Chapter 24 — The Recycling Center
Rufus muses about provenance.
Followed by Chapter 24 —— The Recycling Center, in which Saskia heads to her place of work, nervous about who she might find there.
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Hello Friends,
I have a buddy, Barry, who moved to Berlin many years ago now. He’s been writing a newsletter since then, maybe longer. Anyway, Barry’s an artist who does a lot of work with collages, and recently he wrote about provenance. His missive got me thinking about how we are all collectively articles of provenance. Our paths through life collect truths, assumptions and perspectives. That is, we all bring our own perspectives or slants to whatever we put into the world. And thus, we attest to authorship and source.
Considered from this point of view, time travel is a fundamentally changing operator that acts on the provenance that we supply. No longer, for instance, are we constricted to witnessing a time or event from one perspective; and in seeing another point of view on the same circumstances we might change how we ascribe authorial credit.
Barry likened provenance to a map, in that it shows where something was, where it is now, and where it is headed. I liked this metaphor, and the more I thought about it the more I liked it, because maps have edges, and though what is on the map is invariably the reason we acquired, it is at the edges where maps are most mysterious; a map’s edge hints at where you might go, or have been. It offers intimations … it’s a little like the last paragraph in a chapter, it’s what entices you to strike out in search of more.
More generally, a provenance offers hints at the myriad inspirations that inform a piece that are hard to put a finger on. It’s a bit like an impartial witness to an event.
All that said, in the same way that neural nets are influenced by their training data without specifically housing copies of what they’ve “seen”, I am certain that artist’s works are influenced by factors that even they are not consciously aware of. The emotional inputs that come from witnessing largesse or malignancy, for instance. These are factors less likely to be found at the edges of a map … perhaps they are the unseen layers above and below a traditional map that describe the same place at different times.
The above commentary feels particularly germane to today’s chapter of The Curve of Time, given that Saskia is heading into her place of work, namely the recycling center. Her work there as a machine learning specialist might only feel tangentially connected by the previous paragraph, but it was more the witness borne by the various objects passing through the trash facility that I had in mind. Somehow each object brings it’s own testimony to some small part of the way the world outside the facility was operating over the previous week or so. Anyway, that was the connection I saw. Perhaps it’s time now to see what, if any, other provenances Saskia finds there.
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
PPS. For those of you curious about Barry’s work, check out his substack page.
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter twenty four, in which Saskia heads to her place of work, nervous about who she might find there.
— 24 —
The Recycling Center
Saskia had the niggling sense that there had to be some abstraction of the principle that underpinned recycling that would yield a resolution to the grandfather paradox of time travel——the inherent contradiction exposed by the thought experiment that had you going back in time and murdering your grandfather. Unfortunately, nutting over the possibilities, she kept getting distracted by the surety that there must also be a less graphic embodiment of the problem of voiding your heritage after it had borne you as fruit. Still, every time she returned to examine the principle underlying the reconstitution of material accoutrements from discarded trash she felt surer and surer that recycling had something to say about the homicidal philosophical conundrum.
Those thoughts, however, faded into the background as she approached her place of work, replaced by the disconcerting thought that her double might already be here.
She had indulged herself the extra twenty minutes it took to stop by home on her way from Mica’s. Not just for a change in outfit, but, more importantly, to see if her doppelganger was still there. Having slipped her key into the front lock, she’d paused, conscious that were the roles reversed, she’d have appreciated a knock, or the ringing of her chintzy doorbell. She hated the electronic gadget, but looking at it made her wonder if it and its camera was connected to both their phones. She pressed the button, and an alert chimed on the phone in her pocket.
Her double didn’t answer.
She cracked the door open and in a whispered shout, lest anyone on her block think she’d lost her mind, she called into her house: “Hello?”
Still no answer. Again, she pressed the doorbell. Again, the phone in her pocket chimed. Again, nothing else happened.
Saskia opened the door wider and let herself inside. From the living room came the pitter patter of Tomato’s paws on the wooden floor, and then quieting as he hit the runner rug in the hallway.
Tomato seemed happy and Saskia scooped him up. “Where is she?” But Tomato just purred. It wasn’t the first time Saskia had lamented that her cat didn’t speak in her own tongue. At least, he’d never admitted as much. Besides, Saskia wouldn’t have expected him to be forthright about his food supplies even had he had the gift of the gab, so she went to the kitchen cupboard and emptied a sachet of food into his bowl. Had she used but half the package and stored the remainder in the fridge, she might have spotted the note from her double. But Saskia was too generous.
