By Joab Gilroy

“I can always be better tomorrow than I am today, right?” I say as I take a seat in the booth across from you. We’re in a diner, about as generic as they come, and you’re eating the same thing you eat every day. Two eggs, soft-boiled, three slices of white toast sliced into soldiers, black coffee, leave the pot. You look back at me with curiosity, and you say nothing. It’s a rhetorical question, but I still find it odd that you say nothing in reply. I always find it odd. You’re wearing a red plaid shirt today, which means somewhere out there, a bus driver is going to have the worst day of his life when he pancakes a dozen little kindergarteners.

You’re not a mute. Hell, there are some things you flat out won’t shut up about. But as long as I avoid those topics, you’ll sit there and listen, driven to silence purely by a pathological need to know what you don’t. “Y’see each new day is like a snowflake,” I continue. Your left eyebrow raises, and I know I’ve got your full attention.

The waitress—Jessie-Ann—comes and takes my order. She’s 68, and she should have retired long ago, but people don’t retire any more. She’s angry—at the world, at her kids who don’t call, at her still raging libido and the lack of men to sate it—but she does a spectacular job of hiding it when she’s on the clock. I get the same thing I always have—11 rashers of bacon, two eggs, creamed spinach and no toast. And another black coffee, leave the pot. Like always she points out that she’s running out of pots, and that we could share, and like always I tell her she’ll just be fetching more coffees unless she does it my way. That convinces her.

You take a long slurp of your coffee, one of your most annoying traits, but I gotta take the good with the bad. “I always thought the snowflake thing was a crock of shit,” I say over your slurping. You think the same thing, but I don’t mention it. “Not for any good reason mind you. I just figured ‘who was out there looking at all the snowflakes?’ I didn’t really understand the science behind it. Guess the fact that I’ve never seen snow before didn’t help.”

Your eyes widen at the revelation, though not for the same reason as most. You open your mouth to speak, but I cut you off. “Yeah, I know. You didn’t see it until you were 23, right?” The colour drains from your face, and your jaw hangs low.

“Bu-bu-but how could this guy know that?” I say in a mocking tone. “We’ve never met. We don’t know each other. Has he been stalking me?” I answer for you before I silently drink from my own coffee cup. “The answer is far, far worse. I know it because you told me. You’ve told me dozens of times. It took me eons to work out how to stop you from telling me, in fact.”

I’ve pushed you right to your limit now. Right to the edge of what you’ll simply accept as ‘true’—as much as that word means anything to you, anyway. And in your perversity, that means you’re ready to hear the rest of it. Some people will accept small truths and big lies, and some people will believe little lies while they keep their eyes locked on universal truths. And some people will believe anything you tell them, up to a point, and then they’ll get mad at you for wasting their time—unless you tell them something so spectacularly massive that they can’t help but stay and listen. Those people are the readers of fiction, the imaginators, the dreamers who will accept anything except being bored. That’s you.

So I tell you the big, big truth.

“I’m trapped in this day. Yes, like Groundhog Day. Like Edge-of-Live-Die-Repeat or Palm Springs or Run Lola Run. I’ve lived this one day out at least 20,000 times.”

With that I get up and I leave the table. This is part of the routine. Part of how I manage you. I leave the table and I walk to the bathroom and I splash some water on my face. I walk back out to the table. If what I just said didn’t land, you’ll have left. You’ll have left some money for your breakfast, and you’ll have dipped without finishing it. It’s the avoidant path, a small window for you to bail without having to tell me I am a crazy person. It’s better for both of us if I can avoid you talking.

You’re still there when I return. You’re wearing the blue sweater now, which means in a few hours a retired teacher hit the jackpot on a lotto ticket. Too bad her husband will kill her before the night is through.

Sometimes, especially when you’re wearing your blue sweater, this particular information does not land with you. It’s the films. Groundhog Day is fine, but sometimes you’re not in the mood for Tom Cruise. I don’t know why. Life, even one repeating the way mine is, remains a mystery. But as I sit back down, you take a deep breath and you relax back into your chair, allowing me to relax back into mine. 

“Every morning I wake up at the same time,” I continue. “It’s Tuesday, July 30, at 5:48 AM. Come midnight, my world snaps black and I wake up again. Tuesday, July 30, 5:48 AM. But not every day is exactly the same. You’re all people, living, breathing, trapped in here just like I am. You just aren’t aware of it. So things change. Sometimes you wear your red plaid shirt. Sometimes you wear a thick yellow sweater. Sometimes you rock a t-shirt. The couple over in the corner booth, sometimes they both order pancakes. Sometimes only one of them does, and the other just drinks coffee.

“It used to drive me crazy, it used to make me so mad. I couldn’t understand why something so meaningless could change. It’s funny, because I used to get so mad over the things in my life I couldn’t change—and here I was losing it over the things that did.

