Chapter 11 — Back To The Beginning
Rufus talks about his weekly sign-off.
Followed by Chapter 11 —— Back To The Beginning, in which Saskia returns to the beginning to find a familiar stranger.
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Hello Friends,
The astute among you might have noticed that today’s featured image is a visual echo of the one I used for the first episode of this podcast. As I put it together, I was reminded that I’m really enjoying the meta time-travel nature of these missives, this way of sharing my work with you. That got me reflecting on how I’ve been structuring our communications, and I suddenly realized that I’ve not talked at all about the sign-off I’ve been including on each dispatch.
Appreciating that such sign-offs become synonymous with their authors on shows like this, I wanted something that both reflected an important aspect of my world-view, but also something that spoke to the themes of time travel.
I’m a firm believer that we get back what we put out into the world, not just literally but figuratively too. It’s kind of my version of karma. It’s partly the idea that life isn’t zero sum, so that putting more good out there doesn’t mean you’re less likely to be on the receiving end. In fact, it’s an optimistic reminder that being nice is not a collective action problem. There is no downside!
Beyond that, the sign-off is intended as a reminder that our actions can cascade and that we will likely see the effects on those downstream of our actions, because not everything runs away from its source. And especially in a world where time travel is part of the thematic substrate, the possibility of an Escher-esque river in which we can place a paper boat in the water and reasonably wait to watch for its return is always in the air.
Finally, since we’re going to see Saskia’s cat Tomato again today, I would note that the content of my sign-off holds for pets too. And we don’t need to step all the way to reincarnation and the hope that I might come back as one of my own pets, because the loop is much tighter than that, if at the same time less literal. Feeding and caring for my cats is immensely rewarding, for the love I shower on them is returned many times over; there is nothing so comforting as cuddling an old cat. Where kittens are just fun to be around, the history you create pays huge dividends down the line.
Anyway, that’s the background behind my sign-off.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter eleven in which Saskia returns to the site where and when she first slipped in time.
— 11 —
Back To The Beginning
The unfortunate end to what she had quietly considered a date, had sent Saskia into a tailspin, the conclusion of which was a determination that she needed to better understand what exactly was happening. What power she had inadvertently acquired?
The obvious place to start was where it all started, and with that in mind she began the ten day journey back to the beginning. It sounded simple enough, but, three days in, she was already exhausted. The clock could only be wound back so fast, and it was as if she’d woken up and decided to walk to San Francisco. Now, she was closing in on San Luis Obispo, which left her not nearly halfway. A hike like that would have garnered blisters on her feet, and she was definitely experiencing general body aches to complement her overall fatigue. No doubt, these were induced by the act of slipping in time and the stress of avoiding being seen. In short, she was exhausted.
It was worse than that, though. For unlike the trek to San Francisco, a rest on her own trek meant an inconvenient setback. A three hour nap didn’t just mean picking up where you left off. It meant going backwards——well forwards, in time, but backwards from her intended destination in the past. It also created a problem with extra versions of herself floating about, for any sleep on her way back to the beginning meant two copies of herself had to now wind the clock back past that point in time; the first from passing backwards to the point where she decided to close her eyes, and the second pass to make up for her nap.
She would occasionally see herself near the point that she flipped the direction of her path through time, but it was awkward to communicate with someone traveling in the other direction through time, and besides it was just herself anyway. It seemed unlikely that such conversations would add much over her internal deliberations, and she was still feeling unnerved by the self-duplication that had resulted from her exchanges in the restroom at Cleo’s. So, she simply avoided versions of herself at other stages in the journey back to the beginning of it all.
On the bright side, it was reasonably easy to avoid her first pass through those days, given that she had her entire apartment to play with, and the extra knowledge that she’d avoided her home office most of the last week. Most of the last month, if she was honest with herself. The logistics were painful to wrestle with, but at least the only version of herself that she absolutely had to avoid was the one who had first passed through this time. That version of herself would have been completely freaked out had she known she was sharing her apartment with multiple versions of herself, and who knows if she mightn’t have set off some sort of Back To The Future event that would result in her dissolving out of the universe? Had that been what happened outside the bathroom at the restaurant? But in reverse, meaning she had somehow inadvertently managed to make a copy of herself? And what had happened to that other her?
The safest course of action was clearly not to interfere with herself again: avoid bumping into herself and she couldn’t split into multiple copies.
Always occupy a new space in time became her new mantra. It was exhausting to keep track of, but not impossible.
She helped herself to a couple of slices of leftover pizza, vaguely recalling that she’d been surprised on her first pass through this time that the pizza in the fridge had disappeared. She’d chalked it up to absent-mindedness back then, but here she was, discovering the missing pizza’s true meaning.
