The Lost Time Accidents

by John Wray

  “What then, is time?” asks the saint. “If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” Neither the past nor the future, argues Augustine, truly exists—and the present is merely an instant. “The present of things past is memory,” he writes; “the present of things present is perception; and the present of things future is expectation.” Augustine’s conclusion—never fully stated, but unmistakably implied—is that time is subjective. It exists in the mind alone, and nowhere else.

  This notion stupefied Waldemar nearly as much as the Michelson-Morley result. Augustine’s theory was an even blunter refutation of Newton’s law of absolutes, and he’d conceived it in a North African backwater, surrounded by desert, a millennium before Sir Isaac had drawn his first breath! Scrambling to recover his equilibrium, Waldemar reminded himself that Augustine had been a cleric, not a scientist; but the fact remained that Ottokar had cited him. The thought of it made Waldemar physically ill. Newton’s laws—with their elegance, their reasonableness, and, above all, their immaculate order—were the reason he’d consecrated himself to physics; without them, he might as well have stayed a pickler. He was not a young man who took pleasure in ambiguity. Ambiguity was dangerously close, in his estimation, to hypocrisy; and hypocrisy—as every true revolutionary knows—is the music by which complacency and decadence dance their unholy quadrille.

  The next citation was more unsettling still: As the soul grows toward eternal life, it remembers less and less. This seemed more like something his mother might mutter into her handkerchief at church than anything relevant to Ottokar’s work. In which tightly shuttered compartment of his father’s brain had this mystical strain been concealed? For the briefest of instants, Waldemar found himself questioning Ottokar’s competence, even—fleetingly, half-consciously—his sanity; it took his last reserves of love and strength to force that portal closed. The very next night, however, when he identified Plotinus, of all people, as the author of the passage, his confusion returned with a force that swamped him utterly. Plotinus was the worst of the old pagan neoplatonists: a fuzzy-headed metaphysician who’d inspired countless early Christian flower-sniffers, not to mention soothsayers and Gnostics and God knew who else. Important as he might have been for the Church, he had no place in a scientific treatise.

  Ironically enough, it turned out to be the Church—or one church, in particular—that set Waldemar on the proper path at last. Disenchanted with his father’s taste in philosophy, he narrowed his focus still further, restricting it to the parts of Ottokar’s text that seemed to refer to actual events of his duration. This proved most difficult of all, to his dismay, because the slightest reference to the sausage-chewing sow his father had fornicated with each weekday made piss-colored spots dance before Waldemar’s eyes and the carpet twitch and heave beneath his feet. In the end he was reduced to pondering a single sentence of the letter, which he read and reread, recombined and dissected and recited to himself until it acquired the power of prophecy. It was the plainest of sentences, no more than a phrase: the pulpit for preachers in Paměť Cathedral. It was pure chance, he would later write—certainly not fate, let alone Providence—that this turned out to be the only phrase he needed.

  Ottokar had been clever—cunning, even—to hide the key in plain sight, in a thicket of high-minded nonsense. It stood out exceedingly subtly, betraying itself only if one knew where to look. Unlike his brother, Waldemar recalled that pulpit very well, not only because of its peculiar globelike shape, but also because of their father’s fascination with it. Like the uncle of Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, who’d once torn out a lock of his nephew’s hair so that the boy might never forget having seen the royal carriage pass, Ottokar had given Waldemar’s ear a sharp twist on that December morning, then directed his gaze upward toward the gilt-and-silver pulpit without a word of explanation.

  The significance of that structure—for it was clearly the pulpit itself that interested his father, not the lisping, milk-faced clergyman it buttressed—became the defining enigma of Waldemar’s youth. If he’d kept the memory stowed away until that moment, if he’d hesitated to tell even his brother, it was only because of the tremendous charge it carried. But now his father himself, two years after his death, had eased the mystery back into the light. And what affected Waldemar most keenly—what made his eyes water and his fingers go numb with excitement—was that his father had done so with such stealth that he alone, of all people living, could recognize it for the hidden sign it was.

