Chapter 39 — Priming the Pump
Rufus describes the first occurrence of meta time-traveling that he’s been forced into, along with a couple of ways in which the real world has crept into The Curve of Time.
Followed by Chapter 39 —— Priming the Pump, in which Saskia leaves the race track and sets up her encounter with Zeno.
Listen to full episode :
Hello Friends,
We have a wrinkle in the timeline! Well, not so much a wrinkle, and honestly I’d be pretty impressed if anyone noticed it without my drawing attention to it, but I have had to gone back and make an edit that it’s conceivable someone might notice. And I know there are some of you out there with steel trap memories, so I feel compelled to acknowledge the change.
The event necessitating the change is actually in Chapter 42, but it requires a small change to this chapter which any really close readers will note actually requires five total word changes in earlier chapters (I’ve made more spelling and grammatical errors than that).
So, what is this seismic shift I’m alluding to? Well, Mica and Saskia are switching surnames, and Saskia’s new surname will actually switch by one letter. Henceforth, Mica will be Mica Topp and Saskia will be Saskia Pollack.
Why this change? … Well, without giving too much away, a few chapters hence, it will be convenient to have someone to be slightly confused by Saskia’s surname. It’s not a big story point, but it helps push a story thread back to align better with when I’d like it to happen in the story.
I’ve made the changes to all of the text occurrences on the website, but you’ll have to forgive me for the audio file hiccups in the earlier chapters which I’m leaving in for now. Pretend you just misheard them ;)
Another element that you might at first mistake for a mishearing today, is that BEAM, the non-profit I mentioned back in the commentary for chapter 36, makes it into the novel’s text. Indeed, BEAM is not the only real-life group pressing for some positive change to make an appearance in today’s chapter. My buddy Steve Lowe was instrumental in the early days of the Eagle Mountain pumped hydro project, so shout-out to Steve too!
There is still fiction though, in the form of Coast-to-Coast Cabling, which already had its own chapter. Coast-to-Coast Cabling is a figment of my imagination, though the idea is based on a wonderful Sun Cable renewables project which started life as green hydrogen but then changed to an HVDC (high voltage, direct current) project. It’s nearing completion and will ultimately be capable to delivering up to 15% of Singapore’s power use from a solar farm in norther Australia. There will, in all, be over 5000km of cabling! So powering New York from Nevada isn’t just a pipe dream, though laying cable over land that is already being used is harder to negotiate than across seabeds. Anyway, cause for optimism.
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 nine, in which Saskia leaves the race track and sets up her encounter with Zeno.
— 39 —
Priming the Pump
With four thousand dollars cash in her pocket, Saskia slipped out of the Lone Star Park right after sending Jamal off to place the next bet. It seemed like a fair trade to her: maybe he didn’t get what he was hoping for, but she did leave him with a financial windfall.
She crossed the parking lot and bummed a ride to the DART train line and was now walking from the Uptown station, back towards her hotel. Coming from LA, Saskia was used to a car culture, but Dallas was another level altogether, and choosing not to use the ride-share apps was definitely an added inconvenience.
The trolley tracks on the road glistened with the precipitation of a light shower that had now given way to sun, and Saskia smiled at the puddles at the edge of the road, a rarity back in LA. It was the little differences that reminded you that you were far from home. Then, she noticed a cat. Same, but different again. It reminded her of Tomato. She missed him, but had her fluff-ball even noticed she was gone yet? Would he, assuming she made it back shortly after she left? Animals had senses we didn’t understand. Maybe Tomato understood time travel.
Saskia tumbled into a melancholy. Traveling made you miss your pets, and friends, no matter how out of the ordinary your destination was. She’d noticed it before, particularly on work trips. And, it was always worse when traveling alone. Traveling through time seemed no different, though of course, technically, she had switched location too.
A woman walked by chatting on her phone, and Saskia felt even more lonely not being able to call home. She wondered if Mica was missing her too? She probably hadn’t been gone long enough. How did people survive before mobile phones? Maybe there was a way to contact Mica without mucking everything up?
As she got closer to the hotel, Saskia realized that even if she did call Mica, that Mica would not know her yet. Her younger self was yet to win the lottery. Then, a selfish thought occurred to her: why not call? Just to hear Mica’s voice. Mica had told her she was always being contacted by kooks. She could use the phone in her hotel room, but on reflection that didn’t feel private. The idea of other hers listening in ...that felt too fraught. She’d feel too self-aware under her own scrutiny. Did hotel lobbies still have phones? If not, then surely there was a business center she could use.
∞
Twenty four hours earlier in the time of the world around her, Saskia sat in a retro phone booth in the lobby of her hotel. It took her twenty minutes of phone tree flattery to induce the front desk at Mica’s paper to connect her with Mica, but finally Mica’s line was ringing.
“Hello? This is Mica Topp.”
Saskia’s heart skipped a beat. Mica’s voice was a bridge across time.
“Hello...?”
“Hi,” Saskia found her words again. “Hi, I’m Robin. Thanks so much for taking my call.”
“Sure thing,” Mica’s voice warmed to match Saskia’s. “The front office said you wanted to ask me about my charities article?”
“Yes! I know it was a while back. I just wanted to get your take now——you know, in case your rankings changed.”
Mica gave Saskia twenty minutes, she was such a kind soul. Who took the random call from a stranger in order to help a group of organizations that they had no real affiliation with? The only downside to the call was that Saskia missed her more and more, the longer they spoke.
“So, if it was you,” Saskia said. “Who would you donate to?”
