Things are starting to get repetitive, for Sam more than the others.
“Have you ever looked into the eye of a devil?” he asks dramatically, one hand on the switch beside the black window. “The eye of a devil?” he asks.
Rick grunts. Every time, a different grunt.
It always starts here in the observation room, overlooking the test chamber. Sometimes it starts after Sam gets shot, but usually we’re just moments before the lights turn on. Usually we don’t know about the gun yet.
Either way, it always takes me a moment to reassemble the mind, to recall where I am in the loop. In the end, I guess it doesn’t matter, but a man goes a little crazy when he’s not sure what universe he’s in.
Our group is reflected in the glass at this slight angle that makes the four of us look like we have big heads, oversized brains, apt to burst. In subtle ways, I am starting to notice how we’re falling apart. Our skin droops. Hair falls out. Clothing disintegrates. We are echoes far from their origin. Last time around the loop, I lost my wedding ring. Damn thing turned to dust.
Sam, smirking, always smirking, waits a moment and asks, “Have you ever known true true true darkness?”
“Quit the bullshit,” says Rick, the engineer.
Gruff, honest, and far too old for space travel, Rick is my favorite member of the group. He called Sam’s experiment a “design flaw that could end all life as we know it,” and still he came along, probably just to say I told you so, which he would do plenty of times, not long from now.
“My apologies, Rick,” says smirking Sam. At this point, I can say what Sam will say before he says it. He shrugs twice. He says, “I’m only only trying to prepare you. A lot of people, first time they see it, they burst into tears for no reason. First time I saw it, I couldn’t sleep for a week. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t sleep.”
“Jesus, Sam. Thanks for the warning,” says my wife, Susan.
When our marriage counselor told us to get more involved with each other’s work, I don’t think this was what was meant. Sam never said anything about bringing my wife along. In retrospect, this makes sense, but only Sam could make us believe it was important to have a historian on the moon.
Says Sam, “Best to look in the corner of the room of the room first. Slowly bring your eyes to the center, where you’ll see see it floating there, staring back at you. First time I saw it, I couldn’t sleep for a week.”
“Turn on the lights,” I say. “We’re ready.”
Rick says, “Turn on the lights. We’re ready.”
Sam looks at me, then Rick, brow furrowed with confusion, as if he isn’t quite sure what he thinks he heard. The other thing I’ve learned is that the others are usually reset each time we switch universes, so unlike me, they don’t know they’ve been trapped in an infinite loop of déjà vu.
I say, “Impatience doesn’t look good on you, Rick.”
Sam says, “Impatience doesn’t look good on you, Rick.”
Jacob, the activist, bites his lip and takes a small step backward. He’s looking ill, but you can’t tell if that’s from motion sickness or the fact that he’s died so many times recently. He should’ve never been invited here.
“Ladies and ladies and gentle gentlemen,” says Sam, the smirking scratched record, “may I present to you, the first artificially created black hole.”
He flips the switch once, but I hear the click twice. Inside the test chamber, the lights flash, filling an enormous white cube, so pristine and flawless that the corners and edges are imperceptible, and there in the center, an impossibly perfect black sphere, floating in a white prison.
Susan takes my hand and squeezes.
Sometimes she whispers, “I can see myself.”
The eye of the devil never stops staring, and you can feel it like the strict gaze of a parent who has taught you to fear what has created you. It will consume and create us, recycle us, again and again and again until we are used up, dust.
Jacob pulls a gun and shoots Sam in the chest.
A few times, I tried to stop this from happening. A few times, I started the loop by shoving Jacob to the ground and taking his gun. But sometimes the gun wasn’t there until he needed it, it would appear in his belt-loop like a bad film cut. Sam always wound up dead, even if no gun went off, an exit wound would splash pieces of his spine across the observation window.
This time, I don’t feel like interfering.
Susan screams. Rick stumbles backward, falling to his ass. He cries out, “I fucking told you so!” Sam clutches at his chest as he slides down to the floor, smearing blood on the wall behind him, over the faint pink echo of earlier smears.
He says, “Have you ever looked into the eye of the devil?”
“The devil?” he says.
Jacob shoots the window next. Impossibly fast, the window is vaporized, and just as quickly our bodies are yanked like kites into a tornado, stripped down to atoms inside the demon’s pupil, crushed into a singular mass, erased entirely from existence. Then we are regurgitated, reformed, recycled.
MIKE (#234)
I’m always first.