  The pulpit was no more than five feet in diameter and (aside from a narrow, flattened opening through which the priest protruded) was perfectly round. It had been meant to symbolize the triumph of Catholic doctrine in all the seven corners of the world, evidently, because its silver-plated surface was marked by lines of longitude and latitude, and all the continents of the earth—Antarctica included!—were proudly represented in gold leaf. But Waldemar had spent nearly three years assisting his father, and he knew that geography had held even less interest for him than the niceties of internal combustion. It must therefore have been the shape of the pulpit that had mattered to Ottokar: its shape, and the relation of that shape to the pulpit’s purpose as a staging area for the Holy Word. A globe had been chosen to symbolize Rome’s omnipresence simply because the earth, at the time, was as much of the universe as mankind understood.

  It was then that Waldemar had a remarkable thought, one that set him, quietly but inescapably, on a course for infamy. If the shape of the pulpit was the feature that had inpired his father, and if the pulpit had been built to house the truth, and if that truth—the divine truth, the Holy Word of God—had been meant both to explain and to contain the universe, then Ottokar’s message wasn’t so obscure at all. He was saying, in effect, that the sphere was not only the fundamental shape in the solar system—not only the shape taken by the planets, and by the moons of those planets, and by the sun at its center—but that the sphere was the shape of the universe itself. We were all contained within it—all matter, all energy, all experience, all time—like the priest in his pulpit in Paměť Cathedral.

  But then, in the course of a month’s feverish work, my great-uncle strayed even farther. If the speed of light was unchanging, as Michelson and Morley insisted, then time and space would clearly have to bend; but a spherical universe alone wasn’t enough to account for the interferometer’s readings. The distortions in space and time would have to be local—measurable in a few cubic feet in the basement of a Midwestern university—and the act of measurement itself would have to summon those distortions into being.

  This last notion, in particular, led Waldemar to suspect that he had forfeited his place among the sane. He was speculating wildly now, almost hysterically: this new work felt less like science to him than like philosophy, or poetry, or some strain of wordless, polyrhythmic song. He was drifting into twilight, Mrs. Haven, but the glories that awaited him there were beautiful—so beautiful that he regretted nothing. There was power in severing the umbilical cord of precedent: the power of complete supremacy. Finally, after more than a year of hurling himself against the walls of consensus reality, he could feel those walls starting to give.

  In the ensuing weeks, emboldened by his progress, Waldemar scuttled his last remaining scraps of orthodoxy. He found himself utterly alone, in a singularity of his own making, falling away from everyone he’d ever known or cared for. There was no turning back any longer, no bread-crumb trail, no lifeline to the past. He was wholly at the mercy of the future.

  If the cosmos as a whole is subject to mysterious forces that warp it into the shape of a globe, Waldemar reasoned, shouldn’t those forces have the same effect on smaller amounts of matter, given the right set of conditions? The fact that the world as we experience it doesn’t seem filled with countless bubbles of spacetime—essentially tiny, autonomous universes, as he was coming to believe—is no argument against the possibility. We don’t see the world around us as constructed of microscopic particl
es, after all, yet no one has contested the atomic model in a century.

  The idea of the observer having an impact on observed phenomena would eventually find expression in Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, of course—but this was two decades earlier, Mrs. Haven, and Waldemar went Heisenberg one better. What was the act of inquiry into the nature of time, he asked himself, but an expression of human consciousness: in fact, the highest form of that expression? What else could be the catalyst, therefore—the source of the impulse that made spacetime buckle—but the concerted action of the human brain?

  At last, after weeks of exquisite agony, he appreciated Augustine’s genius. More than that: he saw its implications burst into flower around him in explosions of pure mental color. It was the defining moment of his life, and Waldemar knew it, though he had no idea as yet where it would lead him. The foundational postulate had been established: the great and reckless leap from the salons of bourgeois reason into the primeval fissure from which true genius oozes. It burned his former self away, it stripped him of his ego without mercy, but he was eager for the sacrifice. He’d have traded the world for this one crumb of insight: that time and space themselves are in transit, subject to a motion both pliable and absolute, and that man can influence said motion by an act of focused, virtuosic will.

