So we got serious about it. The hawk and the skate rat were just the beginning. Our goal was to find every single moment of beauty, every tiny perfect thing, that this particular August 4th had to offer. There had to be more: Moments when, for just a few seconds, the dull coal of reality was compressed by random chance into a glittering diamond of awesomeness. If we were going to stay sane, we were going to have to find them all. We were going to have to mine August 4th for every bit of perfection it had.
“We have to be super-observant,” Margaret said. “Stay in the moment. We can’t just be alive, we have to be super-alive.”
In addition to being super-alive we were going to be organized. We bought a snazzy fountain pen and a big foldy survey map of Lexington and spread it out on a table in the library. Margaret found the spot on the Wachusett Reservoir and wrote “HAWK” and “16:32:30” on it in snazzy purple ink. (Military time made it seem that much more official.) On the spot marking the rear steps of the library, I wrote “11:37:12” and “SKATE RAT.”
We stepped back to admire our work. It was a start. We were a team: Mark and Margaret against the world.
“You realize that when the world resets in the morning the whole map’s going to be erased,” she said.
“We’ll have to remember it. Draw it again from scratch every day.”
“How do you think we should go looking for them? The perfect things?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just keep our eyes open, I guess.”
“Live in the now.”
“Just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“Maybe we can work in sectors,” she said. “Like divide the town into a grid, then divide the squares of the grid between the two of us, then make sure we’ve observed each square at every moment in the twenty-four-hour cycle, so we don’t miss anything.”
“Or we could just walk around.”
“That’s good too.”
“You know what this reminds me of?” I said. “That map in Time Bandits.”
“Okay. I have no idea what that means.”
“Oh my God! If the universe stopped just so I could make you watch Time Bandits, then I think it’s all worth it.”
Then I started trying to explain to her what it said in Flatland about the fourth dimension, but it turned out I was totally mansplaining, because not only had she already read Flatland but also, unlike me, she actually understood it. So she explained it to me.
“We’re three-dimensional, right?”
“I’m with you so far.”
“Now look at our shadows,” she said. “Our shadows are flat. Two-dimensional. They’re one dimension down from us, just like in a flat universe the shadow of a two-dimensional being would be a one-dimensional line. Shadows always have one fewer dimensions than the thing that cast them.”
“Still with you. I think.”
“So if you want to imagine the fourth dimension, just imagine something that would cast a three-dimensional shadow. We’re like the shadows of four-dimensional beings.”
“Oh wow.” My flat little mind, like the Square’s, was getting blown. “I thought the fourth dimension was supposed to be time or something.”
“Yeah, that turned out to be a made-up idea. They’ve even worked out what a three-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional cube might look like. It’s called a hypercube. Here, I’ll draw one for you. Although with the caveat that my drawing will be merely two-dimensional.”
I accepted this caveat. She drew it. It looked like this:
I stared at the drawing for a long time. It didn’t look all that four-dimensional, though I guess how would I know?
“Do you think,” I said, “that this whole time loop was somehow created by superior four-dimensional beings with the power to manipulate the fabric of three-dimensional space-time itself? That they folded our entire universe into a loop as easily as we would make a Möbius strip out of a piece of paper?”
She pursed her lips. She took the idea more seriously than it probably deserved.
“I’d be a little disappointed if it was,” she said finally. “You’d think they’d have something better to do.”
* * *
She texted me two days later.
Corner of Heston and Grand, 7:27:55.
I got there at 7:20 the next morning, with coffee. She was already there.
“You’re up early,” I said.
“Didn’t sleep. I wanted to see if anything weird happened in the middle of the night.”
“Weird like what?”
“You know. I wanted to be awake when the world rolls back.”
The crazy thing was, I had never even tried that. I had always slept through it. I guess I’m more of a morning person.
“What’s it like?”
“It’s the weirdest thing ever. Every day has to start exactly the same way, so if you woke up in your bed on August 4th—which I’m assuming you did, unless I’m severely underestimating you—”
“You’re not underestimating me.”
“So if you woke up in bed the first time, you have to wake up in your bed all the other times too, so that the day starts exactly the same way every time. Which means that if you’re not in bed at midnight, it puts you to bed. One second I was sitting on the floor dicking around with my phone, the next the lights were off and I was under the covers. It’s like there’s some invisible cosmic nanny who grabs you and tucks you in.”
“That really is the weirdest thing ever,” I said.
“Plus, when you hit midnight, the date on your phone doesn’t change.”
“Right.”
“I guess that part’s not that weird.”
“So what are we looking for here?”
“I don’t want to spoil it,” she said. “I think that should be part of the rules. You have to see it fresh.”
Heston and Grand was a busy intersection, or busy enough that it had a stoplight. It was weird to see rush hour traffic—everybody heading off to work, so urgent and focused, mocha Frappuccino in the cup holder, to do all the stuff they’d already done yesterday, which would get undone again at midnight. To make all the money they would unknowingly give back overnight.
7:26.
“I don’t know why I feel nervous,” she said. “I mean, it pretty much automatically has to happen.”
