Repeat

by Neal Pollack

  “That’s just what a girl wants to hear,” said Juliet.

  “Well, it’s true!” he exclaimed.

  The valet brought their keys. Juliet got behind the wheel. Brad stumbled into the passenger seat. He sniffed.

  “Were you smoking before dinner?” Juliet asked. “It stinks.”

  “No, but I had some in the glove compartment.”

  He opened the box. There was a blown-glass pipe, seven inches long and three inches thick, inside, along with a Bic lighter. The little nub of Lemon Lift that he’d put in there for an after-dinner treat had definitely been crisped a little.

  “The valet was smoking my weed,” he said.

  Juliet laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” Brad said. “This stuff is expensive.”

  “Less expensive than that bottle of wine we had in there.”

  “This is bullshit!” Brad said.

  “Calm down.”

  “I won’t calm down!” he said.

  Brad flung open the Prius’s door and stood up, wobbly.

  “Hey!” he shouted toward the valet. “Hey, man.”

  The valet looked up.

  “Did you smoke my weed?”

  “Maybe,” the valet said.

  Brad stepped toward him.

  “Maybe? Well, maybe you should have some respect for other people’s shit.”

  “Honey, don’t,” Juliet said.

  “Honey, don’t,” said the valet mockingly.

  All day, people younger than Brad had been sneering in his face. Well, he was done now with this stupid town and its pampered, entitled residents. His vengeance would begin tonight with this valet at a secret hotel that he’d never be able to afford. Brad stepped up onto the curb. His shoe turned sideways. His ankle followed. A hot shard of pain traveled up his leg.

  “Fuck!” he shouted.

  And he fell into the gutter.

  The valets started howling and pointing. Juliet got out of the driver’s seat and went over to her fallen husband.

  “Are you OK?” she asked.

  “It’s not broken,” he said.

  “It’s not broken,” the valet whined mockingly.

  Juliet looked at him with the anger of a mother bear protecting her cubs.

  “Shut up, you little asshole,” she said. “You’re going to turn forty too someday. We’ll see how you like it.”

  She pulled Brad up by his pits. Brad stood on his good ankle and hobbled into the car. They drove away in silence.

  “Infinite time loop,” he said in the car on the way home.

  “What?” Juliet said.

  “That’s what I pitched to Fox today. A show about an infinite time loop.”

  “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “It’s about a guy who’s trapped in an infinite time loop and doesn’t know how to get out.”

  “You mean like Groundhog Day?”

  “No, more sci-fi. He keeps bounding around to different times of his life, and he can’t get out.”

  “So, like Quantum Leap?”

  “No, not at all. It’s got more comedy in it than that.”

  “Like Hot Tub Time Machine?”

  “No.”

  “Back to the Future?”

  “I wish.”

  “So what is it like then?”

  Brad sighed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Just keep working on it, dear.”

  “They’re not going to buy it. They don’t buy anything.”

  “Well, you can’t just give up.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, you dumbass, you have a family to support.”

  “My ankle hurts,” Brad said.

  “I bet it does,” said Juliet. “I’ll give you some herbs when I get home.”

  The way up to the house had many turns and bumps. The Prius handled it with about as much agility as an armadillo; you got them for the gas mileage, not the handling. Brad felt his dinner sloshing around in his guts like so much reconstituted mozzarella. His ankle throbbed deeply.

  Limping through the front door, Brad saw Linda in the kitchen, mixing up potions.

  “The girls are asleep,” she said.

  “How was it?” asked Juliet.

  “Oh, they were very good. They ate everything I gave them, and then we played Parcheesi and watched some old episodes of The Herculoids. It was very enlightening.”

  “Sounds like it,” Juliet said.

  “How was dinner?” Linda asked.

  Brad staggered to the kitchen sink, leaned over, and unleashed a horrific torrent of vomit.

  “Oh God,” he said.

  “So, not good?” asked Linda.

