by John Wray
“Just a moment,” said Sonja. “Does this have something to do with those two Americans—Michaels and Murray?”
“To hell with Michelson and Morley. They’re still thinking in straight lines, fräulein. Everyone is. That’s why no one can make sense of their results.”
“I’m not sure you’re making sense just now, Herr Toula.”
“I’ve done the mathematics, fräulein. It comes out beautifully. I don’t need to make sense—not the kind that you mean. The numbers will do all that for me.”
Sonja looked hard at him. “But if time travels in circles—”
“In spheres.”
“—in spheres, as you say it does, then why hasn’t anyone noticed?”
“Excellent question! Because we’re all inside of them, you see.”
“Inside of what?”
“Of the chronospheres, of course. We’re trapped within them, stuck to their inner skins, like dust grains on the surface of a bubble.”
“Just a moment,” she repeated. “Did you say, just now, that you hadn’t managed to control it?”
“My work hasn’t advanced that far yet—I concede your point—but it follows from everything else. It’s a kind of observer-induced distortion: every action has consequences, even human attention. One can’t help affecting the phenomenon one studies, simply by studying it. Am I being clear?”
Sonja nodded uncertainly.
“All that’s required to affect time, by logical extension, is simply to begin observing it.” He waited impatiently for her to nod again. “The problem is that time is impossible, under normal conditions, for us to perceive. We can’t see it passing, and for exactly that reason—and for that reason only—it passes without conforming to our will. Do you follow?”
“I think so,” said Sonja. “What you’re saying is that, given the right set of conditions—”
“Exactly, Fräulein Silbermann! It’s like standing in the middle of an overcrowded city, or in the center of a maze: in order to understand where you are, to get a sense of the pattern, you need to attain a higher vantage point—the bell tower of Saint Stephen’s, say—to acquire perspective.” He rocked from side to side in his excitement. “That’s what I need your help for: to escape from the maze. I need your help to rise above the timestream.”
“I’ll be happy to assist you however I can, but I still don’t see how—”
“You can knock me out of time, Fräulein Silbermann. Kaspar told me that you did the same for him.”
“I did?” Sonja stammered, more baffled than ever.
“A week ago,” he said, triumphant now. “The same night as the widow’s dinner party.”
Finally she understood. It ought to have been obvious from the start, evident in the simple fact of his calling at that hour. There was nothing theoretical about what he wanted, nothing rarefied or obscure. She hadn’t expected it—not from him. That was all.
“Waldemar,” she said, as kindly as she could. “You’re going home now. Do you understand me? You’re going home and getting into bed.”
“Aren’t you listening to me, damn you? I’m giving you the opportunity to make use of your skill—of the gift that you have—to bring about an unprecedented—”
“I’m your brother’s sweetheart, Waldemar. Are you capable of grasping what that means? No, don’t bother answering. Go home and do your multiplication tables. And count your blessings I pity you enough not to tell Kaspar.”
Waldemar’s face went unnaturally still. “Pity me?”
“Good night, Waldemar.” She rose from the bench and walked straight to her front door without looking back. It was slightly ajar, just as she’d left it, and she slipped inside and pushed it shut behind her. Waldemar made no attempt to follow. When she looked out of her bedroom window, no longer bothering to keep out of sight, she saw that he was standing as he’d been when she’d first glimpsed him, with his head cocked to one side and his arms hanging slack, staring calmly at the bench where they’d been sitting. She watched him a great while, fascinated in spite of her distress, and at no point did she see him turn or shift. She imagined that time moved differently for him already—that he’d managed to escape its hold without her aid—and she couldn’t suppress a shiver at the thought. She drew back from the window, willing him away with all her might, and when she looked again she saw that she’d succeeded. She went to bed with the awareness that disaster had missed her—missed her by a hair’s breadth—and resolved to tell Kaspar as little as possible. She fully believed that was the end of it.
Monday, 08:47 EST
A remarkable thing has happened, Mrs. Haven, and I’ve got to write it down. Waldemar’s breakthrough can wait.
