Chapter 1 — Unstuck in Time
Hello Friends,
Welcome to The Curve of Time. This adventure is going to be part behind the scenes, and part chapter-by-chapter installments of my namesake book——which, incidentally, isn’t yet finished.
But let me contextualize a bit: A couple of years ago I published my first book. I’ve got another pretty much ready for publication, but most importantly, for the project you’re reading about (or listening to), I’m in the throws of writing a novel about time travel.
At this point, I have, in more or less solid draft form, the first twenty five-ish chapters of The Curve of Time (I like short chapters, so this represents about a quarter of the book). The rest of the novel is a mixture of detailed sketches, interspersed with a few chapters that are in a similar state to the opening ones. Importantly, I can see the path from here to completion.
Now, they say writing is re-writing, but, more than ever, that feels pretty apropos for a time travel novel. One of the inevitable themes, in any story in which the protagonist has the ability to wind the clock in either direction, deals with the nature of what it means for something to have happened, and whether changing the course of history, large or small, is really possible. Thinking about all of this gave me an idea, and that idea was the kernel from which this project has grown.
So, here’s my plan: I’m going to send out a chapter a week. And I promise you: I’ll stay ahead of the requirements of these dispatches. What’s going to make this particularly fun, though, is the deliciously precarious question of whether I’ll be forced to go back and revise a chapter I’ve already shared.
To be sure, there will be changes——I make no warranties that these chapters are anything beyond solid drafts, though, of course, I hope they strike you as more——and I warmly encourage you to share your thoughts with me. I’m interested in everything from punctuation and spelling to the consistency of characters and how the story is gripping you (or even if it isn’t).
In the event that I do discover something in chapter 42 that necessitates a revision to chapter 17, I’ll certainly let you know, and if the change is substantial enough, I may even re-share the new chapter 17. At that point we will have learnt that time travel is possible, for the world you thought you were reading will have changed; through the re-writing, which is to say the writing. I’m not planning for that to happen, but the risk exists.
Anyway, enough for today. Given this is my first missive in this experiment, I’ll keep the preamble short and dive right into the story.
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 these dispatches to arrive directly in your inbox:
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter one.
— 1 —
Unstuck in Time
The first time Saskia came unstuck in time, she didn’t spot herself in the background. Then again, she wasn’t exactly attentive to her surroundings until she happened to notice her cat, Tomato, in the back yard, moving like someone had drugged him. The cat’s soporific motion caught her eye and jolted her. Not physically, just in her mind. Like a lizard basking in the sun, suddenly alert to the sky above. But as she watched Tomato, she realized ‘drugged’ and ‘soporific’ didn’t accurately capture what she was witnessing. So, she broadened her focus, scanning for additional indicators. It was then that she noticed the trees, organisms not frequently considered susceptible to drugging. They no longer waved in the wind. They moved instead like congealed confetti. As if shot by a high speed camera and played back at the proper 24 frames per second. A smooth——oh, so smooth——slowing of motion. And as she watched the trees, their motion slowed to the capture of an ultra high speed camera.
Her future self, hidden in the shrubs, wasn’t really that much older than the Saskia experiencing everything for the first time——a week is neither here nor there when you’re in your late twenties——and she wasn’t surprised that her younger self had missed her. You’d be distracted too, the first time you untethered from the ordinary flow of time.
It didn’t help that all Saskia——the one slipping in time——really wanted to do was relax. To spend time dozing in the sun. Day-dreaming of love. In fact, you could argue she was doing a splendid job of achieving her desired goal. Not the day-dreaming about love, but the dozing side of things.
It was partly a consequence of her dozy state that she first became un- tethered, shadows receding around her unnaturally. She wondered if it was the sun’s hot glare moving in that had baked her brain. Conceivably, the sun was part of the catalyst that kicked her out of her complacent binding to the natural flow of the universe.
∞
Coming unstuck in time can be easiest understood through an analogy with respiration. You don’t normally think about breathing. You just do it. You go through life breathing, your mind focused on day to day dilemmas. But one day, maybe you catch a soccer ball in the gut——kicked hard——and you get winded. Someone runs over to you and tells you to breathe, and you start thinking about it. Or maybe you see someone with Covid struggling for breath, and the act of watching them gets you to think about your own breath. Suddenly, you recall that spiritual get-away you took early in your twenties, when you, and a dozen strangers, sat on ornate Afghan mats on the wood floor of a little shed by a creek. A shed the zen master leading the session owned. You hear the water, hear the birds, hear the insects. Smell the eucalyptus in the air . . . Focus on your breath.
That’s what it was like for Saskia. When she noticed those first little deviations in the world around her.
Most of life is experienced in tightly regulated flow. Not too fast. Not too slow. Any divergence is unsettling. Like a face that is too perfectly symmetric, we fight it. It’s what makes a storm scary. A big fierce storm, that is. And, at first, all that Saskia noticed was that something was amiss. But her torpid state stunted her instinctive reflex to jump back in step with time. It was the cat that tipped her off, and the trees after that.
Still, it’s one thing to notice the storm, it’s quite another to control it. And, in truth, Saskia never understood exactly how she connected the slippage with anything she could exert her own will over. Even the Saskia watching from the bushes was unaware. But there it was.
Once she focused on it, however, unlike the godly power of a storm, she was able to tame it. Ever so slightly at first. With deliberate concentration she could slow the world around her down. In the beginning it was almost imperceptible.
Then, as she attuned herself, she began to understand the lightning re- flexes of professional athletes, formula one racing drivers, table tennis stars. Saskia understood their reflexes in a whole new light. Felt their reflexes.
It took time, if you’ll pardon the pun, for Saskia to stop time altogether, and more time still to reverse the world around her. “Reverse the world around her.” That is a poor phrasing, because Saskia couldn’t control the whole world. That would be nonsense. No, Saskia merely gained the ability to chart her own path through the world. Intentionally.
Later, Saskia also learnt to speed time up. To send the trees spastically jiggering back and forth, exactly as you see them in a fast forwarded video. Ghosts don’t exist, but they can be confused with someone passing through our ‘reality’ at higher speed. Like a motorbike screaming past when you’re standing just a little too close to the side of the freeway, only faster. And in a different direction.
When Saskia did first realize that she could not only slow time down, but she could even move backwards through it, she did the obvious: she won the lottery.
It was the sort of thing you only bother doing once, because it really does change things. Though perhaps not as you’d expect.
