by John Wray
The face pulled slowly back into the darkness. “I’ve got it up here.”
I climbed those steep, crumbling steps with a mixture of hope and foreboding, hanging back when I got to the threshold. Not a soul was in sight. Light from an electric candle in a faux-gothic sconce played over walls draped in wine-colored velvet, the kind you might encounter in a psychic’s waiting room. On the far side of the vestibule doors, its face pressed hard against the beveled glass, crouched a life-sized latex model of a hobbit. I turned the dragon-headed knob and stepped inside.
The hall past the hobbit was dim and wood-paneled and rank with patchouli and sweat. More electric candles lined the walls, and their flickering made everything I glanced at jump and shiver: framed movie posters and Batman paraphernalia; foam-rubber weaponry in Plexiglas vitrines; sagging latex masks on wooden mounts, like souvenirs of Narnian safaris; and—at the end of the hall, given pride of place in a spotlit, bloodred alcove—the uniform of a Standartenführer of the SS, armband and jodhpurs and jackboots and all.
A door somewhere creaked and I skipped quickly backward, not sure what to expect—a Luger-toting husband? a batsuited son?—but it was only my hostess, impassive as ever, holding an envelope between her thumb and middle finger.
She had on a housecoat of sorts (quilted green silk, printed in a pattern of interlocking yellow ankhs) and seemed larger and more owlish than before. She took me by the elbow and steered me into a fantastically cluttered living room, and in that instant I knew, without quite knowing how, that there was no husband, no son, no one else in the house—the objects on display were my hostess’s own, relics in a private sacristy, and she drew a dismal power from them all.
“I knew you’d show up sooner or later,” she said, gesturing toward a pair of pleated vinyl couches. “I’ve been walking on soft-boiled eggs for the past week.”
I had a chance, as she arranged herself on the chirruping vinyl, to examine her more closely. She was a medium-sized woman, with fine—even delicate—features, who nonetheless exuded massiveness. Where other women might be round, or even stout, she was blufflike, almost sedimentary. I’d never realized how many countless small behaviors I associated with the opposite sex until I was confronted, in your neighbor, by their total nonexistence. Her androgyny had a calming effect, strange to say, and so did her matter-of-factness about my presence there. I couldn’t shake the impression that I’d met her before—in some other, less unnerving living room—and I wondered what this déjà vu could mean.
“I should introduce myself,” I said, though there was clearly no need. “My name is Walter Tompkins.”
She nodded slowly in acknowledgment—so slowly that the significance of the gesture fell away before she’d finished—then pointed at the couch across from hers. She waited for me to sit before she spoke.
“This note must not be for you, then. My mistake. It’s addressed to somebody named Tolliver.”
“Tolliver?” I squeaked.
“That’s what it says here. Waldemar G. Tolliver, ‘Gentleman.’” She gave me another dead-eyed nod. “Gentleman is in quotation marks.”
At last your long silence made sense. I had no idea how you’d learned my real name, Mrs. Haven, but at the moment it didn’t much matter.
“That’s me,” I said, holding my hand out for the note.
“Tolliver,” she said thoughtfully. “Waldemar G.”
“It’s kind of an inside joke of ours, actually. I call her ‘Mrs. Haven,’ and she calls me—”
“Any relation to Orson Card Tolliver? Author of The Excuse? Prime Mover of the Church of Synchronology?”
“I get that a lot. No relation at all.”
She watched me for a moment. “I’m a member of that church myself—at least I used to be. That’s why I ask.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d give me that note.”
She passed it across to me without a word. My name was printed on the envelope in clumsy block letters, like a grade-school version of a ransom note.
“I still don’t know your name,” I said. “I don’t recall Hildy mentioning you.”
“She wouldn’t have.” As she said this I noticed—or imagined I noticed—the vestige of an accent of some kind. “My given name is Nayagünem Menügayan.”
No sooner had she uttered those extraordinary syllables than the déjà vu was gone, as if a hex had been broken, and a tiny, jewel-like memory replaced it. I remembered where I’d met her, though I did my best to keep my face composed. Not that it made the slightest difference. She could tell.
“Pleased to meet you, Ms.—”
“But you can go ahead and call me Julia. Everyone does, in the industry.”
“Julia. Okay.” I hesitated. “What industry might that be?”
Menügayan spread both arms wide, to indicate the jumble of phantasmagoria around us.
“Right!” I said, getting to my feet. “You certainly were very kind to let Hildy leave this note in your keeping. I won’t take up—”
“She didn’t leave it in my keeping. She left it hidden in a book inside her mailbox. I found it there, Waldemar Gottfriedens Tolliver, and I took it out. Now sit down and listen.”
