Chapter 54 — The Lottery Test
The Curve of Time, Chapter 54 —— The Lottery Test , in which Saskia and Mica put Saskia’s ability to win the lottery to the test.
Followed by Rufus musing on the value of apprenticeship, wherever you can find it.
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— 54 —
The Lottery Test
Mica thanked her contact at the lotteries agency and hung up the phone. She turned back to Saskia. “OK, today’s winner was William Stanton.”
Saskia pursed her lips and gave a curt nod. “So, give me the numbers.”
As Mica was reading the numbers aloud, another Saskia walked into the room. She was holding up the winning ticket.
Saskia ignored her double and kept writing the numbers down. “Next?” she asked.
“Twenty, and three,” Mica completed the list.
Saskia jotted the last two numbers down. Meeting her future id’s eyes she declared: “I’ll be back, thirty seconds ago.”
She stepped from the living room, into her office. There, she quietly rolled time backwards. She heard her later id un-return, and, before that, her time in the bath and the bedroom with Mica, and indeed Mica’s arrival.
To distract herself she fiddled with the edge of the piece of paper that she’d written the lottery numbers on. The scrap of paper felt as heavy as a flap of leather, and Saskia reflected how weakened she invariably felt as she sped time faster than its ordinary flow. It was all the more noticeable as she felt super strong in those moments just before and after she turned the direction of the flow of time about. She wondered if the rush involved with turning time backwards or forwards again would ever wear off, or if she’d ever get used to the exhaustion of hoofing it. At least, unlike running up a hill, the exhaustion passed quickly and she felt heroic while doing it.
There was no doubt that she was getting better at it, too, which meant she didn’t need to concentrate quite as hard as she’d had to when she was first testing out her new power.
A few hours later, and twenty hours ago, Saskia waited in line at her corner bottle shop, still thumbing her slip of paper. She’d already done this once without a problem, why would she ever have doubted she had free will?
When she reached the front of the queue, she told the woman at the cash register that she wanted to purchase a ticket for tomorrow’s draw. She read out her numbers, one by one, and the cashier entered them into the computer.
“That all, love?” the cashier asked when Saskia was finished.
“That’s the lot.” She winked cheekily at the cashier. “The rest is up to chance.”
Unfortunately, the cashier misunderstood both Saskia’s list, and her aphorism. She had combined Saskia’s last two numbers into one, “twenty” and “three”, becoming “twenty-three”. She was, however, familiar with customers asking her to add her own lucky number into the mix, and thus, to complete Saskia’s ticket, she’d included sixteen, as she always did.
∞
Back in Mica’s present, Mica turned to the returned Saskia. “Sixteen?”
Saskia looked up from her ticket, confused. “That’s what I’ve got.” She pulled the slip of paper that she’d written the numbers on out of her pocket.
“That’s seven numbers,” Mica objected.
Saskia checked her ticket again. “No, six. Five, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-three, and twenty-nine.”
Mica pulled the winning numbers up on her computer. She checked the result against her own jotted down numbers. “Three, five, eight, twelve, twenty and twenty-nine. You’ve got different numbers. They’re close, but ...”
Saskia stood speechless, staring at the numbers she’d jotted down. She held up her note. “I didn’t write sixteen down, either. But I also had three, not twenty-three. Oh, and twenty. Twenty and three, somehow became twenty-three. Who knows where sixteen came from?”
“I mean, you won something. Better than being slapped in the face with a wet fish . . . but you didn’t change the big win.”
The two women spent the next five minutes trying to make sense of what had happened, but nothing felt as simple, or clear, as quietly trying again.
∞
Saskia found the same cashier, half an hour after she’d bought her ticket the first time. She showed her the ticket she had bought and explained to the cashier that she must have taken down the wrong numbers.
“Pet,” the cashier responded, “you don’t have any real agency in this game.”
“But those weren’t the numbers I wanted to buy.”
Behind Saskia, a gentleman recognized her as the Powerball winner of a couple of weeks ago. His interest was doubly piqued by the prospect that the woman in front of him, not only resembled the recent winner, but seemed so sure of the numbers she wanted to purchase that she had returned in order to exchange her ticket for the one she really wanted. In this, he saw an opportunity.
The cashier didn’t like being accused of error, but the man offered to buy the offending ticket so that the young woman in front of him could get the ticket with the right numbers on it. Other than the besmirching of her good name, the cashier had no skin in the game, so she took the young man’s money, entered the young woman’s new numbers into the computer and handed the young man the ticket.
William Stanton thanked the cashier, showed Saskia the revised ticket and swapped his ticket with hers.
Saskia thanked the man, pocketed her new ticket and headed back to Mica in Mica’s new present.
∞
When Saskia returned to Mica the second time, she produced the same ticket that she’d had after the first time she went back. It was annoying and mystifying, but it faded into the background as she felt a constriction in her chest. She stood up straighter and clutched at the pain. Was she having a panic attack? She pushed the feeling aside, and asked Mica who this week’s winner was, again.
Mica checked her notepad. “William Stanton.”
Saskia pointed to Mica’s computer. “Do an image search for William Stanton.” Mica keyed the name into her computer and Saskia tapped the fourth photo that showed up on the screen. “Click on that one.”
Saskia laughed out loud when William Stanton’s website revealed him for what he was, an amateur magician. A magician whose claim to fame was a passably descent ability with close-up performances of slight of hand.
“What?” Mica asked.
“We’ve been swindled.”
It didn’t really matter whether it was the magician, or if Mr. Stanton had just been an agent for some higher power in the universe, Saskia’s chest was getting worse. Bad enough that she couldn’t just push it aside. With her right hand, Saskia rubbed her middle two fingers just below her left breast.
“Are you alright?”
“I think I might need to go to the hospital,” Saskia said plaintively.
That was chapter 54, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
One thing that struck me about today’s chapter was the idea of doing experiments in life in order to make sense of things. It’s sort of the flip-side to what we talked about last week viz stopping to smell the flowers. Related, also, to what I talked about a couple of months ago when I described the importance of mixing it up in life; it’s that experiments are the school for learning the unknown. In any event, in honor of today’s chapter, I thought I’d take a moment here to talk about a purposeful deep dive I took a few years ago.
In the spirit of giving anything a go, I had, shortly after we bought our first house, hacked my way through the construction of a couple of small decks around our house. I felt pleased with myself about my efforts, though I could already see mistakes I’d made on the first deck that I avoided on the second. In any event, after installing a pool we suddenly needed yet another deck. Still, given the significantly more ambitious nature of the new deck, I felt intimidated.
Happily, one of my daughter’s friends dad’s is a high end carpenter and I saw an opportunity. What if I hired Joe, but on the proviso that he take me on for the project as his apprentice? The experience was amazing. Frankly, Joe was amazing. My woodworking game has never been the same!
That adventure has put me on the lookout for such opportunities ever since; witness, for instance, my jumping at the chance to operate an excavator late last year.
Anyway, to share my happy epiphany: if you ever have the chance, I would encourage you to take the opportunity to appoint yourself as protege and dabble in something new. If my own experience is any guide, you’ll surprise yourself by what you learn, and how widely the lessons might apply.
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
