The Forgotten Iterations

I stood there looking at it for a moment.

I was thirty-five years old when I “woke up,” and I worked at the only hardware store in town. I lived alone in the apartment above it. My routine downstairs, in between the shelves, was purely mechanical: tidying the toolboxes, sorting the screws by size, knowing perfectly well that come Monday everything would go back to exactly the same mess as before. An empty routine. Like the mug. In Villavera it was always the same gray October week. An almost perfect loop.

But the loop itself didn’t really bother me, I didn’t care about it, there was nothing I could do to change it, so I’d come to accept that this was just how life was. Repeating the same week over and over.

What I wanted to do was rebuild who I’d been before all this started. I had no proof, only the terrible feeling that I wasn’t just stuck in a loop — that with every repetition the loop was taking people, and the ones it didn’t take it rewrote, so that they fit around the missing piece. It alters your past. It manufactures a new, clean biography for you, one where everything fits perfectly except for some insignificant little detail that’s been left out of place.

I’d been remembering on my own for fifty-two weeks when I saw him. It was at the bar on the square, four in the afternoon. Marina, the waitress, was crossing the place with a loaded tray like she did every Monday, but that afternoon, just before she clipped the corner of the counter, Álex shot to his feet and caught the porcelain plate in mid-air a second before it would have shattered on the floor. No one else reacted. The few customers kept on with their own thing, still locked into their inertia, but Álex stayed standing in the middle of the bar, holding the plate in his shaking hands with a look of complete terror on his face. He was staring at the porcelain and then at his own fingers, frozen with the pure horror of someone who’s just realized that time has broken.

I went over to his table, took the plate out of his hands before he actually dropped it, and got him out of there. It took me hours to get him to stop trembling. To convince him he hadn’t lost his mind, I opened the kitchen cupboard and showed him my collection: the mug with the glued handle, a one-pound coin even though I’ve never been to England in my life, and that blue wool sweater that had turned up in my drawer. I told him those objects were the loose stitches of a sick reality, and that the loop didn’t just repeat the days — it was a blind force that charged a price for each repetition.

I confessed that, over my sixty weeks on my own, I’d figured out that there were fewer of us in Villavera each time; that the town was quietly emptying itself out. But the real horror wasn’t that. The real horror was that the tide kept wiping faces off of photographs, changing the names on the mailboxes, rewriting the memories of everyone else so the world made sense around the absence — making sure nobody missed the ones who were already gone.

We’ve spent fourteen iterations together. Fourteen weeks of relief from this repeated solitude in the middle of a frozen town, where Álex has ended up becoming the only real thing I have. Until today.

The kitchen clock reads six in the morning now. It’s Monday. I’m holding the mug between my hands and the coffee is still hot, but suddenly the air goes thick and time stretches like a thread about to snap. It’s a strange feeling. Everything spins and starts to fade away. I understand perfectly well what’s happening to me right now. I’m disappear—

[1] (Note: Iterations are counted from Alejandro Vidal’s awakening.)*