Page 24 of Time Loops & Meet Cutes
However, as I’m exiting the restaurant, I pass a group of young people—university students?—having an animated conversation at a table near the door.
“And then he swore that time slowed down and started going backward,” someone says.
I reduce my speed as much as I can without drawing too much attention to myself.
“I’m serious!” a man exclaims. “That’s what happened. Then it started feeling like I had, like, chronic déjà vu.”
I come to a stop. Does this have something to do with dumplings?
“Really?” someone else says. “That’s never happened to me, and I’ve done shrooms a bunch of times.”
Hmph. How unhelpful.
Back at home, I pull up Google on my phone and make another attempt at finding the dumpling lady from the night market. I look at vendor listings and photos for other markets, but I can’t find any evidence of her existence. I contact the event organizers, who have no idea what I’m talking about.
Are Avery and I the only ones who saw her?
Was she some kind of ghost? And if so, how do you look for a ghost?
I wish I could spray a little WD-40 on my life to get time moving again, but alas, that’s not how it works—or is it? I consider it for a few seconds before rejecting the idea. WD-40 would probably irritate my skin, and what else could I spray it on, other than myself? No, that seems more far-fetched than my other ideas.
And—not for the first time—a more disturbing possibility seizes me: AmIa ghost?
I try to push that idea out of my head by watching too much reality TV.
Unsure what else to do, I spend the next few days eating dumplings. I go to a few restaurants in Scarborough. Avery joins me at a place in North York. Eventually, I—and I seriously can’t believe I’m even thinking this—become a little sick of dumplings, but that doesn’t make me give up.
One day, I attempt to make dumplings myself, something I’ve never done before. They taste reasonably good, though they look an utter mess.
The next day, it’s June 20 again.
Wanting to do something a little different, I text my sister. I tell her that I’m taking a “mental health” day from work and ask if she’d like to hang out. After Madison gets over the shock of me taking a day off—I’m not in the mood to explain the time loop again, even if she’d believe me—she agrees, and we go to a restaurant on Bayview, not too far from where she and her boyfriend live. The restaurant is rather run-down, and it looks slightly out of place between a pâtisserie and an organic butcher.
“Are you sure you’re not sick?” Madison makes a show of peering at me after the waiter has taken our order. She’s wearing jeans with holes that are probably supposed to look cool and a T-shirt for a band that she’s mentioned in passing before. We have similar facial features, though her physique is rounder, closer to our mother’s than our father’s.
“I’m not sick.” I pause. “I work sixty hours most weeks. I deserve a break every now and then, right?”
“I mean, yeah, but it’s not like you to say that. I’m just glad you realized that work is never gonna love you back.”
I shrug. “One of my coworkers… I’m supposed to be mentoring him, but he never does his work properly, no matter what I tell him. I keep having to redo his stuff. He’s the owner’s nephew, so if I complain—”
“Oh no,” Madison says. “Yeah, I can see how that might not go over well.”
“What about you?” I ask. “How’s your job?”
“It doesn’t make me want to slam my head into a brick wall every day, so it’s better than the last one, I guess. Low bar, though.”
Unlike usual, I don’t make any comments on her job-hopping.
“We should do this more often,” I tell her. “Hang out. Just the two of us. It’s nice.”
The fact that I’m 99.99 percent sure she’ll forget what I said—unless these dumplings do something that the others haven’t—makes it easier to say things like that.
But I’m hit by a pang of melancholy. Madison won’t remember our lunch; I’ll be the only one with the memory. Sure, we can do it again, on some other iteration of June 20, but it won’t be building on anything we’ve done before.
I’m not much of a gamer, but it’s like my sister—my own sister—is a non-player character in my life, a character fully run by the game’s software. Avery is the only other real player. Everyone else might appear to be here, but at the same time, they’re not truly here.
The server sets two steamers of dumplings in front of us, and I mumble my thanks.