I was sitting at the card table just now, struggling with the contradictions and minutiae of my great-uncle’s theory, when I became aware of a discomfort in my lower body—a sort of roiling muscular impatience—with its focus at the buckle of my belt. I shifted and the sensation ebbed briefly; but it came back soon after, and this time there was no mistaking it. I needed the bathroom, Mrs. Haven, and I needed it quick.
My first reaction was disbelief, then astonishment, then a wild rush of hope: if my guts are resuming their God-given functions, then my banishment from the timestream might not be as total as I’ve thought. I wasn’t able to think this proposition through, however—not fully—because by that point I was in a state of panic. I tried to move my feet inside their slippers—to wiggle my toes, at the very least—but the roar of my bowels drowned out all competition. I won’t say more than this: the only thing that frightened me worse, at that moment, than the idea of getting out of my chair was the idea of not getting out of it. I bit down on my lip, steeled myself for the worst, then shut my eyes and pushed back from the table.
When I opened my eyes, I was exactly where I ought to have been: an arm’s length from the table with my legs slightly splayed, as though a medium-sized textbook had been dropped into my lap. I hadn’t dematerialized, or inverted the timestream, or exploded in a shower of gore. I kept still for a moment to let this sink in. Then I leaned forward in my chair, dropped to my hands and knees, and hauled myself into the tunnel.
Have I described the tunnel to you, Mrs. Haven? It’s a kind of dismal wonder in itself. At one time it was nearer to a trench, a shoulders-width gorge cut through what my aunts always referred to as “the Archive”; but that era is past. Aside from the occasional cone-shaped hollow—the one I’m sitting in as I write this, for example—the tunnel is never more than five feet high, and usually less than three. A kind of clear-eyed dementia took hold of Enzie and Genny in their twilight years, but they never lost their commitment to their work—Enzie’s so-called research—in which this tunnel played some unfathomable role. Its purpose had to do with time, they admitted that much: with time’s shape, and its color, and the sound that it makes as it moves. It was a proof of some sort, or so my aunts implied. But what was being proven, exactly—what the Archive is, or does, or represents—was left for future ages to discover. My father and I used to joke about it.
Crawling through the Archive is torturous and asthma-inducing at the best of times, Mrs. Haven, and its sloping, strutless walls are none too stable. To make matters worse, it’s well known that my aunts passed their days, toward the end, constructing snares and booby traps for prowlers. The material of the walls is mostly newsprint—whole decades of The New York Times and the Observer and the Daily News and the Post and the Sun, bundled together with duct tape and wire—but countless other artifacts impinge, in an order that never seems completely random. On my way to the bathroom, for example, a framed postcard of an eighteenth-century Haarlem farmhouse led to a broken African mask, which led to an aluminum baseball bat, which led to a hardcover copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A few feet farther on, at the door to the bathroom, a stereoscopic postcard of Vienna’s famous Ferris wheel sat cradled in the wax jaws of a shark. Past that bend in the tunnel lies the door to kitchen, which I don’t have the nerve
to investigate yet. God knows what bugaboos await me there.
The bathroom, to my surprise and relief, turned out to be fairly clean and free of clutter. I lingered after the completion of my mission, in no great rush to slink back to my desk. I let my sight drift from the tiles under my feet to the pressed tin above, then glanced at the bookshelf behind me. A Bulova digital clock radio on the second-to-lowest shelf read
09:05 AM
Eighteen minutes had passed since I’d left the card table: exactly the amount of time that ought to have passed, if time were moving normally again.
This may not strike you as much, Mrs. Haven, but it hit me with the force of amnesty. I began to make plans right away, sitting there with my pants around my ankles, and every scheme I hatched began with you. My next step was clear: I needed to wash my hands in the sink, find some presentable clothes, get out of this hellhole and tell you the rest of this history in person. I yanked the pull chain and got to my feet.
