“If it kills me, I’m coming home!”

He could repeat it a thousand times inside his head but couldn’t get it to come out of his mouth. In fact, there was nothing he could do or say that wasn’t in the script. It just kept going on and on and on, the same old shit over and over and over again … just like that stupid movie Groundhog Day.

Wait … stupid movie? John had to be more careful about thinking stuff like that. What if all movies had a strange life of their own and Bill Murray’s character really was living the same day again and again. That poor bastard just kept trying something different … at least that guy had fucking variety … at least in that flick, he got to try to change things. It even solved itself eventually, but nothing really worked until he figured out the key. Why couldn’t there be some great moral to John’s story? Some key to help him get free of the damn thing. No, no. He had to be living a stupid, hockey cult flick. Day after day, the same events, the same faces, same expressions, same everything … it was driving him fucking nuts. What’s said in the room … stays in the room. No fucking shit.

The only place he could alter things was inside his own head. What he thought and how he thought it still seemed to be his own, and he clung to it like a lifeline. Hell, maybe he could think his way back home?

As he sat, looking forlorn and feeling even worse in the clubhouse after packing his things in a box for like the hundredth time, he started to really wonder about that idea of thinking his way out of this mess. Didn’t Nash try to do the same thing? Yeah, yeah, Nash was just a dude in a movie but hell; he was based on a real guy, just like Wigand. Maybe there was something to his gripping tight to ideas that knotted with A Beautiful Mind? But then again, that beautiful mind was pretty fucked up, wasn’t it.

Nash was a sick fuck, imagining entire worlds and people and past and present and … whatever. The depression John was portraying outwardly intensified inwardly and he thought for a moment that he really would fucking cry. What if he was as nuts as Nash? Was Donna real? The game? Mike and the other two sons who’s names he didn’t even fucking know? Or … were Riley and the Inn and baby Terrence Nathan Biebe … was that all real? And either way, was he going to be able to get a grip on everything enough to recognize what was real and what wasn’t?

Terror rippled through him. When he sat in the town meeting, fuck no, he wasn’t thinking about making a game of it, he was thinking about taking control of the repeated cycles so he could figure out if he’d gone Nash or gone nuts or just gotten caught up in the hurricane of the Portal … which of course, was also a possibility.

He began to sense an overwhelming emptiness, a kind of isolation, like he was totally alone and it was making him soul sick. But … there was always one moment when he didn’t feel so fucking alone. One, startling moment that, like everything else kept repeating itself … that moment he woke beside Donna … and heard Riley’s desolate cry.

Riley was real. Granted, during the rest of his plotted out, strange and repetitive life he had lots of moments when he wondered. But at that moment, he didn’t wonder anything except how to get back and comfort her. Every other moment was devastatingly lonely, even with friends all around … John was painfully cut off from everything that really mattered.

Again, the argument. Again, he and Donna stomping around the fucking coffee table. “That smile is not for me,” but inside John’s head he was wondering why he gave a flying fuck who she smiled at? Why did they have to have this fight again? Did it mean a damn thing the first time, God sakes? The woman wants to climb over the fucking snow bank, let her! He hated the argument. Started getting edgy every time he neared it. Didn’t anyone see how badly suited he and Donna were for each other? Jesus.

The life he was living continued on its merry loop, same after same after same until he was sure he’d just plain lost it, that he was probably actually tied to a bed in a mental institution somewhere in Burlington and would never find his fucking way home. And for one brief moment he almost gave himself to that … to the possibility that this was all there was. Period.

And, if it was all there was … there were good parts, right? The boys were a joy, the game was fun, and as he skated alone on the pond behind the house, staring at the net in the darkness and looking like he was worried about the game the next thing he heard were her skates scratching on the surface, he turned right on cue, fell and slid a few yards.

“Heard you lost some,” she grinned.

Yeah, there were some good things … the kiss he was about to trap her against the snow to enjoy … and the sex afterwards, ay? Maybe … if he was doomed to live in Mystery Alaska … he could focus on the good parts of it?

“John!” came the shrill scream, drifting from a place so far away John’s heart again broke. Accept this? Not as long as he lived and not with Riley crying from some other world for him.

He felt Donna at his side and wondered why he missed the sex again. Sheesh, if it was supposed to be one of the fucking good things about being stuck there … if he really was stuck there … why did he keep missing it?

Again, that sensation of having a sticky cock under the sheets. He blinked and slowly, without even making it seen, John shifted his hips to release the tender flesh of his cock from the sheet.

Huh? Fuck no, he wasn’t sticky. He wasn’t even fucking naked under those sheets! And like a blast of lightening something suddenly made sense!

John’s mind clicked and thumped into sync with rational logic for the first time in God knew how long. Number one, of course he didn’t recall the sex … because they never filmed the sex! Number two, no wonder he knew what was going on when he wasn’t around a particular event … Crowe had read the damn script so of course he knew. It explained why John had no memories of what he did during those events … because he was doing nothing at all! Crowe was probably enjoying a hot cuppa and watching from a damn director’s chair with his name on it. Taking that thought a little further … no wonder he thought he was sticky and sexually spent … Crowe had planted that reality inside his head to play the fucking scene!

And finally, number three … Jesus! No wonder he couldn’t change anything he said or did … he was actually playing the character! Motherfucker!