  “It was great,” said Juliet. “He just had too much to eat, drink, and smoke.”

  “That pretty much describes the 1980s for me,” Linda said.

  The babysitter left. Brad sat on the couch, an herbal salve around his ankle, a mint in his mouth, and an ice pack on his head, watching an episode of 30 Rock on the DVR.

  “Look at that,” he said. “Liz Lemon is a fuckup just like me, but she never has any trouble paying her bills, because she has a job.”

  “Liz Lemon is a fictional character,” said Juliet.

  “My life is a mess,” he said.

  “It’s not that bad, dude. You have a beautiful wife and two girls who love you.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “It should be.”

  “My head hurts. I need to get stoned.”

  “You do not,” said Juliet. “You’ve been stoned all evening and you will get stoned first thing tomorrow.”

  “So what?”

  “So,” she said, “what you need is clarity.”

  “And where am I going to get that?”

  Juliet sat silently, lost in thought, turning her head back and forth, as though she was having a debate with herself.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe what?” Brad said.

  “Hang on a second, I’m thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “On the one hand,” Juliet said to herself, moving her hands up and down as though weighing possibilities, “but on the other . . .”

  “Usually a discussion involves two people,” Brad pointed out.

  “Shh,” she said. “The witch is thinking.”

  The idea of a witch thinking gave Brad a little chub, so he quieted down.

  Finally, after a couple of minutes, Juliet sighed and stood up. “Desperate times . . .” she said. She kissed Brad on the forehead. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  Brad blearily surfed back and forth between SportsCenter and Adult Swim. Juliet disappeared into her sunroom. Brad heard her rummaging around and some clanging and the zapping of the halogen light that she kept over some of her more sensitive crops.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted back to her.

  “I’m busy!” she shouted back.

  “Doing what?”

  “Leave me the fuck alone, dude!” she exclaimed.

  Juliet was the world’s sweetest person, but woe unto the person who bothered her while she was working.

  About fifteen minutes passed, and then she walked through with a basket full of sprigs and sprouts and fungi, like Little Red Riding Hood in cat-eye reading glasses.

  “Need some help?” Brad said.

  “I’ve got this,” she said.

  “Good,” he said, “because I’m having a hard time standing up.”

  Then she went into the kitchen, filled a huge stockpot with water, did some chopping, and boiled things. Brad watched basketball highlights. There was some clinking of glass. A half hour later, at about 1:00 a.m., Juliet returned with a little dr
opper bottle and a glass of water.

  “What the hell have you been doing?” he said.

  “Cooking,” she said.

  “Cooking what?”

  “I want you to drink something.”

  “What is it?” he said. “You witch.”

  She kissed him on the lips.

  “I barfed, you know,” he said.

  “I’m a witch,” she said. “I’ve tasted worse.”

  She took the rubber dropper and plopped four little drops into the water glass, sloshing them around with a spoon.

  “This will relax you,” she said.

  Brad sipped.

  “Drink it all at once,” she said.

  He gulped. It tasted old and weedy and full of secrets.

  “What did I just drink?” he said.

  “Just trust me, you’ll sleep great,” said Juliet.

  “I trust you,” Brad said, “but what are you doing?”

  “It’s an experiment,” she said. “A sort of risky one.”

  “Risky? How?”

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “I think. Now let’s go to bed, old man.”

  Brad limped to the bathroom, changed into his stinky pajama pants, washed his face, and brushed his teeth twice. He felt pleasantly drowsy. In the mirror, his face seemed to shine out in the dingy light.

  This is it, Brad, he thought. This is all you get.

  Juliet was at the doorway of the girls’ room. Cori and Claire were sleeping calmly among the stuffed unicorns and SpongeBob paraphernalia and Amelia Bedelia books.

  “They’re cute,” he said.

  “They’re the best,” said Juliet.

