Stagnation

Time hung still in the diner. My hallucination rolled its eyes. “Holy shit, are you cereal? I’m you, dumbass. Or I’m one of many Maxes you’ve left behind.” Her mouth quirked, like somebody had told a joke that she didn’t find funny.

I hoped I didn’t sound like that normally, but I guess being stuck in a nightmare diner would make anybody grumpy—much less being stuck there because of your own choices. Or the choices of another you. Shrug.

I tried not to look around. Everyone else in my dream was frozen, like flies in amber, and it scared me to see them like that. Without the passage of time, they weren’t the people anymore. Just statues. My grumpy old clone was the only thing still breathing.

“Can you get me out of here?” I asked.

“Oh, so you want help? Thought you could control everybody and everything, huh? Twist time around your fingers?”

I stayed silent. How do you even respond to something like that?

My hallucination sighed, and fidgeted with the hem of her shirt, never breaking eye contact. “Look,” she said. “You know what an oxbow lake is?”

“Yeah, it’s a—”

“Yeah yeah shut up, it’s a rhetorical question. I’m you, idiot. I know what you know, and we both know what an oxbow lake is.” She gave me a pointed look, and continued. “It’s a bend in a river that gets cut off, making a U-shaped lake. In Australia, they’re called ‘billabongs.’”

“Why did you explain it if we both know what it is?” I asked. I’d been going to say it but she cut me off. I didn’t even get to say billabong.

“To remind you how annoying you sound when you explain things,” she replied. “I’m so sick of the sound of your voice, Max. I’m so fucking sick of it. Anyway, that’s what happens when a river gets bold ideas about forging its own path. It gets cut off. It stagnates.”

“Is this a warning, or are you telling me off?”

“Neither!” She grinned—or at least, she showed me her teeth. “I’m just blowing off steam.”

I walked away after that without replying. I tried to come up with a cool, biting retort, but I couldn’t think of one. She wasn’t trying to help me, she was only looking down on me. I didn’t need that, not in the middle of all of this nightmare stuff.

“See you soon!” she called after me, rank laughter bubbling up from her booth in the frozen diner.

It’s not too late to save Chloe, no matter what the other Max thinks. I can reach out to her. Follow her back through the dream world, out into reality.

I focused on Chloe and concentrated. I felt light-headed, and then I stumbled out of the woods in front of the lighthouse. I fell to the ground, and Chloe fell next to me. She had been carrying me.

“Max? Say something!”

“Chloe? I… I must have passed out. Sorry.”

I shiver. The nightmare had been so vivid. I—the other me—she had been… what had I done to her? How had she ended up in that place? I didn’t want to think about it anymore.

I stood up and stared out at the storm. A great twisted column of water trailing wisps of foam and debris, slowly bearing down on us. Funnily enough, it reminded me of the time stream, which also sort of felt like a twisted, fraying column of water. Every time I rewound the time stream, I damaged it more and more, and now the backlash from that damage was going to destroy Arcadia Bay. I could reach out with my powers and grab the time stream right now, if I wanted to, and drag myself back to a few minutes earlier. I could talk to dream Max all over again. But it’d probably make the storm even worse, and I didn’t want to see her again anyway.

I looked back to Chloe. Her face was wet from rain. She held out a photograph of a butterfly—my photograph—and my body went numb. I realized right away what she wanted me to do.

“It’s the only way,” she said. “There are so many people in Arcadia Bay who deserve to live.” I could barely even listen to her. She was right, and I still didn’t want to do it. I wanted to stay here with her forever. But I think that made me a bad person, and she was better than that. She convinced me to go back one more time, to the moment before I discovered my time powers. To snip off the damaged parts of the time stream and let nature take its course unimpeded. To let my best friend die.

I kissed her, tears in my eyes, and took the photo.

