten; of peoples perished. To time, and indifference. His final project – a posterboard of images, printed – was since gobbled likewise, by forces grander and crowned. He kept her final words to him. Recorded them. She spoke down while peeling his effort and stagnation from her wall: something kept impermanent, a sail punctured and returned for voyages damned.

“Thank you, Bill. It was a pleasure to show it.”

Bill had been bent and torn more often, since. But never so irreparably. Faraway. Nauseated. Unable to keep his twists in order; a chaos run amuck. He was a stranger in his own Home. Each visit a new betrayal. And trapped, too. Unable to relocate. To leave for a reprieve. To ask about Friday’s donuts, or Monday’s boredom. To pass idly at a corner, or at another’s desk. He wasted his verbal gropings on nothing; on viral videos he could not comprehend, and to which he paid no attention. He re-counted her poster’s measurements and his table’s circumference. Wrote letters, paid postage, with no intention; no audience. Emails. RE: Quarterlies? RE: Bill? RE: URGENT QUARTERLIES RE: Hello RE: Goodbye

More than ever, she was every moment. The fractal of his life. Complete.

Why was she silent about the pillow, the one on her side? It was naked, and not held. Why did she ignore it with his hands, creeping, thoughtlessly, alone, kept at her sides? She never acknowledged them. They stayed; the pillow, steady. Why did she turn from him at 1:11? Neck, lines of indifference, wants to give up. A move of boredom, of elsewhere. Where did she go? Why would she leave him? Just after committing?

She wore socks. Not mismatched, though he craved that perfect dissonance.

He doubted her window; he obsessively remeasured his geometry, and questioned the sun. The seasons lacked clarity. Clothing, warm. Sunlight, an intrusion, a blaze – a summer’s breeze in passing. Yet sweaters strewn about with no thought. Without classification; dirty, clean. A few patterns he knew, floral amalgams dreamt by suits – in black, in blue, in grey – put together, altogether technicolor; they were hers. He strained and found nothing for him, there. Nothing of him.

The sheets, blue, with wrinkles pouring across the bed’s sides. Not a container – not for such gales. Not adequate enough. He had pulled his own bed out to feel the dimensions. Bought a new tape measure; the old one, battered, useless, long gone. He slept on the ground, just next to it. While awake, grasping and pressuring each edge, forming his own wrinkles. Replicants. She spoke. They shifted. He reached, desperate. They dance around, alight with a sinking fire that only he feels. A burning they share, but he bears. The wrinkles. What could he do? The wrinkles. Taunting him – too parabolic to track. Too brief. So much he cannot understand. So much. Lost.

Old habits returned. Renewed on the underside of his table. Kept in darkness – where he knew he left them.

“Bill,” his father’s voice, fresh with frost, “Why in the fucking Hell do we have to talk about this again?”

Bill kept each day since she had left them. Records that he bled, and remembered. Nothing could be felt forever, so he cut and hid them somewhere he knew his father would never misplace. Would never abandon.

“This isn’t your Goddamn property. You have no – no Goddamn right, Bill. I pay the...I’m trying. Damn it. I’m just...trying. Bill. It’s for you to do homework on, and we...I mean, we eat here, Bill. You shouldn’t just go destroying the table that way.”

Each day a slice. Just on the underside; a place no person looked, a place kept in the upside down. A place no person would bother measuring.

In time, the 6th grade textbook came around to circles. Their perfection, something beyond quaking human hands, was what Bill admired most. Each in his teacher’s classroom he named. Imagined lives for them; they would envelope in times of need, spiral in times of peace.

Then began the gobbling.

Consumption was taught. Dissection. He ripped them apart; shredded for satisfaction. Undid and recreated at will; became reliably malignant – a bent mind put to crooked task. He began measuring.

The knife he now left on his table was suited for this task. He began at once, without noticing. Homeless and desperate. Reaching out with limp force; his wrist finding a tug, an aim. Gauging into anything with a memory for him. With patterns he could trace, and cross, and lose and keep. Just for him.

With ease, he cut into his table. Permanence. Counting.

Each night, Bill would ignore the repetitions around him, the false security of files and strands and 36x24 and laundry and Home, and retreat to the underneath for another stay. Another statement. Welcome, he’d whisper. You are welcome. Yet nothing back. Back.

This crept inward. He crawled. It was unsustainable.

He was taught this – or against it. He tried to remember.

“Well, no, Bill, no circle can have a circumference of infinity. I don’t even...well, I’m not even –”

Bill had heard enough – then. Buried in the library stacks, forgotten, he taught himself enough to avoid it, again. He inquired and searched and the world yielded. With saw and pencil, with impunity and disregard, he designed a favorable world. One of logic and precision. One filtered through his beloved methodologies. Perfection. Social graces put to the equations of his mind; a smile become circumference, a handshake become a radius, a donut become pie. Until her, and Home.

The fractal of his life.

Bill attempted to touch his way, to cut. But, even in the disarray after Her, his mind found its path. For months, he wondered if he could come back. Find his way. And, one day, Bill looked up toward his wonders, his carvings, and saw a conclusion.

And he devised a plan.

...

On the 364th day, it worked.

Fittingly, she inspired him. Her final words revived him.

They were seated 5 inches and 2 centimeters apart; in the under approximately 100 times she was beside him, she kept herself on the seat to his right. His father sat across from them both. A discolored, muted sea parted them, each windswept and spent, but, always, Bill would keep her, waves of fresh lavender, close.

“Bill, never be afraid to ask. Questions are always the start of something new.”

He came to understand that he must ask Her, that he must pursue. It was not a matter of a hypothesis failed, or a field calculation gone askew. Of course it had been Her; of course he had observed Her. Bill’s pursuit drew inspiration from repetition – the comfort and thrill of redundancy. His resentment, toward an affectation kept away, was self-serving. Survival meant avoidance. Yet a map’s impermanence begs improvement. Redesign, new measurements. Bill believed he could plan this new world. To embrace it. He could marry a new truth to his boxed reality. To the life he spent contained by calculation: a willing prisoner, a gifted warden.

Free from obligation, from laborious requirements, he visited the grocery store each day. His path was immaculate; a treasure beyond the confines of worth. Something entirely himself. Sightlines never more than 29 yards and 2 feet from the entrance; visibility gaps of less than 2 and a half seconds; completion time 11:59, and entirely repeatable. Twice he was asked if he required help or assistance. Twice, he responded:

“No, thank you. I’m just heading Home now.”

Finding Her again was forgone, so, when she arrived, he calmly completed his loop.

He lingered at the Coinstar machine by the automatic doors.

He waited just over 6 seconds before exiting the door.

He unlocked his car, put the key in the ignition, and followed Her.

He allowed himself 20 to 25 yards, depending on the curve or the turn, and accounted for her accelerations and decelerations. He glanced at the trees and the distance – at times beside him and closing in, huddling – while freely passing the familiarities around him. He had never been in this neighborhood before; he lived here.

He parked 199 feet from Her car.

Now, he watches, and he waits.

...

He steps on no cracks approaching her door. He counts 73. He looks straight at his hand: knuckles curled with precision, purpose, but empty, so unfamiliar and just filled with space and air. Her door’s flat matte black is cracked, and he can’t possibly trace each beginning to its end – nor back again. It is beginning to show a bit of discolored white underneath. He glances at the aged, rusted oval rested just above his hand’s position. But he can’t be sure – not yet.

He knocks on the door with his bare knuckles.

Bill watches his own foot tapping, memorizing its foreign, creaking tempo; he finds this, a task of self, and control, difficult. Infuriating. The door begins to open.

He ends and begins with his mouth agape.