The Loop

Dan Sanders

• Publisher: Anvil Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781772141801
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur Allgemein

Winner of the 41st International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest

Alan is unsure if he is dead or dreaming, he only knows that he is stuck in a loop. He finds himself being forced to walk along a straight path through an unending pine forest where any deviation from the path causes him to black out and begin again. Dipping in and out of an endless purgatorial walk, Alan relives key moments in his life where he missed the opportunity to learn, escape, and change: The death of his mother, an abusive relationship with his father, and the opportunity to connect with his only real friend, a neighbour he never speaks to named Edgar.

The Loop chronicles the life of an alcoholic who is unable to escape his past to explore the ways in which abuse can shape someone into their abuser and the ways trauma can transfer from one generation to the next. How much of who we are is who we are? How much of it is someone else? What if this has all happened before?

1.

My vision blurs and I am in the forest. I am mid-step and catching myself from falling. I reach to brace myself against a tree, but the tree slides backwards as my arm locks at the shoulder and swings in unison with my left step. My left arm swings with my right step and wrenches the rest of my body violently enough that it forces the air from my lungs. I am walking through the forest. My arms swinging perfectly in time with my steps. It is warm, but not hot and I cannot turn my head. I am walking through the forest. I breathe in on every third step and breathe out on every sixth. I am walking on a path in the forest. I can’t seem to open my mouth. I am walking on a path in the forest. I am unable to stop walking on the path in the forest. I try to shake my head, wake up, scream, but my vision blurs and I am in the forest. I am mid-step and catching myself from falling.

The path is painfully exact, a flat plain of undisturbed pine needles, stretching into the distance. A pleasure to walk on and immune to vegetation. Grass grows to its border and stops, each blade bends back, even against the wind, like the path erupted from the earth and made its own space.

It is flawless. The pine needles seem to have been arranged by hand, each at perfect right angles, a bed of x’s and squares. I drift between both, seeing only x’s then squares, then cubes. I try to make shapes. I have enough control to let my eyes lose focus and fall into the space between the needles. Let myself examine the edges and wonder what it would be like to pick them up with my hands, lay them down myself, and spend eternity making a beautiful, endless pattern, just for me.

There’s not a leaf, not an acorn, a pine cone has never rolled onto the path and made little triangular drifts in the pine needles. It is a thick bed, little pricks in my feet to assure me that I am alive, or at least, aware.

As near as I can tell and as far as I am concerned, there is only the forest, there is only this path, I am alone in the forest. I am lost in the pine needles.

I was baptized in a church three times the size of our house. I don’t remember my own baptism, but I’d witnessed others as an altar boy. I remember those. They took place in the centre of the church, not by the altar, but fifty feet away, down a long tiled walkway. It was quiet until the baby cried, solemn as a funeral, sparsely attended, and procedural. Very rarely was anyone particularly happy, the baby would be dunked in transmogrified tap water, cry out in panic at being held by a stranger, and the new parents would rush to pull the child back from the priest, back from the water, the expression from all was mostly relief that it was over. A thing accomplished in the centre of a cavernous room — mother, father, child, stranger.

It is just beginning but for all intents and purposes, we are already at the end. The incomplete link between birth and absolution has been completed, an immediate rebirth. It feels tacky somehow to be reborn again so soon, greedy and without consideration for all that’s to come. From here on out, the rest is procedural.

I don’t remember my own baptism, of course, nobody does. I don’t remember much of anything, really, but bits and pieces, here and there, the important parts of my life come through in fits and flashes suddenly and without warning, especially now that I am at the end of it.

It always moved faster and faster as it went, months moving past like days and so on. Everything in life slowly moved further away, pulled across time like a rubber band, and then, in an instant, it suddenly snapped somewhere deep in my chest. The confusion of having to see the distance between now and then as I hurtle towards it, the terror to be able to feel every inch of distance from my birth like it was the slight distance between my limp arm and the glass I’ve dropped and broken into bits beneath my chair.

I have enough time before I pass to wonder if anyone will find me before the sun moves across the sky again and pulls me from the shade of my umbrella, baking me in front of all I have left, then a moment of relief to finally not feel one way or another about it.

The insects do not cross the hard boundary of the path and never touch me; birds approach overhead and lazily drift away. The path drifts gently to the left, into the distance, as far as there is to see, sometimes uphill, sometimes down. I am allowed to feel the effort. I am allowed to lurch forward and feel the exhaustion of the uphill climbs, and the tricky relief of the downhill passages. I am allowed to feel spry, young, and tired. I am able to feel the joy of remembering these movements. I am allowed to fall and lose my balance, but I am forcibly shunted into posture once I’ve regained my footing. I must walk. I don’t know why; maybe I am dreaming.