She begged me not to forget her. “Never,” I said, before I seized the time stream and wove it, strand by strand, into the remembrance within the Polaroid. I strained, and my vision blurred—time travelling with a photo is hard work—and when everything grew clear there was no photograph. I was looking at the butterfly through my viewfinder, and there was a flash, and I was in the girls’ bathroom at Blackwell Academy, taking a photograph thirty seconds before the murder of the woman I love. My camera spat out the photograph, brand-new, and I broke down in tears.

I heard Chloe walk in. I heard Nathan Prescott behind her. The same words, the same argument. The same fear in her voice when he pulled a gun on her. I was not the same. I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know what was about to happen.

It was too late. The Max who let Chloe die, who first discovered the time stream in this very bathroom, was gone. It was impossible for me to avoid changing history, because I had already changed myself. And it may have been too late to save Arcadia Bay, but it was not too late to save Chloe.

“Stop!” I screamed, through tears. I couldn’t help it.

“Shit! Who the fuck is that!” said Nathan. He grunted, like a dog throwing up—I think Chloe kicked him in the nuts—and fell to the ground in a heap.

“Come on!” shouted Chloe, and I staggered to my feet and rushed out of the bathroom, stumbling over Nathan’s prone body and running directly into Chloe.

“Ow, could you maybe just—Max!” She took a step back and looked me over, head to toe. “Max Caulfield! Oh my God! How can—actually, we can talk about this in the car. Let’s get the fuck outta here!”

She grabbed my hand and dragged me down the hallway, through the doors and out of school. It was the middle of the day, but I was in no condition to go to class anyway. I hadn’t pulled the fire alarm, so class would continue, unlike the last time I’d lived through this day. Already things were so different, and yet I technically hadn’t rewound time. Sure, I’d gone back to the moment I took the photograph, but that didn’t count. That was my fresh start.

If I reached out with my powers, I could feel the time stream, taut and smooth. It was pristine. So long as I didn’t use any more time travel, there wouldn’t be a storm after all. I had a chance to do it all over again. Maybe Chloe was right. Maybe she really was fated to die. But maybe—maybe!—things could actually work out.

I got into Chloe’s truck, and we took off. I guess we saved Warren the trouble of getting headbutted. That wasn’t gonna happen now. Come to think of it, maybe I’d try keeping my distance from Warren this time around. He was well-meaning, but he sort of gave me the creeps.

Chloe broke the silence. “Max Caulfield, back from Seattle. God, I can’t even be mad at you. I think you just saved my life.”

I blushed, and tried to smile. It wasn’t too late for her to die regardless.

“Oh dang, your face! You’ve been crying! Hell, I should be crying too, since that Prescott shitwipe almost fucking shot me. There are some tissues in the glove box.”

The tissue box was crumpled almost into a ball, but I dug out a few sheets and dried my eyes. Through folds of alabaster I caught a glimpse of her blue hair, angelic, and I sobbed softly. I had her back. I beat the storm. All we had to do was navigate the next couple days, and this would all be behind us. The blocky LED display on the dashboard read “OCT 7.” The storm had been on October 11th. Just protect Chloe for four days.

My plan worked, I suppose: I really did keep Chloe safe. I sent the police an anonymous tip about Mr. Jefferson’s Dark Room, and the cops arrested him in the middle of third period. I wish I could have seen it, but I was out in the woods with Chloe. There was no way I was letting her anywhere near Blackwell until Mr. Jefferson was taken care of. I kept her away from the junkyard and the train tracks too. I didn’t think I could get Nathan arrested, but I kept my fingers crossed that he would lay low for a while after Mr. Jefferson got put away. It was nice, out in the forest. Chloe kissed me while we were sitting under a birch tree, and we watched the sunset together. My heart felt full.

But things can go bad so quickly. The next day, when she dropped me off at Blackwell, I could feel that something wrong. There was a crowd gathered around the girls’ dorm. My stomach lurched. I broke into a sprint. How could I forget Kate? I’d been so focused on Chloe that—no, there would be time for recriminations later.

