Chapter 12 - Routine

People see life as a logical sequence of actions and consequences, inside which one makes plans for the foreseeable future, maybe the following year, or decade, but how do you plan a life that’s dealt in days which have no connection with each other?

He lived for a day, and when the day ended, so did his current self. He lived for a day, that was it, but oh so many times! As time passed, he stopped keeping track of how many times he had returned to the lounge, and whether those repetitions spanned days or centuries.

The wall paneling and the language scribbled upon it had started to look worn, like abandoned artifacts from ancient times.

There is no planning life if it lasts just one day, and that’s what his life really was, he was just too cowardly to admit it, so he borrowed time from the future and put things in it, time that didn’t belong to him yet, and for all he knew, he might not get at all. 

Planning that borrowed time was just as absurd as venturing into a virgin territory with maps of some place else and relying on them for guidance. 

The debt of these variances accrued, and he got more and more lost while dutifully following his useless map and desperately trying to bend reality out of shape to make it match his expectations. 

Reality didn’t take kindly to that. 

At some point he looked back at the road traveled and accurately mapped that uncharted territory, puzzled to notice, in retrospect, he’d have gone farther if it weren’t for his reliance on the wrong map, and as for the direction of his travel, it had never been up to him, or subject to change. 

The reason we still insist on building rigid frameworks in the thicket of possibilities we call life is we’re driven into a wretched panic by its untamed chaos. 

He felt that panic intensely, bouncing from scenario to scenario with no end in sight. The more he ventured into his forest of Helmuths, the more pieces of himself he lost, and felt like a substitute in his own life for the real him who was away.

In all the time he’d been there, and, honestly, he didn’t know if ‘there’ was always the same place, or a set of almost identical lounges reflecting each other, he had documented more travels than one could experience in a lifetime, and seen places people can’t dream of, but none of the destinations had ever been of his choice.

He was a tourist through reality, vaguely plotting an itinerary, while the details of the journey were not his responsibility, and during which he only had to account for himself. 

We fail to recognize our glut of traditions, laws and social norms is meaningless in the absence of context and consistency. 

Anyone who got stranded unexpectedly in a foreign country whose customs and language one didn’t understand can attest to that. 

Everything looks unreal, the places, the people, the happenings, like a dream, just like a dream.

A dream where all your actions are disconnected from their meaning.

Through his unusually long life, he wished for a companion; the chance presented itself more than once, and he begged the potentials to stay with him, however briefly, in the only place where he knew he could be himself, but then he had to bow his head in shame because he had nothing to offer them there, other than the tangled web of alternate realities he kept falling through. 

The few who really cared about him hated him for leaving, as he always had to, against his will, and resigned themselves to living their lives without him, while he was left alone to repeat endless versions of the same day in the muzak room.

He wished he could remember something, anything, from the time before he woke up in this room, but there was no before, a strange concept for people to accept in a universe based on duality, an after without a before. For him, time itself started in the lounge, and there was nothing more to say about that. 

People don’t pay attention to life while involved in its minutia, but for an external observer who only drops in every few years, life seems to run in circles. 

It’s as if the memories of the protagonists get wiped clean at the end of a cycle, allowing them to start the same story from the top, oblivious and excited to continue their journey. 

His life ran in circles too, only in different ways.

He was the tree falling in the forest when nobody was there to hear it, living in a perpetual present which followed him around rather than him it, and which bent time around him to keep him in sync with all his Helmuths as he shifted through realities. He wondered sometimes how many more of them were there he hadn’t yet had the chance to be.

The unfinished stories bothered him the most, especially the ones whose details had plagued him while involved in a particular life, like, for instance, what was Inclusion 35B and what had come of it. 

He wished someone would come over with Cliff Notes for all his abandoned story lines, and was even willing to hear the unpleasant scenarios, just so he wouldn’t have to feel like an unfinished embroidery with all the threads left hanging.

Of all the searing discomforts his situation engendered, the worst was the gut realization this untamed chaos, this mixed bag of loose threads, all too short to serve any purpose, was life. 

That’s what life looked like in the absence of well-intentioned but completely useless maps.

“Have you seen my keys?” his wife asked, rushing as always because she was running late for one of those important events he never stuck around long enough to learn anything about. 

He couldn’t remember when he got there, but was relieved at least he had landed in a familiar place this time, and one with good food. A man could only subsist on sandwiches and beer for so long.

“On the counter,” he replied, absentminded.

“Honey,” she said, walking fast towards the door, “can you go to the corner store and grab a bottle of wine? The Kellars invited us to dinner.”

He mumbled something that sounded like acquiescence and resented her deeply for being able to walk through that front door and end up anywhere other than the muzak lounge.

He was determined to avoid returning to his fated realm for as long as he could manage, planted himself on a sofa in the family room and flipped through the channels in search of news, eager to learn something that might inform this life story. He made the mistake of leaning back and putting his feet up, dozed off and woke up a few hours later in the lounge.