  It was this last hypothesis, Mrs. Haven, that held the seed of Waldemar’s damnation.

  The mathematics didn’t fit, not yet, but that would come. He had his entire duration to make the mathematics fit. He desired no fame for himself, no glory, no material compensation; the envy of his rivals would suffice. That and the fact that he, Waldemar Toula, second son of Ottokar Gottfriedens, had redeemed his father’s Lebenswerk from oblivion.

  * * *

  At virtually the same time, working after hours in his office in the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein was writing a paper. Calm where my great-uncle was euphoric, complacent where he was shrill, taking measured steps through a landscape Waldemar glided over on wings made out of candle wax and spit, the rumple-headed Jew with the “dark, soulful eyes” was putting the finishing touches to his Viennese colleague’s destruction. He was about to provide the answer to the apparent paradox posed by Michelson and Morley, and his answer, once proven, would extinguish all others. Science brooks no dissent, Mrs. Haven; not over the course of time. Soon the case would be closed. Waldemar’s work—and, by extension, his father’s—would vanish into the vacuum of obsolete ideas.

  The “Patent Clerk,” as he came to be referred to in my family, had never heard of my great-uncle, any more than Waldemar had ever heard of him; but like Newton and Leibniz, like Darwin and Wallace, these two young German-speaking eccentrics were closing in on the same territory at virtually the identical moment. The fact that Waldemar overshot the mark disastrously, arcing like a comet over the (relatively) stable ground on which Einstein stood, did nothing to lessen the sting of his rival’s conquest of the scientific mainstream. 1905 would go down in history as Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the year in which, at the age of not quite twenty-seven, without so much as a university degree, he hit on the preposterously, childishly, almost insultingly simple formula E = mc2, which describes the universal relationship between energy and matter.

  It would prove to be a magical year for my great-uncle as well, but the magic in his case was black as pitch. His father had met his end in the form of a watch salesman’s Daimler, a death that was not without a certain gentle irony; Waldemar’s nemesis, by contrast, was neither a man nor a machine, but an idea. That idea’s name was special relativity, Mrs. Haven, and there was nothing gentle about it whatsoever. As obscure as it was—and as innocuous as its author appeared—it had the power to annihilate the world.

  VI

  LESS THAN A WEEK after the disastrous evening at the villa Bemmelmans, Sonja Silbermann was roused out of a greedy, slovenly sleep—the sleep of a woman in love—by the sound of gravel glancing off her bedroom shutters. She put on the sternest face she could muster and stepped to the window, expecting to find Kaspar outside; before she’d undone its catch, however, she remembered that Kaspar was away, visiting his mother in that little town in Moravia whose name she could never remember. She blinked groggily out at the street, taking care to keep back from the light, and wondered which of her past errors of judgment had chosen that particular night to pay a call. To the right, a row of chestnut trees curved downhill toward Schwarzenbergplatz; to the left, her father’s cherished Bugatti touring sedan hulked like a battleship under its waxed canvas cover. It was Heimo, she decided, stifling a yawn; Heimo or possibly Karl. Karl had always been the surreptitious sort.

  She was about to close the shutters and crawl back into bed when she caught sight of a figure at the edge of the trees. Only one boy she knew held himself so correctly, so proudly, as though the Kaiser might ride by at any moment. She opened the window noiselessly, with a practiced hand, and whispered to him that she’d be right out.

  Something’s happened to Kaspar, she thought as she hurried downstairs. Something terrible’s happened. And she was right, Mrs. Haven, though years would pass before she found out what it was.

  She’d expected to find Waldemar on the stoop when she opened the door, but he kept to the chestnut trees’ shadow, still standing at some version of attention, his loden cap held out like a bouquet. It was his stillness, more than anything else, that convinced her that he’d come bearing bad news.