  He wanted to give his daughters so much more than he had. This thought was usually a jumping-off point for some spectacular self-pitying on Brad’s part, but not right now. Juliet’s concoction was making him feel lighter and happier than he’d felt in a while.

  “This stuff is great,” he said. “Why haven’t you given it to me before?”

  “It’s not something you want to take very often,” she said.

  Brad was so sleepy now. He could barely make it into bed. His head was on the pillow before he could even crawl between the sheets. Juliet kissed him lightly on the forehead and then on the lips. She tucked him in tight, like he was a baby.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” she said. “See you soon.”

  “Soon,” Brad said, and then his eyes were closed.

  As he drifted away, Brad could only think of three words. They repeated themselves across his consciousness like a mantra. It wasn’t the mantra he wanted, but sometimes you’re not able to choose.

  Infinite time loop, he thought. Infinite time loop.

  Infinite time loop.

  CHICAGO

  1970

  Brad sensed mostly darkness. There was a little tinge of red around the edges of his perception, like the last thin corona before the sun sank away at night. Mostly, though, it was black. Not scary black, but a comfortable, warm night that would go on forever.

  He also registered warmth. It was so very warm and, what was that feeling? Wet. But it wasn’t wetness like after a shower or swimming. This had a thickness to it, a fluid, gelatinous quality. He was cradled like a ham in aspic. Not that he’d ever eaten a ham in aspic, but he’d seen a photograph of one in a Jacques Pépin cookbook. Maybe the fact that he was thinking in antiquated dinner-party appetizer metaphors meant that he was hungry. But he wasn’t hungry, and he also wasn’t full. Brad had never felt more nourished. Every cell in his body was fed, alive. His neurons snapped with pleasure.

  His limbs were . . . did he have limbs? Maybe. Brad thought he could sense his fingers and toes wiggling. But mostly he just drifted, lost in a vague sea of semiconsciousness. The sounds were wonderful. He heard a kind of white noise, not like what came out of the machine that he and Juliet had bought to drown out the early-morning garbage trucks and leaf blowers and construction hammers. This was something deeper and fuller, a transmission from beyond. It fizzed and crackled, full of mysterious messages, unknowable information. In the middle of it all was a faint, deep throb, a steady pulsation. When it went, Brad sensed it not just in his ears but throughout his whole body. It was life itself, the Mind of God.

  I am the star child, he thought to himself.

  For eternity, it seemed, he drifted like that, with no sense of space or time. All his neuroses, his little pains, his negative and critical thoughts, his financial problems, his petty rivalries, his barely suppressed anger, his low-level weed addiction, his career failures, his bad decisions, his inability to fix his own car, his predilection toward eating salty and spicy foods when he wasn’t really hungry, his eternal frustration that the Cubs were never going to win the World Series ever again, his jealousy, his half-written scripts in a drawer, his unwillingness to fully love his daughters even though they were right there in front of him, his weak and sensitive stomach disappeared into the vast liquid abyss. Brad Cohen was everything and nothing. Like Krishna, he contained multitudes.

  And then it was over.

  Brad felt a pressing on his head, insistent, pneumatic. It shattered his insular paradise, lasting twenty, maybe thirty seconds. But he suddenly had a sense of time; that was a bad sign.

  The pressure ceased. Brad felt suction, as though he was headed up a tube. He twitched his limbs in a panic, sloshing around, and opened his mouth to cry out but tasted only fluid. Then the pressure came again, this time a little longer and a little more forcefully. The pushing was insistent, like he was a skydiver unwilling to leave the plane, or a salmon trying to escape the turbine’s wrath. Brad felt himself moving downward, inevitably and forever.

  But downward out of what?

  He heard a little popping noise, a balloon bursting. His feet became unmoored. Now he really started to flail. He didn’t want to see what was at the end.

  He was being squeezed out of a tunnel by forces he couldn’t control. The pressure kept coming, steady and insistent, for what felt like hours. Brad’s breathing quickened; panic filled his brain.

