Chapter 88 — Back Again
The Curve of Time, Chapter 88 —— Back Again, in Saskia returns to Mica and Mica’s present.
Followed by Rufus’ musings on the similarities between writing and assembling a jigsaw puzzle.
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— 88 —
Back Again
Saskia once again sat at Mica’s kitchen counter. With the towel Mica had given her, she patted her dark locks of hair, her usual springy curls subdued by the opening drops of the shower she’d been caught in, on her way over.
In front of her, Mica added fennel seeds, cardamon pods, and four rays from a whole star anise to the broken cinnamon stick, peppercorns and other spices already in the dry toasting skillet. She ignited the stove. The spicy aroma spiraled free, and she tipped the contents into a tea strainer, along with a teaspoon of black tea. She carefully placed the whole basket into Saskia’s cup and steeped it in boiling water.
“You’ve gotten more elaborate,” Saskia cooed as she inhaled deeply.
Mica gave Saskia a goofy smile and pulled her forward for a kiss. “You know, I was thinking: not noticing when the world changes——I’ve had that too.”
Saskia’s brow furrowed. “Like?”
“The day I got my driver’s license. My experience——it mismatched my anticipation; as if I was watching someone else’s world.”
As she digested Mica’s reflection, Saskia dabbed at the deep blue splotches on the shoulders of her blouse. “Transition vertigo?”
“Yeah.” Mica dipped a honey-heaped spoon into the brewed tea and poured frothed milk into the cup that she proffered Saskia. “I wanted it. I knew it just happened. And it still didn’t feel real.”
“Like the day I met you.” Saskia’s finger brushed Mica’s as she took the chai Mica handed her.
Mica blushed, but a knock at her front door broke the moment, and she went to answer it.
∞
“Saskia?” Mica’s head snapped back in surprise, before turning from the rain-soaked Saskia at her door, to her interloping twin still sitting on the high stool with a chai in her hands.
The Saskia at the door——the Saskia native to this timeline——followed Mica’s eyes, and her own eyes bulged as she spotted her doppelganger.
Then, and though perhaps she shouldn’t have, the Saskia at the kitchen counter looked every bit as surprised as the other two. “Wait . . . ”
It was Native Saskia who recovered first, and with wet fabric clinging to her body, she entered the apartment and raised one eyebrow suggestively at Mica. “You’re cheating on me with——”
“Hold on,” Mica interrupted her. “Who is who?”
Saskia put her chai down and with a sheepish smile handed her double the towel Mica had given her but twenty minutes earlier. “I think I must be the interloper. But only by a few days,” she qualified her admission.
Sopping Saskia closed the door behind her.
“Soo ...” Mica started, glancing at her chai fixings. “Wait, you didn’t give me all those spices.” She was connecting dots out loud. “And, there was I, worried that time travel might steal you from me altogether.” She grinned at both Saskias, tickled by the turn of events. “Now, I’ve got two of you.”
The Saskia at the entryway didn’t look any less confused. “I——” she started, as she unbuttoned her waterlogged blouse. “I don’t get it.”
“Three days ago, I changed the past, I stopped Sienna from——”
“Sienna?” the two women at the door asked in unison.
Saskia took a sip of her chai. Of course. She was living in a timeline in which the other two women had not discovered Sienna’s attending the meditation retreat, because here, she hadn’t. Here, they didn’t even know there was a Saskia employing that alias.
As Native Saskia continued to wrestle with the wet button-holes, Saskia explained what she understood, though she elided over the why she’d gone back, focusing instead on the oddness of arriving in a new timeline. In fact, she abstracted away the specifics of their here-and-now, preferring to align herself with her double, and admit that they both had taken a Mulligan on their first interaction with Mica. “It was weird,” she glanced at her now-topless twin, confirming that it was, indeed, a shared memory, “but I can’t imagine going back now; my expectations would be so high——revisiting our first encounter——because, now . . . now I know it can become something . . . ” she trailed off.
“Makes sense,” Mica grinned at them both, “both of my memory of that day, and that it’d be hard to go back. But, here and now, there are two of you, and you’re both devoted to me.” With a twinkle in her eye she clapped her hands together. “Warm bath?” she pointed at the already half naked Saskia. “You can rub my back.” And then swiveling her finger to her other paramour, “And you, my feet.”
∞
There was an odd awkwardness as they undressed in the bathroom. They’d all seen each other naked, felt comfortable in front of one another even, but that was in pairs, or simply alone. Perhaps it was the uncanny valley that traded on the nuance between de-robing in front of your mirror self, and not a mere a mirror image of yourself.
For interloping Saskia, it was hard to think of her other self as herself-but-not. Still, she slipped into one end of the bath, with Mica’s feet in her lap. Her twin——this timeline’s native Saskia——sat behind Mica at the other end, her legs wrapped around Mica’s hips and her toes brushing Saskia’s own inner thighs. Though she’d previously, many times, touched herself, the intimate touch of her doppelganger felt different. Unnatural. And it was strange, to openly share that touch with a lover. Her twin’s sameness lent an uncomfortably incestuous air to the mix. Or, perhaps that was the natural apprehension that came with her first blush with a threesome?