“It’s going to happen. Whatever it is.”
“Okay, watch for the break in traffic. Here we go.”
Lights changed somewhere upstream, and the road emptied out. A lone black Prius turned off a side street and rolled up at the red light right in front of us.
“Is that it?”
“Yup. Look who’s driving.”
I squinted at it. The driver did look weirdly familiar.
“Wait. That’s not…?”
“I’m pretty sure it is.”
“It’s whatshisname, Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight!”
“No,” she said patiently, “it’s not Aaron Eckhart.”
“Wait. I can get this.” I snapped my fingers a couple of times. “It’s that guy who gets his head cut off in Game of Thrones!”
“Yes!”
It was Sean Bean. Actual Sean Bean, the actor. Realizing he’d been spotted, he gave us his trademark rueful, lopsided grin and a half-wave. Then the light changed and he rolled on.
We watched him go.
“Weird to see him with his head back on,” I said.
“I know. But so, what do you think?”
“I liked him better as the guy who threw up in Ronin.”
“I mean what do you think? Is it mapworthy?”
“Oh, definitely. Let’s map it.”
We went back to her house to redraw the map and watch Time Bandits, which she still hadn’t seen. Her parents weren’t there; her mom had left for a business trip that morning, and her dad was always away at the same yoga retreat, forever.
But she was exhausted from having stayed up all night, and she fell asleep on t
he couch five minutes in, before the dwarfs even show up. Before the little boy even realizes that the world he lives in is magic.
* * *
It was like a big Easter egg hunt. Margaret got the next one, too: a little girl who made one of those enormous soap bubbles, the kind you make with two sticks and a loop of string, that always pop after like two seconds, only this one didn’t. It was huge, approximately the same size as she was, and it drifted low over Lexington Green, undulating like a weird, translucent ghost amoeba, farther and farther, past where you could even believe it hadn’t popped yet, before it finally crossed a sidewalk and met its end on a parked car.
I found another one two days later: a single cloud, alone in the sky, that for about a minute, seen from the corner of Hancock and Greene, looked exactly like a question mark. But I mean exactly. Like someone had typed it in the sky.
A full five days later she saw two cars pulled up next to each other at a light. License plates: 997 WON and DER 799. The next day I found a four-leaf clover in a field behind my old elementary school, but we disallowed it. Not moment-y enough somehow. Didn’t count.
That night, though, about eight o’clock, I was biking the streets at random when I saw a woman walking by herself. Thirtyish, heavyset, dressed like a receptionist at a real estate agency. Somebody must have texted her, because she looked at her phone and stopped dead. For a terrible second she squatted down and covered her eyes with one hand, like the news had hit her in the stomach so hard she could barely stand.
But then she straightened up again, raised a fist in the air, and ran off into the night singing “Eye of the Tiger” at the top of her lungs. Good voice, too. I never found out what the text was, but it didn’t matter.
That one was fragile: The first time I tried to show it to Margaret we ended up distracting the woman and she didn’t even notice the text. The second time she got the text but apparently didn’t want to sing “Eye of the Tiger” in front of us. In the end, we had to hide behind a hedge for Margaret to get the full effect.
We wrote them all down. CAT ON TIRE SWING (10:24:24). SCRABBLE (14:01:55)—some guy playing in the park made quixotic on a triple word score. LITTLE BOY SMILING (17:11:55)—he’s just sitting there smiling about something; you kind of had to be there.
It wasn’t all about the perfect things. We did other things, too, that had nothing to do with any of this stuff. We had contests: Who could come up with the most cash in one day without actually taking it out of the bank. (I could, by selling my mom’s car on Craigslist while she was at work. Sorry, Mom!) Who could acquire the best new skill that we’d never tried before even once. (I won that one, too. I played “Auld Lang Syne” very badly on the saxophone; she spent the day trying and increasingly furiously failing to ride a unicycle.) Who could get on TV. (She won by talking her way into the local news station, posing as a summer intern, and then “accidentally” walking on set while they were live. They got so many e-mails from people who enjoyed her cameo that by the end of the day they’d offered her an actual internship. That was Margaret for you.)
I couldn’t have cared less who won. With all apologies to the rest of humanity who were forced to repeat August 4th over and over again like so many lifelike animatronic automatons, being stuck in time with Margaret was better than any real time I’d ever had in my life. I was like the Square in Flatland: I had finally met a Sphere, and for the first time in my life I was looking up and seeing what a crazy, enormous, beautiful world I’d been living in without even knowing it.
And Margaret was enjoying it, too, I knew she was. But it was different for her, because as time passed—I mean, it didn’t, but you know what I’m saying—I began to wonder if there was something else going on in her life, too, something she didn’t talk about and that I didn’t know how to ask her about. You could see it in little things she did or didn’t do. She checked her phone a lot. At odd moments her eyes went distant, and she got distracted. She always left a bit early. When I was with her, I was only ever thinking about her, but it wasn’t like that for Margaret. Her world was more complicated than that.
