Unable to sleep (unfinished work, lab reports) (don’t ask, don’t ask), but tomorrow’s pickup day, so I make myself get out of bed to take out the trash. As I’m walking to the gate, I see myself, back from taking out the trash.
He’s carrying a scale under his arm. I’m not (yet). I want to ignore him; I hope he’s going to ignore me. At least the moon is up; the moon is fat and yellow and full. If there are now two of me all over again, there aren’t two of those (yet (checking) ok). The air already smells like jasmine, just like it did last night and the night before. I try not to look twitchy in front of myself, trusting he doesn’t believe killing me will settle anything.
“Hey,” the other me says, walking through the gate and presenting as real friendly. “I know this is weird, but I was wondering: could you give me your bag for a second? I’m doing an experiment.” He’s perky, setting his scale on the ground exactly so, like in his world the lab reports he gets only ever contain good news.
I hand him the bag. He hefts it a bit, then gets on the scale, going, “Hmm,” before setting the bag down on the walkway and getting on the scale again.
“Yes?” I’m curious as to what I’m going to figure out, as he weighs himself without the bag.
“7.27 kilos and change. Definitely lighter than the bag I carried.”
“So?”
“Maybe, as an experiment, after you’ve tossed the bag in the bin, on your way back, when you run into yourself, check to see if the bag you are carrying is lighter or heavier or just the same as the bag you’re holding now.”
Not quite a nightmare, just a (nother) time loop: science. Hopefully all this will signify something. There will be an after and when it arrives I’ll climb back into my bed and there won’t be four or five looping me’s demanding I fix things. Maybe when the loop closes it’ll leave just a lighter version of myself behind, taking my panic away with it.
We part ways. I toss my bag in the bin. I look around, wondering when it’s going to happen, that shimmer I’m not supposed to notice which will set me on this loop of meeting myself taking out the trash, over and over, observing the weight of garbage, forever. But there’s no shimmer, just the usual Thursday night: house after house with bins in their driveways, wheels pointing outward, jasmine and trees and the banged up flying saucer in the vacant lot across the street.
The lights are on, so I think why not, let’s pay Oscar a visit. Maybe all I need to do to break the loop is hang out with neighbors more instead of digging deeper, lonelier ruts. I ring the doorbell thingy on the saucer.The top springs open and Oscar’s green furry head with the googly eyes pops out.
“Hey, Oscar,” I say.
“What do you want, Shel?”
“The funniest thing just happened to me tonight, Oscar. I ran into myself while I was taking out the trash.”
“Did he hit you up for money?”
“No,” I say.
“Then what do you have to complain about?”
“I have so many things to complain about, Oscar, you would not believe, but you wouldn’t happen to know anything about time loops?”
“They stink.” Oscar cocks his head and looks at me warily. “You’re probably going to drag one in here and mess up my clean white rugs.”
“If you’re talking to me you’re already caught in it.”
His eyes begin to swirl, even more googly than usual. “Thanks a lot, Shel. You want to come inside or you want to wait outside with your butt hanging out like a chicken?”
People always say stepping inside flying saucers is risky (they whisper probes, like you know what they’re talking about), but me and Oscar get along okay. Still, with all the weird physics and whatnot I can easily imagine my loop fracturing until there are dozens of me perpetually taking out the trash. Then again, maybe Oscar might know how to fix things.
Inside, the saucer is huge and resembles one of those bachelor pads from the 1960s, split level and gleaming. There’s a whole bunch of Oscars, all green, wooly, short, getting baked, with googly eyes and impossible to tell apart. A bunch are on couches in the conversation pit watching classic Warriors on the widescreen (Game 3, 2017 Finals, Durant slides the dagger into Lebron); tucked between them is one of me.
Apparently, the last thing I tried didn’t work.
Even more Oscars are just around, doing alien stuff, experiments. I wouldn’t be surprised if Oscar had looping issues of his own.
Oscar waves a gadget at me, which begins to purr. “A mild one. Smell this.” He turns a knob then holds the gadget under my face; it smells like the unwashed bottom of a compost bin. Just awful enough I feel time unclenching itself around me.
“What am I supposed to do now?” I ask.
“Pay me fifty bucks.”
“I’m standing here in my bathrobe; does it look like I got fifty bucks on me?”
“Fine. You could smoke out and watch the Dubs with us while your loop breaks. Or are you up for a little experimentation?” He gestures at my copy on the couch.
“I have to go to work tomorrow,” I say.
“Want to go look at the moon, see what it’s really like?”
“Another time, Oscar.”
“Do you want me to tell you something about your condition?” The other Oscars stop what they’re doing and stare at us, anticipating the speech that’s going to explain everything about what I’m going through and how nothing can fix a goddamn thing about it.
I can feel my shoulders tensing. “What’s there to know about my condition?”
“Look, you’re not the only one here who’s a copy of some original who’s no longer around. You’ve got symptoms, Shel, like the tendency to get sucked into time loops, and nothing’s going to make them stop. It sucks that you have to live with it, but living with it is not as bad as you think it is.”
He’s from an advanced civilization: of course he would know everything about what’s wrong with me.
“I don’t need to hear that. I just need to know how to fix this loop.”
“Fine! Ignore me when I’m trying to help you.”
“I’m sorry, Oscar,” I say. “I don’t mean to be like this.”
“Relax and things will take care of themselves. Venmo the money to me tomorrow. And sort your recyclables for once in your life; you’re killing the planet.”
It’s not as bad as before, but I feel the loop tugging. “Do you have a scale I can borrow?”
“What do you want it for?”
“It’s for an experiment of my own.”
“A hundred bucks. I’m not a tool lending library, Shel.”
“Fine.”
