Chapter 43 — You Look Awful
Rufus describes some of the dichotomies between being old and young.
Followed by Chapter 43 —— You Look Awful, in which we return to Saskia and her mother, Miranda, in the Dallas hospital in the aftermath of Saskia’s accident.
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Hello Friends,
One of the idiosyncrasies of writing a novel about time travel is that you find yourself on the lookout for markers of time, in whatever shape they might show up. One that occurred to me the other day, while I was digging away at our trench, was body aches. Specifically, that they visit more frequently as one ages, and last longer when they do. I’ve noticed this before when climbing, as many of my climbing partners are a couple of decades younger than me.
This got me thinking about aging more generally and how our perspectives change over time. What often seemed crucial when I was younger looks much less important today. Performances on exams, what you “wanted to do with your life”, and finances all fade into the background when compared with health, love, and care for those around you; the things that really matter, no matter in how small a way they manifest.
Conversely, the young tend to have more energy to throw at whatever project has taken their fancy in the moment.
These are two sides of the same coin, sometimes expressed as: youth is wasted on the young. Perhaps, though, it would be more accurate to admit that it is only the young who have the energy to enjoy youth, moreover everyone else has trouble being perfectly in the moment after a lifetime spent learning to reflect. This has manifested in my own life as I watch my daughters fill their schedules to the brim, while I prioritize time to think. From their point of view: as soon as I’m spending energy being grateful for physical abilities, I’m no longer in the moment and truly enjoying said abilities. It’s a bit of a yin and yang.
Personally, I’m struggling with a meniscus tear that has prevented me from running for many months now. And yet, I’m torn about surgery, in part because of the sample size one personal experience I had about a decade ago which took about a year to completely recover from. I guess age does not guarantee we will analyze data any better. The good news: slowly, I’m coming around emotionally, to the intellectual realization I had a month or so back: it’s maybe time to undergo the knife.
Pulling on a different thread, aging is another reason to mix it up, since it is well documented that the perception of time passing slows with novel experiences, and inevitably as we age we put a higher premium on relishing the passing minutes. Incidentally, this connection with our perception of how fast time passes is hypothesized to be a primary cause of our experience of time speeding up as we age; when we’re young, everything is new.
Anyway, aging is a theme touched on in today’s chapter when we return to Saskia and her mother, Miranda, in the Dallas hospital in the aftermath of Saskia’s accident. So, without further ado, let’s head there now.
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
— 43 —
You Look Awful
Saskia awoke, confused. She was lying in a bed. Not a luxurious one, and not her own, but comfortable enough. She went to scratch an itch on the back of her right hand. But as she lifted her left hand to do so, she discovered it was tethered. A glance revealed tubes. Plugged into a plastic something taped to her forearm. A needle! Her eyes traced the tube back to an IV bag.
Turning back to the itch on her right hand, she discovered the cause: a wire from a heart-rate monitor taped to her index finger.
“You’re awake.” Miranda turned quickly to the hallway. “Nurse!”
Saskia recognized her mother’s voice and her eyes tried pulling her into focus. “I don’t feel so good.”
“You look awful,” her mother concurred. “I mean——”
“I feel awful,” Saskia cut Miranda’s start at an apologetic correction short. “How long have I been——? What day is it?”
Saskia was surprised how lucid she felt. A moment ago she had been unconscious, and now ... she took in the curtains encasing her world. To her left and right they were baby blue, but the curtain at the foot of her bed had a print on it. A coastal image, San Simeon perhaps? The top ten inches of each curtain had a loose gauze netting between the fabric sheets and the strip of eyelets that hooked the curtain to the track in the ceiling. From beyond the cotton walls beeps penetrated. Monitors, attached to patients in neighboring beds. Or were they her monitors? There were voices too, one a little louder, “Chantel, can you check on nine.”
Footsteps. “Sure.”
Saskia focused back on her mother, though she’d missed whatever she had just said. Behind her, a nurse pulled the fabric wall aside and bustled into the space around Saskia’s bed. “Good morning, sunshine.”
“Where am I?”
“Baylor. The university medical center. You’ve had quite a nap.”
“You’ve been unconscious almost two weeks, sweetie.”
Two weeks since when, Saskia wondered.
Another nurse brushed in, and together he and his colleague ran quick checks of Saskia’s vitals before leaving with the promise of finding one of Saskia’s doctors.
Saskia turned back to her mother and closed her eyes a moment. This coma thing was taxing. When she opened her eyes again Miranda gazed at her, shaking her head gently.
“Pumpkin, I have so many questions.”
Saskia smiled back; she too had questions, but she wasn’t sure her mother was the right person to ask.
“You want to tell me about Mica?”
Saskia blinked. How did her mother know about Mica?
“She’ll be back any minute.”
“She’s . . . ” Saskia drifted off.
“She’s a cutie.” The corner of Miranda’s lips tipped up, an echo of one Saskia’s own characteristic mannerisms.
But Saskia wasn’t sure where to start. What even to reveal.
“Would you rather start with the stash of cash you were carrying?”
“You met Mica?”
“She called. I answered. And then, she flew right out, right away.” There was implication in Miranda’s voice. “She dropped everything and was here that night. She just stepped out to grab a drink.”
If Mica had called——Saskia must have already met Mica . . . they were in the future. Or her past? How far in the future? A future Saskia hadn’t yet lived?
The cotton wall behind Miranda rustled. The rollers in the ceiling glide track clicked rhythmically, and there was Mica, inside Saskia’s curtained bubble.
“Remember me?” Mica asked. Her question was more tentative than Miranda realized.
But, even in her discombobulated state, Saskia understood. At least she thought she did. “Did you feed Tomato?”
“Oh my goodness,” Miranda gasped, bringing her hand to her mouth. “I——I completely forgot about Tomato.”
