Chapter 94 — No Time To Mourn
The Curve of Time, Chapter 94 —— No Time To Mourn, in which Mica and the Saskias flee.
Followed by musings on how apparently unconnected events can impact one another.
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— 94 —
No Time To Mourn
They escaped out the back of Mica’s apartment, leaving by her garage, and never passing the front entryway. There was no sign of Dennis’ wife when they left, and they had no reason to suspect she’d seen them go as they drove up the Malibu Coast.
Beyond fleeing their immediate danger, they had no grand plan.
Saskia wondered if Mica’s neighbor, Suzy, was still quelled of panic. To appease her, Wassily had remained at Mica’s, though Suzy hadn’t been thrilled that everyone else had upped and left before the police arrived. That, notwithstanding her belief in Mica. But Saskia had insisted that sticking around made them sitting ducks for any other crazies that might emerge from the woodwork, and Sienna’s lifeless body gave enough credence to Saskia’s claim that Suzy relented.
“I can’t believe Sienna’s gone,” Saskia said as the roiling ocean outside the car disappeared behind a row of rebuilds that had already emerged from the ashes of the recent fires. “I know——she didn’t exist at all a couple of weeks ago, but ...”
“Wistful nostalgia?” her twin asked. “For what might have been?”
Saskia shrugged.
“Like a relationship gone?” Mica added. “After you’ve been dumped.”
Mica’s remark hit closer to the bone than Saskia suspected she’d meant it to, and Saskia wiped away the tear that swelled from the corner of her eye. “Like there’s an alternate world where we all——” Saskia stopped short, her thought incomplete. Instead, she asked: “Did you ever read Hua Hsu’s Stay True?”
Her twin, in the passenger seat, gave a knowing nod, because, of course, she had. Mica, on the other hand, shook her head slowly.
“It’s beautifully written. About a life cut short.”
They glimpsed the rolling breakers again as more vacant lots opened on their left.
“There’s no way Dennis’ wife could find us, right?” Shotgun Saskia’s mind had clearly wandered down a different tangent.
“Could she track us down?” Mica’s eyes cut over to her lover from this timeline. “Going back in time, and following us here?”
“One of us would have noticed her by now,” Saskia objected. “And since we haven’t——to follow us——she would’ve had to fork off a new timeline.”
Her twin nodded. “Meaning: we’d be safe in this one.”
It was a clear-cut case of the impermeability of their lived-lives serving as a serendipitous insurance policy.
“What if she went into the future?” her twin second-guessed her own conclusion.
Strange, that even as time travelers, though their lived pasts were as safe as everyone else’s, their futures were just as unknowable.
“As long as our future selves don’t go visiting past haunts, at least until everything seems safe, it would take a lot of luck for her to find us.”
“There might be others.” Mica piped in as she stopped at a pedestrian crosswalk.
“Sure,” Saskia conceded, “but the same would apply to them.”
The man crossing the road in front of them did a double take as he passed the front of Mica’s car, his eyes flitting between the Saskias. From the back seat Saskia waved to him, and, embarrassed, he to continued on his way.
“Parallel universes give missing persons a whole new context,” Saskia’s double mused.
“Or not,” Saskia countered. “We’ve disappeared——to safety——unless Dennis’ wife has figured out how to jump between arbitrary timelines, which would be weird.”
With her brow furrowed, Mica glanced back at Saskia.
“Proximity matters,” Saskia explained, “I can’t just jump to Mars in the physical world, why should time——or timelines——be any different? You have to be close, in every dimension, to a point on one timeline to jump to the ‘same point’ on another.”
“Makes sense,” her double concurred. “And it explains why, when we blow up to avoid a cusp point, we often just end up back in our own timeline again. Kind of like there’s a rubber band that holds us to our timeline. The rubber band snaps us back into place——”
“——unless we break the rubber band,” Saskia agreed with her. “Like, if we change something that makes where we go, incompatible with the timeline we left. That breaks the rubber band.”
“And once it’s ruptured, it’s like stepping through a trapdoor. But odd, that we can’t consciously control it.”
“Or not.” Mica grinned at her Saskias. “We all breathe all day without thinking about it.”
From the back seat, Saskia gave a loud burp.
Her companions looked back at her.
“It’s like a burp. Sometimes you keep your mouth closed and swallow it back: that’s reversing time. But other times your mouth is open and it escapes out into the world, and then it disperses so fast that——if you let that happen——it can never be recovered.”
All three women chuckled.
Mica returned her attention to the road, and a silence fell over the car. Saskia put her hand on Mica’s shoulder. “You alright?” Mica smiled at her in the rearview mirror and a jolt of warmth shot through Saskia. Perhaps a relationship here wasn’t impossible.