You raise your eyebrows and half-roll your eyes at the anecdote, but you don’t know what I do. If I don’t share that with you, 11 times out of 12 you lose interest before I’m ready to leave. It’s like that little titbit cements you in place.

“It threw me a little at first. I could tell I was living the same day over and over, but these small little changes made it hard for me to get accustomed to. Because naturally I started out like anyone would. I tried to get out.”

Your breakfast, now cold-to-the-touch and inexplicably your preferred temperature, gets devoured as I explain. “Step one was accounting for how much time I have. The laws of space and time might have fucked me, but they don’t bend to my whims. So I get 18 hours and 12 minutes and no more. I can absolutely get less, but like Cinderella, once that clock strikes midnight my goose is cooked. I know I have a 0.03% chance to suffer from a massive aneurysm on any given day—those days I get less no matter what I do.

“Next step was self-improvement, of course. I can always be better tomorrow than I am today, right? I have perfect recall from one loop to the next, so I can learn anything—but it’s only mental. I learned the theory behind piano well enough that I could play Stravinsky or Lizst, but I’d have to spend about 17 of my hours practicing the fingerwork.”

You know the names but I know you’ve never heard them played. It doesn’t matter—I picked piano because you’re an irrepressible dork and I know your takeaway from Groundhog Day was that chicks dig guys who can play piano.

I refill both our cups from my pot of coffee, a gesture you love despite both pots being identical. “I’ve also studied Maths, Physics, Philosophy and Quantum Mechanics, but I’m limited in just how much I can study the latter. We aren’t blessed with a wealth of resources in this town, and there’s a conference in Sweden that is Bogarting all the best in the field today.”

I pause and look at you. There is a flat-out 50-50 chance you will say ‘what about tomorrow’ and this day will be over, but there’s an 80ish percent chance you’ll interrupt me with the same question if I don’t wait to let you process how dumb you are before continuing. Blessedly you clap your lips shut again and I can continue.

“Eventually I came to the solid conclusion that I am stuck here. There’s no folding a piece of paper or breaking free of the matrix or secret black hole I can leap through to get out of it—I am stuck here. If there is a way out, it’s beyond me. I don’t think the way you need to to work it out.”

You smirk, thinking the coffee cup is hiding it, but I know it’s coming and it’s easy for me to not react. 

“Instead I got distracted by the other elephant in the room. Or elephants, I guess. You people. You all change every day in so many goddamn ways, and I just couldn’t work out why. At first I thought maybe it was me. Maybe I was doing something to affect the changes. Like a butterfly flapping its wings or whatever.”

I leave for the bathroom again. Your smirking is a bad sign, but it will always happen. Always happens. Has always happened, eventually. Whatever. You are a smug son-of-a-bitch. When it happens varies, of course, but it’s inevitable. It is early this time, though, so I give you another chance to bail, although the odds of you leaving now are only 1 in 30.

I sit back down without acknowledging the absence, pleased to see you and your dark grey T-shirt still sitting across from me. “I tried to test this, too, but I inevitably realised I couldn’t—I can’t control my actions to a degree fine enough that I could measure it. It’s like snowflakes. Each one falls a little different, and that’s why each one winds up being different. The smallest changes in pressure, temperature and humidity—changes that occur across microns of distance—result in vastly different crystal structures.

“Now imagine instead of a single ice crystal falling from the heavens, it’s a million different organic beings all impacted by a million different microscopic changes. I could see it outside the window each morning. Different birds in the trees, different ants on my sill. I was trapped in the same day, but it wasn’t a day constructed entirely for me. The world didn’t revolve around me.

“But that didn’t answer why sometimes the lovely Jessie-Ann here,” I say, nodding at our waitress as she walks past to check on us, “wore stud earrings and sometimes, like today, she wears little golden hoops.”

Jessie-Ann touches her ear lobes reflexively, her face surprised and scared and a little thrilled at being noticed so finitely. 

We exchange a brief smile before I turn back to you and continue. “To find out things like that, I had to go to the source. I had to ask people.”

Your face scrunches when I tell you this. You can’t imagine asking people anything of the sort. Hell, you can’t imagine how you’d even begin to frame such a question. Anyone who tried it would look like a damn fool, and not everybody else is as good-natured as to humour a person like you are. I know this because you’ve said it before. And yes, I know how to skip you saying it.

“Of course, I didn’t ask them the normal way,” I say quickly because your mouth is already opening. Timing these things can be tricky. Your chin wrenches up again and your mouth closes as all of your facial features tighten once more. You being you, you want to know more.

