The Endless Loop
| 21 min read
The alarm went at six, and Ethan Carter had already been awake for four minutes, lying still in the dark, waiting for it. He let it ring anyway. He hit snooze, which bought him nine minutes he never used, and got up on the fourth minute of the nine, because that was how the system worked. The snooze was not for sleeping. It was for the sound of the room going quiet again.
Shower. Two minutes for the water to come up to temperature in a building put up in 1926, which he had timed. Shave on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The gray suit or the navy one, alternating, both from the same rack at Macy's, both altered by the same tailor on Corinth Street who had told him, twice, that he had one shoulder lower than the other.
Coffee in the pot on a timer. Two eggs, scrambled dry, the way his mother made them, which he had never especially liked and had never stopped making.
Out the door at 7:12 for the 34 bus, which came at 7:19 and was late on Thursdays because of trash pickup on Belgrade Avenue. Orange Line at Forest Hills. Fourth car, because it put him at the stairs at Downtown Crossing. He read on his phone, but not really. He mostly looked at the reflection of the car in the black window across from him and at his own face inside it, and thought about nothing in particular, and got off.
He was thirty-four years old. He had done this, with small variations, for eleven years.
The firm was Halloran Reeve, seventy-one people on two floors of a building on Federal Street, mid-sized in the way that meant nobody outside accounting had heard of it and everybody inside it had. Ethan handled a portfolio of family-held companies. A linen supply outfit in Everett. Two dental practices. A third-generation marine hardware business in Gloucester whose books had been kept for forty years in a hand-ruled ledger by a woman named Dot, who had died, leaving behind a system so idiosyncratic and so completely correct that Ethan had spent a month translating it and had felt, doing it, something close to love.
He was good at his job. That was the part nobody put in the story about men like him. He could look at a trial balance the way a mechanic listens to an engine, and find the place where the sound was wrong. He had once caught a $19,000 error by noticing that a number ended in a digit it had no business ending in.
He liked that a column could be made to close. He liked that when it closed, it was closed, and no one could argue with it, and it stayed closed forever.
His father had been a house painter with four trucks and a shop off Hyde Park Avenue, and Ray Carter had never once in his life known, on any given Tuesday, whether he was solvent. Ethan had watched him at the kitchen table with a stack of mail he wouldn't open, sorting the envelopes by size, and had understood at fifteen that there were two kinds of adults in the world. There were the ones who found out. And there were the ones who knew.
At five o'clock he shut the laptop, put it in the bag, said goodnight to the same three people, and went home.
On the Thursday it started, the coffee was wrong.
He noticed it in the first sip in the eleventh-floor kitchen, and his mouth registered it before his mind did, a sourness at the back with something scorched under it. He looked at the pot. He looked at the machine. He poured it out and made another cup and it was the same.
Later he found out the office manager had switched vendors to save nine hundred dollars a year. At the time it was just a bad cup of coffee, and he set it down and went to his desk.
The bus had been late that morning. His sandwich place on Devonshire was out of the turkey and havarti, which happened perhaps three times a year, and he took the chicken instead and ate it at his desk and didn't taste it.
The feeling started somewhere in the afternoon. Not memory, exactly. More like walking into a room where somebody had already set the table for you. He came out of the elevator and knew, a half second early, that the man in the blue vest would be standing at the printer with his arms crossed. He knew, before she said it, that the woman from the marketing floor would hold the door with her hip and say there you go, sir, and she did, in that order, with that exact stress on sir.
At 4:40 Sarah Pham leaned into his cube with her coat already on and said, "Living the dream, Carter."
She said that. She said that every Thursday. He had heard it four hundred times and had never once heard it.
That night he ate leftover chicken thighs standing at the counter and put on a program about restoring canal boats and watched two episodes without following either. He got into bed at 10:40. The building's radiator did the thing it did, the knock and the sigh.
"There has to be more than this," he said out loud, into the dark, and then felt stupid, because it was the kind of sentence a person says in a movie, and because he had no idea what he meant by more. More of what. He had money in the bank. He had his health. Somewhere out past that sentence there was nothing but a shape he couldn't name, and he fell asleep before he found it.
Friday it got worse.
He knew the bus would be on time and it was. He knew there'd be a woman with a rolling oxygen tank at Forest Hills, and there she was, and he'd seen her a hundred mornings and had never once wondered about her. He knew the elevator would stop at seven and nine.
