Chapter 87 — Silver Bullets
The Curve of Time, Chapter 87 —— Silver Bullets, in which Mica visits another lottery winner.
Followed by a quick tour through my creative life.
Listen to full episode :
— 87 —
Silver Bullets
The world at the “time” when Saskia had left to intervene with Sienna was not the world Saskia had left. One thing, however, was similar: Charles Belfry had just tested his nascent ability to slip in time, and Mica was at his front door again, to write up the story of another lottery winner.
This time, though, when Charles welcomed Mica into his living room, there, on the couch, was a very aged man. The man bore a striking resemblance to Charles.
Mica extended her hand and introduced herself.
The elderly man smiled at her. “Yes, I know who you are.”
Mica was surprised by his unequivocal assertion, and hazarded a guess herself: “And, I assume you are Charles’ father?”
The older man’s grin broadened. “Close. Try again.”
Mica’s eyes dilated. Was this the classic time-travel trope of intergalactic exploration? The one precipitated by a trip at close to the speed of light, and the time warp that caused. “You’re——” but her voice faltered as she compared the two men in front of her, in search of similarities. Both had bushy eyebrows, full lips, even if the older man’s were more cracked and brittle. More remarkably, they both had the same mole just below their left eye.
Seeing the penny drop, both men held out their right arms and pulled up their sleeves: there, just below the elbow was an identical scar. “Skateboarding accident when we were nineteen.”
The older man was an older Charles. One who had gone a long way into the future and had now returned with all sorts of knowledge for his younger self.
The Older Charles looked into Mica’s eyes. “Is your Saskia still with you?”
“How do you know Saskia?” Mica asked.
“She’s the one who started everything. I thought I was the first”——older Charles glanced over at his younger self——“back, right now. I thought it was somehow the meditation retreat that had opened me to it. And, I guess it was, in a way. But a lot of people learnt to slip in time last weekend.”
Mica’s head was abuzz. “You’ve seen the future?”
Older Charles nodded.
“What happens with climate change?”
“That is the least of our problems.”
“We solve it?”
“Well——” older Charles broke off. “Time travel is not a silver bullet. Not for anything. Silver bullets don’t exist.”
“But——”
“If people work against one another——the world can die from a million paper cuts, and it can do so in many ways.”
For Mica, though, if anything was to number in the millions, it was the question she had for older Charles. Unfortunately, he’d said his piece and mysteriously shut down. Refused to say more. At least to her.
∞
As she rode her bike back down 17th Street, it dawned on Mica that she’d been swept up in Saskia’s certainty that it was only possible to travel so far and fast into the future or the past. That that speed——it was funny how she reflexively used a spatial term to describe a temporal change as well; time really was just another dimension——that speed had an upper bound. She felt that she ought to have seen the folly of that perspective, especially given that she, herself, couldn’t slip in time at all.
What was to say that someone else wouldn’t make Saskia’s ability look prosaic? And, by doing so, what was to stop them from traveling far into the future, or the past?
That was chapter 87, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
I noticed a funny thing reading it. Something probably easier to notice on the page than aurally: “below” and “elbow” are anagrams of one another, and the use of them in the same sentence, juxtaposed so close together, really tickled me.
It’s an idiosyncratic example of how different mediums can elicit different responses with the same “underlying material”. It’s something that has piqued me in the past. Indeed it’s those differences, coupled with the differences in how content is produced, that makes an interesting lens through which to view my own creative journey.
Let me elaborate.
During my undergraduate studies, while most of my courses were in mathematics, I spent a good chunk of time taking still photographs. Macquarie University’s student union offered basic photography classes, and I had the opportunity to play in a darkroom for the first time. Yes, I’m that old; that was years before the advent of the digital camera, back when every photo you took felt expensive.
Anyway, the upshot of my dalliances in the dark were that at the conclusion of my undergrad studies I flirted with the idea of going into photography rather than mathematics. In the end though, I decided that, for me, mathematics offered a richer forrest to play in. That, and the fact that I landed a great scholarship that meant a PhD would be likely three years, fully funded, and right on the doorstep to Europe, swung me to mathematics.
As a starting grad student without a big social network in a foreign land (and remember this was in the time before email, and when video chats were still science fiction), I ended up watching a lot of movies. It probably didn’t hurt that there was a great old movie theatre called The Phoenix Picturehouse close to my home.
It was watching classics and new release arthouse films that it first occurred to me that if one let the pictures move, then there were untold extra layers of complexity: dialogue, character, score and story. Extra dimensions that turned photography into a much richer landscape.
But I was knee-deep in the math-thing and my supervisor, fresh off patching up the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem with his supervisor, and on his own journey, took up an offer from Harvard and moved to America. Fortuitously, he took his graduate students with him (something, at the time, that I was a little circumspect about, as it added another few years to my PhD). Even more fortuitously, though, technology had marched forward, and digital video became a thing and the graduate student union bought some cameras for interested students to play with.
Long story short, I got properly hooked on film, and after finishing my doctorate, I moved with my wife to LA with the aim of directing films.
In order to cut my teeth, I needed content to shoot, and that meant scripts. And so it was that I was lead to writing. It took me another decade to realize that the writing was what I enjoyed most, though who knows, perhaps a decade from now, novels will look like just another station along the way.
I guess the moral of my life’s trajectory is agreement with Charles’ sentiment that there are no silver bullets, and, maybe even more, it’s impossible to predict how one dot in a story leads to the next until you’re many miles down the road.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
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