Page 70 of Alone With You in the Ether

“So what’s the shape?”

“Well, I don’t know. I can only understand time within my experience of it.”

“Which is?”

“A little different from the Pirahã,” he said drily. “As in, I expect to wake up in the morning. I need light, refrigeration, all that, so I pay the electricity bill every month. That sort of thing.” She was looking at the bend of his knee, tilting her head to scrutinize the angle of it. “I can’t possibly understand what time looks like because I’m inside my experience of it, but whatever version of time I’m inside has to be different than the version the Pirahã occupy.”

“You say that like you’re trapped,” Regan noted. “Or they are.”

“Well, aren’t I? Aren’t we? We can’t speed it up or slow it down. We can’t navigate it.”

“Not yet,” she said, sparing him half a smile.

“Well, we only know that time can’t possibly exist within the Babylonian denominations of sixty. Notactually. A second is only a second withinour perception. We try to standardize it, to make it useful, but we don’t know the rules. We’ll probably never know the rules.”

“And how does that make you feel?” She was chuckling to herself, making a private joke.

“Trapped,” he said, and she looked up.

“Does it?”

“Yes. From time to time.”

“Like you’re in a mortal prison?”

“You’re being facetious,” he observed, watching her mouth quirk with confirmation, “but yeah, kind of. Do people ever ask you what you’re doing next?”

“Always. All the time.”

“Right,” he said. “So that’s my point.”

“Don’t drop your chin,” she told him.

“Right.”

She turned her attention back to the parchment, continuing to draw.

“I don’t mind being trapped,” she murmured, the little strokes of her pencil like caresses to the page. “Sometimes I like it. Easier. Nothing to think about.”

He drummed his fingers on his knee. She looked up warningly, telegraphing a glance that said, Stop that.

He obliged.

“You don’t actually want things to be easy, do you?” he said.

“No, not really. But I wish I did.”

“Why?”

“Well, if time really was a trap and I was on some sort of predetermined course, that would be a relief,” she said. “The idea that I might have options or other time-spaces to occupy is a little overwhelming.”

“Don’t you like being overwhelmed?”

A blink. “Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You just seem like you’re looking for something to overwhelm you.”

“I seem like I’m looking for something?”

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