In the distance there is a tree large enough that it may have produced all the pine needles on earth. The horizon is generally obscured by growth, but as the tree comes into view, the dense growth fades, like it parted, making way for its king.

This king tree is three hundred feet tall from roots to tip, tall enough that I lose the top of it almost immediately. I lift my chin, but unsuccessfully and I am warped back into posture and forward motion. The tree is as wide as it is tall, a braid of trunks, three trees twisting into one, losing the edges of their individuality as they blend together about fifty feet up, just at the edge of sight. The branches reach in all directions, a giant umbrella of green, veined through with brown branches, the canopy is thick as night, gently weeping pine needles in the breeze.

The need to see the top of it, to see something different, to experience something of my own, grows, and I feel the frustration of my captivity, of my limbs disobeying, of being forced into this shell to walk this path. As I pass close to its base, I force my hand out to touch its perfect brown bark. My fingers almost reach it, can almost feel its presence, the space around the space it occupies, but my arm is twisted, not gently corrected back into place, but wrenched behind me, my shoulder pulled painfully from its socket. I am forced to my knees and held until my vision blurs and I am catching myself from falling. I am walking in the forest and the pine needles have gone.

Our home was a fine but shabby two-bedroom row home in a dense and angry section of Philadelphia. It was small, thin-walled and my mother would eventually tell me the story of how she couldn’t keep me from crying — how my crying must have kept the neighbours up nights. She hung extra blankets on the walls and stuffed towels under the door frame to keep the neighbours from hearing, to make it so that she and my father could sleep. She knew that when the neighbours had their kids, they hadn’t gone to the trouble and they were up with the neighbour’s kids more often than they were up with me. It was a shame, she said, that everyone was so inconsiderate.

I don’t remember this either, but I remember her remembering it, calling it up whenever we saw a crying baby, or saw a child requiring more than the requisite amount of attention.

We did most of our outdoor activities at the edge of winter, just before it would become too cold to reasonably swing on a swing set, but cold enough that there were fewer people, fewer children. It must have been November, when November was cold, and the only other child at the playground lost his footing running between the playground equipment. He tripped and fell and split his lip on the sidewalk and cried out. With one hand, she grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back to the car, and with the other, I saw her drive her thumbnail into the flesh of her index finger. It would have bled if we’d parked farther away.

I am walking on a fine brown silt. It gives gently beneath my feet and I learn that I am allowed to cry. The gift of a different sensation overwhelms me. There is a breeze. It is coming from up ahead, instead of off to the left. The trees are smaller. Thinner. Not pines. Deciduous? I don’t know what that word means. I feel as though I was walking on the pine needles for years. I know that cannot be true. I am dreaming an endless dream. I will wake up soon. I will be whoever it is that I am, and I will leave this place. The endless woods. Whatever memory this may be. Whatever contorted thing my mind is forcing me to experience. Any moment I will be breathing on my own power. I will blink when I choose. I will be awake. I will not be walking. I will leave this forest. But for now, I am walking alone in the forest and it is relief enough that it is suddenly different.

It has been so long since I have seen a leaf. Crickets. There are crickets here. The eek-eeking, eek-eeking, eekeeking, drifts in and out as I walk, it gets washed out in the wind as they lift above tall orange grass which whish-whishes in the wind. I dismantle every new sensation into its component parts and weep at the eek-eeking. The newness of the new persistence, doing my best not to notice the repetition of the eek-eeking, the tempo, the exact pause, the whish-whishing of the tall grass feeling intentional, mechanical. The echoes at the end of each noise falling in tempo with my own breathing. Step step step — breathe in eek-eek — step step step — breathe out — whish-whish of the tall grass, blink, eek-eek. My heart drops into the centre of me and would give anything just to take one moment, just a heartbeat break, even if it’s here on the path. Just one moment to process, to figure it out, to think but eek-eeking. The eek-eeking. It is the same as it was and I look at branches dancing overhead in their own perfect steps in the steady breathing breeze. Look at the sky, damnit. Rip your head back and look into the sky and feel something yank your hair and shove your head into the ground, breathe in the dirt just to have an unexpected moment and feel your teeth rip the side of your mouth open to bleed into your mouth and puddle around your nose — gasp and snort, and oh god the pressure and then once again into nothing; then, again, the pines.