At 9:15, in the hallway, Sarah said, "How's Gloucester treating you," and he had known she would say Gloucester, and he had known the little sideways move she'd make to get around him, and by the time she was past him his hands had gone cold.
He went into the stairwell and sat down on a step.
It was not a glitch in the world. That was the part that got him. If it had been a glitch, there would have been someone to tell. He sat there working it out the way he'd work out a variance, and the answer came out clean and horrible: he could predict the day because the day was predictable. Nothing was repeating. He had simply built a life with no variance in it and had stopped looking at it, and now he'd looked.
Eleven years. Say two hundred and forty working days a year. Two thousand six hundred and forty mornings, and he could not distinguish one from another. There was a whole decade back there and it had the resolution of a single Tuesday.
He was still doing the arithmetic when Doug Halloran found him.
Halloran was sixty-one and had one of those faces that got kinder as it aged, which Ethan suspected was luck rather than character. He sat down on the step above, with some effort, and said his knees were shot, and then he offered Ethan the senior manager job.
Gary Pruitt was retiring in March. It was Ethan's if he wanted it. A book of forty clients instead of nineteen, a title, a raise Halloran named out loud, and a path that Halloran did not need to describe, because Ethan could see the whole thing laid end to end from where he sat: partner at forty-four, Halloran's chair at fifty-five, the same elevator stopping at seven and nine for another twenty-one years.
"Take some time," Halloran said. "Tell me by the first of the month."
He put a hand on Ethan's shoulder on the way up, the way you do to a man on a stairwell step, and said he'd earned it, and went out the fire door.
Ethan sat there another four minutes. His father had died in a stairwell, on the second-floor landing of a triple-decker in Dorchester he was bidding on, fifty-four years old, with a color deck in his jacket pocket. The undertaker gave the jacket back with everything still in it.
That night Ethan set his alarm for seven.
It felt ridiculous. He lay there and his pulse was up over a one-hour change to a clock, and he understood, lying there, exactly how bad it had gotten.
At seven he got up and did everything in the wrong order. Dressed before he showered and then had to undo it. Skipped the eggs. Left the apartment at 7:50 into a neighborhood he had never seen at 7:50, which turned out to be full of people, kids in a ragged line outside the Sumner School, a man hosing down the sidewalk in front of the fish market, a whole civilization that had been running out there every morning while he was underground in the fourth car.
He walked past his bus stop and kept going and got the train two stops up, and got off one stop early at Chinatown because he wanted to, and found a café on a side street off Bromfield with four tables and a hand-lettered sign, and stood in line behind a courier with a bike over his shoulder.
The coffee was good. That was almost the worst part.
While he waited he read the corkboard by the door, because it was there. A dog walker. A room for rent in Allston, no pets. A postcard for an exhibit opening that night in the South End, at a gallery on Harrison Ave. Small paintings, from the picture. Interiors of some kind.
He put the postcard in his jacket pocket without deciding anything, and got to his desk at 9:20, and nobody said a word about it, which was its own small piece of information.
The gallery was one room, white, colder than outside, with a folding table of wine in plastic cups. Thirty or so people, most of them talking to each other rather than looking. Ethan stood in the doorway for a full minute with his coat over his arm and nearly left.
The paintings were small, maybe fourteen inches, and they were all kitchens.
Not nice kitchens. A gas range with a burnt-on ring. A drying rack with two plates in it. The corner where a linoleum floor met a baseboard, painted so exactly that he could feel the grit in it. There was one of a kitchen table under a window with morning light coming across it, and a stack of mail on the table, and Ethan stood in front of that one for a while and then went and stood in front of it again ten minutes later.
"It's the mail, right," said a woman beside him. "Everybody stops at that one. I've never figured out why."
She was maybe forty, in a work shirt with paint in the weave of the cuff, holding a plastic cup she wasn't drinking from. Short dark hair pushed back with one hand too many times.
"My father used to sort his by size," Ethan said, and then wished he hadn't.
She looked at him instead of at the painting. "Sort it, or open it?"
"Sort it."
"Right," she said. "Yeah. That's the picture."
Her name was Clara Bettencourt. She'd painted all of it. She had been at it for nineteen years, she said, and this was her fourth show, and if he wanted to know the truth, the last one had sold two pieces and this one had sold three and one of those was to her cousin.