Back outside the saucer, still looping, who knows what’s in my lungs, and now I owe Oscar money, but at least I have a frighteningly accurate alien bathroom scale under my arm, just like I’m supposed to. I wonder when I’m going to see myself again (not yet (checking) ok). I pull my bag out of the bin and pick out some plastic and cans for the recycling, before tossing the rest, breathing and breathing myself closer to calm.
That’s when the me from the saucer catches up. At least he’s dressed in something more than a bathrobe.
“I know you’re in a rush to fix your loop,” he says. “But can I tell you something?”
“Why not,” I say, because when you’re in a loop apparently everyone thinks you have all the time in the goddamn world.
“That Oscar you spoke to, he’s like Oscar #7 or something. Oscar #15 told me back where they’re from, the original Oscar used to keep at least two dozen copies. He made them do all the heavy lifting dirty work stuff for his time machine EZ CopyYourself business, while Mr. Original Oscar looked busy and chatted with customers. Most originals would make their copies stay in crates that smelled of garbage – that way everyone would know who the real originals were because those were the ones who smelled nice. But #7 still thought his original was an okay person, because he thought there was still some empathy there, you know? That his original was one of the nice ones.
“Then one day something went ridiculously wrong with all the time machines and just about everybody on their planet died. Oscar #7 and a bunch of other Oscars found a flying saucer and came here.
“But #7, he keeps thinking it was his fault, even though he knows it wasn’t. That there was something he could have done, some warning light or memo he missed. So while you might see Oscars all over the place, that one doesn’t leave the saucer much. Which is a shame, because he’s a nicer guy than he lets on.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“You know exactly why I’m telling you this.” He gives me the look, like he’s having more parenthetical thoughts than I want to know, then he waves. “Let’s hang out the next time you visit the saucer.”
(I’m trying to figure out how I’m feeling).
I think I’m angry, maybe resentful with myself just for feeling that way, like when I found out the way time machines work is by sending you away whenever and at the same time leaving a copy of you behind, and now you’re not you: you’re just a copy, one prone to time fuckups like loops or worse. Mostly feeling helpless and stuck and stupid for thinking I’d actually get to visit the past, endlessly waiting for my original to come back and erase me, scared at how easily I could do that to myself. The blinking light on the button anyone else would have pressed in time.
I don’t want to be the person who would make someone feel like that, even though of course that’s exactly what I (that other me) just did. I want to be the person who does the opposite of that.
A little bit more of the loop advances, and if I can just get it right I won’t have to keep doing this. On the walkway there I am, having just left my house to take out the trash. I look so miserable. I have to remember that he is the one who is stuck in the early part of the loop, not me, and that I’m supposed to look perky when I interact with him, so he won’t think I’m there to murder him.
The loop commands, so I say, “I know this is weird, but I was wondering, can I hold your bag for a second? I’m doing an experiment.”
He hands me the bag; I get on the scale, I step off the scale, repeating the process without the bag, just like how that happier me did it. I’m about to tell him, “6.78 kilos: definitely lighter,” but the scale uploads directly into my brain that it’s only me that’s getting lighter, not the trash. I go hmm, and he says, “Yes?”
He looks so much like me, worried about all the results, looping and looping, but he isn’t any more me than myself, the me from the saucer or that other version I ran into, the scientist. Why should any of us be worrying?
So I drop the scientist act and just try to be myself in front of myself.
That’s when I see something wonderful. I say, “Hey, this might be just a byproduct of the loop we’re sharing, but you should check out that raccoon up in our apple tree – isn’t that the biggest one you’ve ever seen?”
For a moment I wonder which of us is which, the raccoon staring down at us, the moon, that other me, myself. Another raccoon cuddles up beside the first; are they doubling as well? No, they’re not the same: they’re just close. I feel awed to be in their presence, like I could float away on the slightest of breaths.
“Has this happened to you already?” the other me asks. “Are we still in the loop?”
“I think it’s more of a tangle at this point,” I tell him.
I can see the dread welling up in him, the epiphany yielding to the same familiar ruts, and I don’t want him to feel that way.
“You know what?” I tell the other me. “I don’t think our original is ever going to come back. Building another time machine won’t fix our condition. We’re going to be like this, whether there’s just one of us or a bunch of us. But that version of us will never get to see what we are seeing, right here in this moment. So we’re not copies, we’re just similars. And I don’t want to get rid of you.”
(Now you know).
The two of us just stand there awhile staring, as our thoughts untangle until neither of us are sure we know what the other is thinking.
“I’m going to relax my shoulders now,” the other me says. “You should try to do it too.”
I look at him, and I no longer just see myself. He seems happier, but I think I’m getting happier too, in a way that’s different, but also good (because it’s different).
“When you check in with Oscar, after you drop off the trash, you should stick around.”
“Is he okay?” the other me asks, the one who doesn’t know about Oscar (yet).
“I think we should try being better friends with him. I bet he’s lonely, what with no one but all those copies of himself running around. Anyways, I’m sure after I crawl into bed, if I’m not gone by the time you get back, I’ll come over to visit.”
“Why not?” the other me says. “Anything’s better than tossing around in bed thinking about how it’s only going to get worse.”
We both stare at the raccoons again, or maybe the moon, and I start to giggle, because when things finally make sense, that’s all you can do.
“Ask Oscar to show you the moon, that way at least one of us can see what it’s really like.”
Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s prose can be found in X-Ray, The Pinch, Joyland, Heavy Feather Review and The Offing. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story “Goodwill” was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts.
Featured Artwork:
Destination Zero
Painter and poet Carmen Germain is the author of four poetry collections, the latest being Life Drawing, featured in MoonPath Press (2022). Her paintings and drawings have appeared in various literary art journals, and she has been a visiting artist-scholar at the American Academy in Rome. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, the traditional homeland of diverse Indigenous tribes near the Salish Sea.