I should have demanded to know what this passive-aggressive troll was doing rummaging through your mailbox, or—better yet—have fought my way out with a flaming battle axe, if necessary; instead I sat back down, avoiding her stare, feeling as if I’d been kicked in the kidney. We’d crossed paths once before, a decade earlier, in the parlor of my father’s house on Pine Ridge Road—but the woman I’d met then had been bashful and sweet. I’d never seen a person so transmogrified.
“I’m listening, Julia.”
Menügayan gave a throaty cluck and launched, without further preamble, into something very like a sermon. You were her subject—you and the Husband—and she had plenty to say. The two of you were her obsession, her fetish, her area of personal expertise; over the next half an hour she divulged the particulars of your private life with the precision of an entomologist describing the life of the bee. She spoke a pidgin of her own invention, a shambling amalgam of business clichés and expletives and acronyms hijacked from trade magazines, some of them whole decades out of date. It was the idiom of an acutely solitary creature, somewhere between the ramblings of a hermit and the coded patois of a paranoiac—but I learned more about you in those fifteen minutes, Mrs. Haven, than I could have in a year’s worth of surveillance.
* * *
“Here’s the drill-down, Tolliver. The first thing you need to understand is that the man you’re dealing with is the industry leader in client-specific brainfuckery. We’re talking about a man who founded a religion—a religion, Tolliver—before he was legally old enough to drink. He’s a tactical thinker and he’s patient as hell. Think innovation, Tolliver. Think iteration management. Think long-term convergence. Just think.” She sucked in a breath. “He and Hildy have been making the grand tour: Aruba to Phoenix, Phoenix to San Salvador, San Salvador to Managua, Managua to Dar es Salaam. He’s a ‘financier,’ nota bene: a bankruptcy jockey. He buys companies and sells them at a loss. Strictly a bricks-and-clicks operation, OBVS. And the house always wins.
“Here comes the kicker, though, Tolliver: she likes what he does. She calls him her Galactus, her Eater of Worlds. He’s always flying somewhere in that jet-propelled dildo of his, and if it’s somewhere she’s never been—and he deigns to invite her—she always says yes. Hildy bores easy: that’s her feature set. Time moves more slowly for her than for the rest of us. It’s what makes her step out, de vez en cuando, and it’s what brings her back. Pack this into your pipe: she comes back every time. It’s a synergy game. You think you’re the first one she left him for, Tolliver? Don’t kiss your own ass. You need to get some transparency on this issue. He knows all about her ‘sympathetic friends.’
“Which brings us to you. You’re the retiring type, a garden-variety milquetoast—anyone can see that. That’s the profile she falls for. The non
-integrator. She has a soft spot for wallflowers, bookworms, beatniks, self-anointed deep thinkers: for the unemployable, to call a spade a spade. She doesn’t believe in her own brainpower, at the end of the day. She doesn’t see herself as a resource, going forward. That’s her back-of-the-line, Tolliver, and Haven leverages it to the hilt. Strictly plug-and-play: that’s his game in a chestnut. Strictly transactional. She’s susceptible to Vuitton and Lambrusco, to happy cabbage, to payment in kind, no matter what pie-eyed spiel she tries to sell herself. She puts out for people with pull, like anybody else who’s got no Schwerkraft of their own.
“To summarize, Tolliver: she’s en route to a safari in Kenya. The ‘relationship’ you’ve had, such as it was, is not extensible. YHNTO, if you understand me. It is what it is. At the end of the day, the day’s over.”
Menügayan paused at this point, as if expecting me to ask some sort of question. I bobbed my head morosely for a while.
“What does YHNTO stand for?”
For an instant she regarded me with something approaching affection. “You have nothing to offer.”
“Okay.” I shut my eyes to keep the room from spinning. “One more question. Does Mrs. Haven—does Hildy have any idea what the Church of Synchronology actually—”
“Hold that thought, Tolliver. Excuse me a tick. I’ve got to go see a Chinaman about a music lesson.”
Before I could reply she was gone from the room. I sank back and pressed my palms against my temples. I hadn’t been able to follow half of what she’d said—more than half, to be honest—but I was a changed man by the end of her soliloquy. I felt postoperative, the beneficiary of a complex but necessary surgical procedure, one no less effective for having been performed by a gorilla.
If I’d had a higher opinion of myself—or of you, Mrs. Haven, come to think of it—I might have doubted some of what she’d told me; as it was, I believed every word. Whatever role this depressive occultist was destined to play in my life, it was clear to me that our affair—yours and mine—had passed some hidden point of no return. I tried to call your face to mind and could not do it.
“It’s hopeless, then,” I said when she came back.
“Eh?”
“I never had her. Isn’t that what you’re telling me? Not for a second.”
Menügayan shrugged. “The best-laid plans of mice and midgets, Tolliver. You don’t have the hit points to take Haven on, you don’t have the charisma points, and you sure as hell don’t have the gold doubloons.”
I nodded and got to my feet.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m grateful for your candor, Ms. Menügayan—”
“Julia.”