We become Mike Jenson. We are teaching sixth grade physics. We pass out tests that half the kids failed, saying things like, “Good improvement, guys,” in my voice, our voice, this voice, one voice.
The bell rings. Thank God.
The students leave like there’d been a bomb threat. Oh so thankful for the respite of lunch break, we’re quick to close the door behind George, also known as “dandruff boy” whenever we talk to Susan about him.
Our stomach gurgles.
Susan made our lunch today. On the Susan diet, we eat no wheat. We open the paper bag to find an apple, a yogurt, and a Hershey kiss. This is the same thing we ate yesterday. We wonder, Is this happiness for me? We imagine divorcing her. We wonder where the passion went. Rumbling stomach aside, we throw the lunch away, and sometimes there are already crumpled brown lunch bags in there, echoes of earlier loops. Sometimes we eat the lunch and die a little.
We always end up at the vending machine in the teacher’s office. We always flirt with the pretty substitute teacher with the southern accent and amber hair. We always pick something different from the machine. This time, Snickers.
On the walk back to our classroom, we watch a plane fly overhead and we wish that we could somehow transport into one of those seats and go wherever it was going, no matter where, no matter what.
Inside the room, there’s Sam.
“Michael, Michael, Michael,” he says, opening his arms for a hug. Living in this neighborhood, we’re not used to suits and shiny shoes, so it takes a moment to place this billionaire in a shack of a classroom. “You look surprised.”
“It’s been a while.”
“Too long.”
“Are you just passing through?”
“Sit,” he says, pointing to my desk. “You’re the reason I’m here.”
We sit in the chair where our students normally sit while Sam takes the cushioned recliner we consider our throne, commandeering what is ours as he always has, the pompous prick. We feel like a dog trained by fear around him, like he might kick us if we didn’t stay out of his way. We feel pathetic.
“I’m here to recruit you,” says Sam with a smirk full of small print.
“For what?”
“Your dream job. Your dream since college.”
“What’s that?”
“Your dream since college,” he repeats.
We ignore the echo. “I’m doing it already,” we lie.
He gives the classroom a quick once-over, then claps his hands. “I need a logic man like you,” he says. “A logic man like you. I’ve always been impressed with the way your mind works, Mike. You’ve got a mind like no one else.”
“I’m flattered.”
He reclines in our chair, puts his feet on our desk, and slowly folds his hands over his chest. “You can see things at every angle. That’s rare, I’ve come to find. I’ve come to find that’s rare. People are so fixed these days. People lack creativity. They consider themselves logical but really that means really that means they’ve locked to one frame of mind. Allied with one answer. They’ve trapped themselves. Logic, Mike, logic is recognizing there is more than one answer to every question.” He leans forward and says, “I want you to help me find those answers.”
“I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” we admit, noticing the clock on the wall, anticipating the end-of-lunch bell. We hate that bell. “The kids will be back soon, Sam. I’ve got fifth period.”
“Beginner physics. I know.” Sam stands up. Sometimes his jacket is tattered and stained with blood. “There’s no interview process, Mike. If you say yes, you’re on the team. We’re leaving tomorrow morning. We’re running the collider within the end of the month. I want you to be there for that.”
“Collider? You built a collider?”
“You thought I wouldn’t?”
“For what?” we ask.
We can’t believe our ears when Sam says, “Making universes.”
Outside, the bell rings, but we barely hear it. We stand, always in the shadow of our old roommate, and looking up at him we say, “Like we talked about.”
“Just like we talked about.”
We remember those long nights, stoned out of our minds, journals open and pencils scratching, writing down every exotic thought that crossed our minds. It was sophomore year we thought of the machine that could create new worlds, and we saw it then in Sam’s glazed eyes that he would make it happen one day.
We shake hands.
Once Sam leaves, the kids arrive, and we stand at the front of the room and we wonder what Susan will think about this. With a smile, we realize that we don’t really give a shit. We ask the students to pass in their homework.
RICK (#234)
We are cursing a wrench, condemning the tool to hell for all eternity, cursing this whole blasted engine, and for a second we’re tempted to throw the piece of shit wrench across the hangar and give up for the day. But we are Rick and we never let a job go unfinished. We focus. We get the bolt tightened.
“Hey, Rick!” shouts a voice from the enormous open doors.
We moan. Third interruption this morning. Did they want this rocket fixed or not? A little privacy would’ve been nice. We hold up a hand to shield the glare of sun on cement, but can’t tell who’s coming.
“Yeah?”
