Chapter 36 — Five Out of Six
Rufus muses on the role of luck in our lives.
Followed by Chapter 36 —— Five Out of Six, in which Saskia follows up on her plan to pay for her hotel with another lottery ticket.
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Hello Friends,
A couple of weekends ago my wife and I hosted thirty kids from BEAM, a wonderful program designed to help underserved students enter advanced study in mathematics. I ran through some mathematics puzzles with the kids, led them on a hike up the creek on our property in Ojai, and had them try identifying the fifty or so fruit trees we’ve planted in our orchard. Meanwhile, my wife and our good friend, Kara, prepped food and drinks that kept us all sustained.
From all accounts, a splendid time was had by everyone. What struck me most, though, and what I’m still mulling over was: how much luck rules our lives.
Given that today’s chapter deals with chance, luck seems to me an interesting thing to meditate on here. So, what exactly am I talking about? Well, spending the day with these students I was struck by a few things: first and foremost they were generous and polite. That’s not to say that my own kids and their friends are not, but though the BEAM kids probably wouldn’t articulate it this way, it seemed to me that they really appreciated the effort we’d gone to to make a fun day of it all. Their reactions reminded me how the luck of our personal histories primes us for the adventures ahead.
Beyond being grateful of the effort we’d put in to make the day fun, I was also surprised by the conclusions that the students drew. From their perspective, my life looked grand and they chalked that up to my own engineering. Now, I agree with them that I’m living a dream, but I didn’t quite have the heart to correct their assumptions on the causality of how I got here. For me … I’m firmly of the belief that life has treated me very well——I’ve been very lucky on just about every metric you could choose to measure life on——but in their eyes, the material accoutrements surrounding my existence, and the fact that it seemed as if I get to sit under a gorgeous California live oak by a creek and think about mathematical puzzles all day … well to them it seemed as if that was a consequence of my being a mathematician. As a result of that faulty reasoning, many of them to pledged to double down on their own studies.
Perhaps you can see the internal conflict I experienced? More than my mathematical studies, I would chalk a huge portion of my current lot in life up to the luck of my life partner. The thing is, the serendipity of lucking out in love felt a lot less actionable than continuing their studies and putting their efforts into new explorations. Maybe though, my silent condoning of the path they assumed I’d navigated was not as disingenuous as it felt to me in the moment, since, as my wife later pointed out me, it could have been that, it was that I was a mathematician, that was what attracted her to me.
Either way, I was reminded of the capricious quality of nature when, after the kids left, I was chatting with Kara. I don’t recall how it came up, but at some point she showed me a photo she’d recently taken of a spider eating a bee. It was an arresting image, with the adversaries hanging from the side of flower. What struck me most, however, was that I had, only a week or two earlier, captured on video myself, a wasp attacking a spider that was already being assailed by hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of ants. The two records narrated diametrically opposite outcomes. Maybe not luck, but it sure looked that way to me.
Happily for BEAM students their day ended with an early dinner, during which we were treated to the auspicious site of two deer blissfully traversing the rock slide across the creek. As their bus driver assured me, such a sight was a blessing from nature. Good luck, and better still, a good omen.
By the way, if you’re looking for a program to direct some philanthropic support to, BEAM is a wonderful one to consider.
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 thirty-six, in which Saskia follows up on her plan to pay for her hotel with another lottery ticket.
— 36 —
Five Out of Six
Saskia thumbed the five winning numbers, and the one might-have-been, as she walked the patterned carpet towards her hotel room. A chat with the cashier had revealed that five correct numbers ought to neatly cover the cost of her room. She was quietly tickled by the idea that the ticket gave some purpose to her recovery night, the moniker she’d adopted for the time she spent bobbing along with the natural flow of time and catching up on sleep.
In the bedroom, Saskia striped down to her T-shirt and panties and slipped between the bed sheets. It was hard to judge the passage of time for her id whenever she slipped outside the traditional flow, but it felt like she’d just pulled an all-nighter since she landed in Dallas. She laid her head on the pillow and closed her eyes.
At 7AM the alarm on her bedside clock started chirping. Morning had arrived faster than felt reasonable, but Saskia climbed out of bed anyway. She’d spent as many hours sleeping as she could risk, and still be sure to leave the room before her first-pass-through self showed up.
In the kitchenette she saw her still-future self again, but simply gave her older id an impersonal nod. She held her hands up in front of her chest, a physical acknowledgement to her other self that she understood it was best they didn’t interact. Her older self made a reciprocal hand gesture and turned away. Saskia left the room and only subsequently realized that her double’s turn away was actually a turn towards her, but one played out in reverse.