We finally watched Time Bandits, anyway. It holds up pretty well, though I don’t think she liked it as much as I did. Maybe you have to see it as a kid, the first time. But she liked Sean Connery.
“Apparently it said in the script, ‘This character looks just like Sean Connery but a lot cheaper,’” I said. “And then Sean Connery read the script and called them up and said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
“That must have been a perfect moment. But I don’t get why he comes back at the—”
“Stop! Nobody knows! It’s one of the great mysteries of the universe! Forbidden knowledge. We shouldn’t even be talking about it.”
We were on the foam couch in her family’s rec room, which had a thinly carpeted concrete floor and one glass wall that looked out at a big backyard.
I’d spent most of the previous hour inching imperceptibly sideways on the couch, nanometer by nanometer, and then subtly shifting my weight so that my shoulder rested against hers and we were sort of leaning against each other. It felt like some cool sparkly energy was flowing out of her and into me and lighting me up from the inside. I felt like I was glowing. Like we were glowing.
I don’t think anybody in the history of cinema has ever enjoyed a movie as much as I enjoyed Time Bandits that night. Roger Ebert watching Casablanca could not have enjoyed it one-tenth as much.
“Margaret, can I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course.”
“Do you ever miss your parents? I mean, I can hang out with mine pretty much whenever I want—and anyway, where my parents are concerned, a little of that goes a long way. But you hardly see yours at all. That’s got to be hard.”
She nodded, looking down at her lap.
“Yeah. That’s kind of hard.”
Her corkscrewy hair fell down over her face. It reminded me of double helices, of DNA, and I thought about how, somewhere inside them, there were tiny corkscrew-shaped molecules containing the magic formula for how to make corkscrewy hair. How to make Margaret.
“Do you want to go find them? I mean, we could probably track them down inside of twenty-four hours. Hit that yoga retreat.”
“Forget it.” She shook her head, not looking at me. “Forget it. We don’t have to.”
“I know we don’t have to, I just thought…”
She still wasn’t looking at me. I’d hit some kind of a nerve, a raw one that led off somewhere that I didn’t quite understand. It hurt me a bit that she wouldn’t or couldn’t say where. But she didn’t owe me any explanations.
“Sure. Okay. I just wish you’d gotten a better day, that’s all. I don’t know who it was that chose this day, but I question their taste in days.”
She half smiled; literally, one half of her mouth smiled and the other didn’t.
“Somebody has to have bad days,” she said. “I mean statistically. Or the bell curve would get all messed up. I’m just doing my part here.”
She took my hand—she picked it up off my lap in both of hers and sort of it squeezed it. I squeezed her hand back, trying to keep breathing normally while my heart blew up inside me a hundred times. Everything went still, and I almost think something might have happened—like that might have been the moment—except that I immediately blew it.
“Listen,” I said, “I had an idea for something we could try.”
“Does it involve unicycling? Because I’m telling you, I never want to see another of those one-wheeled devil-cycles in my life.”
“I don’t think so.” I kept waiting for her to put my hand down, but she didn’t. “You remember you had that idea once, where we travel as far as we can and see if we can get outside the zone where the time loop is happening? I mean, assuming it’s limited to a zone?”
She didn’t answer right away, just kept looking out at her backyard, which was getting darker and darker in the summer twilight.
“Margaret? Are you o
kay?”
“No, right, I remember.” She let go of my hand. “It’s a good plan. We should do it. Where should we go?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it matters that much. I figure we should just head straight to the airport and get on the longest flight we can find. Tokyo or Sydney or something. But you’re sure you’re okay?”
“Absolutely. Absolutely okay.”
“We don’t have to. It probably won’t work. I just thought we should try everything.”
“We absolutely should. Everything. Definitely. Let’s not do it tomorrow, though.”
“No problem.
“Day after, maybe.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
She nodded, three quick nods, as if she’d made up her mind.
“The day after tomorrow.”
* * *
We couldn’t start out before midnight, because of the cosmic nanny effect, but we agreed that at the stroke of midnight we would both leap out of bed and she would immediately book us flights on Turkish Airlines to Tokyo, leaving Logan Airport at 3:50 a.m., which was the earliest flight to somewhere really far away that we could find. Margaret had to be the one to do it because she had a debit card, because she had a joint bank account with her parents, which I didn’t. I promised I would hit her back if it worked.
Then I snuck out into the warm, grassy-smelling night to wait and be attacked by numberless mosquitoes. There was no moon; August 4th was a new moon. Margaret came rolling up with the lights off.
It felt close and intimate, being in her car with her in the middle of the night. In fact it was the most boyfriendy I’d ever felt with Margaret, and even though I was not in actual fact her boyfriend, it was a thrilling feeling. We didn’t talk till we were cruising along the empty highway, surfing the rolling hills on the way into Boston, under the indifferent, insipid orange gaze of the sodium streetlights.
“If this works, my parents are going to think we ran away together,” she said.
“I didn’t even think about that. I left mine a note saying I caught the bus into Boston for the day.”