Sabrina Foster has just placed a personal ad in Time Out. Four cars away in the same train, Allan Marjoram, whom she does not know, has just circled that ad with a red pen. He lives with his parents in Harrow, which is where Rezia Begum used to live. Rezia does not know that her husband Malik is in the next car. As he gets off the train, though, he is horrified to see her there, though she doesn't see him. He passes two police officers, who are handling a disturbance inadvertently caused by one of the other passengers, who is called, oddly, Geoff Ryman. There is also a Margaret Thatcher on board, who works, coincidentally, as a thatcher, and she is definitely not the Margaret Thatcher others are thinking about. What's in a name? (But that byline belongs to one of the other passengers.)

All these people do not know each other. What links them at every moment is something which has not yet happened. That not yet is one of the governing principles of 253.

Robert Altman's film Short Cuts is based on a number of stories by Raymond Carver. Where the stories were quite separate, Altman links them into multiple and overlapping strands: a major character in one strand, say, may play an incidental role in another. Again, not all of these people know one another. The links are often fortuitous, one thing sparking off another in a concatenation. Slavoj Zizek writes of it that:

The great revolution of Robert Altman is that he untied this effect of immixture from the privileged diegetic gaze. This tendency, which was first expressed in Nashville, reaches its perfect culmination in Short Cuts. The destinies of nine particular groups (mostly families) are held together not by the gaze of some hidden voyeur but by [the repeated arial shots of the trajectories of] helicopters that spray insecticide on Los Angeles ... These nine threads intermingle in totally contingent ways, so that the same event acquires absolutely incommensurable meanings through its inscription in heterogeneous series. (Zizek, Metastases of Enjoyment 209)