The Lost Time Accidents

by John Wray

  Kaspar obliged them with trembling fingers, thanking chance—and fate, and even Providence, for the sake of comprehensiveness—that he’d brought his matches along. His encounter with the maestro hadn’t shaken him unduly, but Karl Wittgenstein intimidated even his own children, and Hermann Borofsky was known far and wide as a wunderkind. He’d won the Paris Prize for mathematics at the age of eighteen, and now, in his thirties, was rumored to be testing the spatial implications of the Michelson-Morley experiment in a specially light- and soundproofed chamber beneath the Physikhalle in Göttingen. After lighting the cigars, Kaspar hovered a half step behind Silbermann’s armchair, making clear, as politely as possible, that he had no intention of leaving.

  They were discussing a young man from the provinces—a difficult and eccentric physics prodigy—who’d developed a preposterous new theory. Kaspar’s legs began to buckle as he listened. A curious certainty took hold of him: a sensation akin to clairvoyance. He had no need to hear the young man’s name.

  “Explain to me, Hermann, if you would,” Wittgenstein growled, “how the universe can take on shapes we can’t perceive.”

  “I’m speaking purely mathematically, you understand,” Borofsky replied in his pebbly Russian accent. “But this young man—this boy, really—seems to have arrived at his ideas without using mathematics at all.”

  “All the more reason to be skeptical,” Silbermann interrupted. “Not only does the theory—if you must call it that—countermand Newton, it flies in the face of basic common sense.”

  Borofsky puffed at his cigar. “Unfortunately, Professor, the mathematics of his theory work out beautifully.”

  Silbermann replied with a figure of speech that Kaspar was amazed to hear him use. “If neither time nor space is absolute, Herr Borofsky, you’re knocking physics back to Ptolemy, if not to Aristotle himself. We might as well be Hindus, living on an earth supported by six white elephants. We might as well be floating, all of us, inside a soap bubble!”

  “That’s entirely possible.”

  “I’m waiting, Hermann, for your explanation,” Wittgenstein said tersely.

  “My apologies, Herr Wittgenstein. I’ll try to frame the idea as free of mathematics as possible, if you’ll indulge me.”

  “By all means.”

  “Let’s consider time in geometric terms. If x equals the longitude, y equals the latitude, and z equals the altitude of a given event’s location in space, then an additional coordinate—let’s call it t—could be said to describe its position in time. Each of these coordinates, needless to say, could easily be moved about, simply by addition or subtraction.” He stopped for an instant, as if at a sudden memory, then turned without warning to Kaspar. “The fourth dimension, in other words, is as mutable as any of the others.”

  “Four dimensions now, is it?” Silbermann cut in.

  Wittgenstein cleared his throat. “You must realize, my dear Hermann, that what you’re saying sounds absurd.”

  “Think of this evening’s party,” Borofsky went on, unfazed. “Your house stands at the intersection of Alleegasse and Schwindgasse; the intersection of those two streets provides us with our x and y coordinates. Furthermore, since we are gathered on the second floor above the ground, ‘second floor’ shall serve us as coordinate z. We have now fixed this event in space, in three dimensions.”

  “Well said!” Silbermann muttered. “Here we sit, dead on target, with no earthly need for a fourth.”

  “That’s where my distinguished colleague is mistaken, I’m afraid. The invitation for tonight’s festivities read ‘Palais Wittgenstein, Alleegasse and Schwindgasse, second-floor apartments, at seven o’clock in the evening.’” He shot Kaspar a wink. “Seven o’clock, gentlemen, was this party’s coordinate in the fourth dimension. And it was every bit as necessary—as I’m sure our host will agree—as the preceding three.”

  Karl Wittgenstein was not a man given to laughter, but he was laughing now. “I agree wholeheartedly, Professor Borofsky. It was highly agreeable to have our guests arrive tonight, and not tomorrow morning.”

  Silbermann’s mien, meanwhile, had grown steadily darker. “The simple fact, gentlemen, that time can be viewed in such terms doesn’t mean that it must. The idea that the speed of light should be the same for every observer, no matter how fast that observer himself may be traveling, is simply—”

  “It’s simply the only explanation for the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment,” Borofsky broke in impatiently. “Time and space will have to bend a little, I’m afraid.” He turned to their host. “This young man is a genius, Herr Wittgenstein—mark my words. He’ll be hailed by the world as the greatest scientific mind of the century.”