∞
Saskia left the sorting floor, and with it the dense smell of fetid matter. Friends she’d given a tour of the facility to invariably referred to it as a stench, but Saskia preferred to marvel at the organic notes that underpinned it. It permeated the entire building, much as she imagined a rot must have sat heavy in the streets of London during the middle ages. It was a backdrop she no longer smelt.
Entering her office, Jasmine, a colleague who worked on the robotics, told Saskia that Boss-man had been looking for her. Clearly he’d noticed she wasn’t around yesterday, and apparently he wanted to see her.
When she entered his office, he looked at her without giving much away in the manner of emotion. “Saskia,” he said, opening the conversation with one word.
“Hey Boss-man.” It was an affectionate term. She couldn’t recall the exact origins of the moniker, but it was a beautifully ironic fit. Ravi might have been CEO, but his background was he was nitty gritty and he cared far more about the technology than the accounts. Nobody called him Ravi anymore.
True to form, he wasn’t upset about her absence, but he did want to know if it was emblematic of something he needed to attend to. “Tell it to me straight, do I need to replace you?”
“I was out——”
“And I couldn’t care less.” Boss-man steepled his hands in front of his mouth. He had lovely, elegant fingers. Endurance athlete fingers. Not weathered climbing fingers, but the kind of fingers used to ratter-clacking across a computer keyboard all day. “But I heard you won the lottery too.”
Saskia laughed. Her laugh was relief. She could never have worked for some covert agency; her ability to misdirect was worthless. Happily though, Boss-man had presented his own misdirection. Skirting time travel had been laid up for her. “I love my job. I don’t care about the money. You know that wasn’t how you enticed me.”
Boss-man smiled at her flattery, but his smile waned when he had the demasculating thought that even his salary——even before she’d won the lottery——would have been of minimal enticement.
Saskia went on to offer that he could keep her salary. “Hire someone else, just let me work with them.” Saying this made Saskia realize, that her winnings could be a force for good, a force much bigger than herself. “You, everyone here, this is my life.”
“And yet you didn’t show up yesterday.” Boss-man dipped his head at her significantly.
Saskia bowed her own head. She knew Boss-man wouldn’t press for details. He regarded Saskia’s personal life as inappropriate conversation.
“I console myself that it’s not personal.”
Saskia looked up, confused.
“Your mother called the other day. Seems I’m not the only one you’ve been skipping out on. She wanted to know if I’d sent you to a conference in Texas.” He shook his head with a laugh. “So, yesterday?”
Saskia realized that Boss-man had just presented her with her next excuse, on a platter. Saskia dutifully blushed. “I meet someone.”
Abruptly, Boss-man waved his gorgeous hands in front of him. “La la la! I don’t need to hear more. This is a place of work.”
Saskia smirked at him.
In an attempt at some waning semblance of hierarchy he insisted that she still needed to show up, and then dismissed her.
In past visits to Boss-man’s office, Saskia had imagined the time when her future self was sitting on the other side of such a conversation. It had never been hard to imagine. But now, for the first time, her future felt less certain. The irony was not lost on her that today, armed with her new ability to slip in time, her life’s path felt much less clear.
∞
“You’re a mess,” Jasmine said, shaking her head at Saskia.
Saskia had just given Jasmine data she’d, apparently, already handed over a couple of days ago.
“Are you sure you’re alright? Maybe you needed two sick days?”
Saskia’s mind went back to Mica. She blushed. “I wasn’t sick.”
“You go girl!”
Saskia was grinning giddily when it struck her, the most obvious reason she might have forgotten giving Jasmine the data: she hadn’t. Though her double had obviously not shown up yesterday, she might well have made an appearance two days ago. Jasmine had, inadvertently corroborated as much, by suggesting Saskia had needed a second day off. Suddenly, with the speed that only a mind in full flight could muster, Saskia’s thoughts diverted elsewhere: how nice would it be to share the load? To take a day off now and again. Maybe it was something to revisit when she got home, assuming her double was there.
Still in the conversation Saskia had forgotten, Jasmine misinterpreted Saskia’s expression and plied her for details about Mica, further misinterpreting Saskia’s hesitation as reticence to reveal details about her new love interest.
∞
It became clear, when Saskia returned home that evening, that she needn’t have concerned herself about her double appearing at work. Sienna had left her a note, which Saskia had somehow missed in her haste that morning. It was affixed to the fridge door under her nifty little “infinity” magnet.
It was a short note. It merely confirmed that her double had left, and not to worry about her showing back up. At least not for a few decades. She did allow the possibility that she might, “one day in the distant future, stop by to compare notes on how our lives worked out”. The thought brought a tear to Saskia’s eyes, which she wiped away with a finger as she finished reading.
It was signed “xoxo S”.
