I spent the morning struggling with the Sunday crossword and watching The Social Network. In the afternoon, I wrote this:
It was the end of the world, again, and Jane was having an epiphany.
“These grand realizations of yours are getting a little tiresome,” said Abbott. “You have one every time this happens, some critical insight, but you know you’re never going to act on them.”
“You’re just jealous,” Jane said, “because you’re dead and I’m not.”
She knew she was being mean, bringing that up. Abbott was sensitive about a lot of things, but his death most of all. She’d promised, more than once, not to talk about it anymore. She’d survived the original attack on the city and he hadn’t. It was just that simple, and it was just dumb luck. But he’d ticked her off, this holier-than-thou attitude he’d adopted lately, claiming she never acted on anything, as if these epiphanies — and there hadn’t been THAT many of them, really; she was just a naturally introspective person — as if they didn’t really mean anything, as if they didn’t really matter. They mattered to her, and she WOULD act on this one, and Abbott was just being a jerk suggesting otherwise.
Still, she regretted it. He was dead, but neither of them really wanted reminding of that fact. The last thing she needed was for him to go off and start haunting someone else.
“You know I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I’d do anything if I could reverse time far enough back to save you.”
Abbott grumbled, but she knew he wouldn’t stay mad. He wasn’t locked into the time loop as much as everyone else in the city — like her, he COULD act, COULD change — but he was still very much a creature of habit, and sometimes she thought he just let himself get swept along with every reiteration, repeat past actions, mistakes, grievances, just so he wouldn’t have to fight. He could be a jerk, but he usually wouldn’t rally much beyond that.
Take that stubble on his chin, for one, that five o’clock shadow he refused to shave off, despite hating the look of it in the mirror, despite the fact that he kept scratching at it. “It’ll just grow back,” he’d said. As if that was the absolute truth, as if they hadn’t both made changes happen, hadn’t carried over memories from one loop to the next, hadn’t chipped away at cause and effect until it acted a little bit more like it had before the attack. Sure, she couldn’t bring Abbott back from the dead, yet, but he could at least shave off those damn whiskers.
“I just don’t think you’ve thought this all the way through,” he told her now. “The loop always starts up again AFTER the chronobomb was detonated near City Hall. Even if you could do it, I don’t see how being somewhere closer to the blast is going to change anything. Epiphany or not, time will already have exploded. It will ALWAYS already have exploded.”
“You never studied chronomechanics,” Jane said, as the city began to fracture outside the window. “You weren’t in the war. Leave this to the professionals.”
I think I may spend the evening reading.