Chapter 7
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The next morning, Jack didn’t answer the phone. Instead, he struck it against the hook each time it rang until he was left in blessed silence.
Early morning light filtered through the curtains and illuminated the satchel on the floor, where he’d left his notes last night.
Heart in his throat, Jack crawled out of bed. Rifled through his bag until he found the forms, neatly clipped together.
He flipped through them and groaned aloud. They were perfectly blank. No blue notes scribbled across the page.
A cursory exploration revealed that he hadn’t somehow lost them. Just in case, he searched his suitcase, and found nothing.
Yesterday’s notes had disappeared. The muffin and candy bar waited on the nightstand.
Jack sat on the bed, heart pounding, tears welling in his eyes. “What the fuck?” he whispered. Panic clawed at him, tore its way from his belly to his throat, which burned as if it had been ripped open.
He began to shake. After a few long minutes, he dialed the front desk.
Boris answered. “Y’ello.”
“Hi,” said Jack slowly. “I’m in room three-oh-nine. Um, I can’t seem to find my date book, and I’m wondering if you could perhaps tell me today’s date?”
“Today?” Boris grumbled. “Fuck if I know. Hang on.” Rustling. The sound of something falling from the desk. A pained grunt. The squeaking wheels of a chair. The staticky sound of the receiver being lifted. “It’s the seventeenth. Tuesday.”
“The seventeenth?” repeated Jack. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m fucking sure. Three-oh-nine… You just checked in last night, and you already forgot the day?”
“I, uh… I’ve got a lot going on right now. Thanks for your help.”
“Sounds like you need it, buddy.”
The line went dead.
Jack hung up, moving with the speed of a man on the verge of death. He pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes, held them there until stars flashed across his vision.
“Fuck.” Terror seeped into every bone in his body. He stumbled downstairs on numb legs.
“You aren’t scheduled to check out until tomorrow,” Boris told him, scowling when Jack tried to return the key. “You sure you have somewhere to go?”
After a long pause, Jack pocketed the key, dread heavy in his heart.
At the train station, the conductor confirmed his ticket was incorrect, and the clerk refused to fix it.
Jack spent a long time sitting on the bench, staring at the swaying trees, deafened by trains as they thundered past.
It was the seventeenth.
It had been the seventeenth for days now.
Jack had one dollar and fifty cents in his pocket again.
His notes were blank.
Boris had called at 7:03 a.m.
The muffin and candy bar had resurrected on the nightstand.
This… was the same day. Over and over again.
Jack spent a long time staring at the wall, trying to comprehend this.
“The same… day. The. Same. Day,” he said aloud, tasting the words, bitter on his lips. They hung in the air like an aerosol, stinking of panic and despair. “It’s the seventeenth.”
The same day.
The same day.
What the fuck?
Jack went to the beach, wandered barefoot through the sand.
Murky water sloshed over his ankles. Eventually, he put his shoes back on and returned to the hotel room.
Sand flaked from his shins like glitter.
He scrubbed it off. Laid on the floor. Then sat on the toilet for an hour without taking his pants off, staring at the wall.
He called work. Dan fired him again, this time with enthusiasm. Kathy didn’t remember their conversation from yesterday.
The neighbor was still going to feed Rainy tomorrow.
He called his mother, offered no explanation, and sobbed. “Jack?” she said, confused. “Jack?”
He hung up the phone and laid on the floor again. She didn’t call back.
Then he climbed from the fire escape to the roof and cried while he ate his muffin. A squirrel stole the crumbs.
He sobbed all over a bewildered Boris, who pulled a bottle of whisky from under the desk and shoved it at him. “Keep it. You look like you need it.”
So Jack drank until three in the morning, when he threw up all over the pillow beside him.
When he woke, the vomit was gone, along with the whisky bottle. Only the muffin and candy bar remained, undigested and whole, mocking him from the bedside table.
Three days passed. Jack oscillated between panic and despair.
He called work and got fired again. He asked Boris what day it was and cried at the response.
For two hours each night, he sat in the shower under scalding hot water, then climbed up onto the roof and stared at the stars until his shivering became uncontrollable.
He inventoried his clothes. Everything he’d lost when the suitcase burst open had reappeared, whole and clean, as if nothing had ever fallen into the gutter or blown away.
One night, he bought liquor instead of a gas station hot dog, drank it from a paper bag on his way back to the hotel.
He found Boris at the front desk, flipping through a new magazine.
Blond girls in bikinis grinned at him, their calves coated in sand, hair fluttering in the breeze.
Pages and pages of bikini babes in increasingly naughty poses, some of them pulling at the straps of their swimsuits, a teasing grin on their symmetrical faces.
“Why not just buy a porno?” he asked and Boris shrugged.
“Can’t read it in the lobby.”
That was as good a reason as any, Jack supposed. “You want a drink?” He offered the paper bag.
Boris peered inside and stifled a laugh. “Shit, you are having a bad day! Yeah, gimme some of that.”
They drank under the humming neon sign. Cars drove past. Their headlights illuminated the lobby through the windows and reflected off wet sidewalks.
Under other circumstances, Jack might have appreciated the moment.
But Boris was no friend, and this was a strange, dirty hotel with suspiciously few guests.
But a drink was a drink.
“You, uh, wanna blow off some steam?” asked Boris after a few minutes of silently trading the bottle back and forth.
Jack blinked at him blearily. “What?”
Boris inclined his head, blue eyes blazing. Jack’s heart leapt. “I could meet you in the supply closet in ten. You know… If you want to.” His voice was low and smooth—Jack wanted to lap it up like ice cream.
An answer climbed onto the tip of his tongue. He gripped his knees until his knuckles went white.
If Jack was living the same day over and over again, was Boris?
Probably.
Was Boris aware of it?
Didn’t seem like it.
If they slept together, he wouldn’t remember anything.
Though Jack was tempted by those blue eyes and full lips, something about the situation didn’t sit right with him.
Could Boris consent if he didn’t know he was living the same day over and over?
If Jack had sex with him, was that taking advantage?
Did it matter if Boris wouldn’t remember tomorrow?
An eyebrow raised. Boris leaned back in his chair, licked his lips, stared down at his hands. “Listen, if I misread anything—”
“You didn’t,” Jack assured him, tapping his fingers anxiously against the countertop. “I just—I gotta be up early. Not a great idea. Sorry.”
“Right,” said Boris, looking anywhere but Jack’s face. “Yeah, got it. Have a good night.”
“Yeah,” said Jack, reaching for the brown paper bag. “You, too.”
He took the stairs two at a time, trying to outrun Boris’ disappointment and his own guilt.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to fuck Boris. That he wasn’t tempted. But that would complicate things—at least for Jack.