THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 75
she could tell—the angle of the light
changed, not in a flash but in a gradual
sweep, like a bare bulb swinging at the
end of a cord. By the time she’d got
around the cul-de-sac, it was morning
again, that same morning, and she was
on her way to the storage lockers to
meet Emily, and they were to begin their
run, to do it all over again—the house
on the lake, the king mattress in the ga-
rage, the motorcyclist, and the grad stu-
dents. The jolly mother with the quiet
teen-age son. And then the disabled
woman and her aide, and the missing
bed frame, the little white drop-leaf
table perched on the mattress stack. The
old woman and the war veteran and the
couples, and at last the tweaker with the
cats and the charred bedroom, slowly
filling up with identical futons like a
bag of microwave popcorn. Then back
to the lockers, and back to Kim’s, the ex
and the assistant, and back to the cul-
de-sac to start again.
It was as if there were two Bevs: the
one who experienced the day for the
first time, and this one, the one she re-
garded as herself, trapped inside the
other. She could read the mind of her
original, could see what she saw, could
feel the body inhabiting her actions.
But she couldn’t shout back, couldn’t
compel the first Bev to change a single
thing: not a movement or a perception,
not a word or a thought. The first dozen
cycles, the first hundred, she screamed
silently at First Bev to wait, just wait,
let me think, let me see. But eventually
she gave up on that. It was clearly one
of the rules of whatever was happen-
ing: nothing could change. She could
only observe.
So she convinced herself that obser-
vation was the way out. There was some-
thing she was supposed to notice, some-
thing the forces of this mad world
wanted her to perceive before she would
be freed to finish her life, to experience
newness every second until death. That’s
what had been taken from her—the ab-
solute pristine uniqueness of each bor-
ing moment of existence. For a long
while (and who knew how much time
was passing outside the loop—seconds?
millennia?—or perhaps the universe was
idling, just waiting for her to finish), she
searched for whatever it was that she
was supposed to find. Somewhere in
the mundane chaos of that ordinary day
there had to be something: a detail she’d
missed the first time, and then again
and again and again. In the jolly wom-
an’s house, something written in the
boy’s notebook. In the silver trailer on
the hill, the yellow meadow of sticky
notes adhering to the fold-down break-
fast table—what did they say? The faces
in photographs in the grad students’
rental. A voice on the radio from the
motorcyclist’s kitchen window. She
would discover the existence of a single
detail, then spend the next dozen cycles
waiting for the moment when she could
seize it, perceive it, fix it in her mind’s
eye. The day, she believed, was not in-
finite. If there was something to be seen,
she would see it, and she’d be liberated,
and relieved of the burden of this ter-
rible, ancient memory.
At least, that’s how she felt in the be-
ginning, or, rather, in what turned out
to be the beginning: her enthusiasm for
the task before her was motivated only
by the promise of release. Then, grad-
ually, she began to forget. First her mem-
ories of life before the loop faded, and
were supplanted by memories of ear-
lier cycles: particularly rewarding runs
of observation and perception that re-
sulted, initially, in extraordinary feats
of deduction; and, later on, in the epiph-
any that it was not necessary to reach
conclusions, only to observe and cata-
logue; and, later still, in the acceptance
of the superfluity even of memory it-
self. Her powerlessness had become a
new kind of power, an infinity lodged
inside the finite. She wondered, while
it was still possible to care about such
things, why she couldn’t have performed
this alchemy during her life before the
loop, transforming her shortcomings as
a mother, a mate, a teacher, into this
magisterial indifference.
Was this how gods were born? Had
she become one? A time arrived when
she knew that’s what she was, a god,
and with that knowledge came a con-
tentment and a pleasure that she had
never known in life. And eventually the
knowledge faded, too. All that remained
was the pleasure, disembodied and lim-
itless, the loop itself nothing more than
a decoration, like the pointless stars
etched onto the bowl of the sky. THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
J. Robert Lennon reads “The Loop.”WHAT’S
THE
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