  No one spoke for a moment.

  “And what about the young man himself?” Wittgenstein said finally. “Does he agree with your lofty opinion?”

  “I couldn’t say, Herr Wittgenstein. Thus far he’s worked in obscurity. He hasn’t even taken his degree.”

  “Excuse me, please,” Kaspar heard himself stammer. “Pardon the interruption, but I believe I know the man you’re speaking of.”

  He stepped forward stiffly, automatically, like a mechanical toy, and drew in a whistling breath. It was the greatest moment of his duration to date, and the most terrifying. An eccentric young prodigy from the provinces, heretofore unknown, who’d developed a preposterous new theory. The ceiling seemed to bow toward him, its gilded fretwork low enough to touch; the rushing in his ears might have been the music of chronology itself. Wittgenstein and Borofsky sat as if trapped in amber, their mouths slightly open, their eyes round as coins. The floor was now Kaspar’s and he took it boldly. What he had to say was perfectly straightforward.

  “I know the man of whom you’re speaking,” he repeated. “I’m privileged to inform you, gentlemen, that he is my brother.”

  His words fell on the men like a blow. The look on their faces was hard to interpret, but it might very well have been awe. Their cigars hung slackly from their gaping mouths.

  At last Silbermann spoke. “A small misunderstanding, I’m afraid.”

  “What in blazes?” Wittgenstein got out at last. “Who is this person, Ludwig? Is he out of his wits?”

  “My name is Kaspar Toula, sir. Waldemar Toula, as I’ve already mentioned—”

  “Boy,” Borofsky said calmly, “the man we are discussing is a former student of mine at the Technical University in Zürich. Not your brother, unless I’m very much mistaken.”

  “But the theory you describe,” Kaspar said, fighting for breath. “It must surely derive from the Accidents—I mean to say, the Lost—”

  “It does nothing of the sort,” said Silbermann. “It’s a theory, not yet published, which Professor Borofsky refers to as ‘special relativity.’”

  “I see,” answered Kaspar, though his voice made no sound. “I see that now. Yes, of course. Thank you kindly.” He bowed to all three men, who continued to goggle in astonishment, then promptly made his excuses to the sisters Wittgenstein, and to Sonja, and to everyone else he met on his way to the landing, then left as quickly as his shaking legs would take him. Before his feet had touched the pavement he was running.

  * * *

  Kaspar ran across Karlsplatz—as good as empty at that hour—then down past the Graben, with its grandly priapic monument to the plague, and out Rotenthurmstrasse to the bile-colored canal without pausing for breath. Time moved lethargically, thickening into a soup, the way it often did when he was frightened. At Ferdinandstrasse he spun clownishly on his heels, skidding slightly, and made for Valeriestrasse with all possible speed. He thought passingly of Sonja, and of the embarrassment he’d caused her. Sonja will be just fine, he said to himself, and of course it was true.

  His brother was a different matter. The thought of Waldemar getting word of the new theory from anyone else’s lips made Kaspar go dizzy with panic. He couldn’t predict what would happen, couldn’t picture Waldemar’s reaction even dimly, and that blankness wa
s more dreadful than any image could have been. He simply couldn’t form the least idea.

  He’d expected to find the villa’s gates locked when he arrived, or at least locked to him; but the hussar let him enter without comment. He found the widow in the unlit parlor, barely visible in the gloom, sitting straight-backed and dour with her hands in her lap. She was waiting for someone, or in attendance on someone, and for a moment Kaspar wondered who it was.

  “Good evening, Frau Bemmelmans. Pardon my—”

  “He’s upstairs.”

  “Where exactly, madame?”

  “Upstairs,” the widow said, already looking away.

  * * *

  Kaspar heard Waldemar before he saw him—heard him holding forth in reasoned, deliberate tones, as if explaining something subtle to a child. He followed the sound up three flights of stairs to an unpainted door, turned the handle and let himself in, as if he were at home in that godforsaken place.

