The Looping Way of Things

Viv looked down at her ring while she smoked, her eyes tracing the intricate mathematical design wrought in micro-fine platinum wire, finer than the thinnest human hair. Since the day it had come into her life Viv had been losing herself in her ring. A therapist once told her she was “dissociating” when she did that, retreating to an inner-space where she was safe from what she feared most, which he said was “abandonment.” He always wanted to talk about her father.

She had wanted to scream at him, to explain that the ring didn’t take her to a safe place at all, that it was a puzzle and if she could just figure out how all the prime numbers and the ratios of the loops worked together she could find the answer. The answer to what? She didn’t know.

Viv had said these things to an earlier therapist and she’d been prescribed antipsychotics so she did not say them to any of the subsequent ones. “You’re in your place, Viv,” the doctor would say. “Let’s talk about who gave you that ring.”

Her father had given her the ring. That was true. She had been nine years old and the ring was too big for her slim finger so he had clasped it around her neck with a golden chain and it had weighed heavily against her bony chest for years until her hands grew. Then he had squeezed her tight, kissed the top of her head, told her he loved her, and walked out of her life forever to go live in his own father’s decrepit hunting lodge in the far away in the mountains. He’d just returned from a trip there and he had to go back, he said. Since then the ring had only been out of her possession once. Several therapists had suggested an MRI, but Viv wouldn’t take the ring off long enough to get one. That had nothing to do with him, though. The cigarette, on the other hand…

Viv hadn’t smoked in a decade, but there had been several cartons of Cathedral cigarettes on her father’s cluttered counter and faced with the daunting task of going through his things she had impulsively grabbed a pack along with a book of matches and went out onto the stoop. Cathedrals had always been her brand. She’d gone into her parents bedroom the day he’d given her the ring and seen that he’d left a pack on the nightstand. He’d left a lot of things. She smoked it that night in the backyard. “Your first act of defiance,” a therapist had once said.

Based on the smell of the place Viv could have smoked inside. Plus it was hers now, she could do whatever she wanted with the cluttered house containing her father’s cluttered life. She could burn it to the ground without going back inside. She looked at the matches in her hand and imagined a conflagration followed by an insurance check. Then she thought about an investigation followed by an explanation followed by another trip to the place she’d been sent when she’d burned her notes. They’d taken her ring at that place.

She’d become overwhelmed by the stacks of papers and folders in her office at the university. It was the digital age, but much of her life’s work had been theorized and drawn out on bar napkins and diner menus and she had kept them all. They had piled up and turned her into a prisoner in a penitentiary made of files and boxes. She should have taken them home and done it in the barbeque, but there were too, too many so she’d started burning them on her desk. Her father’s house looked just like her office. Viv tore her eyes from the match she didn’t remember lighting and looked back at her ring. The nicotine made her head swim.

There were fire alarms but no sprinklers in the theoretical physics department so most of her work had survived. At her request it had all been boxed up and moved to Archives by the time she got back. She’d started fresh and discovered with some delight that while she’d always been respected, people were now afraid of her. When she’d shown up at the Computer Science department for a high-resolution 3D scan of her ring they’d done it right away though she hadn’t made an appointment. She’d taken the ring off, but stood next to the humming little box full of lasers while grad students had whispered behind her.

Viv crushed out the butt and threw it into the bushes where it came to rest among a hundred of its brothers, tossed there by her father, and headed back into the house. The morning sun had been bright, but the shades were pulled and the kitchen was dim. Viv’s office was dim. The more glory in your field the better your office, so Viv had been relegated to a windowless, interior room. She was notoriously bad about reporting problems to maintenance and had a reputation for working for months under burned out fluorescents. They called her “Viv the Vampire,” but also because she tended to work late. They said she had a foul mouth.

She laughed at their jokes, even if they weren’t funny. Her colleagues were brilliant but enough of them had boggled with incredulity when she’d tried talking to them about how, under the right conditions, she thought things could become “unstuck in time,” that objects or even people might be able to “slip back in time,” and she’d not told even a single one about her suspicions that her ring was somehow the key.