The traffic lights at the top of the Pepperdine hill turned red and Mica pulled to a stop. Cars crowded behind them as Mica’s eyes wandered idly up the green slope to their right. Suddenly, she turned to her passengers. “Where are we going?”
It was an excellent question, but Saskia pumped her open hand gently in the air. “You know, there is a version of time travel that lets us have our cake and eat it too; lets us change the past without duplication.”
Mica raised an eyebrow at Saskia, and Saskia’s double shrugged that she, too, was lost.
“I can imagine a future. I imagine we stop at El Matador, the beach up ahead. And we forget everything. We go for a swim. But the waves today are big, and maybe one of us would get swept out to sea. And, I don’t like that future, so I scrap it.”
“Ok?” Mica glanced from Saskia to her twin to see if blood ties might be enough to unravel Saskia’s riddle.
“I’d want a do-over for something I’ve not actually lived.” Saskia gave a firm nod, pleased with her ad-libbed scenario.
“I still don’t get it,” Mica admitted.
“It’s like I’ve closed off a bubble in our timeline. Nothing I imagined actually happened. And it didn’t affect the here and now; didn’t make more duplicates of us. But it’s not so different: the causality just happened in my head, which makes that a kind of time travel of its own.”
Her double nodded slowly. “Kind of like how a leader’s vision can shape reality?”
Saskia smiled at her double; she would guess, dollars-to-cents, that her counterpart was thinking about Bossman. Would the general public have difficulty with the idea of being a lover to your doppelganger, or being one member of a ménage à trois that included such a pair? A curious question to consider. There were no doubt prejudices against both possibilities, and, even if the former was a more abstract idea to most people, she wondered if it would be more, or less, frowned upon.
She had never understood how multiple partners could possibly feel right, or work. But here she was, the universe conspiring to show her that she was more closed minded than she’d believed herself to be.
In front of their car, a squirrel darted into the road. Stopped on a dime. And reversed itself.
“Did you know: squirrels are inadvertently responsible for planting about 2000 trees a year,” shotgun Saskia mused.
Mica squinted one eye while raising the eyebrow above her other eye.
“Go ahead, look skeptical. She knows.” And front-seat Saskia gestured to her twin in the back.
Saskia nodded. “She’s right. Experts reckon there are cases where squirrels’ forgotten stashed acorns have saved entire forests. Regenerating grove after grove of oaks.”
“So, now I’ve got two squirrels of my own.” Mica chuckled. “Gorgeous girlfriends who keep generating more and more copies of themselves.” It was a sobering thought. Saskia lived her life with such intention. Always in the belief that she could chart her course through the world. But there were dimensions beyond her understanding. Dimensions that quietly aggregated, accumulating to a tipping point and then out of the blue something grand an intractable appeared before her.
“Look”——Mica shook her head——“that’s all well and great, but it doesn’t help with what we should do.”
“We should save humanity,” Saskia’s double put a none-too-fine point on what they should do. “Just because we can’t save the timeline we’re in, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make a copy of space-time that can move forward with a chance of surviving.”
“But, time travel is what brought us together. It’s not all bad. I’m not even sure I would eliminate it, even if we could.”
Mica tenderly kissed Saskia’s hand, which was still resting on her shoulder. “You can always try going back later. I’d like a little longer together.”
“Or——we could go back together.”
That was chapter 94, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
You know, how in life, sometimes one thing, that, by rights, is completely unconnected with another, interrupts the second, and, despite the lack of real connections leaves you feeling a little disconcerted? Like the way you might feel if a palm reader told you you’ve only got a year to live might leave you a little uncomfortable. I mean, in that case, I’d also feel a bit grumpy at the palm reader, because, you know, making up reckless destabilizing fictions like that feels, well, a bit callous.
Anyway, I just had a super weird experience. I got a random wrong-number call from a guy who identified himself as Dennis. The thing is, it left me feeling like the palm reader. Though, I’m happy to report that I had more decency than to report my thoughts to him. I was left with the quandary of if I’d——I almost felt obliged to tell him to be careful because I’m a writer and in my most recent chapter in my latest novel I’ve bumped off a Dennis!
I’m pretty sure I was right not to say anything.
One last uncorrelated interruption to acknowledge before I wrap up today’s commentary, and a partial reason for its brevity: I’m curious if anyone can hear the rain in the background? As I’ve mentioned, my chapters runway right now is very short, which means I’m recording this just a couple of days before it drops. This wouldn’t ordinarily be a big problem living in LA and recording in my daughter’s closet, but we’re now on our third day of consecutive rain, so I’ve had no choice but to record under the gentle pitter patter on the roof. Thought I’d mention it now, in case anyone did notice it and wonder what was going on.
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
