Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

The rest of Bonnie’s predictions ended up coming true. Nobody cared.

I turned the corner into the dining room and jumped. There was Bonnie at the table, shoulders so slumped she resembled a tombstone.

“It was awful,” she said. She looked like she had been up for hours already. “They weren’t the ones to help me. Not at all. I was so wrong about everything.” She stared down into a full mug of coffee that I could tell had gone cold.

“Did something happen?”

She glanced up at me and made her face go calm. “No. I had a bad—dream. I had a bad dream in which I was interrogated a lot and then they were going to open up my skull and look at my brain and maybe fuck with it a little. Good thing I ran the clock out on that.”

To hide my relief, I picked up her mug and reheated it in the microwave. “Good thing it was all a dream,” I said.

Bonnie said, “I know you don’t understand but I appreciate you listening. I just have to lay low this week. I have to be sensible. No one else is going to save me. No faith in family. No faith in institutions.”

I had never known Bonnie to talk like this. So depressed and… gnomic? But then I remembered it was her birthday, so perhaps she was mourning the way all women of our age were supposed to mourn the precipitous vanishing of our worth, like, Whoops, time to grow a personality, which the world will also devalue! Bonnie had always been devastatingly confident—but who knew, it could have been the kind of confidence that only flourished within highly specific parameters and withered time-lapse-fast without.

“Hey. Don’t be too sensible. It’s your birthday! We got those drinks tonight.”

Bonnie groaned and the microwave beeped.

Later on in the evening Scott said, “I didn’t mean that it was next month. I meant today is the start of a new month. Which is this month.”

Bonnie closed her eyes so she could roll them, but we could still see it.

And later on in the evening when the talk turned to shitty men and the list full of them and our lives full of them, Bonnie, who had gotten quietly wasted, said, “Men men men men MEN. Can they not be the only subject of conversation left in the whole entire world please ? Can we please just talk about something nice?”

But that was Bonnie for you.

Her email read, BIRTHDAY CANCELED! I’ve decided to embark on a new adventure. Arctic Circle expedition, BITCHES. I leave in an hour, therefore no time to get drunk with you jokers. I’m drunk

She said, “What would you do? Hypothetically.”

We were a little surprised. Bonnie didn’t usually go in for these kinds of conversations. She thought these topics were nerdy meaningless masturbations for super dweebs. Stop acting like life is a Star Trek movie, it’ll never happen! she’d say. Sometimes she substituted a Star Wars movie for a Star Trek movie. Then again, we’d been discussing the list of shitty men, about which she seemed very oh this again , so maybe any interruption would do.

Phyllida would improve herself. Read books, learn languages and musical instruments and complicated choreography that didn’t require too much muscle strength. “Also, I would punish those I deemed deserving of it. They would be in a hell of my own making, unaware they would be doomed to relive these torments again and again. It would be a long time before I tired of this.”

Damn, girl!

Scott would travel and spend all of his money as quickly as he could. We politely overlooked the fact that Bonnie already could do this, sometimes did do it.

Devon would quit her job and just do nothing. If you were living the same week over and over again it meant you weren’t aging, so time no longer had you propped up on its handlebars propelling you forward no matter what, as you spit out bugs and tried not to slip off. No, time in this scenario was chill as hell, willing to stroll with you around a track and have a stoned, circular conversation nobody would be able to retrace. How wonderfully relaxing, and so very necessary when everything had been so apocalyptically stressful. “I would get to know my friends better. Though I would keep far away from most of my family. For them, duration and repetition would not be improvements.” But Devon relented, a little. “I might give it a shot if I got really bored. In a literal thousand years.”

Nina would try to save everybody.

We would wear elaborate disguises in order to spy on our friends and see what they really thought of us; we would binge-eat; we would sex-marathon; we would try new hairstyles; we would get three dogs; we would get teardrops and ice cream cones tattooed on our faces; we would get five cats; we would do every drug; we would not garden .

Sure, I made my contributions. But this was the only thing I said that I really meant: I said that I actually hated this hypothetical conceit. When you dug right down into it, it was odious. Because you could do anything you wanted, you could do absolutely whatever, and nothing would ever, ever, ever, ever be allowed to change.

Bonnie looked placid. “Yes, what then? If it just starts over again and again and never stops no matter what.”

“You make your peace with it,” said Derrick. “You have to relinquish your attachment to time as it was.”

Scott said, “You said a week, right? That’s lucky. That’s where it’s at. Way better than a day. In a week, you can really get somewhere.”

Her email read, Hi, assholes! Birthday drinks are canceled. Giving you tons of warning so you don’t end up meeting anyway to talk about me behind my back because that’s like your favorite pastime. IN OTHER WORDS, I HEARD EVERYTHING. Is that really what you thought of me? What is so wrong with choosing joy? Well. You got your wish. The longer this week goes on the more familiar I become with it and the great grand repeating shittiness we’ve gotten ourselves into. Thank you so much, losers! Now I’m depressed just like you.

We had no idea what she was talking about.

It did still sound like Bonnie.

She burst into my room without knocking.

“I think I got it! Do you remember this time?” she gabbled.

I squinted at my alarm clock. “… time?”

At this, an utter devastation settled over Bonnie. A flat, matte no-expression gray exoskeleton that turned her head and picked up her feet and walked her out of my room.

Bonnie raised her glass. “Here’s to the nights I will remember with the friends who always forget,” she said, and downed the whole thing. We sat still. If we did or said anything, she would predict us again, mimicking us in that horrible sarcastic voice.

“Go,” she said, and we ran out of the bar.

Her email read, I’m just really sick of you all. Sorry.

Something was wrong. Bonnie wouldn’t get out of bed. She didn’t shower. I brought her food but she’d only pick at it. When I asked her what was wrong, or how I could help, all she would say was, “Look. Sometimes I just don’t have it in me to get it up again for yet another seven days of the same old, same old, same old.” I had never seen her like this.

She intoned:

Another man, another bad man

First a bad man

First outrage

And then or simultaneously