As they settled in the steaming water, Saskia wondered: “How long do you think, before we have different reactions to the same situation——the same new context?”
“You mean before you’re truly two distinct Saskias?” Mica asked.
Saskia shrugged as she picked up Mica’s foot and begun massaging her toes.
Native Saskia peeked over Mica’s shoulder and addressed her double with a conspiratorial grin, “How long before our ‘Saskia’ embeddings are appreciably different?”
Complicitly delighted, Saskia nodded back. They were evolving apart, breath by breath——transforming, as it were——but for now they still had a shared frame of reference. Their memories, most of them, connected them. Perhaps split-selves would always somehow feel their twin’s existence. She’d heard it said of identical twin’s before. She offered her carbon-copy a wink. “Attention is all we need?”
Mica looked over her shoulder at her Saskia. “Are you two speaking in a secret code?” She had no excuse for jealous feelings. And yet, she still had them.
“You didn’t tell her about Transformers?” Interloping Saskia asked her double, and to Mica, when she turned back to her: “She didn’t tell you about attention? You and I——I mean, not you, I guess——we had donuts in Pasadena——” She shook her head. “Never mind.”
For a moment, each of them, like spooked turtles, retreated into their own shells.
Mica was clearly the “center” of their unconventional ménage à trois, but Native Saskia was surprised that years of shared context with her twin, including their love of machine learning, didn’t put them more in sync. Maybe it would help to fill the gap that she sensed her interloping self had already filled in another timeline: “Transformers were the architectural leap forward that made the LLMs——the chatbots. They understand most words, but it’s when they took the nearby words into account that they——that’s what gives them their incredible power.”
The Saskia at Mica’s feet smiled back at her, but addressed Mica: “It’s like the difference between taking a holiday in a foreign country and doing a cultural immersion. First contact has one meaning, but it’s as you take in the surrounding context, that meaning solidifies.” She traced her finger along Mica’s calf. “If I said ‘model’ it would take context to know if I’m talking about a mathematical model or——”
“A fashion model?” Mica completed Saskia’s conundrum.
Saskia smiled at her, recalling the first time they’d had this conversation.
“It’s really just a slew of linear transformations,” Native Saskia offered, by way of elaboration. Her eyes lifted again, to her double’s, as she caught the muted twitch of her interloping twin’s lips.
“In a funny way,” Interloping Saskia admitted, “it feels like living life is as mixed and muddled up as those linear transformations right now.” It was the second time in a week that she’d met herself, and already the other her was a noticeably different person. It left her feeling like a third wheel. Her context differed by a veritable nothing, but it was a grain of sand in an axle; rather than make a pearl, it tore scratches in the metal that encased it. “So what else has happened that I don’t know about?” she asked. “Since”——she thought for a moment to place where her path had diverged from the two women in front of her——“since we tested our ability to win the lottery a second time.”
“What happened in your timeline?” Mica turned the tables on her.
Saskia averted her eyes momentarily. She didn’t want to burden her companions with hypotheticals, and she let the moment stretch.
“Are you alright?” Mica asked, leaning towards her feet and placing her hand on Saskia’s.
Saskia looked up at Mica. “It’s fine. I’m just tired. I’ve been running the clock to catch up to where I left off——and it’s not even where I left off.” Temporal proximity, it seemed, overwhelmed all else.
An insistent knock at Mica’s front door interrupted the moment and she extracted herself from the tub.
Wrapped in a terry cloth dressing gown, she opened the front door and was surprised to find: “Saskia?”
That was chapter 88, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
This one certainly took some shuffling. It felt like assembling a jigsaw puzzle! There were so many disparate, but related ideas that I was trying to cram in. Lined up just right I was sure they would reinforce one another and the whole would be a marvelous sum of the parts; misaligned, though, it would be like a very rough fourth grade orchestra.
Connecting such a collection of ideas together, is one of my favorite aspects of writing.
Which is not to say there weren’t iterations in which it felt as though I was forcing two pieces together. You know, how sometimes you can do that, and maybe the underlying forms kind of fit, but you can tell that it’s not right if you’re being honest with yourself, and really look at the image on the component parts.
But it was more than just trying to find the right way to connect the pieces. Somehow, it was as if this puzzle was one of those jigsaws purchased at a rummage sale; the box was open and, though the person who sold it to me swore it was complete, the more I tried piecing it together, the stronger the sense I got that the bigger risk was that there were some pieces from another puzzle altogether, mixed in. Sifting those aside was as tough as making sense of the picture I was trying to complete, especially because it was as if a giant swath of the reference image was missing; as if a giant ribboned cross had been torn out of the center, where tape that once held the box together had absconded with the photo beneath its stick.
Part of me feels good about where I’ve landed, and another part of me says that I’ll really need to sit with it a bit longer. That’s part of the process: write something, walk away, come back, and look at it with fresh eyes. And the truth is, I’m not far enough ahead of the podcast right now to give myself the space to see it properly … but more on that in the next couple of weeks.
In fairness, some of the earlier chapters have had some real polishing since I aired them. Nothing particularly structural, but they’ve definitely improved and I’m suspicious that this chapter has a similar fate ahead of it. Still, I hope you enjoyed this first pass.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. It’s been a while since I reminded you: 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