Knowing when her younger self would return, she set her alarm and took a four hour catnap on the couch. On waking, she realized that she had avoided her earlier self heading to the couch for the doze. That was when she’d remembered the emptiness of her home office. So, after another light snack she headed inside, already reversing through time as she opened the door. Only when she was sure it was safe did she emerge periodically, principally to eat and use the bathroom. The office was more of a closet really, with no window to the outside world. That made it difficult to judge the passage of time, other than by the course chunks demarked by the way light leaked in through cracks around the door as it shifted from the weak ambience of day, to the dark of night and finally, with a sudden switch, to the orange glow of the hallway light again.
Saskia recalled a Stanford pscyh experiment that she’d once read about. One in which the volunteers had been placed inside a closed room without access to the outside world. Apparently those subjects had, on average, fallen into a self-prescribed 25 hour day.
∞
As she slipped backwards through her sixth day of the world around her, Saskia wondered how much time she had ‘lived’——if that even made sense to ask. It was an interesting quandary to mull over, and, if nothing else, it at least helped while the time away.
In the end, excepting a few fleeting interactions she had with versions of herself mildly out or sync with her own id, Saskia made it back to her destination without incident.
Arriving at the morning that she first slipped in time, she left, not just the office, but the house itself, aligning again with the natural flow of time. She took up a position at the bottom of her garden, hidden behind shrubs by the fence. There, she waited for her younger self to come out, blanket in hand to lie on.
While she waited, Saskia had fretted about the potential for something to go drastically wrong. Again, she worried about a Back To The Future event that would dissolve her out of the universe. Heaven only knew where her other self who’d intercepted her on her way to the restroom had gone. Maybe she had just gotten lucky that time. How did this all work? She was here now, and she felt very real, surely if she were going to disappear she would have already done so, but then she wouldn’t be there for herself to see and muck it all up. One thing was certain, thinking about it hadn’t helped anything.
She scratched at an itch below her right collarbone, and figured it was best to play it safe as far as she could.
Once her younger self showed up and seemed to have dozed off, Saskia determined to make a closer inspection of her sleeping younger self. To listen carefully to the smooth rhythm of her breath.
She approached her doppelganger with time slowed to a crawl, figuring that she could always reverse time if she needed to, in order to disappear fast. Moreover, she reasoned: if she did eventually reverse time, she’d see herself coming back before she got there and could start reversing time even earlier. The internal consistency of her travels was difficult to make sense of, but as the saying went: better to play with a bad plan, than no plan at all.
∞
She drew close to her sleeping younger self, and scanned for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing peculiar jumped out at her. Her sleeping self was breathing smoothly, with her only movement the rapid fluttering spasms under her eyelids——and then she suddenly twitched in her sleep. Her hand flew up to her closed eye-lids, narrowly missing the older Saskia as it did.
The last thing Saskia needed was to distract her younger self from the moment she learned to slip in time. That was exactly the Back To The Future problem she had to avoid. Sure, she could slip in time now, but could she teach herself to do so if she somehow disturbed her first blush with time travel and she never learnt in the first place? She hadn’t been able to bring Mica back with her at all. In fact, it was questionable whether she’d even been able to slow time down for her.
Her speculation flustered her, and she felt a prickly hot flush. It gave her movement a jittery unpredictability and she retreated back to the nearby bushes to watch. To see what happened next.
She watched Tomato hop, from what she knew to be her neighbor’s compost heap, onto her fence, claws clasping the vertical wooden planks. The cat then dropped stealthily into her garden. Abruptly, it slunk down. Stalked and coiled, inching closer to a titmouse that flitted at the edge of the lawn. But before the cat could spring, the bird took flight. The cat stood taller again, and Saskia’s attention shifted to her younger self, who was now stirring. Perhaps it was the bird, and not the cat, that had ultimately broken her nap.
Saskia watched as her younger self began slipping in time. It was fascinating to see another person——which in itself was weird, because this ‘other person’ was none other than herself——slip in time. To see herself gradually coming to terms with what she had experienced.
A big part of her wanted to reach out, but intuitively she understood that what she was watching was, not merely something that had already happened, but that the risk of interfering jeopardized nobody more than herself. In the end her younger self went back into the house, and, not understanding anything that hinted at what had happened to her, Saskia decided that it was time to simply return to her present. Besides, she’d now spent too many days avoiding her doubles. It was all too much to take in mentally.
She was thinking about how to get back without bumping into herself traveling in either direction through the next week when she realized that the shed at the bottom of her garden had been unvisited in the last month.