  “Fräulein Silbermann.” It seemed more an observation than a greeting.

  “What is it, Waldemar?”

  “I wouldn’t have come here.” He jerked his head toward the house. “I never would have come here otherwise. But something has happened, you see.”

  She’d known for a week—ever since that hideous dinner and the glorious night that came after—that the world would conspire to take Kaspar from her. Bliss on such a scale was never freely given. The Toulas had come by their family curse only recently, but the Silbermanns had nurtured theirs for generations, and had long since diagnosed it as pessimismus. Their fatalism endowed them with strength and clear-sightedness, up to a point—it enabled Sonja, for example, to flout the conventions of her sex—but it also placed a check on their ambitions, to say nothing of their hopes. And there were hours, in her most private thoughts, when Sonja pictured herself as a kind of lightning rod of circumstance: instead of simply bracing for the worst that might befall, as any self-respecting Silbermann would, she was actively calling it down.

  Waldemar had been watching her silently, still clutching his cap, and now he laid his left hand on her shoulder. His face gave her a turn: his handsome features were as frantic as the rest of him was still. All his anxiety, all his confusion, all his passion seemed to find its focus there. But something else was present in Waldemar’s face, as well—an emotion she could in no way account for. His eyes were dark and heavy-lidded, like a martyr’s in some early Christian fresco, and his upper lip was sweating with excitement. He looked less the bearer of sad tidings, suddenly, than a rebel angel on his way to hell.

  “What is it, Herr Toula? Has something happened to Kaspar?”

  Waldemar’s laugh was percussive and sharp, not like Kaspar’s at all, and it burst out of him so fiercely that it scared her. “Nothing has happened to my brother, fräulein—you’ve made certain of that.”

  She was wide awake now. “Please speak clearly, Herr Toula. What do you—”

  “I need your help, Sonja. I need it tonight.”

  She ought to have felt relief, gratitude that Kaspar was well, but she felt no such thing.

  “Sit with me a moment, Herr Toula. Explain to me—”

  “You wouldn’t understand, I’m afraid. It’s a scientific matter.”

  “If it’s a question of physics, perhaps my father—”

  “Your father would understand me even less.”

  Nothing Waldemar said or did surprised her, not truly, because she’d always t
hought of him as alien. He was alien still, an unknown quantity, though he was struggling to disclose himself to her. She felt sympathy for him now—even tenderness, of a kind. The set of his jaw was as defiant as a child’s.

  “It must be lonely for you, Herr Toula, having no one understand you.”

  “It is, fräulein. It’s exceptionally lonely.”

  He let himself be led, after some resistance, to a rusting iron bench between the chestnuts. Sonja waited to speak until he’d sat beside her. “Will you explain the source of your distress to me, Herr Toula, if only as an experiment? I promise that I’ll do my best to follow.”

  “It’s strange,” he said, nodding. “We’ve sat like this before—we must have done—but I can find no remnant of it in my memory.”

  “This seems familiar to me, too,” Sonja said, not entirely certain why she was agreeing. To reassure him, she supposed. But something in her gave a sort of quiver.

  “Does it?” Waldemar whispered. “Then you must help me, fräulein.” He put a hand on her knee, gripping it roughly, nothing at all like a lover. “The villa is too far to walk, perhaps, but we can hire a carriage. You could come just as you are, in your nightgown and slippers.”

  “Which villa do you mean? Not the widow’s, surely? Why on earth—”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, already on his feet. “She’s at a spa in Baden, taking the waters. No one needs to be told.”

  “Waldemar,” said Sonja, taking care to speak clearly, “if you don’t tell me—at once—what you need my help for, I’ll go straight back inside.”

  “You require more information, of course. That’s only fair.” He smiled down at her. “I’ve found out about time, you see. That it travels in circles. Not in lines, but in circles—in spheres, to be more precise. This is happening everywhere, fräulein. All around us. Even now.” He squatted before her. “I haven’t managed to control it yet, that’s all.”