The shape becomes a man, Sam, sometimes with bullet wound, always smirking, and he reaches out to shake our hand. We stare at those perfectly trimmed fingernails and we look at our own greasy hands, and we gladly spread some of the juice of manual labor into this bastard’s soft palm.
“Got a towel?” asks Sam.
“On the cart behind you,” we say, nodding.
Sam wipes clean his hand and says, “Let’s start over.”
“A little late for that,” we say, and we remember the stolen patents, and we wonder how he hid his tracks, and we wish we wish we wish we could prove that he’d stabbed us in the back. We want to punch his face in.
“I have a job for you.”
We’re stunned. “You’re really asking me this?”
He nods. “We did it, Rick.”
“Did what?”
“We birthed a black hole.”
“It worked?”
“All systems stable.”
We want to smash that smirk off his skull with the wrench in our hand, but the bastard could be telling the truth. We ease off the anger. We ask questions. We want specifics. We’re impressed. The bastard actually did it.
“Show me pictures.”
“That’s the funny thing about it,” says Sam. “That’s the funny thing about it.”
We’re not sure if we heard him twice, but it seems that way. We shrug the déjà vu aside and ask, “About what?”
Sam says, “I said the pictures never turn out. It’s unphotographable.”
Sometimes Sam says, “Have you ever known true darkness?”
We sense that something is wrong with him. There’s an odd disconnect between his eye movement and his body movement, like a video where the audio is off sync and the lips are moving faster than the words form. We ask about other people he’s told about this. We’re the first. We want to know how soon we can leave.
He says, “As soon as soon as you finish this rocket. Who do you think is funding the launch?”
We hate this man. We only recently finished paying off the debt owed for lawyers failing to get back what was ours, thanks to this one man, this man who we could kill with one swing. We offer a handshake to this devil.
“Raincheck,” he says, smirking, walking away.
Sometimes we do kill him.
SUSAN (#234)
We are Susan. We are getting dressed. Suburban home. Los Angeles, California. We know these things, we have her thoughts. This morning we are so very happy our husband is not on this planet.
Black dress, pulled tight over our curves, we touch our breasts when we straighten the straps. We are happy with how we look. Kiss the mirror, leave red lipstick. We can’t even remember the last time we wore this lipstick for Mike.
We take a taxi to a penthouse. Sam’s penthouse.
He’s not there, but we expected this. The doorman buzzes us in. We check our hair in the reflection of the elevator door, waiting, waiting, waiting, the numbers ticking down out of order, 29, 28, 27, 28, 27, 26, 25, until finally, ding, the doors open and we step inside, high heels clicking. We have a key to Sam’s penthouse, we twist the knob with our manicured hands.
Spacious. Excessive. So very Sam.
We go immediately to the bedroom. We drape our coat over the back of a tall leather desk chair. The bed is full of pillows. Soft blankets. We’ve missed this bed, since Sam’s been away. It hasn’t been the same. We sigh. But this is still good.
Crawling into bed, we roll onto our back and find the remote control from the nightstand, and with this we turn on a large television. In a few minutes, Sam’s face appears on the screen. Sometimes, he has blood dripping out of his mouth, but it’s funny because we never mention the blood. He’s in his office, sitting now on a chair so that we see his whole body.
“My love dove,” he says.
“I’ve missed you,” we say in Susan’s whine.
“We don’t have much time.”
“I hate when you say that.”
Sam removes his shirt, one button at a time. We unzip our dress.
“Mike might suspect something.”
We roll our eyes. “So what?”
We move our hands to our thin black underwear. Sam removes his pants. With the dip of a finger, we begin to writhe in pleasure on Sam’s bed while he moans and strokes for us to watch 239,000 miles away.
Suddenly Sam says, “Oh. Shit. Fuck. They’re ready. They’re calling me.”
We hear a buzz on his end of the line. He pulls on his pants and walks off screen to answer the phone. We stop fingering ourselves, leaving our hand there unfulfilled, letting out a long sigh. In our mind, we think, This is the last time I do this.
“Baby?” says Sam.
“Yeah?”
“I have to go, but but I have to ask you something.”
“Okay.”
“Will you come here? Will you join the team here?”
We thought he’d never ask. Without hesitation, nearly brought to tears, we tell him that of course we want to come. We couldn’t stand going another eight months without fucking him for real.
“What will I do there?” we ask.
“You can be an outside consultant. With multiple universes, babe, you never know what part of history of history we might be able to visit.”
