Curled up in a brocade chair, thinking about a cappuccino, about how I need to eat something. Clicking a button on my airpods to make the world go quiet. How is that possible? I am watching a documentary; I’ve been doing a lot of that these days, in my spare time. Really I have too much of it, and nobody else here seems to have any — and when I graduate, totally directionless and useless with a degree, like the men in books; scorned without ever having felt real love, like the women in books… anyway that’s not the point. The point is I have time. 

What do you do when he gets confused and disorientated? a voice asks the woman on screen. Well, he’s disoriented all the time, says Deborah, but it doesn’t matter because we don’t need to be in time. She smiles. Not teary at all. We’re on another plane, Clive and I. 

This is old documentary footage. No chance that Clive Wearing is still alive today. Was he really alive when they filmed this or did he die when the time loop started? His wife, Deborah I mean, insists he’s happy. Outside of time, he has become happier as it passes. When Deborah leaves after a visit he asks her cheerfully to come back at the speed of light, please. And of course she will. But in the beginning, he was screaming and crying and nauseous, fiercely scribbling in a notebook he’s never seen before: 

I am now perfectly awake. First time for… years… months. 

He is met with about a thousand identical lines. It happens every couple of minutes, this sensation of gaining consciousness from total blackness, which he can now calmly describe as precisely like death. No difference in day and night. No thoughts. No dreams. Every couple of minutes he’s astonished to be alive, awake; he crosses out the last time he wrote it because that must have been when he was a dead

man walking. He adds a check mark to prove that this time, he means it, which of course will eventually be scribbled over like the rest of the check marks. 

He used to be horrified and angry by the idea that it was him who’d been writing in this all along, telling Deborah that he’d never seen the notebook before, yelling at her for not believing him. Twenty years later, he’ll let her tell him stories about the life he does not remember. Still writing in the notebook, though. His ability to write seems to have devolved; the words get bigger, pencil smudged, everything but that last line faithfully crossed out. Sometimes I look in the mirror and it feels like making eye contact with someone else — startling, starting, sorry to impose. Sometimes I look at the clock and think it must be wrong. 

When Deborah speaks I am distracted by her British accent, by the way one of her front teeth pokes out over the other as though she isn’t living hell on earth; she’s found the perfect shade of lipstick. I wonder if she’s ever done a color analysis — she tells the camera, me, about how she had to leave him; they can’t live together anymore even though she tried, tried repeating the same day over and over for nine years until she was crazy. It took nine years for her to find a brain injury unit that she could stand to think of Clive living in. Then divorce papers, then new relationships which could not and did not last because they weren’t Clive. I was looking for Clive, I guess. She smiles. Not teary at all. Tells us about renewing her vows. The documentary crew reassures me that she visits whenever she can. 

It’s not enough. It’s more than anyone else on this planet could do but it’s not enough, because every couple of minutes Clive thinks he’s truly awake for the very first time and has never really seen her before. Total mystery, by the way, how he knows to miss her without remembering a single moment of their life together. The heart is just an organ, hollowed-out and busy pumping blood — it can’t be possible that she was buried deep enough inside to escape viral encephalitis — there’s a brain scan proving that Clive no longer has a hippocampus with which to learn, with which to hold memories. But he remembers to miss her anyway and he remembers how to play music. Deborah wants us all to know that he was a brilliant conductor once. She wants us all to know about the voicemails that pile up during the night: hello, darling, it’s Clive here. I don’t care about anybody else in the world. Just you. Please come. I love you. Bye-bye, darling. Can you come see me, please? I have no clue what’s happened. I just want to talk to you. I don’t care how late it is. Come to me at midnight or one o’clock in the morning, I don’t mind. I just love you and I want you to come as soon as you can, will you, darling? Bye-bye. Somehow Deborah can live with this, the same way Clive lives whole seven-second lives in her absence. Writing in a notebook he’s never seen before, between endless assertions of new consciousness: 

DEBORAH FOR ETERNITY. 

And I just don’t understand how Clive ever stopped screaming. He does not have “aggressive outbursts” anymore — how? I am not an angry person, but sometimes, something gets so deeply under my skin that I have to take two or three breaths and clamp my teeth shut; hold, don’t throw up, be kind again. How did Clive learn how to do it without anything to learn with? He is so calm, telling the documentary people that they are the first human beings he has ever seen. Two men and one lady. There’s a poster by his sink, brightly colored with instructions on how to get ready for bed, clearly written by Deborah because it starts with “DARLING!” at the top. It’s unclear to me how he gets through his day — we’re left unclear on that, all for the best; wouldn’t want the crew to be there the moment he wakes up, although of course they are, because every moment he is newly awake. Feels just like death. No dreams, no thoughts. Nothing. The interviewer asks him if he misses his old life. Yes, although I’ve never been conscious to think that. Apparently he’s never been conscious to think anything at all — he doesn’t remember himself as truly alive even before he was ill — so she asks, what do you miss? 

I’m on the edge of my seat and can’t see anyone; the outside of my brain is all fogged up; the rest of the world doesn’t matter. It has never been as poignant as the interviewer’s next question: if you could do anything, if you had free choice, what would you do? Clive does not ask what she means – he knows that he is a prisoner of recurring consciousness, of seven-second infinity, of a brain injury unit that he wouldn’t find his way back to if he wandered out the door. He’s smiling and wistful, almost laughing when he answers, Oh, a gin and tonic, I think. With a cigarette. Then, of course, waiting for time to elude and disappear, and her arrival. 

So here is the answer, the anchor; one woman; Deborah for eternity. Can get about one tear out of all of this before it ended a minute ago, before it’s burying itself in time, time which for me is always eluding and disappearing; I who am always waiting, for, please, her arrival.