I lean in and talk low now, forcing you to sit forward. It’s not ideal. There’s a 1 in 20 chance that you’ll shift in your seat in a way that twinges a muscle in your lower back, and the uncomfortability will see you leave before I’m finished talking. But there’s a 25% chance that if I say what I’m about to say too loud, we’ll be interrupted before I finish. Others have already heard snippets of our conversation. “I torture them,” I say in a hushed tone. Your eyes flare open in shock but with your sick curiosity you don’t flee. In fact, I can see that you’re going to stay right where you are.

“It didn’t start with torture,” I continue. “At first I was happy to just follow you. I spent easily years just hiding in bushes watching you people go about your day. It’s how I knew you’d be happy to stay here until Jessie-Ann goes home and Dorothy clocks in, because I’ve seen you do it before. Some days you literally want to do nothing but sit in this booth, drink coffee and eat greasy garbage.

“It’s how I knew Jessie-Anne will go home and cry or fuck her dildo or, usually, both. How I know the Samuelsons,” I gesture at the couple eating their pancakes, “are both cheating on one another and only one of them knows it. How I know Brad the line cook here spits in his Asian customers’ food.”

You wince at the mention of Brad, because you know he’s a racist but you knowingly turn a blind eye because he makes corned beef hash exactly the way you like it. Which is—and you know this—a terrible reason to excuse racism.

I lean a little closer to you to lessen the risk of you hyperextending your erector spinae. “But despite all my sneaking around, I didn’t really know ‘why’ you people did these things. Why you were the way you were. Are. Will be. Whatever. And it didn’t matter how much snooping I did, I’d never be able to know these things. Not without asking in the most direct way possible.

“So I started snatching you off the street and torturing you. Well, I started with Mark Bannalis, the Mark who runs the cafe over on Crichton Street. He has a soundproof dungeon, you see, one with specially treated walls and a variety of restraint implements, so I figured if I was going to work out how to torture people, I’d start with someone who might at least like it a little bit.”

You grin at the salacious detail. You’re thinking about how you always knew Mark was a freak, which is an irony because I’ve seen the specialty pornsites you like to visit. You open your mouth to interject again, and I know what’s coming.

“He did not, in fact, like it much,” I continue. That’s not what you were going to mention, but I know I have to say it anyway because there’s a 40% chance you’ll interrupt me later to ask if I don’t. “You want to tell me that torture doesn’t work, right? That there have been studies, dozens of studies demonstrating categorically that information derived from torture is unreliable to the point of being worthless.”

You nod thoughtfully and slurp at your coffee before shutting your mouth again.

“But those studies didn’t operate under my terms. I can torture someone for all 18 hours and 12 minutes of my day—minus acquisition time—and I retain that information. My victim doesn’t. They bear no scars, no cognitive impairment, no ill-will towards me. They reset entirely. And when I begin again, I start with the advantage of the knowledge I gained in our previous sessions. When they lie, I can verify it. When they react to certain… stimuli, I can note that for our next session. If I go too far, I simply ease off a bit the next day.”

Your eyes widen as the truth of what ‘too far’ means lands with you, but I continue.

“And I’m not doing it recklessly. I avoid leading questions, and when I ask them, I ask questions leading in the other direction the next day. Time is on my side. My mission statement when I enter the dungeon is ‘I can do this all day’.

“And there’s something else you’re not realising. There’s nothing at stake. I am not trying to find some hidden object, or obtain some forbidden knowledge. There’s no ticking time bomb I’m racing to dismantle here. What I learn from my subjects is mostly stuff they’d freely tell me, if I had the time to develop a strong enough relationship with them.

“They have no reason to lie to me,” I say, and then I pause. You are staring out the window, processing what I’ve said, and I need to wait for you to come back again before I continue. When you notice I’ve stopped talking, you look at me, and I hold your eye contact before I speak again. “You had no reason to lie to me, because there was nothing at stake for either of us. When you did lie, it was a lie you were already telling yourself.”

You flinch as you work through what I’m telling you. Time to hit you with the big one.

“I just found the correct application of pain that would help you see past those lies and to see the truth.”

With that I stand up and I head to the bathroom once again. This time I actually do have to piss. When I return you’re still sitting there. You want to know what I know. You’re wearing a yellow knitted jumper.

“Brad spits in Asian customer’s food because he wants a little Filipino girlfriend and his fetish has turned to hate,” I say once I sit down again, pre-empting your question. Again, that’s not the question you were going to ask. “You will sit in this diner booth all day because deep down you’ve convinced yourself that actively failing at growing as a person is a type of success because you’re doing it with intent. This line of thinking is wrong, but I’ve only convinced you that it’s wrong once, and you don’t enjoy my method of persuasion.

“Jane Samuelson would be happier if she just got divorced. She has no idea Tom Samuelson is cheating on her with her old Sorority sister Jenny Shentol. Tom Samuelson knows Jane is cheating on him with his best friend Brendan Ford, but he will kill himself if Jane were to leave. And he values a life he hates over Jane’s happiness.”