“And Mike?” we ask.
“I’ll take care of Mike,” says smirking Sam. He buttons up his shirt. “We’re running the collider the collider again,” he says. “I think we’ve got it figured out this time. I think this is the start of something big, love dove. I’ll call you after to tell you all about it, and make plans for get getting you here.”
“I love you,” we say.
The screen goes white. We collapse into the soft blankets. We grin so wide it makes our eyes water. We laugh and roll about, feeling like a teenager intoxicated with first love. Sometimes, on the television, the eye of the devil appears, watching us from its prison in another universe, as if it has found us wandering.
JACOB (#234)
Our mouth is to a megaphone. We bark across the lawn, “We’re not put on this earth to destroy this earth!” We look at fellow protestors, cheering, clapping, our people, our brethren. We see Megan in the audience and our heart isn’t the only muscle that grows at the sight of her.
We bark, “Leave the destruction to the gods! We are not gods!”
Across the lawn looms the cement headquarters of Invotech, who every other week seems to push the boundaries of safe science, like kids playing with a toy chest full of nuclear warheads. We’re ashamed to admit our father worked for them, a child like all the rest, luckily killed by cancer before doing anything irrevocable. We shake a fist in the air at that cement doomsday factory and bark, “You can’t decide the fate of the universe!”
No surprise, there’s no media coverage. Some of the protestors are yawning. We want to tell them not to give up, but this is the eighth protest this year, and no one likes to come up empty handed that many times.
“Change takes time!” we yell, mostly to our fading peers.
Megan catches my attention, motioning for me to get off the stage.
We slip away from the crowd for a moment to kiss. She tastes like hot chocolate and lip balm. She shivers and we rub her arms and tell her she can go home if she wants, that we can handle this. She says, “We’re in this together.”
“I wonder if they’ll send someone out,” we say.
“They never do.”
“Today feels different,” we say.
“People are starting to leave,” she says.
“It’s not about quantity, Megan. Even if only one person shows up, that means someone cared enough to show up.” We see movement from the headquarters, a big door opening, and we think we see a car approaching. “See that?” we ask.
“Someone’s coming?”
The protestors behind us fall quiet, now hearing the engine of the car, a black sedan, slowly coming to a stop about ten yards from us. One male gets out. We recognize him immediately. Who wouldn’t? It’s Samuel Davidson, the founder, owner, devil himself.
“Mr. Edwards?” calls out Sam.
“Yeah?”
“I’d like to speak with you privately, if you please.”
Megan squeezes our hand. Our heart pounds.
“Of course,” we call back, and we try to walk toward him but Megan is reluctant to release her grip. We kiss her, hold her face, her soft skin, gray eyes, and we tell her how much we love her.
She says, “Don’t trust him.”
We release her hand and approach the man by the sedan, who steps aside the back door with trained grace and says with a smirk, “After you after you, Jacob.”
We get inside. Spacious. So very Sam.
The driver is hidden behind a black partition.
Sam slips into the seat across from us. We’re offered a glass of merlot, the best glass of wine we’ve ever tasted. It warms the gut. Sometimes, we decline the wine, refusing the temptations of the devil. Sometimes it’s chardonnay. Either way, he opens with the same line:
“Have you ever known true darkness?”
We think, Do you count?
We say, “Have you ever known when enough is enough?”
“I’ve seen into the center of the universe, Jacob.” Sam folds one leg over the other, straightening a wrinkle. “I think there’s plenty more to know.”
“At what cost?”
Sam shakes his head. “You take this too personal.”
“You could destroy the universe.”
“Jacob, Jacob, Jacob...” he shakes his head. “The universe will be fine.”
“If this is how you get us to stop protesting, it won’t work.”
“I’m not here to stop you. I want to prove it to you.”
“Prove what?”
“That we’re not monsters.”
We laugh. We think of dinner table conversations with our father about how science is God’s way of telling us that we’re capable of doing better, of outdoing God, of staking claim to the whole universe, manifest destiny style. We were sickened by the idea then, we’re sickened by the idea now.
Skeptical, we ask, “Prove it how?”
“I want you to come to the testing site. I want you to see into the eye.”
We cock our head to one side. “The eye?”
Sam nods. He says, “The eye of your creator, Jacob.”
Already we’re thinking this is our chance. This is our chance. We’ve been out on this fucking lawn for months trying to get some attention, laughed at by the news media, ignored by all, and finally we get a break and it’s better than we could’ve dreamed. There must be a catch, but we can’t worry about that now. We lean forward and say, “I don’t know how you’ll change my mind, but I’m willing to give you a chance, Sam.”
