Chapter 65 — Hotel—Early Morning
The Curve of Time, Chapter 65 —— Hotel——Early Morning , in which Saskia twists Zeno’s arm.
Followed by some musings on sleep during travels.
Listen to full episode :
— 65 —
Hotel—Early Morning
When they awoke, Saskia glanced at her phone. She was surprised to find she was already conscious at nine in the morning, and she scrolled through her notifications. Evidently, she’d slept through a notification from her doorbell app. Curious, she opened it. Someone had been knocking on her door in LA, an hour ago. That meant 6AM, LA time. Who the hell was knocking on her door that early?
The image from the doorbell camera was, as always, not as good as she’d have liked, and she chided herself for her inept installation. So often a lack of commitment to tedious tasks came back to bite you in the butt. Then, the man turned momentarily profile, glancing back at a car passing by on the street. In that moment she recognized the face. Even in the dawn light it was suddenly unmistakeable: Zeno Williams.
Mica noticed Saskia stiffen, and peeked over her bedmate’s shoulder. “What the ...?”
“That’s my front door,” Saskia explained. “Was. Just over an hour ago. We were still asleep.”
“He’s looking for you?” Mica was thoroughly confused.
On the front doorbell video, Zeno pulled his phone from his pocket and checked something. “Why didn’t he just return my call?” Saskia asked, mystified.
The two women considered the idea of catching a flight right back to LA, and Saskia scooting back in time to meet him. “We know he was there this morning,” Saskia reasoned.
“Or, you could just call him again,” Mica suggested a simpler solution. “He obviously wants to talk to you. And, we need you here anyway in order to cap the well.”
Conceding Mica’s wisdom, Saskia called, once more. Once again she got Zeno’s voicemail. “Mr. Williams, this is Saskia Pollack again. I noticed you outside my house an hour ago. Please call me back when you get this.”
Saskia hung up and turned back to Mica who shrugged. “Maybe you do need to go back and physically ambush him.”
The two women sat there silently. Each trying to make sense of what was happening. Then, Saskia’s phone rang. The caller’s name appeared on screen, and Saskia answered: “Zeno Williams?”
“You knew about the well before anything went wrong.” Zeno wasn’t wasting time with pleasantries, but neither was his statement an accusation; merely a level-setting of what he knew.
“Yes,” Saskia admitted without admitting anything. “You rejected my help then, but I have a new idea. I think I can still help you.”
“Last time you tried to help, you ended up in hospital.” Again, there was no intimidation behind Zeno’s words, just a reminder that perhaps she wasn’t as powerful as she felt. Zeno wasn’t ready to admit that he too had learned to slip in time, especially as he only suspected that this might be what Saskia had in mind. Of course, if she did plan to go back, then she was decidedly more adroit at time travel than he. No matter how he’d concentrated, every time he’d tried going back in time he’d hurt himself with a painful jolt. It felt almost as if, in trying to reverse time he would inadvertently run into an electric fence.
But if reversing time wasn’t possible, then what other plan did Saskia have to staunch the flow of oil?
“You want to dive to the well head?” Zeno was incredulous.
“You have ADS suits, yes? Atmospheric diving suits.”
Zeno confirmed that Saskia’s guess was the case, even as his mind raced to comprehend how they might help. “But——”
“I want to dive down near the well head in one.”
“Absolutely not.”
While Saskia protested that she wasn’t an ADS novice, Zeno struggled to connect dots that he could barely make out. How would slipping in time near the wellhead help anything? He put it to her point blank: “How would that help anything?”
Saskia forged ahead, “You’d just have to trust me. But I have a cover story.” She pitched him her cover story: that she was working with Mica on an exposé, but that with his cooperation Mica was open to shifting the framing from a story about the fossil fuel industry’s negligence to one about the difficulties they had to overcome supplying the world all it needed. For that, though, the two women wanted footage of the wellhead.
While she spoke, Zeno googled “Mica Topp”. His initial hits revealed a journalist who wrote stories about lottery winners, immediately piquing his interest. Was this Mica the one he really needed to account for? To buy time, he parried that he would be happy to give them footage they already had. All the while he scrolled through to the second and third pages of his search.
Saskia had expected Zeno’s counter-offer. It was a roadblock, but in the time she spent arguing around it, Zeno found a webpage linking Mica to a climate activist group. He was playing with fire, to be sure. But, as the saying went, it was better to keep your enemies close.
Nevertheless, what she was proposing was madness. Oil was streaming out with torrential furry. In the range of a barrel a second. That was a gusher of biblical proportions. It took far less to kill a man, but she——did she know the early history of oil strikes? “Blowouts are dangerous,” he cautioned.
Sebastio Salgado’s high contrast black and white images of the Kuwaiti oil fields had seared in his mind as a child. Dramatically documenting the raw slick of oil drenching a felled worker, some saw the power of mother nature, Zeno simply saw raw power. And while underwater blowouts might not be as common as those on surface wells, they were harder to manage as the Deepwater Horizon had amply shown.
He explained to Saskia that the blowout was too powerful to cap. “We need to drill a relief valve first.”
“Let us get footage of you trying.” Saskia countered. “It doesn’t have to work. Worst case, for the story, we just need to see you giving it a shot. Make it look like you are trying.”
In the end Zeno let himself be persuaded. He was sure there was no chance of pulling off what Saskia had proposed, but there was little downside to a performative show, and the physical risks could be managed. He wasn’t the one taking them, at any rate. The friendlier narrative would be a pleasant reprieve in the coverage. More than anything, though, he was keen to have one of his divers document Saskia’s actions. Perhaps he would see something that revealed more to him.
That was chapter 65, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
Assuming everything has gone to plan (and that you are listening to this episode as it drops) I should be galavanting somewhere near Sydney right now, reaffirming one of my key identifying characteristics——that I’m Australian.
It’s funny how we pigeon-hole people with attributes. Rufus is Australian. Rufus climbs. Rufus writes. And of course those attributes need not be internally defined; a friend lost their house in a fire. Another got cancer. Identifiers, unwelcomely thrust upon them.
Anyhow, back to travels. The other week, while spending a night up in Ojai, I was struck by how common it is to struggle with sleep in a new or unfamiliar environment, and I spent some time noodling on why exactly that might be. The LLMs chalked the response up to an evolutionary survival mechanism combined with general anxiety that comes with being outside what is familiar. I’m sure those are fundamental components, but I suspect some of the specifics redound to new places feeling different because we form mental models of the world around us and in the case of unfamiliar environments, those models are obviously less complete. So, it’s a bit like we’re sleeping in a cave with the world around us mysterious and dark. Where, our own home feels more like sleeping out in the open; the world around us well known and identifiable. Maybe my metaphor is a little backwards, but you get the idea.
However you cut it, the quality of your sleep is influenced by how well you know the world you’re lying down in. Put another way: there is comfort in the devil we know.
Maybe it’s also that danger in the world around us is much rarer than our minds conceive. So, in the foreign bedroom, the unwelcome looms much larger than its actuality. The human condition is very good at channelling stories, while familiarity breeds not only contempt, but complacency.
A bit like how, when defined by accomplishments, we often undervalue our own successes once we’ve achieved them.
Anyway, fingers crossed I’m sleeping well right 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