It was then that I noticed, as I hiked up my briefs, that the clock radio behind me still read
09:05 AM
By the time I’d grasped the import of this terrible discovery I’d fallen sideways into the bookshelf and brought it down with me across the floor. A vast sucking sound filled my ears, a noise like the wind at the mouth of a whirlpool; and it seemed to me, as I fell, that I’d heard that monstrous sucking all my life. The water in the bowl was still flushing, still revolving like our galaxy in miniature, and I knew its bright cascade was neverending. My exile was anything but over: the little Bulova had stopped functioning as soon as I’d come near. I’d brought timelessness with me, in other words, as surely as a carrier of the plague.
Looking up from the floor—where I lay crumpled under a landslide of pop-physics paperbacks and rolls of quilted lilac toilet paper—I found the things closest to me in a state of suspension, hanging perfectly still. Farther out, this motionlessness gradually gave way to an elliptical drift, like the course of planetoids around a sun. For the very first time, I was able to witness the phenomenon of which I form the epicenter: to perceive it for myself in all its geometric glory.
This is beginning to read like a passage out of one of my father’s novels, I realize—but you’ve got to admit that what’s happening to me could have fit tidily into the old gasser’s oeuvre. I can see the pocket-paperback version clearly, with the sort of airbrushed starscape on its cover that never seems to go out of style: The Accidental Chrononaut or Timecode: Omega or Little Lost Lamb, Who Made Thee?, filed away among the works of Orson Card Tolliver’s later period, after he’d become morbid and self-pitying and unable to keep up his end of the conversation; after the Syndrome had come to tyrannize his thoughts, just as it had his father’s and his grandfather’s before him. Orson’s last books were barely a hundred pages long, nostalgic wish-fulfillment dreams posing as interdimensional quests for vanished lovers, meditations on aging that no amount of gamma gunplay could disguise. His heroes and heroines were rarely human, and often not even carbon-based life-forms; but they were all, without exception, solitary. My fate would have lent itself perfectly to one of my father’s plotlines, even before the chronosphere expelled me, if for no other reason than its loneliness.
VII
ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1905—three days after Waldemar’s midnight proposition—Sonja celebrated Kaspar’s return by taking him to a musical evening at the Alleegasse salon of Karl Wittgenstein, a schoolmate of her father’s and one of the wealthiest men in the empire. Professor Silbermann had only the vaguest of notions that his assistant and his daughter were acquainted, and was amused by the coincidence of their arriving simultaneously; he never relinquished the belief, in later years, that their romance had begun at the Wittgensteins’, and no one took the trouble to correct him.
When the two of them entered, the professor was sitting on a cowhide divan, smoking a pungent cheroot; he looked back and forth between them in bewilderment, then ushered Gretl Stonborough—née Wittgenstein—over to make introductions. “I think I ought to know your daughter, Herr Professor,” she laughed, extending a gloved hand to Kaspar, then kissing Sonja warmly on both cheeks.
All eight of the Wittgenstein children were brilliant—they were famous for it even then, when most of them were barely out of school—but Gretl was judged the most brilliant of all. She was long-limbed and thin, almost gaunt, with the dark-lidded eyes set far back in the skull that the Wittgensteins all had in common. She had a seriousness about her that Kaspar had never encountered in a woman of twenty-four, but she grinned whenever she caught Sonja’s eye, as though they shared some confidential joke between them.
“So this is the Herr Professor’s assistant,” Gretl said solemnly. “I hear you’ve become indispensable.”
“Professor Silbermann could dispense with me at any time,” Kaspar said, feeling his face go hot. That hadn’t been what he’d meant to say at all.
Gretl patted him on the arm and turned to Sonja. “I have a surprise for you, darling. The maestro is here.”
Now it was Sonja’s turn to redden. “Where is he?”
“In the Chinese room with Hermine, making utter mincemeat of her latest portraits.”
Kaspar looked from one girl to the other. Gretl was scrutinizing him thoroughly, which made it difficult to think; Sonja was fidgeting with the hem of her gown. “I didn’t expect to see him here, Gretl. I should have, I suppose, but I didn’t.” She hesitated. “I’m not wearing that smock of his, you see.”
That smock of his? Kaspar thought.