  He found himself in a high-ceilinged study whose fleur-de-lis wallpaper hung in great tattered folds over the tops of three wardrobes. Through a second door he saw the foot of an unmade cot with a pair of freshly blackened boots beside it. He heard no voice now. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples. It was best to rehearse what he would say before he said it: his comportment could go some way toward lessening the shock. It remained unclear, after all, what this upstart in Bern had achieved. The proper choice of words, a certain lightness of delivery, a considered rhetorical approach—

  “You look funny down there,” came a voice from behind him. “You look like a cicada in a jar.”

  Kaspar turned his head slowly. He knew where the voice was coming from, though a part of him refused to credit it.

  “There’s a rumor going around,” said the voice. “I imagine you’ve heard.”

  Kaspar raised his eyes unwillingly to the gap between the ceiling and the top of the nearest wardrobe, where the paper was slackest. His brother sat clutching his knees to his chest beneath a dangling fold, nearly hidden behind it, as though sheltering there from the rain. His head was bent to one side, as if his neck were broken; the toes of his bare feet held tightly to the wardrobe’s beveled lip. He looked down at Kaspar without apparent interest.

  Kaspar chose his words carefully. “I did hear something. It seems that some Swiss bureaucrat—in Bern, of all places—has developed a theory—”

  “Ach!” said Waldemar, coughing into his fist. “I know all about that. I was referring to the rumor that I’ve gone insane.”

  “I hadn’t heard that,” Kaspar managed to answer.

  “You will.”

  “I promise you, Waldemar, I’ll do whatever I can—”

  “That’s kind of you, Kaspar, but you needn’t bother.” Waldemar smiled. “I started the rumor myself.”

  “Did you?” stammered Kaspar, though he knew better than to expect an intelligible answer. Waldemar shrugged his shoulders, rustling the paper behind him and raising a thin cloud of dust.

  “Come down from there, Waldemar. Will you do that for me?”

  “It perturbs you to see me at this altitude, of course,” Waldemar said blithely. “It’s not too comfortable for me, either, as you can imagine. But there’s a protocol I’m following.” He gave a slight shudder. “Time passes more slowly up here, first of all. The farther from the surface of the earth, the lower the frequency of light waves; and the lower the frequency of light waves, the longer it takes time to pass.”

  Kaspar shook his head. “You’re mistaken about that. Altitude should have the opposite—”

  “Tssk! You’d know as much yourself, if you’d been keeping up with your schoolwork.” Waldemar’s lips gave a twitch. “But we both know you’ve been otherwise engaged.”

  Kaspar stared up at his brother and said nothing.

  “I’ll tell you something else, since you’ve come all this way. Would you like me to tell it?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “That Swiss clerk of yours is a shit-eating Jew.”

  Kaspar had forced himself, on the way to the villa, to imagine every possible reaction Waldemar might have to the news, no matter how unnerving—his brother’s outburst, therefore, came as no surprise. It came as a relief, in fact, being appropriate to the spirit of the times. Anti-Semitism hung in the air like smoke in those years, like the musk of the horse-drawn fiakers, and the Viennese inhaled it with each breath; not even the Jews themselves were free of it. Kaspar had been aware of die Judenfrage even before leaving Znojmo, but since the start of his affair with Sonja he’d begun to see it everywhere he looked. Waldemar’s racial paranoia didn’t set him apart: just the opposite. It was the best available argument for his sanity.

  “I didn’t know the man was Jewish,” Kaspar said. “I suppose that’s interesting.”

  “It’s about as interesting as potato blight,” Waldemar answered. “To what other race could he possibly belong?”

  “Please come down, little brother. Come down here and sit with me.” Kaspar took a step toward the wardrobe and extended a hand. “Sonja tells me you’ve made progress with your work.”

  Waldemar blinked at him for a moment, then swung his legs over the edge of the wardrobe and took hold of his arm. “Sonja said that?” he murmured. His hand felt oddly dry and insubstantial.

  “She did indeed!” Kaspar assured him. (Sonja had, in fact, done her best to pass along what Waldemar had told her—though she’d omitted the proposition he’d made.)