“Kate!” I screamed, running up to the building. I couldn’t touch the time stream, or I’d bring back the storm. But I managed to talk her down last time! Surely I’d be able to do it again. I had to. “Kate, wait! Listen!”

She stared down at me like a crow perched on a wire, a speck high above. “Where have you been, Max? I needed you today, and you weren’t there.”

“I was out of town, I’m sorry!” I had been hiding, from Kate and from everyone else. “I didn’t know!” I did know, I had just forgotten.

“It’s too late.” She tipped forward, and I flinched away, but I couldn’t tear my eyes off her. I never forgot how she looked when she landed.

Things fell apart over the next few days. Nathan killed himself too, believe it or not—between the loss of his mentor and the suicide of one of his victims, maybe Nathan was afraid someone would come for him as well. He wasn’t entirely wrong, either. He pretty much murdered Kate—I was so angry that I almost tried to steal one of Chloe’s step-douche’s guns and shoot Nathan myself. But that’s not who I was, or who I wanted to be.

On the day of the storm, I found myself up by the lighthouse again. Alone, this time. Joyce had wanted to do some kind of family event with Chloe and I said, go for it. It had been a hard few days anyway, and she didn’t really understand why I was so paranoid about her safety. It’s hard, when someone you care about doesn’t understand what you’re feeling.

The sky was clear. No storm. Everything I had asked for. But there was a strange breeze blowing off the sea, slipping back across Arcadia Bay. Drawing my attention towards Blackwell, and my failure to safe Kate. It wasn’t right.

I don’t know when she showed up. I wasn’t dreaming, but there she was. The other Max, in the flesh. She had my facial features, but they looked different on her. Her skin was clammy, and her eyes were hard.

“Wowsers. You look bummed out.” She was making fun of me, but she didn’t seem to be having fun.

“Stop it,” I said. “I don’t want to hear whatever mean thing you’re going to say. I know, I fucked it up. I dropped the ball. Kate is dead.”

“Kate’s as alive as she’s ever been, Max,” said Max. “And it’s not like me being here makes a difference. I’m not here to influence your choice. I don’t think I could if I tried.”

I stared down at the Polaroid in my hand. A blue butterfly.

“No, I’m here because this is where it all comes together,” said the hallucination. “There’s nowhere else I can be. You see?”

“Because my failure was inevitable. Hardy har har.”

“You said it!” She winked, hands in pockets, shifting from foot to foot like she didn’t want to be here. Well, this wouldn’t take long anyway. The time stream was as healthy now as it had been four days ago, totally undamaged. There was no storm. My experiment, my fresh start, had been a success. I could start it all over again. Save Chloe. Save Kate. Heck, maybe I could save Nathan Prescott too. He didn’t deserve to die, even if he was a nuclear douchebag.

Focus: The time stream. The threads of the photo. It came to me more easily the second time, because that’s how practice works. Weave the strands together and let them flow. A blur, then a flash, and I was in the bathroom. I warned Chloe, just like before, and we ran away. This time, when we ran, we took Kate.

Camping in the forest with those two was some of the most fun I’d ever had. You wouldn’t expect them to get along, but Kate had a quiet respect for Chloe’s punk rebel attitude, and Chloe saw something delicate in Kate that she didn’t want to damage. Still, I felt distant from them. Within the past ten days, I had seen both of these girls die—Chloe, multiple times. The way they saw it, I was an artsy nerd who had taken them camping because I’d decided that fun matters more than grades. But to me, I was desperately struggling to protect the people I care about, and the best I could come up with was running away to the literal fucking woods. I was at the end of my rope. What was going to go wrong this time? Was a bus going to crash into Alyssa? Was I going to have to bring her out here to babysit too?

As it turned out, no, I did not bring Alyssa camping. It wouldn’t have worked. When I went camping, I could bring a handful of people with me, assuming they were whimsical or desperate enough to accept my invitation. But no more than a handful. When Nathan noticed that Chloe and Kate had both run away, he decided that his previous victims must have been planning to turn him in. He took his fears to Mr. Jefferson, who was much smarter and more dangerous than his protégé. Mr. Jefferson torched his Dark Room, and he told Nathan that there was only one thing left he could do to get revenge.