∞
This morning’s cashier raised his eyebrows and let out an impressed whistle as he examined Saskia’s ticket. “Don’t see that very often.”
“How much does it pay out?”
“Should be maybe twenty-six hundred.” The man’s fingers rattled over the cash register keyboard, before running horizontally across the screen. His head bobbed, impressed. “You’re luck gets better. Two thousand eight hundred and sixty-two dollars.”
“Wonderful.”
The man turned to a drawer below the scratch tickets and pulled out a sheet of paper. With his other hand, he pulled a pen from a glass jar on the counter and laid it beside the paper. “Claims form. You got your ID, right?”
Saskia balked. “My ID?” She might as well pay for the hotel with her credit card.
The cashier explained that the tax office theoretically required it for any win in excess of twenty-five dollars. They’d bend the rules sometimes, but anything over six hundred was non-negotiable.
Saskia tried to maintain her smile, but she felt weirdly irked by the idea. “Poop. I left my wallet at home.” She batted her eyelids. “Just this once?”
The cashier’s lips pulled tight and he shook his head side-to-side. “State law.”
“It’s OK, I can come back.” Saskia gave a forced little laugh. “Worth it, right?!”
∞
Saskia bought a bagel. A great big zero she thought as she sat on a bench outside the cafe. She took a bite of her zero, and watched the world go by, considering what to do next. Across the parking lot, a young man had stopped to help an older woman with her groceries. The woman had been struggling to wrestle her shopping cart to her car. The man was gracious in the way he helped her, and it was all the sweeter to Saskia when she saw him surreptitiously check his watch. He was clearly anxious about the time, but he stayed helping the older woman anyway.
Saskia smiled. The world was full of good people. Suddenly, she knew where her winning ticket was headed.
She resolved to buy more winning tickets over the next few days, and find them good homes. It would be fun, and it would give some purpose to her recovery nights. It could be her own little brick in the wall building a stronger, happier society.
∞
When she returned to the hotel, she bumped into the room service woman outside her room. Without thinking, Saskia greeted her.
The woman stared back with a blank expression, making clear that this was their first encounter. She indicated the “no room service” door hanger. “I clean your room?”
“Sure. Actually, no need,” Saskia quickly corrected herself. Who knew how many of her there were inside, and even if it was just her, she couldn’t just wait for the room service woman to leave and then start rolling time backwards. Actually, any external access was insanity!
“You have been whole week,” the maid noted. She pointed at herself and then flipped both hands upwards, raising them slightly in a gesture that suggested Saskia would put her out of a job.
Saskia gave a toothy smile. “It’s just me and I’m a bit of a neat freak.” But then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a twenty dollar note which she thrust upon the maid, sending her on her way. Saskia made a mental note not to touch the door hanger.
Entering the room, Saskia finally knew what her kitchen self had been thinking earlier: she was back to square one on the question of finances.
Not acknowledging her other selves felt even lonelier than not speaking with a stranger you saw every day in the cafe you bought your coffee, or the one you sat next to on the train to work.
She pushed backwards through time, and wondered about the myriad non-exchanges that lay ahead of her this week.
There were plenty of instances in the normal flow of life in which Saskia wondered how she’d feel when a critical life event cropped up. Before it had happened, she’d wondered many times how it would feel when she landed her first real job. And when it did finally happen, she’d had an odd out of body experience, finding herself as captured by emotions she’d anticipated as those she felt. Had she——even before learning to slip in time——already robbed herself of experiencing future events with her contemplations? Life was circular, even without time travel.
Was glancing at herself across the room enough to bend the arc of the universe? The realization that there was nothing new under the sun left her feeling more lonely. It made Saskia miss Mica.
∞
Seventy two hours earlier in the standard flow of time, Saskia was in the main room, alone again. She was reading a book she had bought when she’d paused for a bite to eat and to buy tomorrow’s newspaper. Watching the television was hopeless, what with everything playing in reverse. Happily, though, Saskia could read a physical book or newspaper that she brought back with her. It took skill, because it required concentration to slip back in time, but, like riding a bike, Saskia found that with practice she improved. She’d now graduated to the metaphorical equivalent of hands-free cycling, only it was her mind that Saskia’s practice freed up.
She was turning a page, again noting its unusual heft, when another copy of herself materialized in the middle of the room. In fact, there were two extra Saskia’s and they were splitting apart mitosis-style. Well, they were already split, but one wandered backwards to the door to the hallway outside, while the other moved over to settle herself on the couch.