He smirks in reply, knocks on the partition window, and says, “Garage.”
Sometimes, he says, “First time I saw it, I didn’t sleep for a week.”
SAM (#234)
Our hand hovers over the red button. We used to think it was cheesy design to make this button red, but, then again, if there was any button we didn’t want to accidentally press, it was this one. A collider initiated without preparation could destroy the entire compound and leave a crater the size of Manhattan on the surface of the moon. We’re glad the button stands out.
“Ready when you are,” says Hank.
“Cameras rolling?” we ask.
“Affirmative.”
“Shields up?”
“Of course, sir.”
We feel the energy of the button beneath our palm. We envision the wealth and fame of a successful test. We rationalize a failure. This is only the first test, this is only the first test, we repeat in our buzzing mind.
“Sir?” says Hank.
“I’m fine. On three.”
We count down to one. Sometimes we have last-second concerns that we’re about to destroy the entire known universe. Sometimes we imagine receiving a Nobel Prize before a crowd of thousands, thanking our family, our friends, our colleagues. Either way, we press the red button.
In the chamber below, invisible to the eye, atoms explode. Atoms reassemble. Atoms are crushed, exploded, eviscerated, expanded, stretched, and broken. Dimensions are twisted. In less than less than an instant, a black sphere appears in the middle of the chamber, floating, suspended by electromagnets, the size of a basketball. In a blink it is gone.
We aren’t even aware that we’ve fallen over. Hank, too. We pick ourselves up from the carpet and move to the window. The test chamber is empty.
“Wild,” Hank says. He wipes sweat off his brow. Then he wipes sweat off his brow again.
“It worked for a second,” we say.
“Did you see it?” asks Hank.
We think a moment, then reply, “It was more like it saw me.”
“I know how you feel.”
“What do you think went wrong?” we ask, picturing a thousand different things that could be altered, from the strength of the magnets, the position of the sun relative to the moon, to the unpredictability of subatomic chaos.
Hank says, “Maybe it just needs to be faster.”
We laugh. “Crank it up, then.”
He leaves the room to consult the staff. We lean against the wall, staring at the red button, thinking of people we could bring up here to help.
We think about Mike Jenson, though we try not to, seeing as we’re fucking his wife. He was a brilliant kid in college, just never took advantage of it. We picture him begging for a chance to work with us.
What about Rick Carson? He’d know how to fix the collider better than anyone. Even if he’s still sore about that business with the patent lawsuit, he’d never let this opportunity pass him by. We think about trying to get some snapshots from the video feed, for proof, since Rick might want to bash our head in with a wrench before taking our word for it.
We look down into the test chamber.
Sometimes it’s empty. Sometimes, the eye is looking back at us.
In the next instant, Sam is dying on the floor, gripping his gunshot wound, and he doesn’t look very surprised. We’re separate again, touching our bodies, mystified by the concept of individual existence, individual minds.
During some loops, I’m not the only one who remembers.
I recall immediately that Sam was fucking my wife, and my wife, Susan, she turns to me because she knows what I’ve seen, and Rick, he wishes he still had that wrench. Jacob is in the middle of the room staring at the gun in his hand.
Wind is whistling through a bullet hole in the glass. In this universe, the glass is stronger. Here, we always get a little more time. Sometimes Jacob shoots himself in the throat. Sometimes he kills all of us. This time, he says, “The fate of the universe is not in our hands.”
Sam groans, “I couldn’t sleep for a week.”
I look at Susan and say, “I wish you would’ve told me.”
For a moment, she’s more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen. She lets a tear roll down her face and she says, “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
Jacob says, “We are not meant for weapons of mass destruction.”
He shoots Sam in the face.
Rick is crawling across the floor. When he passes, he says, “I fucking told him this would happen.” He adds, “There’s an emergency shutdown button on the desk. I think we have time.”
I say, “Don’t bother.”
Jacob says, “Our first sin was creating fire.”
Then he shoots himself. Behind him, splattered in red, the window cracks a little more, the devil’s eye pulling at our souls. Rick arrives at the desk. He presses the emergency shutdown button.
I turn to Susan and say, “I want a divorce.”
Then the black hole explodes. Everything is made to nothing.
Things are starting to get repetitive, more for Sam than anyone.
“Have you ever ever looked into the eye of a devil?” he asks, smirking.