Tales From Heller

À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu

Day 1:

It's been about a month that I've been trapped in this parallel universe, and in some ways it's been growing on me. My day follows a predictable routine: wake up at 6:15, eat some sort of fancy breakfast, go to classes on autopilot, chat with Mr. T, stand somewhere in the back of the club meeting, finish my classes, walk home, play piano, read, repeat. It's that I know my decisions have little consequence, and that's comforting too. I've taken no leadership roles, nor have I done anything to distinguish myself beyond being polite to my peers.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I took a vacation somewhere. I'm an unaccompanied minor, so it would be hard to travel far, but imagine if I just blew a bunch of money and went to Hong Kong or something. Heller couldn't even contact my parents if they tried. Do I have parents? When I walk to school now, I daydream about visiting foreign countries. Sometimes I think about home instead: my real friends, that really bad electric piano I need to replace, my cat. I miss them. I miss them too much.

School was unremarkable today. I have no homework for tomorrow, nor did I have any tests today. So all of it was boring worksheets and lectures that at this point come second nature to me. Maybe tomorrow will be more exciting.

Day 2:

Fate has played a cruel joke on me—and has clearly been reading my diary. What gave it away to me at first wasn't that the New York Times homepage was the same, but that French toast was on the menu for breakfast once again. And of course my morning alarm is still the Groundhog Day one. The funniest thing is that my diary still has my entry from the last iteration of today. How does that work?

Immediately I set about identifying what it was I had done yesterday to deserve being sent back to the same day—it wasn't as if September 17th were a holiday. Truly, there was nothing, and by the time I had reached Heller I could find no guiding purpose to my actions that previous day. But that previous day, now, was today.

I made no indication in any of my classes I had seen the same day already, until I had my TA period with Mr. T. He'd know what to do if I approached him frankly:

"Mr. T, I think I'm stuck in a Groundhog Day loop," I said deadpan, and he reacted similarly:

"Oh yeah, that happens to me all the time. Have I told you the code word yet?"

"What code word?"

"I tell everyone who tells me they're stuck in a time loop to greet me with the word 'boulangerie,' so that I know immediately they're stuck in a time loop. I assume this is your first repetition, then, if you didn't know that?"

"It is. So what do I do?" I asked, desperation not quite having sunk in yet.

"You can start by filing these papers—you've done this before, so it should be easy."

The most frustrating part about time loops, I realized, is that you can't suddenly shirk your duties because you think your actions are fruitless. If the flow of time were to suddenly continue, you would be left behind.

"So why do you think I'm stuck in this loop?"

"Well, we have two examples of historic precedent I can think of off the top of my head. In Groundhog Day, Phil Connors was forced to learn to become a better person: over the film, he metamorphosed from a closed-off jerk into someone who was willing to be kind, not knowing if it would ever reward him. Happy Death Day has a more fundamental premise: the protagonist, a sorority girl, needs to figure out who tries to murder her every day. The commonality there is that both characters have a mission, something they need to accomplish. It's not just a Sisyphean punishment."