My father was also a staunch advocate of silence, and when he couldn’t get it, he would settle for predictable noise. When he got home from work he’d turn the radio on immediately. The radio was a large wooden thing set in the corner of our eternally mismatched living room. He’d inherited the radio, it was his father’s, or his mother’s, he’d told me it’d eventually be willed to me. He didn’t know that when he died I would be precluded for legal reasons from receiving anything from whatever was contained in his estate. Though I don’t know if he ever properly filled out a will, it’s hard to imagine him ever making it to a lawyer’s office on any business not related to bail.

The radio only received a few stations and even when it was perfectly tuned it still pulled in a fair bit of static which persisted as a steady undercurrent beneath whatever he was playing to soothe his nerves. I don’t think he had any great love of music, or the news, it was white noise, just enough to drown out the sounds of the neighbours, the cars driving by, me and my mother, his own thoughts.

She hummed above it, out of rhythm, tune, or sync of whatever was being piped through the wooden mesh speaker of the radio, which I thought was haunted until I was in my teens. The woodgrain on the side panel hid a demonic face in the knots, in the stain. It was something I’d tried to show them, tried to draw for them: two eyes, teeth, brown and frozen in a perpetual rot of wood. They never saw it, he swatted my head and told me to focus. He always told me to focus, it was his escape out of any father/son moment that lingered past his very short attention span.

She hummed almost constantly. He would ruffle pages. I would watch them for cues on how to do anything other than sit still in a thin film of sound and hope that one of them would say something to the other, or to me, or to comment on whatever noise it was that they thought they were ignoring. It was deafening all the same and I spent most of my time ignoring them, adding another layer of silence, and disappearing into whatever silent activity I could find. I was too young for anything beyond quick picture books, and a TV didn’t find its way into the house for another year or two. I remember blocks being a favourite. I remember the blocks were wood but the container was plastic, a big plastic tub with holes cut out in the shapes of the wood. The goal, I guess, was to make a game of cleaning up. So that you didn’t leave the red block shaped like the Arc de Triomphe out on the floor for your father to step on at 3 a.m., drunk, on his way to piss or vomit. So that he didn’t thunder up the stairs and throw your door open so hard that the handle left a crater behind the quilted wall, almost certainly waking our dear sainted neighbours, screaming and throwing the block at the centre of your chest, the dull thud of it lost in his shouting, your cries lost in your mother’s, their fight tumbling out into the hallway, back into the bedroom overwhelming the white noise machine, the neighbours from down the street throwing up their window to shout “shut the fuck up” at the three of us. I think that was the purpose of the little holes in the tub, the general idea, anyway.

One of them threw away the tub the next day. I got to keep the blocks, but the tub was somehow shattered when the fighting made its way to the first floor, to get away from the bedroom windows. It was crunched into plastic shards, underfoot or against the wall, and swept up before I woke up from my padded room to wobble downstairs and look, no tub, no nothing, everything is perfectly normal, let’s hum in tempo with news radio.

There were a lot of nights like that — not all of them started because of my blocks, but other small or invisible infractions. It was like we saved up all the noise we were scared to make all week for some weekend outburst, drunken or otherwise. I don’t think my mother was a drunk, but she was too careful about everything for me to know one way or another, and she was gone before I really knew what that word meant, or that it applied to my father. I was a child, and my understanding of things was basic and primal. In my mind, my father was a tornado that would sometimes roll through the house and it was best to stay out of his way at all times, just to cut the odds of being in the way when he was spiralled up and tearing things apart.

I think it would have been helpful for her, in the long run, if she’d taken a path like my father did, and I eventually did, to shut out all the noise with something useful: drinking. Drinking at least, in the moment, feels productive. It’s an active participation in the world and an investment in yourself. It was like hanging quilts all around your insides. It had the same basic effect. Whatever you’re trying to silence builds up inside you all the same, but shouting or weeping or anger or violence is more civil when you’re drunk, it’s forgivable. You can’t run around your life shouting and weeping all the time. You drink to get it out of your system. You don’t let it take hold of your abdomen and fester there, releasing itself in one grand final moment at the Jersey Shore. You get rid of it in bits and pieces over time, as penance for being.

She took walks, which sounds healthy, but mostly I think she walked and ruminated, worked over her days and planned her escape with her fists clenched or didn’t do any of that and pretended that everything was just fine, which would be worse. I distinctly remember hearing her tell someone that my father “doe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 1.
• 2.
• 3.