J. Robert Lennon on Order, Chaos, and the Self
The narrator of “The Loop,” Bev, is a middle-aged divorcée who has recently started volunteering for Movin’ on Up, a charity that distributes donated furniture to recipients in need of a new sofa or bed or desk. Did Bev or the furniture come first when you started thinking about this story?
The furniture! The characters in this story are fictional, but I do drive the truck sometimes for a similar organization in the town where I live. The work offers little glimpses into people’s lives, which generally gets me thinking about my own life and how I ended up the way I did, what has gone wrong and what has gone right. I lent some of this rumination to Bev.
Bev’s divorce has left her depleted, “tired even of rage,” but she’s realized that she’s good at moving furniture, adept at “the strategic Tetrising of bureaus and bookshelves and chairs and lamps.” How satisfying is that to her, and how important is the other part of her work—dealing with the donors and the recipients and the other volunteers?
I think there’s a little bit of altruism in her desire to work for Movin’ on Up, and some interest in the people she meets. But more of her satisfaction may derive from creating order and solving domestic problems, tasks that she fears she isn’t very good at in her own life. Of course, having a new kitchen table doesn’t solve the problem of the self, but it’s easy to imagine otherwise when it’s not your table and not your self.
She meets a teen-age volunteer, Emily, at the storage lockers, but the boy who was supposed to join them hasn’t shown up. They agree that they’ll be able to manage, but is this the first indication that the day might be out of kilter?
Sure—and anyone who has a job that involves complicated logistics, which is to say most people, can probably relate to the way that an absent worker, or bad weather, or a broken truck, or whatever can break the narrative of the whole day. Bev’s desire to make it work with only Emily stands in, I think, for her vain hope that she’s succeeded in parenting her own daughter. (I suspect that she has succeeded with her daughter, more or less. A lot of parents—myself included—sometimes let their worries drive them to define down success until it’s an effectively unachievable goal.)
As they’re picking up and dropping off, pieces of furniture start to appear and disappear: a coffee table is suddenly perched on top of a pile of mattresses; a metal bed frame has vanished from the room it was in. The objects themselves are very ordinary—how significant is the disjunction in the story between the ordinary and the extraordinary?
It’s kind of my whole shtick, to be honest—I like to make the quotidian register as bizarre in fiction. It’s a reflection of how I see the world, and seems metaphorically rich to me, whether it’s in the context of a science-fictional riff or an exploration of a cognitive state. Here it’s a little of both—the mysterious objects are warning signs, like an aura before a migraine, of the unexpected drama to come.
The final client of the day lives in an apartment filled with cats and junk, where there’s been some kind of fire. Many people would recoil at entering (Emily among them), but Bev appears to take this in her stride. Why doesn’t she turn around?
I think Bev is fascinated by the client in question, a woman down on her luck and losing touch with reality. Certain advantages—privileges, really—kept Bev afloat during a rough time in her life, but it isn’t hard for her to imagine a plausible reality in which her safety net disappears and she becomes as lost as this client. She does end up lost, of course, but not in a way that she could have imagined.
This was the last—and longest—stop on the run, and there’s a sense of relief when it’s over, as Bev and Emily return to their regular lives. It’s at this point, when everything seems to have come to an end, that the meaning of the story’s title becomes clear. Did you know from the outset that the story was leading to this moment?
No, I didn’t—I initially was just trying to describe the particular strangeness of these furniture-delivery runs. Eventually Bev accrued an ex-husband, a daughter, various kinds of guilt. I’m not sure what made me disappear the bed frame, but that’s what put me on a trajectory toward the ending. Later drafts connected all these elements—the mundane, the emotional, and the fantastical.
Bev, it turns out, is a hostage to the day, destined to pick up and drop off furniture over and over again. “It was as if there were two Bevs,” she thinks. “The one that experienced the day for the first time, and this one, the one she regarded as herself, trapped inside the other.” We’ve spent most of the story with the first Bev, and now, at the end, we’re with the second Bev as she analyzes her shifting response to her existence inside these seemingly endless cycles. How many stages of enlightenment (or grief) is she passing through?
I honestly don’t know. Thousands? Millions? Enough to make her lose her humanity and become something else entirely. Enough to give readers pause every time they’re tempted to say, “If I could do it all again, I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Should we all be aiming to reach Bev’s state of acceptance in our own lives?
LOL. Talk about unachievable goals!
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Cressida Leyshon, BruceDayne