  “I have made progress,” said Waldemar, hopping down and steering Kaspar to his cot. “What else has Sonja told you? Has she reconsidered my request?”

  “What request would that be, little brother?”

  Waldemar let his arm fall. The boyish enthusiasm of an instant before was gone without a trace, and an elderly man’s suspicion had been lowered across it like a metal shutter.

  “What exactly did she tell you, Bruderchen?”

  “Only that your work has been going well, and that you seemed—well, that you seemed in the highest of spirits—”

  Waldemar made a queer rasping noise in the back of his throat. “In other words, Kaspar, she told you nothing. She made meaningless noises, and you lapped them up gratefully, ass that you are. You probably considered them music.” He nodded to himself. “She told you nothing at all about the Accidents.”

  Even from the mouth of a lunatic, that term compelled my grandfather’s attention. “No,” he said, gripping the bed’s coverlet. “That is to say, she told me certain things, but not being a physicist herself—”

  “Then I’ll tell you now, you starry-eyed buffoon, though heaven knows you don’t deserve to hear it.” He brought his mouth alongside Kaspar’s ear. “Chronology, dear brother, is a lie.”

  Kaspar raised his hands at that, as if to arrest a speeding motorcar; but there was no halting his brother any longer.

  “Sequential time is a convenient fiction, an item of propaganda—a fable propagated from the birth of Jesus outward by a collective of interests that has spread in all directions since that instant, growing in power in direct proportion to the advance of so-called chronologic time.” He held up a finger. “Civilization was founded on numbers, Herr Toula, and its downfall can be read in them as well. Today, for example, the interests to which I refer are approximately one thousand, nine hundred and five times more powerful than they were at the beginning of the so-called Christian era. The very calendar we use, in other words, is not only the totem of the progress of this aforementioned ‘collective,’ but the actual numerical index of that progress. What do you say to that?”

  Kaspar shook his head and said nothing. Waldemar touched his fingers to his temples, as if he were about to attempt telekinesis, which wouldn’t have surprised his brother in the slightest.

  “You’re a clever boy, Kaspar—nearly as clever as I am. I don’t intend to condescend to you.” Waldemar withdrew his fingers from his brow. “I’m confident, for example, that you can identify the se
cret society to which I refer.”

  Kaspar hesitated. “The Masons?”

  “The Jews,” said Waldemar, without a hint of irritation. The precision of his answer seemed to please him.

  “But surely—I mean to say, surely it was the Christians who began numbering the years from Christ’s birth,” Kaspar interjected, forgetting himself for a moment. “The Jews would not likely have chosen—”

  “You fancy yourself an expert on Jewry, of course,” Waldemar said genially. “And no doubt you are, in your bumbling way. You’ve been taken in by the secret sharers, after all—you’ve been welcomed with open arms, because you pose no danger to them. Taking you in, in fact, was the surest way of rendering you harmless.”

  Kaspar found himself nodding. “I don’t see why anyone would bother—”

  “Because you were closing in on them, dear brother. You and I were closing in. The two of us together.”

  “Listen to me, Waldemar. I need you to explain—”

  “But they have a surprise in store for them. The truth will soon be clear for all to see. Nothing moves in a straight line: not even history. The highest and the mightiest have built their empire on a foundation of ashes, and to ashes shall their empire return.”

  Waldemar was breathing effortfully now, his face set and pale, like the figures on the plague column on the Graben. “What has been, Kasparchen, will come again. Tell that to Fräulein Silbermann from me.”

  It was at this precise instant, he would later recall, that Kaspar first began to fear his brother.

  “You must realize—after what you’ve just said—that there can be no future for us,” he murmured, in the hope that he might make himself believe it. But there was no end in sight, Mrs. Haven, and my grandfather knew it. He was witnessing not an end but a beginning.

  Waldemar gave a shrug. “Your time is now,” he said simply. “The future is mine.”

  There was an inherent contradiction in this statement, given Waldemar’s beliefs about the nature of time; but Kaspar had no strength to point it out. He left the room in a daze, placing one foot gingerly before the other, and put the attic and the villa and the Accidents behind him, breathing more easily with every step he took.