Ethan asked her the question he'd come there to ask without knowing it, though he asked it badly, in a roundabout way, something about whether she'd always known.
"Known what?"
"That you'd do this. That you wouldn't end up doing something else."
Clara laughed, not unkindly. "I do do something else. I do medical billing for a periodontics group in Brookline, Monday through Thursday, eight to four."
He didn't have anything ready for that.
"You thought I painted," she said.
"I thought you painted."
"I paint Tuesday and Thursday nights and all day Saturday, in a room I share with a guy who makes furniture, and I gesso panels on Sunday afternoons while I listen to podcasts about murders. It is the most boring life you have ever heard described." She drank some of the wine finally and made a face at it. "People come to these things and they think they're looking at freedom. It's not freedom. It's just a different set of Tuesdays."
They ended up on the bench outside at eleven, after the gallery emptied, with the cold coming up through the slats. He told her about the stairwell and the arithmetic. He told her about Sarah Pham and living the dream, and she said the thing he would think about for months afterward, which was that the horror wasn't that his life was repeating, it was that he'd been treating it as a rehearsal.
"For what, though," Ethan said.
"That's the question, man. I don't know. Nobody I've ever met knows." She got up and started winding a scarf around her neck. "But you can't rehearse two thousand mornings. At some point somebody has to tell you the show's been running the whole time."
She gave him her number written on the back of a price list. She said the Tuesday class at the Roslindale community center was terrible and he should take it.
He took it.
It was terrible. It was eleven people in a basement room that smelled like a church basement, taught by a retired high school teacher named Phil who said "commit to the line" with the frequency of a metronome, and Ethan was, by a comfortable margin, the worst person in the room.
That was not the discovery he'd been hoping for. He'd half expected the thing everyone half expects, that there had been a talent in him all along, folded up and waiting. There wasn't. His drawings looked like drawings of the idea of a chair. A woman in her seventies named Roz produced, in forty minutes and without apparent effort, a study of a coffee can that made him want to put his hands over his own paper.
He kept going. Not because it got better, which it barely did, but because Tuesday nights had stopped being a thing that happened to him.
The rest of it he changed a piece at a time, and about half of it failed. He took the commuter rail one morning to see what it was like and it cost eleven dollars and got him in twenty minutes late. He said yes to a bar thing with the audit group and stood at the edge of a conversation about fantasy football for ninety minutes and left. He tried a running club and hated it in a way that surprised him with its purity.
Some of it took. He started walking the last mile from Downtown Crossing and learned that the city had a smell that changed by block. He ate lunch outside on the steps at Post Office Square and watched a man feed pigeons in a manner that suggested a long-running dispute with specific pigeons. He called his mother on Sundays instead of every other Sunday, and after the third week she asked him what was wrong, and he said nothing was, and she said, "All right," in the voice she used for numbers she didn't believe.
At work he was mildly worse for a while, and then better than he had been. He found himself calling clients he hadn't needed to call. He drove out to Gloucester and stood in the marine hardware place for two hours while the owner's son showed him the bins, and he came back with a way to restructure their inventory accounting that saved them a small amount of money and took him four unbilled evenings, and he could not remember the last time he'd done something at that job because he wanted to see it done.
In February he had dinner at Clara's studio, which was a corner of a room on Thayer Street with a rolling rack, a card table, and a space heater she was not supposed to have.
He had been carrying an idea around for a few weeks, and he put it on the table between the takeout containers, and it was: what if he quit.
Not immediately. He had savings. He could do eighteen months, maybe two years. He'd take the classes seriously, get into something part-time, and see what happened. He'd worked out the numbers on the train the way he worked out everything, and he laid them out, and he was pleased with them, and he watched Clara's face while he did it and could not read what was on it.
"You want me to say it's brave," she said.
"I want you to say something."
"Okay." She put down her fork. "It's the same move."
"What is?"
"This." She waved a hand at his page of numbers. "Look, you were in a box you didn't choose, and it got unbearable, so now you want one big decision that fixes it forever, and then you're done deciding. That's not the opposite of the box. That's the box with a different label on it."
He got hot in the face. "That's not what this is."
"Isn't it? You were going to be the man who never has to find out, and now you want to be the man who blew up his life, and both of those guys get to stop thinking." She sat back. "I've watched three people do this. One of them's fine. Two of them came back in eighteen months with nothing to show for it and a great deal of shame about it, and one of those two doesn't paint at all now, because he can't stand to be reminded."
