This chapter, I think, nicely brings together many of the characters, and as I’ve mentioned before, a sense of everything happening at the same time. ‘A feeling’ Bennie said …. ‘that we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet’. And ‘Alex felt what was happening around him had already happened and he was looking back!’
Of course, they do have a shared past history when they discover they both knew Sasha. Why are they both so intent on finding her? Are they hoping she will have remained unchanged? It is a co-incidence that it is another incident with a wallet that bring Alex and Rebecca together.

There has been fifteen years of war, and a resultant baby boom, and so of course, babies are an important part of society. ‘An army of children – the incarnation of faith in those who weren’t aware of having any left’.
Alex is bothered by his job of ‘parroting’ ‘People’s opinion weren’t really their own’, but hasn’t this always been the case? Whether opinion is formed by religious authorities, local pressure, or by advertising, can we ever claim to have our own opinions?
Alex has 15,896 ‘friends’ yet in the current non fiction ‘Evolutionary Biology’ we are discussing, it states that the average social grouping in villages is about 150, and this is reflected in modern society too. Perhaps the term ‘friendship’ needs to be redefined in the internet age, and this is exactly what Rebecca is doing. Her new book ‘was on the phenomenon of word casings …. that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks . English was full of these empty words – ‘friend’ and ‘real’ . . . .’
Alex believes that he needs ‘another fifty people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realising it’. But I think he is still himself, and still questioning motives and honesty.
I think we must be in the date about 2021, because Alex talks of ‘the weight of what happened more than twenty years ago’ and I’m assuming he is talking of the Twin Towers destruction.
We are also directed back to ‘Safari’ when we learn that Lulu is partnered with the Samburu warrior’s great grandson, and meet Lulu, who we met last as a nine year old.
Everyone seems to gain at the end, apart from Scotty Hauseman. Bennie is determined to prove he has not lost his touch, and that Scotty is a genius. Benny decided ‘It’s time to make you a star’, but Scotty had never asked for that. Alex realises he is a ‘genius’ at PR, but thinks originally that ‘Scotty Hauseman did not exist – He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished’ Like Rebecca’s word casings. But he is wrong, and realises that ‘a ghostly version of Scotty Hauseman flickered at Alex from the dregs that were left, sexy and racist. He had never been a shell, but always himself, and had continued to write songs throughout his life. Perhaps his ‘time’ had now come.

I've been thinking a lot about this going back in time desire because I recently moved back to my home state and have connected with some people on Facebook. There seems to be an almost universal desire to reconnect with our pasts possibly for a sense of grounding. However, much like Bennie and Alex we find that all has changed and once we revisit the old it just is an old memory.
We must remember the past and learn from it to keep going forward or we will stagnate, or make the same mistakes repeatedly.