“It’s OK,” Mica reassured them both. She stroked Saskia’s hand. “I’ve been checking on him since I last saw you. You said you might be gone a while.”
Miranda looked mortified. “In two weeks he could have starved.”
Saskia was quietly relieved that Miranda had forgotten about Tomato. “No need to worry”——she clasped the papery skin of her mother’s hand——“my compost bin has plenty of mice, even if Mica hadn’t been watching him.”
“Saskia!”
Saskia turned to Mica. “What day is it?”
“Sunday, April 10th,” Mica answered, more significantly than Saskia’s mother realized.
Abruptly Saskia turned back to her mother. She recalled Boss-man’s mention of her mother’s call to her work; she was hit by a wave of relief that she hadn’t called her mother after Miranda called her work. How that would have complicated things!
Miranda inverted her own hand with Saskia’s and caressed Saskia’s arm with her fingers. “You have the most lovely arms, sweetie.”
Mica and Saskia both turned to Miranda, who smiled back.
“I used to have arms like yours. Taut. And yours used to be twigs. But now”——she held her right arm aloft, and with her left hand fondled her sagging tricep——“now mine looks like my mother’s.” To Saskia, she said: “You wouldn’t remember that. You were too young.”
“I remember grandma’s arms.”
“No, you wouldn’t remember my arms.”
Saskia cocked her head at her mother.
“To you, people have a constancy of tone.”
Saskia gently shook her head. “Are you sure you didn’t get hit on the head, mom?”
Her mother laughed. “You haven’t lived long enough to see people change, sweetie.”
“I was alive when you were my age,” Saskia protested.
“Strictly speaking. But nobody remembers things like that from when they were five when they’re the age you are now.” She gave another laugh. “You weren’t paying attention to the tone of my arms when you were five.”
Saskia suppressed the urge to tell her mother she could now go back and check this if she wanted. But as she quelled the impulse she realized that it was a false one anyway. There was no going back twenty years.
“What are you thinking, sweetie?”
“Just about aging.”
“Your self-image changes too,” Miranda continued her thought. “When you’re young, you see yourself as older. But you two,” she turned to Mica and back to Saskia, “you’re right in that sweet spot. At thirty you feel thirty. At my age, your self-image struggles to keep up with the changes. I still think of my arms as as toned as yours.”
“At thirty our mental models stop updating?” Saskia asked with a laugh.
“Maybe we stop seeing the changes,” Mica suggested.
“If it’s just perception,” Saskia countered, “I’m sure there’s some tech could help?”
Miranda shook her head. “Technology can’t change your perception.”
“Sure it can,” Saskia rejoined. She posited glasses for reading as the canonical example.
“Well, I’m glad you’re feeling better.” Her mother shifted in her chair. Then stood. As she did, she complained that the medical staff only ever showed up when the emergency buzzers sounded. She pulled the curtain to one side. “I’m going to find your doctor.” But before she left, she turned back to the younger women and permitted a smile. “I’m sure you lovebirds would appreciate a minute anyway.”
Saskia spun back to Mica and spoke loud enough for Miranda to hear: “She didn’t let me tell her about microscopes and telescopes.”
Mica’s brow furrowed. Confused.
“They’re the same thing,” Saskia elaborated. “Technology that changes our perception. But their influence isn’t just on individuals. They changed the whole enchilada of human wisdom.” In Saskia’s telling the collective mind of humanity was harder to shift.
Mica shook her head. “Ten minutes out of a coma and——I’m not sure if you’re better or worse.”
Saskia was on a roll. She likened the knowledge of humankind to a meta-brain.
“An out of the box brain?”
“Sure, and the LLMs we’ve developed are a technological amplifier for that knowledge trust,” Saskia enthused. “Glasses for the hive mind.”
“Listen,” Mica interjected, “I’ve been dodging your mother’s questions. We need to get our story straight.” She explained that she’d been vague with Miranda suggesting that she didn’t know the specifics of why Saskia was in Dallas. Leaving it at: “A work something.”
“But you called me, and mom answered? How come she didn’t get any earlier calls?”
“I wondered the same thing,” Mica said. “Apparently, you landed on your phone and she only just got it repaired.”
Saskia marveled at the flukes of timing that had been necessary to keep the universe consistent. The universe taketh away, but it giveth back.
“Your mother tried calling a few numbers once she got it working again, but the doctor told her the best thing she could do was to be here. To talk to you. Even if it didn’t seem like you could hear anything.”
“I’ve really been out for two weeks?” Saskia asked.
Mica nodded.
“What about the oil? Is it still——”
“Nothing’s changed. Oil’s still streaming into the gulf. Did you talk to Zeno?”
“Yes. But no. I ...”
“Did you warn him?”
Saskia shook her head gently, unsure of her memories. “I——I’m not sure I can make it back that far again.” She fell back on her bed. “Going back two weeks——it’s exhausting. Six days was exhausting.” Saskia closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Time is weird.” Mica glanced at the curtain wall, and Saskia continued. “I can look about the other three dimensions of our world. See things nearby, no matter in what direction I look. But with time——with time I can only see backwards, and even then it’s only what my mind remembers.”
Mica put her hands on Saskia’s shoulders. Gently, she oriented Saskia’s face towards the cotton wall. “What’s happening out there?”
“Fine,” Saskia conceded, and then immediately objected, “but I could pull the curtain aside.”
Mica closed her eyes and shook her head. “But you can’t tell me what’s happening five feet that way,” she said, pointing at the wall behind Saskia’s head.
Saskia gave a grumpy scowl.
“No matter which way you’re facing. The future just has a big wall in front of it.”
“Saskia?” Miranda’s voice heralded her return. The curtain behind Mica whooshed aside and Miranda entered with Saskia’s doctor. A brain specialist.