  Where am I? he thought, now fully conscious. Where am I going? Did I remember to program the DVR?

  Though Brad didn’t know it yet, the answers to those questions were, in order:

  In the womb. Technically, in Chicago.

  Back to the beginning.

  You’re going to have to wait a long time before you see a DVR, buddy.

  Brad felt air on his feet. And then his ankles. Someone grabbed him and began to tug. No, he thought. Nooooooooooo. But it was happening. He slid down. The compression increased the farther he went, inch by inch. It felt like his shoulders were getting crushed. He couldn’t breathe. Not really, anyway. Seconds passed, and he managed to get his lungs to expand and contract. They filled with fluid. He gurgled.

  There was a huge tug on his backside, which was now feeling air as well, and a series of short staccato pushes on his head, which slammed him like a drum. Brad blacked out.

  He woke and felt absolutely freezing. The insides of his eyelids burned bright red. He could see veins. But he still couldn’t open his eyes. And his hearing wasn’t much better, just a gurgling like he was at the bottom of a fish tank. That drained quickly, though, and he heard gasping and moaning, and the sound of hospital equipment, and, tinnily from above him, the distant but unmistakable sound of one of Motown’s all-time greatest hits. The first three letters of the alphabet greeted him.

  The Jackson 5? Brad thought to himself. How? Why?

  If you suddenly emerged from the womb for the second time, and the first voice you recognized was Michael Jackson’s, would you want to go back inside? Brad did. He still wasn’t quite aware of what was going on yet, but he desperately wanted to retreat.

  There was nothing wrong wit
h the song. Far from it; despite everything, Brad knew that the Jacksons’ music would endure as one of the great pop miracles of the late twentieth century, a perfect confluence of songwriting craft and youthfully innocent talent. But the problem, Brad realized, was that he knew that. The entire tragic arc of Michael Jackson’s career flashed through his brain. Considering he still couldn’t open his eyes, the fact that he was already thinking like a bad Pitchfork critic represented a problem.

  A pair of hands held Brad by his armpits. Brad flailed insensibly. Then he felt himself being passed to another pair of hands. Brad’s foot brushed against something that felt long and rubbery but also somehow alive. Suddenly, he knew what that was, who he was, and where he was.

  Noooooo, he wanted to scream. Don’t do it!

  There was a quick snip, but it felt like someone was cutting Brad in half. He felt hot pain, sharper and more all-encompassing than anything he’d ever imagined possible. The world was cruel, unfair, and evil. A hand slapped his back.

  “WAHHHHHH!” he cried. “WAHHHHHH! WAHHHHHH!”

  He heard applause. The radio was now playing Sly and the Family Stone, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).”

  “WAHHHHHH!” Brad said again.

  Someone said, “You’ve got yourself a screamer, Mrs. Cohen.”

  Asshole, Brad thought.

  But at least the music was good.

  Brad vaguely remembered getting put on a scale, and then some nurses giggled while they had him make a footprint, and then he got a bath in a lime-green plastic tub and was dried off by a cloth that had a crocheted duckling on it. The wall paint was light blue, the smell of cigarette smoke pervasive. Phones rang in the distance. It was 1970. Nurses were unionized and the technology was analog.

  These realizations seemed awfully sophisticated to Brad. If he was really a baby, a brand-new baby, then how could he possibly even know his name, much less remember the commercial jingle for the brand of baby shampoo the nurses used to wash his hair? It didn’t seem possible.

  He moved in and out of consciousness, though he couldn’t exactly figure out for how long. Time seemed to move differently when you’re a newborn. But are newborns really able to perceive themselves as newborns? And are they really able to pose complex existential quandaries to themselves while in swaddling clothes? Another thing: Why could Brad remember his entire life if it hadn’t happened yet? Did all humans have this level of consciousness at birth, only to have it fade away like some sort of discardable mental skin layer?