Viv’s father hadn’t said where the ring had come from so she had shown her grandmother who said she’d never seen it before. The distant old woman hadn’t lived long after her son had left, and Viv had pored through her photographs looking for the ring and found nothing.

Viv turned on the kitchen lights and the room filled with a yellow glow. The stacks of mail and magazines and boxes and files and papers and clutter everywhere made Viv feel very at home, but not in a good way. She tossed the pack of Cathedrals onto the counter as she took in the scene. It landed next to the cartons against a shoebox sized parcel wrapped in brown paper that she hadn’t noticed before. It was tied up with string and had no stamp or postage mark. Written on the top was “To: Viv From: Viv” in her own unmistakable, peculiarly looping handwriting. Viv had never seen the package before.

Reeling with something akin to jamais vu, Viv grabbed at the package and started to undo the string before stopping herself. She’d had to become better at resisting her impulses and she realized whatever was in the package was part of a larger picture and she owed it to herself to proceed with scientific detachment otherwise she really was going to burn down the house. She opened doors, finding first her father’s bedroom, his bare mattress covered with an alarming number of cigarette burns. Eventually she opened the door to her father’s study on the third floor.

Therapists always told Viv that the environments she creates are all reflections of her own inner space and while she took most of what they said with a grain of salt this was true enough to sting. Her father’s inner space must have been a riot. His office made hers look like a minimalist’s Zen garden. He even had the cliche map on the wall with strings stretched across it. It was a map of the known universe. The strings looped.

She had hoped to find a folder with her name on it or perhaps a journal, but instead she found two tall filing cabinets with “Viv” and the year labeled on every drawer. She started at the beginning, when she was nine. Sitting down at her father’s desk, which was covered with overflowing improvised ashtrays, and began reading a letter. “Dad,” it began in her unmistakable loops.

Viv’s head swam and she used her re-centering exercise, the one she’d come up with herself that her therapists mostly approved of. She yanked a hair from her head, knowing she was supposed to skip that part, that this was a “visual exercise,” but doing it felt important now, no matter what the doctors said. She stared at the hair and felt the vast entirety of the universe, twenty billion light years across, surrounding her. She swam in her own insignificance. Then she focused on the single hair and divided it into Planck lengths, the smallest distance it’s possible to measure. She thought about how there were more Plancks stretching across the width of that hair than there would be hairs stretching across the universe and she felt herself a Leviathan, celestial in size, dwarfing and even encompassing countless unseen worlds. Viv settled herself into the center of those two extremes and began to read.

The first letter was a claim and a proof. It said that in three decades Viv would make a discovery that would lead to an invention that would allow objects to be sent back in time. She explained that they could not be sent through space and she was therefore operating from his house in her time.

“Was he schizophrenic?” she wondered, writing letters to himself that, at the very least, emboldened him enough to smoke in bed, resolute in the knowledge that the house would be standing decades later. It couldn’t be.

Viv’s dad had blown two fingers off of his right hand with a firecracker when he was a teen. At best his handwriting looked like it was done by an intelligent monkey. Viv’s script looked like it belonged in an alchemist’s spellbook.

The first letter had included the scores for two upcoming baseball games along with a stern warning to not use the information she gave him to his advantage in any way. She explained that it was very important that events unfold exactly as they had for her. “You have to give her the ring and then leave forever,” it said. Viv felt like three people at once and grew angry with her future self. Then feeling dread for her past self. Then she grew angry with her present self for believing this bullshit.

She wondered if she was losing her mind. She rubbed her eyes, she flicked the lights on and off, turned the pages over and over but every word remained the same. If it was a delusion she was proud of herself for being able to maintain object permanence but Occam’s Razor could not support this reality matrix.

“You sent him away!” she barked at herself. “You couldn’t figure out a better way you stupid fucking asshole?” Suddenly Viv couldn’t tell if she was experiencing a moment or a memory. She laughed, guffawing in the cramped office until her howls broke into sobs as she fell onto the floor.

Time passed. Viv dreamed or was dreaming when she stood and made her way back through the house to the kitchen. She was smart enough to do this, she thought, resolute with the knowledge of what she would soon accomplish.

“I can do this,” she said to herself as she disappeared into the bedroom with the pack of Cathedrals and her package to herself.