"So I should just stay."
"I didn't say that." She rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist, leaving a small mark of white on her temple that she didn't notice and he didn't mention. "I'm saying you're asking the wrong question. You keep asking what you should be instead. The question is what you actually want your week to look like. Nobody lives a life. Everybody lives a week, over and over, until they die."
He walked to the T afterward angry, and stayed angry through Back Bay, and somewhere around Roslindale Village stopped being angry, because she was right and he'd known it by the second stop and had just wanted the ride to be over first.
He drove out to see his mother the last Sunday in February.
Denise Carter had been in the same two-bedroom in Readville for nine years, since she sold the house. He brought groceries she didn't need and they had the conversation they always had, about her knee, about the neighbor's dog, about a cousin's second marriage.
Then, without planning it, he asked her about the shop.
"What about it."
"Was he happy? Doing that."
His mother looked at him over her glasses for a while. "He was happy about half the time. The good half was very good." She turned her cup around on the table. "He hated the bidding. He hated the money. He liked the actual painting. He'd take a job himself, a room, a stairwell, if the crew was busy, and he'd come home at nine at night in a mood so good you'd think he won something."
"I didn't know that."
"You were fifteen and you'd decided about him," she said. "That's allowed. Fifteen-year-olds decide."
She got up and went into the back and came out with a ladder, which she had apparently been keeping in a closet for nine years. It was a six-foot wooden stepladder, paint-crusted an inch thick along the top rail, forty years of colors in cross-section, some of them from rooms in houses that had been sold twice since.
"He wouldn't get an aluminum one," she said. "Take it or I'm putting it out."
Ethan drove home with it sticking out the back of his car with a plastic bag tied to the end.
He told Halloran on the first of the month.
He said no to Pruitt's book. He said he wanted to stay on his own portfolio, and he wanted four days a week, and he understood what that meant for the raise and for the track, and he said it in about forty seconds because he had practiced it on the bus and had learned that the way to say a hard thing is quickly.
Halloran didn't say anything for a moment. Then he laughed, once, not meanly. "You know I asked for four days in 1994."
"What happened?"
"Reeve said no and I never asked again." He clicked his pen a couple of times. "I've got to run it past the committee and they'll be idiots about it for a month. Take Fridays. Don't take Mondays, everybody who takes Mondays ends up back at five days by Christmas."
Ethan said thank you and got as far as the door.
"Carter." Halloran had turned back to his screen. "What are you doing with it?"
"Painting, probably. Badly."
"Huh," Halloran said, and that was the entire reaction, and Ethan found he preferred it to almost anything else the man could have said.
Three years on, the alarm still went at six, four days a week, and he still let it ring before he hit it.
The rest of it he took apart and put back together on purpose, piece by piece, and most of the pieces he put back where they'd been, which surprised him. He kept the eggs. He kept the fourth car, because it did put you at the stairs. He kept the gray suit and finally threw out the navy one. He walked the last mile in anything above twenty degrees and took the bus when it was colder, and the woman with the oxygen tank was named Marguerite and had a granddaughter at UMass Boston studying to be a physician assistant.
He was still an accountant. He was a better one than he had been. The Gloucester people sent him a box of something inedible every Christmas.
Fridays he was in the room on Thayer Street, where he rented a corner from Clara for a hundred and ten a month and where the space heater was still against the rules. They were friends, which was a word he did not qualify. Saturday mornings he was in the class, which he had taken eleven times now, still taught by Phil, where he was no longer the worst one in the room, only the third or fourth worst. Roz had died. Her coffee can study hung in his hallway where he saw it every time he left the apartment.
He was not going to be a painter. He worked that out in the second year, without drama, the way he worked out anything, by looking at the numbers. He had thirty-one paintings and four of them were all right.
The one on the easel was the ladder.
It had been the ladder for seven months. He set it up under the window in the corner of the room with the morning coming across it, and he had repainted the top rail eleven times, trying to get the forty years of colors to sit right, the mint green under the cream under the pale blue that must have been somebody's nursery in 1988. It was difficult in a way that had no bottom to it. Some Fridays he sat in front of it for an hour and moved nothing.
He did not know what he was going to do when it was finished. It was the first thing in his life he had ever not wanted to close.