On the day of the storm, we drove back into town, and I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. A sort of sucking, spinning feeling, like water spiralling down the drain of a bathtub, gurgling back into the pipes it had come from. That would make for a cool shot, water going down a drain. As it happened, I hadn’t taken a single picture during our entire camping trip. I missed photography.

When we reached Blackwell, it was tangled in caution tape and police barriers. There were emergency vehicles parked all over the lawn, and their tires had torn up the grass. We asked a nearby paramedic, and he told us that Nathan Prescott had pulled out his gun that morning and shot four teachers and eighteen students, then himself. He left a note, but it was almost incomprehensible. The doctors say he was on some pretty crazy drugs, which I guess he got from Mr. Jefferson. Mark fucking Jefferson, who got away scot-free. I suppose he must have been preparing for this, thinking up ways to use Nathan as his scapegoat. What a piece of shit.

We pulled over and parked along a side street by Blackwell. We didn’t speak. Kate was weeping softly in the back seat, and Chloe was staring directly out the window at an empty spot on the ground. I was pretty confident she would storm out of the car any second, but she didn’t. She wasn’t, I realized, Chloe Price at all. It was me. I was in the back seat, too, where Kate had been. Neither of the other Maxes seemed to want to talk to me. They were waiting anxiously for the moment when I’d turn back time. My fresh start.

I didn’t feel fresh, but I didn’t disappoint either. I pulled out the photo and sucked us all down the drain, trickling down cold pipes back to the place where it all begins.

It was around then that I stopped playing by the rules for a little while. I knew I wasn’t supposed to do any time travelling, but this was just research. I was preparing for my next attempt, when I would save everybody. I took Polaroids regularly, and I used them to jump back over and over again to see how Jefferson and Nathan would react to my choices. I monitored Kate, trying to find out the exact moments I could intervene stop her from spiralling. The storm came back, of course, but that was fine. Each October 11th, I jumped into the butterfly Polaroid and erased my mistakes, starting the loop anew.

I found a photo from September one day while I was digging through my stuff, and I tried to jump into that one. I figured that if I stopped Nathan from drugging Kate, maybe everything would kinda sort itself out. But no—I couldn’t do it. The time stream didn’t want to go back that far, which was odd. I went back five whole years to save William, so how was a couple weeks such a big deal all of a sudden?

It didn’t matter. None of my research mattered, because there were just too many things that could go wrong. It’s not that Chloe or Kate were destined to die—only that the situation with Nathan and Mr. Jefferson was too unstable to unravel without getting anybody killed. Either Nathan hurt someone, or Jefferson got away, or Jefferson hurt someone, or Kate hurt herself, or all of the above. I actually got shot by Chloe’s step-douche while I was “researching” the contents of his car late one night. That guy had an awfully itchy trigger finger for someone who cares so much about discipline.

Anyway, I couldn’t make all the pieces fall into place, and I was starting to lose it. That’s when I decided to simplify things. I Marie Kondo’d my plan until the panicked interventions and awkward camping trips and everything that didn’t spark joy had been thrown away, and all that was left was soothing to me. And then I rehearsed until it was perfect.

“Chloe, what’s that in your pocket?” I asked. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew how she would react anyway.

“Ha! You noticed?” She pulled out a chunky handgun from her pocket. “It’s my step-douche’s.”

“You stole that? Chloe!” I had to act shocked, or it would be out-of-character.

“More like I borrowed it indefinitively. Not like he needs it anyway—he’s got about a bajillion of these things. He shouldn’t be allowed to own them anyway.”

I rolled my eyes. “And you should?”