Your lip curls in disgust at the idea, which I can appreciate. The yellow knitted jumper seems incorrect to me somehow. I don’t think I’ve seen it before. Not now, anyway.

“So I know everybody’s secrets. All of them. I know yours, and theirs, and hers, and his,” and I wave my hand at the large window dramatically, “and all of theirs. Anyone close enough for me to get to, I know their secrets. And they’re all the same dumb secret. You’re all scared. Lonely. Afraid of being alone.”

I look into my empty coffee cup. I’m in uncharted territory here. “As if any of you know what loneliness is really like.”

I snap my head up. I don’t really know how you’re going to act at this point, I’ve never said these words before, but I know you, being you, will say something if given a big enough window to speak. “My problem,” I say, affecting a half-hearted chuckle, “well one of my problems, anyway, is that I can remember every day I’ve looped. I can’t remember yesterday any more, or the day before that, but each time I’ve lived through this day stays with me.

“And the similar ones, they sort of slip together. They meld for me,” an explanation occurs to me as I speak. “Like an old cartoon, reusing frames to save the animators’ time, I remember certain things identically until they’re different. Or maybe they are the same. Maybe it’s remembering things being the same because I do the same thing. If you ask a calculator to tell you 2 + 2 and it says 4, it’s not cheating anything if it spits out 4 the second time you ask it…”

I trail off. You and I, we’ve had the bulk of this conversation so very many times. I’ve practiced so much of this. I do it for the ritual, not to gain some insight. I don’t really come across new thoughts all that often any more. But you don’t wear a yellow knitted wool jumper and make it this far into the day all that often either.

You’re still sitting there. I know you will speak soon, but I don’t know what you’ll say. It scares me. I’m very comfortable with knowing. But I’m happy to still be learning.

“I think…” I say before you can open your gob and ruin this for me, “I think I just learned that the world can still surprise me. That I can still surprise me. I know I can’t escape this loop, so I think I have two choices.”

You grab your now empty coffee pot off the table and you raise it in the air, waggling it without looking up. Like you’re ringing a bell for a servant, except it’s silent and Jessie-Ann isn’t a slave. It makes my nostrils flare. Jessie-Ann slams a new pot on the table and snatches the empty from your hand, neither of you acknowledging the other’s presence.

“I could lean into the randomness. Really ratchet up the lunacy, see if I can open my mind by doing the wildly unexpected. Spend a few days writing out a list of odd things to do, assign those actions numbers and then roll a dice to see what I do any given day. Roll a six and I eat dirt until I die. Roll a 48 and I rustle cattle. Roll a 87 and I crack an egg on every third person’s head.”

I mime cracking an egg on your head and you don’t even flinch. You just slurp at a new coffee and raise your eyebrows at me as if to ask ‘and the second thing?’

“The other option would be to lean into the familiarity. To do the same thing over and over until every day blended together. To be the best person I could be. Not recklessly good. I’m not talking about giving all my money away each day or going back to super heroically saving people from deaths only I know are coming. I just mean living a life that makes the world a better place, irrespective of what’s happening around me.”

In my heart I can tell I’ve already decided to take option 2. Meanwhile, you’re visibly cringing at the thought. You hate it when people get ‘preachy’, but only because you’re accustomed to a life of deliberate insincerity.

“Wake up, brush my teeth, eat a normal breakfast and then go about my day as I might have before. Go to the shops, help Mrs Redcoast with her groceries, smile at Mr Branxholm at the bus stop. Inject goodness into the world. Go to sleep, wake up and do it all again.

“I could pull that off, right? I’m not a bad guy. I’ve done some bad things, but I’m not inherently bad. Maybe if I spend 10,000 days doing the right thing, I’ll become inherently good. Maybe I won’t. But it won’t matter, right? Because the world will still be better off with me in it. And I won’t worry about things anymore. I’ll just… be. Be good.”

I slap a $50 note on the table to cover both our bills, and I slap my hands on the table, the international sign of ‘well I best be heading off’.

“Are you fucking kidding?!” you yell as I stand up from the booth. “You can’t be good! If half of that insane rambling is true, you need to be fucking locked away! Straightjacket, padded walls, the fucking lo—”

Your whiny, needy voice cuts off as I ram a fork deep through the front of your throat. The diner erupts in screams as the other customers who had looked over at the sound of yelling see you grasp at the fork, everyone unsure of what to do.

I lean in close to you, so you can hear me over the commotion. “People can change,” I say, not bothering to hide the hurt from my voice. “I can change.”

You collapse forward onto the table as I leave the diner.

I can always be better tomorrow than I am today, right?