The mistake is thought coupled with time. She sat directly across from me over a plain white table. Stirring her coffee. There was some form of light-source above us, maybe a skylight. I don’t remember much else from that room except its antiseptic smell. When she accidentally dropped her pen to the floor, I saw that her grey cotton pants were frayed at the hem. Her white blouse ballooned at the cleavage, revealing a glimpse of her ample breasts, a white lacy bra. She reiterated, the mistake is thought coupled with time. Or our idea of time, anyway. Before I robbed that bank, she said, I was compelled to enlist an accomplice. Utterly compelled. Like breathing. It didn’t matter who. I gasped for anyone. And so I grabbed this young girl off the street; she was just walking by, like so many others, but I’d have to say I picked her because of her beaming innocence. It was kind of like an aura, a car with its lights stuck on high-beam, you know. Anyhow, I sold her the spiel, more or less forced her at gunpoint to sign-on. But, shit, I regretted it; she did the whole job shaking like a shitting dog. Haha, I do adore M. Gustave, she added parenthetically. Anyhow, in many ways we were one. But ultimately she was simply a complementary part to my being. Something I could in no way move forward without. After a long pause, she added, she got six months, I got three years. Could have been a lot worse, I guess. I hear she now runs some specialist business that tracks down World War II artefacts or something. It seems a weird thing to me—that point from then to now. And that’s what I’m getting at. Here, she leant forward and her gaze became more piercing than usual. We expect time to transport us, logistically speaking, from A to B. But time shifts like gears, like jigsaw pieces fitting together in a puzzle. It’s a sprawling, whirling thing, not linear. And it often can double back upon itself, just as you would if you were searching for that next piece of the puzzle. But there are many fronts to a puzzle, are there not? She leant back in her seat and started to kick the front legs off the ground. Even, she said, while lighting a cigarette, in a finite setting there is no one place to start or finish. And so time, I say, is simply an infinite version of a jigsaw puzzle. Nothing more.

And I never much cared for jigsaw puzzles.