Sara two at HESTER

They slid inside the little tent without even pitching it, and it flopped around them like a limp membrane. The cold kept Jerzy awake all night and in the morning Sara was the first out of the tent, retching, throwing up the meat and beans which lay there in a puddle on the ground looking just the way they’d found them in the tin. All around, their little camp was like a shipwreck and they were drenched in dew. Sara was shivering so hard it looked like there were two of her. The sun wasn’t yet up out of the trees and in the cold, rosy morning light the second Sara, the one who shivered more on one side than the other, split neatly away from the first, and still shivering a bit she went to Jerzy. No, I’m not the soul, she told him, I don’t think there is one where I am. Then what are you? Jerzy asked. I’m Sara, at least the Sara who shivers a little more on one side than the other. When we shiver too hard you can see there are two of us, but otherwise, the rest of the time, especially in the summer, it doesn’t make much difference and nobody notices. And so Jerzy, for no good reason, set to thinking about the order of the universe. And muddled as the whole thing was, he managed to clear up a few points for himself:

1.Reality is propagated and perceived through a very simple system of waves.

2.We should imagine this system as the surface of two co-­ existing, transparent, spectral oceans. The two oceans are perfectly identical in nature, and differ only in the movement of their waves: Sara one and Sara two.

3.These are inconsistent oceans, the spectra of oceans. Their individual waves, like their individual storms, do not exist in our spectrum of reality. They exist only when the waves of one ocean meet up in the same space and time with the waves of the other ocean. Then a third ocean appears between the two, a concrete, solid one, there in front of our eyes, for a moment, as a resultant: Sara.

4.This third ocean is our world. Sara, Sara lock stock and barrel.

Sara two, also known as Sara who shivers a little more on one side than the other, said that wasn’t really what she meant, but in any case it was too late. The sun had started dappling the meadows and the wood with light, and she stopped shivering and went back to being just one woman, the only true Sara, Jerzy told himself, the only one, and yet for the rest of the day he had a hard time feeling fully convinced.

They sat there in the sun wrapped in grey blankets, Sara boiled some water and poured it in two cups where it turned dark as mud. They perched on a tree trunk or on a moss-­cloaked rock. Jerzy found some broken biscuits in the bag. That was their land, they had their breakfast on it, and the sun began to warm his forehead and fingertips.