“Well, it sounds to me like you care a lot about education. For that, BEAM is a great organization, they give kids, who wouldn’t otherwise get the opportunity, exposure to higher mathematics. And they’re still small enough that your money would go a long way.”
Saskia smiled to herself, that wasn’t what she had asked. “How about you, though? And what if you had a big sum of money. Money that would help any organization.”
Mica snorted a short puff of laughter. “I’m not likely to ever have that kind of money.” But Saskia just let a space build, eventually tipping Mica’s hand. “If I had that sort of money. There’s some big infrastructure projects. Eagle Mountain is a big pumped hydro dream just east of LA. And there’s a couple of wind projects off the coast. And Coast-to-Coast Cabling wants to power New York evenings with Nevada solar. All pipe dreams.” She sighed.
Saskia beamed at the mention of Coast-to-Coast Cabling. “I’m glad there are people like you. Someone’s gotta dream big for the rest of us.”
A few minutes later, Saskia thanked Mica and they ended the call.
Saskia went back up to her room and wound the clock back to the evening before her targeted destination time. She went down to the hotel lobby and booked her room. Her room number wasn’t exactly a surprise, but that she recognized it was a nice confirmatory piece of evidence that everything was going to work out. She paid in cash and headed back up to her room for one last recovery night’s sleep. She stripped down to her underwear and climbed into bed.
Early the next morning, Saskia packed her backpack and left the hotel for the last time. Shortly after 6AM, as the darkness of night faded, Saskia left the Katy Trail and found the rock under which she placed the hotel room key and the hand-written note to herself.
As she walked towards Zeno’s house she debated what to do with the second room key. She’d been dodging herself for over a week. Why not just do the same heading back to the present? Did it really matter if there was another her in the hotel room? What could possibly go wrong?
No, it was better not to interfere any more than she had to, and getting a second hotel would be simple enough, she still had plenty of money left from the racetrack. She tossed the key into a trashcan.
Ten minutes later Saskia stood before Zeno’s house. The front yard was well manicured. It had a Japanese rock garden aesthetic that was out of character with the neighborhood, though the oil black 7 Series BMW parked in the driveway fit well with the neighbors. “Good,” she thought to herself, “he must still be home.” Not so surprising really, it was still 6:40AM, and the first rays of the morning sun were only just kissing the rooftops. Minutes earlier, it had only been as she left the Katy Trail that she had encountered her first two joggers. She decided to see if she could see anything over the fence behind the house, back where it backed onto the Turtle Creek Parkway.
It was more awkward than she’d anticipated, but she had enjoyed the climbing-adjacent demands that working her way along the edge of the creek had called on. Before any passerby passed by, she was at Zeno’s fence. Peering over the top she saw him. The man looked to be fifties, but in good shape for his age. At first he was lying, supine. Saskia thought he was dozing, but she re-evaluated her assessment when he rolled over.
His back rose and fell in a gentle rhythm, his arms extended forward, palms just beyond the mat he was curled on, flat against the sun-bleached silver wooden deck that surrounded his pool. He was in child’s pose. The man was meditating.
Saskia watched and waited, but Zeno held his position. Perhaps he had fallen asleep?
The water in his pool rippled gentle iridescent rainbows that made Saskia think of oil.
In five minutes, he still hadn’t moved, beyond the gentle rhythm of his rib cage expanding and contracting. Saskia’s curiosity grew. How long would he stay in this position? How long could he?
At nine minutes she decided to seize on the opportunity in front of her. She figured there was no harm priming the pump, if you will. Give herself a leg up.
She slowed time down and carefully climbed over the fence. She was exquisitely aware that in slowing time down for herself, her movements played faster to those around her, and so she channelled her inner Tai Chi master, moving like liquid molasses. Beyond that, she figured, as she had reasoned when she went back to watch herself first slip in time: if she was advancing time slow enough then she’d have a real chance at reversing time altogether, should Zeno awake.
Saskia took Zeno in. His demeanor screamed: smooth operator. He had an intricate woven blanket covering the yoga mat he was curled atop of. The blanket didn’t look new, but it did look special enough that the Dalai Lama himself might have gifted it to the yogi in front of her. Sitting on a polished block of wood was a jug filled with some sort of green liquid, a pureed slush that was, no doubt, Zeno’s breakfast. Saskia wondered about its purported healing properties. Inadvertently soaking up the water that was sweating off the jug of organic pulp was a freshly laundered towel.
The multiple speakers of the built-in sound system were of such quality that it sounded to Saskia as if she were walking among a choir or saffron-robed monks vocalizing the resonant hum of repeated mantras.
Zeno himself was wearing a robe with gold filigree on the cuffs and a three inch thick waist sash. His head was bowed and his eyes shut.
As Saskia approached, she further decelerated the passage of time. It struck her that she could plant a seed for their true encounter. It was worth a try at any rate: “You will meet a young woman today,” she whispered in a gentle attempt at subliminal prep. “She will come to you with hard to believe truths. You must believe her when she tells you what she does.” Then, she noticed a cat, perched on a froofy cushion of its own. Zeno’s, presumably. It had been so still she’d missed it up until that moment. But the cat had not missed her. Its gaze was fixed upon her.
Out of reflex, Saskia slowed the passage of time to ultra slow speed. The entire world congealed about her. The cat didn’t even blink. She glanced back at Zeno and it struck her that the power of her subliminal message might improve its suggestibility as time slowed. She risked one more go at subconscious influence.
The cat stood on its cushion and stretched its front legs. A Buddhist sound bowl sat perilously close to the cat.
Saskia determined that discretion was the better part of valor and bid her retreat, back over the rear fence. She’d take twenty minutes to collect herself and then knock on his front door.