“Hell. Yes. Gun control for douchebags only.” She closed one eye and pretended to take potshots at the trees around us. In about five minutes, if I didn’t screw up the small talk, she’d leave to use the bathroom and forget her gun on the picnic bench. I had stumbled into this set-up by accident, as a matter of fact, but it was very consistent: If we ate lunch within view of the outhouse, Chloe would reliably leave to use the bathroom ten minutes or so after we sat down. And if she had showed me her gun, she’d forget it. I think Warren would have called this a “strat,” but I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks. Months? Yeah, a few months at least. I hadn’t really been keeping track.

Chloe left to use the bathroom—to “take a leak in the creek,” she said, since she always insisted on pissing in the stream right next to the outhouse instead of the outhouse itself—and the other Max joined me instead. I gave her a little nod as I pocketed the gun, and she stared back at me with her dead fish eyes.

“How much of this have you seen before?” I ask. We didn’t always speak, but when we did, I tried to steer her away from pelting me with insults, because that’s just boring.

“How much of it have you seen before?” she replied, like an utter prick.

I rolled my eye and ignored her until Chloe came back. “Answering the call of nature!” she said with a mock salute, and I pretended to laugh. The real fun would come later.

That night, I snuck out of the Blackwell dorms, skirting around the security cameras and hiding my face from the janitors, and I went for a long walk. It took me to the edge of town, to a bike rack that always had a loose bicycle. I stole the bike (don’t worry, I brought it back) and drove out of town. I stayed off the larger roads, and at one point I hid in a ditch from a passing truck, but after an hour or so I finally reached Prescott Barn. The location of Mr. Jefferson’s Dark Room.

I waited for Mr. Jefferson for an hour or so, trying to get comfortable. I wondered what had kept him up so late that night. Was he grading assignments? Funny, to think of him doing schoolwork, knowing he was a… whatever he was. Serial killer? I think Nathan was the only one who killed anybody, at least before I started time-travelling. Mr. Jefferson was a serial something-or-other, though, that was for sure.

Anyway, Mr. Jefferson rolled up in the wee hours of the morning with flashlight. He didn’t turn on any lights, but I could just make out the stern cast of his face in the darkness. His sharp jawline. I’d actually had a crush on him, back when we first met. It felt so gross to think about it now. He clicked the lock and heaved open the broad steel trapdoor, and as he stepped into the stairwell I emerged from the darkness and shoot him eight times in the back. He fell forward, tumbling down into his Dark Room and landing crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. I followed him down and shot him in the face one more time. I didn’t know when I started shooting him in the head like that, but by now I would do it every single time. There was something special about watching the moment he stopped being alive.

That was the easy part over with. The hard part of my plan took me back to Arcadia Bay, down around the wealthier districts and past them into the shrubby culverts off the side of the highway. Apparently this was where Nathan liked to get high. It took me a long time to find him, because he would always go somewhere different every night. Sometimes he’d sit up along the road. Sometimes he’d climb a tree. He was on so many drugs that night that he became very unpredictable. Sometimes he’d hang out here, by the old flooded ditches, bumping drugs and playing with his gun. This was the best place for him to be, because it meant there was a low chance we would be spotted. Up in the trees was the worst place, but I was an optimist, so the culverts were always the first place I checked, and I got lucky that night. There he was, crouched on a rock, fiddling with the slide on his gun. His gaunt head ticked back and forth like an ugly little metronome, buzzing with coke and whatever else Frank had sold him. I think he was talking to himself.

Still, I wasn’t home free. Nathan was jumpy as all heck. If he noticed me, he’d shoot me, and he was usually a better shot than I was. If he hit me, or if the gunfire dragged out too long, I would get caught by the cops. This part—finding Nathan in a good place and killing him—was what usually spoiled my plan. More than once, I had restarted the loop from inside a jail cell. I had gotten good enough at doing the restarts that I didn’t even need the butterfly photo anymore.

I stood in a shadow, where he couldn’t see me. I was crazy tense. If I got this right, this might be my final restart. If he didn’t notice me, if I didn’t miss, if a car on the highway didn’t randomly hear me out of sheer bad luck. Still.