The version of herself retreating backwards to the exit looked pleased with herself, and Saskia automatically checked her other newly appeared self. She too looked gratified, though she seemed to be sheepishly avoiding Saskia’s gaze. Saskia cogitated what lay behind her later selves satisfaction.
Smiles are well known to be infectious and Saskia wondered if a closed loop starting here could shift her mood. Was this an instance of exactly what she was trying to avoid? An interaction with herself that moved the needle on her own behaviour enough to force a duplication of herself.
It was an arrogant assumption that expected she could change the course of history with some innocuous mistake. To assume that of all the butteflies who ever flapped their wings, she, by some chance, was the one that caused a cataclysm. The more she considered the idea, the more she realized how laughable the conceit was: we spend our lives desperately striving to make a difference, to no effect. And yet, here she was paranoid that she——that by accident she might, with the slightest nudge, cause just that. But . . . hadn’t she somehow managed to do just that when she inadvertently duplicated herself in the restroom at Cleo’s?
There were mysteries to unravel, but no obvious ends to pull on or tape to tear off——whatever metaphor was required——to reveal the secrets of the world around her.
Saskia gave her older self a tight smile and turned away. She felt more alone now than she had ten minutes ago——twenty minutes in the world’s future, ten of her lived past. It was sad avoiding herself, but odd too. Here she was sitting across the room from herself, spinning the clock backwards with no plan of when or why she was evidently about to take her leave of the hotel. Presumably at some point she was going to merge existences with the other her so assiduously avoiding an interaction; and before that, first she had to become her double who’d left the hotel room, though at this point she had no idea where that double had gone, or, more accurately, returned from.
She wasn’t about to ask her other self, but had she already been biased? Even if they didn’t speak to each other? It was clear that the future her had had some success. It left her wondering whether knowing that alone could trigger a self-fulfilling prophesy. Was this the nature versus nurture of time travel? Innate inclinations versus those induced by interactions with the world around her?
To distract herself she turned back to her book. The Husbands was a fun enough to distract her, even if the core premise of husbands falling ad infinitum from the protagonist’s attic held little allure. She flipped through the pages, the combination of the weight of the paper and her background feeling of melancholy reminded her of the pain she’d accidentally inflicted on Mica back at the Santa Anita racetrack.
Eventually, she stopped reading and let her mind drift back over all that had happened since she met Mica. It struck Saskia that another racetrack could pay for the hotel room she was sitting in. Was that what underpinned her double’s optimistic disposition as she had walked backwards out the front door a few of hours ago? A win at the races? But wouldn’t that also require filling out a claims form?
Still slipping backwards through time, Saskia pulled the newspaper she’d stowed in her backpack tomorrow morning, she’d bought it for her lottery numbers philanthropy and the puzzles; the news she already knew, though she was curious to see the reporting on the oil spill. The racing results page was a crib sheet of sorts; there was no need to do what she’d done at Santa Anita. The newspaper felt as if it was made of heavy cardboard, and Saskia wondered if she’d need to slow her march back through time to give herself the strength to rip the results page free.
Behind her, the door to the hallway opened. The giddy Saskia who had left a couple of hours ago was returning——or rather un-leaving, having un-returned hours in the future. She entered backwards. Un-opened the door and un-stowed the newspaper from her backpack.
Bewildered, Saskia turned to the only other source of an explanation, the older her who, from her spot on the couch, averted her eyes. Was the act of turning away a violation of her self-interference policy? An undue influence? . . . She was smiling.
The smile on her older self’s face was apologetic and resigned, as if she felt herself but a pawn in the universe’s grand plan. She was clearly well aware that she was violating their collective rule on meddling.
Time travel was mysterious, and, like life, it wasn’t always clear what the correct path to take was. If she remembered to do the same later, could this surreptitious nudge be what helped push the whole space-time continuum towards this timeline’s equilibrium? Even self-fulfilling prophesies needed causal links.
Suddenly, the memory of Mica back at the Santa Anita track gave Saskia an idea. It was risky, but her older self on the couch gave her a prim little nod, and that was all the push she needed. In an instant she knew how to avoid the problem of the claims form.
Saskia smiled back at her seated self, slowed her path back through time and headed over to become the her walking backwards from the door.
Walking out of the hotel, she felt giddy. She opened her phone and sent Mica the email that she knew Mica would delete:
Just a few more sleeps until I see you again, my darling. Maybe none for you! I’ve almost blown through your money, but thinking of you——I have an idea. You gave me an idea. xoxo
