Loop

My name is John Malone, I am fourteen and I live in the year 1955.

My name is John Malone, I am thirty-nine and I live in the year 2028.

The year is 2028 and I am tired. My blood is alcohol and my stomach is a swimming pool. The loop is driving me crazy and I can’t seem to lose it. The television screen burns the front of my eyes because I don’t want to close them. If I close them, I might loop.

On December 7th 1955, I discovered the loop. It wasn’t a very big loop nor a very small one. It was simply a loop and I took it.

My father brought home Scrabble that night. I’d heard about it, but for the first time since seeing it in the stores and on television I could play it. We tipped out the little wooden blocks with the painted letters and the board and the whole family sat round the table while my father read out the rules. My mother went to the kitchen to make dinner (lasagne) and my brother didn’t understand much and my grandmother just kept humming Elvis and my grandfather drank all the Scotch. But it didn’t matter because my father read the rules and I listened and we played and I lost and then we played again. I didn’t tell anyone about the loop though.

They probably wouldn't believe me anyway.

The little painted letters danced around in my mind to ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and I blinked.

That was the first time I looped. It hurt. The way your tongue hurts when you accidentally staple it to a wall.

The year was 2002, it was March and I was in New York. Times Square spilled over with people of various shapes and colours, barely aware of a young boy in clothes that were far too plain and eyes the size of dinner plates.

I was there for a total of four hours. I counted.

Then I was home and my head hurt and nobody said I was gone and I was still losing.

When I turned eighteen the loops started to happen more often. I was taking a history exam when I went to Hong Kong. It was 2011 and it was New Year’s Eve. Bright lights blinded my eyes as I wandered through crowds of people and stalls selling flashing gadgets and brightly coloured masks and sparkly costumes. A girl around my age shouted something in Chinese at me and I smiled because I thought she was pretty. The tall buildings lined the sky and the smell of smoke and hot food clogged the air. At midnight a brilliant display of colour and noise erupted through the inky sky. Then I was back in the classroom. It had lasted ten hours that time.

I never finished the test.

My grandmother died the next year. I didn’t cry. My father read the will and my brother didn’t understand much and my mother made the lunch (casseroles) and my grandfather drank all the Scotch. It was a small wake with lots of black and tears and food and black. My grandfather didn’t go to the funeral. They played Elvis when they lowered her casket. I thought the tears would come then, but none came so I scratched my nose and sniffled to make it seem like they had. When we got home my father took my brother upstairs to tell him what was happening and my mother went to the kitchen to put away the leftovers (still casseroles) and I went into my grandfather's room. There were two empty bottles on his desk and he was slumped over with an empty glass in his hand. I went over to him. “I’m sorry she’s dead.” I said it because no-one else would. “And I’m sorry Dad only reads and Mum only cooks and Tom doesn’t get it.” And I was. It was just too bad he couldn’t hear me.

Two years after that I went to Brighton, England. It was 2016; the seagulls seemed happier there. I was there for two whole days, wandering the beach that was more of a pebbled coastline that had happened upon a saltwater lake. I had taken one lick of an ice-cream cone offered to me by a young boy named Michael, before ending up back in my room with the girl I met in university named Christine.

I never saw Christine or Michael again.

In 1965 I spent a week in Las Vegas in 2020.

Drowning in a neon desert.

I had a five dollar bill and forty-seven cents in my pocket and put it all on black. The man next to me with a spectacular handlebar moustache, oozing his own perfume of alcohol and tobacco, hit the jackpot and I realised early on that my luck remained the same no matter what time I was in.

I came back to the funeral. My grandfather had drank too much Scotch that day.

I put on all black.

When we went to the moon, I went to Prague for a month and it was 2022; the moon was still there. In 1974 I lost six months in Alice Springs only to return home and find my brother had killed himself. He was only 24. My father read his diary and my mother baked something in our newly installed oven (a pie) and I sat in his room not understanding much, listening to Elvis, wishing I was drinking Scotch.

Where am I?

When am I?

Why am I?

I asked my father that night what I had done for the past six months. He looked at me strange and said, “Nothing, you were completely normal.” And that scared me.

I drank the whole bottle of Scotch when I turned thirty-five; my grandfather would have been proud.

I missed a year of my life while in a desert somewhere, sometime. My mother had a stroke while I was gone and I visited her in hospital while she was having breakfast (cereal). I wish she could have come to the future with me. Seen all the pretty things and the doctors there. They would have known. They wouldn't have let this happen.

Six months later she passed. Or maybe it was seven months?

I don't think I was there for half of it.

My father read her obituary in the paper and I turned the television on to the cooking channel (they were making a roast chicken). I thought about the loop I had found.

How much time had I missed with my family while sleeping on trains in Bulgaria?

How many birthdays I never went to because I was busy dancing in Japan?

How many more?

Sitting on a leather couch with my eyes glued to the television, the little painted letters dancing in my mind and ‘Hound Dog’ playing in the background, I am thirty-nine years old in my house in the year 2028. I have been here for three years and I have forgotten the past. What year was it when I left?

My father is most likely dead and there is no-one left. So I pray I don’t return to that time; that life.

I am a loop. I turn off the television and go to the kitchen and I stand there drinking all the Scotch and humming Elvis and making dinner (cup noodles) and reading about the world and not understanding much.

And I think.

I think about people and things and songs and words but mostly people.

I think about my grandmother and grandfather, my mother, my father.

I think about Tom and Christine and Michael and that pretty Chinese girl from Hong Kong.

I even think about the man with the handlebar moustache.

L

O

O

P

Three minutes have passed. Probably.

So I open my cup of steaming noodles (chicken flavour) and stick my fork in to break up the pieces.

The tiny pools of oil float to the top and remind me of nothing much but I still make that observation anyway, like someone who still takes note of traffic conditions even when they don't need to drive anymore.

Habit. I guess.

So the world still turns and I still get up every morning because that’s all that’s left for me. Life has become a loop. A habit. And when I am old and grey, I will remember the Scrabble and the simple loop and my family. And when I am dead, someone else can find the loop.