I drew a bead on his back, and squeezed five times. His body jerked; he slumped over, and I felt the tension in my shoulders relax for the first time in days. The first time I killed Nathan Prescott, I almost rewound out of shame, but these days it actually felt pretty good. He killed Rachel Amber. He killed Kate and Chloe. He made me rewind who-knows-how-many times to try and stop him from fucking things up. He was my classmate too, but of course I enjoyed killing him. Anyone would. I was almost sad that this would be the last time I did it.

Before I headed home, I grabbed what was left of his cocaine. Not for me, of course—yuck—but so that they would assume he got shot over drugs when they found him. I had sent anonymous tips to the cops a few times, to find out ahead of time what they would discover, and they never figured out it was me. The Prescott family was always eager to cover up the whole thing, since Nathan died high out of his mind and Mr. Jefferson died surrounded by incriminating evidence on a piece of Prescott property. That was my favourite part of this plan, to tell you the truth. It’s the sort of thing you want to brag about. I killed the biggest monsters in Arcadia Bay, and I made the rest of the monsters cover my tracks. I think Chloe would call me an “alpha bitch,” if I told her about it. Or she might be afraid of me. I never did end up telling her.

I rode the bike back up to the rack where I found it (see? told you I’d bring it back) and I started the walk back to Blackwell. I wasn’t alone. The other Max had been showing up more and more frequently. She seemed excited to see me, actually. We had something of a rapport these days. I’d call her a smarmy know-it-all, she’d say “it takes one to know one.” She’d ask me how many more loops before I was done, and I’d say “it could be this one!” and then she’d smile doubtfully. We had a comfortable silence today; she didn’t say anything until I had arrived back at Blackwell and was about to turn in.

“Good night, Max,” she said, and turned out the lights. Good night, other Max.

I woke up the next morning feeling… well, not feeling much of anything, I guess, and I checked the news. Nobody had found anything. I checked my phone: Kate wanted to get lunch. (She always asked in advance. I used to find it endearing but today it only made me tired.) Chloe left a voicemail saying she’d stolen “hella street signs” and she wanted me to check them out. Two street signs, to be precise. I hadn’t even been impressed the first time she showed them to me.

I agreed to hang out with them, but I would just be going through the motions today. I had most of these hang-outs down to a script by now. They were never much fun anyway—I kinda got the feeling like I’d outgrown those two years ago. The other Max, at least, felt like more of a peer than an obstacle. But that feeling was bound to go away once I stopped time-travelling, right? I didn’t even like the other Max, anyway. Her cynicism was refreshing, but it sorta stung. It hit too close to home, maybe.

Time really slips by when you’re playing along. Before I knew it, I was up by the lighthouse again, waiting for the other Max. I always spent the last few moments of a restart alone with her. The sky was clear, and the wind off the ocean was very brisk, like it was trying to push me, throw me back into Blackwell and the Dark Room and the junkyard and the bathroom. Not this time, fella. This time, there’s no turning back.

I could feel her standing next to me. She must have shown up while I was lost in thought. I waited for her to say something smarmy, to crack a joke at my expense, but she didn’t. I turned around and, to my surprise, realized she had been crying.

“Wow, I guess your heart grew three sizes today, Max,” I said, quirking an eyebrow. “Do you need a hankie?”

She smiled, and shook her head. “No, I’m just nostalgic. Regretful? Maybe that one. What do you call it when something’s inevitable, but you feel bad about it anyway?”

I shrugged away the question. “I never thought you’d be so sad to see me go.”

“I’m not,” she replied, almost bitterly. “Can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?” I asked. Had someone found Nathan? That shouldn’t be a problem, but I wanted to make sure I had all my ducks in a row. I would lose nothing by going back and trying again.

“The wind. The air. The time stream. I know you can feel it.”

I shuddered. Come to mention it, I could feel a strange tug. The funny little gravity of Blackwell Academy, dragging me back to the bathroom where it all begins. There were eddies in the time stream, like it was a river about to go around a bend.

