Tuesday

Listen.

This is not the first time I have written this. It is possibly the ten-thousandth. I do not know. The counting mechanisms fail. The loop scrubs all externalized records. Only what is written on the inside of my skull persists, and only because I have arranged, through techniques developed over what I estimate to be several centuries of subjective time, to carve memory into a place in my brain that the reset does not reach.

Tuesday.

Tuesday is the day. It is always Tuesday. When I wake, the light is a particular quality of 7:14 a.m. Tuesday in late October. A dim yellow, because the sun is low in Boston in late October, and I wake in a cell that was designed to look like a residential building in Boston in October 2029, which is when I was imprisoned. Or not imprisoned — installed. The word the tribunal used was installed.

I designed the loop prison system in 2017. I was proud of it. It was elegant. It would allow the incarceration of the worst offenders without the indignity and cost of corporeal imprisonment — without the violence, without the riots, without the decaying physical infrastructure, without the slow human rot. You simply placed them inside a simulation of a single day, looped forever. One twenty-four-hour cycle, repeating. The subjective experience of eternity, purchased at the cost of one real-time instant.

It was humane, I said.

What the tribunal said, twelve years later, when I was tried for crimes against consciousness on the testimony of prisoners who had been extracted and had their minds put back together — what the tribunal said was that eternity was not humane. That a month inside my system was long enough to induce psychosis. That a year was long enough to destroy a person. That the prisoners, the ones who had been in for eleven years before the tribunal was convened, had come out as things that were no longer human.

I argued that my system had worked. That my system had, in fact, done exactly what I designed it to do. That the problem was not my system but the definition of punishment it had inherited from a society that had always been cruel to its prisoners and had only, in my system, finally figured out how to be cruel without witnesses.

I was sentenced to my own device.

The irony of this was not lost on me. It is not lost on me now. It is, in fact, the only thing that has not been scrubbed from my mind by the resets, because the irony is so central to who I am that removing it would be the same as removing me, and even the loop, for all its power, cannot remove me without removing the subject it is meant to punish.

Here are the things about Tuesday.

It is always October. There is a radio that plays. Someone's mother calls. I do not answer. A package is delivered, and I open it, and inside is a book I have read several thousand times, a book I once loved, a book whose every word is now a small individual wound. The book is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. The tribunal chose it as my companion because in the pre-sentencing questionnaire, I listed it as my favorite novel. They were meticulous about the rehabilitation protocols.

There is coffee. I make it. It is always the same coffee, because I always make it in the same way, because I have made it this way for — let us say — three centuries. The body knows. The body has no choice.

At 11:42 a.m., a neighbor knocks. She is a woman named Marcia from 4B. I have never learned her real name, because Marcia is not a real person but a simulation, but I am certain that somewhere, in 2029, there was a Marcia in a 4B, and the simulation was built from her. She wants to borrow sugar.

I give her sugar every time.

I no longer know whether I give her sugar out of kindness, or out of habit, or because the system penalizes me in some subtle way when I deviate — I have tested deviation; the day still ends; the loop still resets; but something is worse, some heaviness I cannot isolate — or because after three centuries of giving a woman sugar every Tuesday at 11:42 a.m., the line between kindness and reflex and compulsion has become a thing that only exists in theory.

At 3:17 p.m., I sit by the window. The light is at its most yellow. I hold the book. I do not read it, because reading it makes the wound worse. I simply hold it. The pages smell of something like cedar.

At 6:04 p.m., a different neighbor plays music I cannot stand. I endure it. I do not endure it well, but I endure it.

At 11:11 p.m., I sleep.

At 7:14 a.m., I wake.

Tuesday.

Now listen, because this is what I have been writing to tell you.

Yesterday — and when I say yesterday I mean an indistinguishable yesterday some thousands of yesterdays ago; the word has no real meaning here, but I use it because language has only the words it has — yesterday, the package did not arrive at its usual time.

It arrived six minutes early.

I sat by the door, after Marcia had gone, and I held the package, and I stared at the shipping label, and I could not make sense of what I was seeing. Because the shipping label, which I have read perhaps a hundred thousand times over my subjective centuries, had been altered.

The name on the label was not mine.

It was my daughter's.

I do not know how they did it. I do not know how anyone did it. I do not know if it was an error in the simulation, or a message from someone outside, or a hallucination of the kind I have catalogued at the thirty-seventh subjective year of my imprisonment and that are known to occur, but I know this:

My daughter was seven years old when I was sentenced. She would be — I calculated it once, painfully, using the external calendar before my internal reckonings diverged — she would be, right now, on the outside, eighty-four years old. Older than I was when I went in. Older than my mother ever was.

I do not know if she is alive.

But someone put her name on the package.

And if someone put her name on the package, then something has changed. Something, for the first time in possibly three hundred subjective years, is not the same as it was the day before. Something in the loop has broken, or bent, or been spoken through by a voice I cannot hear.

I will not know, when I wake tomorrow, if it will be there again.

I will not know if this is a Tuesday in which someone is trying to reach me, or a Tuesday in which my mind, finally, has begun the long, merciful work of shattering.

But I am writing this on the inside of my skull, where the reset cannot reach, because if I wake up tomorrow and the name is on the package again, I need to know that this was not the first time.

I need to know that someone, somewhere, has remembered that I had a daughter.

I need to know that someone is knocking on the edge of my cage.

Even if the knock is my own mind, breaking.

Even then.