“Hermine isn’t wearing hers, either,” Gretl said, giving Kaspar a wink. “Come along now, both of you. If we ask nicely, His Eminence may grant us an audience.”
Kaspar followed the girls sheepishly through those splendid apartments, through music rooms and reading rooms and chintz-swaddled rococo parlors, until they arrived at an octagonal chamber with paint-spattered bedsheets thrown over chinoiserie tile. A woman with the same arched nose as Gretl was standing with her hand on the shoulder of a black-bearded bear of a man, bobbing her small dark head in rhythm with his voice. The man spoke softly, with his hands primly folded; the shapeless muslin tunic he wore would have dumbfounded Kaspar if he hadn’t seen it many times already. Catching sight of Sonja, he clapped and whistled like an organ grinder.
“Dovecote!” the man bellowed, seizing Sonja by the arms. “Such a surprise! Such a shock! I barely recognize you in that uniform.”
“It’s not a uniform, maestro,” said Sonja, more red-faced than ever. “It’s only a dress.”
“It’s an exquisite dress.” He lifted Sonja’s right hand to his lips. “And it’s also a uniform, as you know very well.” He turned to Gretl. “Thank you for delivering my dovecote to me, fräulein.”
“I’ve also delivered the dovecote’s companion, maestro, as you may have noticed.”
“So you did. Pleased to meet you, Herr—?”
“Kaspar Toula, Herr Klimt.” Kaspar didn’t feel jealous, as such—only painfully conscious of his disadvantage. “I’m to blame for Fräulein Silbermann’s uniform, I’m afraid.”
“Ah!” The maestro squinted searchingly into Kaspar’s face, as though he’d misplaced his pince-nez. “Fräulein Silbermann has told you, no doubt, about this hobbyhorse of mine.” He hooked a thumb inside the collar of his tunic. “I simply believe that contemporary fashion imprisons a woman, and disfigures her shape—which is splendid enough, in my opinion, without our interference.”
“I certainly can’t argue with—”
“Clothing,” the maestro continued, “should be worn only when necessary, and gotten out of as quickly as possible. This capuchinette I have on, for example—”
“Gustav,” warned Gretl.
The maestro laughed and let his collar loose. “Not to worry, my dear. I haven’t forgotten my place. But you’re lucky we’re not in my atelier!” He turned back to Kaspar. “I must tell you, Herr Törless—”
“Toula,” said Kaspar.
“—that Fräulein Silbermann is the most gifted of my models.”
“The most gifted of your former models, maestro,” Sonja murmured.
But the maestro was still taking Kaspar’s measure. “What’s your trade, sir, if I may presume to ask?”
“Herr Toula is a physicist,” Gretl put in graciously.
“Is that so,” said the maestro, scratching his beard. “I must confess, I took you for some sort of—”
“A physicist!” Hermine exclaimed. “In that case, Herr Toula, you must join the discussion that Papa is having with Professor Borofsky, from Göttingen. The professor is giving a lecture tomorrow, if I’m not mistaken, on the mathematics of the velocity of light.”
“I’ve studied Professor Borofsky’s work,” Kaspar stammered. “Where did you say—”
“In the smoking room,” Gretl cut in, shooing them off. “Sonja can take you. It’s a private meeting, but since you’re a student of physics…”
“You behaved very well, Kasparchen,” Sonja whispered to him as they retraced their steps. “Thank you for that.”
“No need to thank me,” said Kaspar, though he was secretly pleased with his show of restraint. “What’s a dovecote, exactly?”
“A birdhouse for pigeons,” she said, drawing him closer. “Please don’t ask me why he calls me that.”
Kaspar considered this a moment, then kissed her lightly just behind the ear. Somehow the nickname seemed appropriate.
* * *
They found Borofsky on a chaise longue in the smoking room, with Karl Wittgenstein on one side and Sonja’s father on the other, each of them clutching an unlit cigar. “The very boy we want!” Professor Silbermann bellowed, with a heartiness that took Kaspar aback. “Fire, Herr Toula, if you’d be so kind! A touch of the primordial spark!”