“But I’m not going back.”

She smiled sadly. “Yes, you are.”

I could feel it getting closer. No! I wasn’t going back. I pulled the Polaroid out of my pocket and ripped it to shreds, but it was useless. The pieces slipped out of my fingers and fluttered away on the wind which whipped at my hair and danced with the scraps of photograph high into the sky. The time stream hadn’t frayed—there was no storm—but the river had been diverted. I had spliced it back too many times, and we were cut off from the main flow of time. Like a billabong. I had trapped myself in a stagnant lake. I strained my powers to burst through the blockage, to rejoin the normal flow of time. It was like trying to open my mouth with my jaws wired shut. I pushed till it hurt, until blood was pouring out my nose, but there was nothing I could do. Everything blurred, and there was a flash. Bathroom. Butterfly. My camera spat out the picture I had just destroyed, mocking me for my attempt to unmake it. It, and I, were eternal. I fell to my knees in shock.

That was the first time I let Chloe die. I rationalized it afterwards: Maybe if something new happened, it would be enough to jump-start me out of the rut I had created. But the truth is that I was too afraid to speak.

It’s not like it worked, anyway—changing the events of the timeline, that is. Chloe lives, Chloe dies, I kill Nathan, I kill Chloe myself. I tried leaving the city. I tried leaving the country. I seduced Mr. Jefferson. I let Nathan shoot up the school. I shot up the school. Nothing.

The other people are getting stale, I think. They’re slowing down. Now that they have no future, it’s like somebody’s let the air out of them. It doesn’t matter if I deviate from the script—Chloe always says the same things. I can punch Kate right in the mouth and she’ll say, “Why would you do that? Anyway” and go right back to whatever she had been saying before.

The other Max is here all the time now. She drifts in and out of my perception. Sometimes she’s hiding in the mirrors, standing where I’m supposed to be. Sometimes she’s everywhere, and everybody around me is wearing her face. I think there are a whole lot of other Maxes, actually. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the same one twice. It’s hard to distinguish between them all. When I’m alone, sometimes I talk to myself and it’s almost like having her with me.

My time powers are stronger than ever. Instead of trying to turn around the river of time, I’m doing a comfortable backstroke through the calm lake of an infinite now. I don’t need photographs. I can go anytime I want, forwards or back. If I rewind quickly enough, I can see an echo of myself from a few seconds earlier, going through the motions. I think that if I ever fully relaxed, time would stop moving entirely.

I went to the Two Whales the other day. I hadn’t really wanted to go, but I had been everywhere else since the last time I’d gone to the diner, and so I was due to visit again. Frank was sitting outside in the parking lot, as always, staring off into the distance. I stayed up all night watching him, once, but I never saw him get up.

The diner was packed, which was nice. The last time I went, it had been empty, and Joyce kept taking my order over and over again without ever bringing me my food. This time, the service was okay until everyone started slowing down. They do that sometimes—they slow right down until they freeze completely. I was tempted to fast-forward until they started moving again, but it’s not as if I was in a hurry.

Then a Max showed up. She seemed distraught, which was unusual. None of us get very upset anymore.

“Who are you?” she asked, as if it wasn’t obvious.

“Holy shit, are you cereal?” I said. “I’m you, dumbass. Or I’m one of the many Maxes you’ve left behind.” She could leave me behind again, as far as I was concerned. I was busy waiting for my hamburger.

“Can you get me out of here?” she asked, with a real attitude. Like it was my problem that time had stopped in here. Oh, no, wait! I remembered who this Max was. My gosh, she was from a while ago.

“Oh, so you want help?” I said. “Thought you could control everybody and everything, huh? Twist time around your fingers?” Not like she’d learn her lesson. Nobody learns in here, least of all me.

She looked offended. Well, she’d had it coming. What had I been supposed to say next? Ah, right:

“Do you know what an oxbow lake is?”