“I appreciate your telling me all this, Julia, but I’m going home now. You’ve just made it clear that there isn’t anything I can give Hildy that her husband can’t give her sixteen times over, and that her fling with me was nothing more than that: the latest in a long and trifling sequence. As you can probably imagine, I’d like to be alone.”
I felt proud of my self-control, under the circumstances, but Menügayan only laughed. Her laugh was a dull, toneless thing, oddly damp and forlorn, like the call of some creature of the lightless deep.
“You’ve got a funny way of talking, Tolliver. Kind of old-timey. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Lots of people,” I said, buttoning my coat. “Most recently R. P. Haven’s wife.”
“I’m disappointed in you, I have to say. One tiny cloud on the horizon and you’re calling it quits. What would your daddy say?”
“That’s none of your business. Who the hell is my father to you?”
“As I’ve mentioned, I used to be a member of the Church of Synchronology. A fairly high-ranking member. I had my own trailer.”
I looked at her. “This house belongs to Haven, doesn’t it?”
Menügayan shrugged.
“Why do you stay, if you hate them so much?”
“Not my decision. The Church likes to keep its jaundiced eye on me. What the Listener demandeth, He receiveth.” She leaned smoothly forward, smiled up at the ceiling, then fixed me with what whodunits like to call a “hungry” look. I knew I should run for my life, but I stayed where I was. Where did I have to go?
“Tolliver,” Menügayan said slowly. “Waldemar Tolliver.”
“I should probably explain about that. The truth is, I—”
“Quite a responsibility to carry that name, I should think. Quite an honor.”
“An honor?” I said, before I could stop myself. “I have a hard time seeing—”
“Waldemar is a name of no small significance to the Church. It was the name of one of our great apostles—the greatest, perhaps. The Timekeeper, we call him. He did battle with the forces of chronology and lost. Perhaps you’ve heard the tale?”
I shook my head. “Like I said, I really need to—”
“He died violently, a martyr’s death, at the hands of an international cabal of scientists and bureaucrats and Semites, in a forest on the Russo-Polish border. His blood—like that of Jesu of Nazareth—is on the hands of the children of Israel. They had too much invested in the Lie of Chronologic Time, you see, to let him live. But there’s a reason, beyond simple mechanics, that a clock’s face is shaped like a circle. Waldemar’s hour was once—praise be to the Prime Mover!—and it shall be again.” She threw her head back and sang, in a girlish falsetto: “Jan Sküs is the name of a friend I met once, and Sküs Jan is a friend I’ll meet twice.” She held her breath for a moment, then gave a tight laugh. “As you can see, Tolliver, the Scripture still moves me.”
I gaped at her, sickened and dumbstruck. She sat there serene as a panther.
“Why have you told me all this? What do you want from me?”
“That’s simple. I want you to steal R. P. Haven’s wife.”
My head felt hot and empty. The candles shuddered weakly in their sconces. The uniform glowed redly in the hall.
“Ms. Menügayan—”
“Julia.”
“You’ve just made it clear to me, Julia, that Haven has everything and I have nothing.”
“That’s true!” she said genially. “Or practically true. But you do have one thing—one small piece of the jigsaw—that your enemy lacks. And it’s a piece that fits right in the middle.”
“What is it?” I mumbled. “What piece do I have?”
Menügayan smacked her lips. “That should be obvious by this point, Waldy. You have me.”
XV
I’m going to work today, my grandfather said to himself. It’s Monday, and I’m going off to work.
He liked how the phrase sounded in American mouths. He liked how unguarded it sounded, how brashly naïve, as if work were a brightly lit hall filled with hundreds of people, possibly thousands, every last one reserving his judgment. He’d waited more than four years for the opportunity of saying those words to himself, and now, at the age of not-quite-sixty, he was as boisterous and cocky as a schoolboy. Via God knew what series of backroom intrigues, Wilhelm had secured him a position in the offices of Kaiserwerks, a midrange timepiece manufacturer based in Niagara Falls—not coincidentally, one of Empress Sisi’s Cabinet’s suppliers—that specialized in brass-and-Bakelite travesties for coddled little girls. According to Wilhelm, Vincent Kaiser himself had okayed the appointment, impressed both by Kaspar’s credentials and the story of his travails. Kaspar privately thought it more likely that Felix “Bunny” Mastmann, Wilhelm’s occasional post-theater companion, had put the hire through without asking his boss; but he certainly wasn’t complaining. He had children to feed, and payments to make on the dilapidated stucco cottage that he’d recently begun renovating. A man who lived as a guest in another man’s house couldn’t marry, after all, regardless of his probity and intentions. And marriage was on my grandfather’s mind.
Ilse Veronika Card, my paternal grandmother, is fated to pass in and out of this history with a minimum of fuss, as she probably would have preferr
ed. Of all the women drawn into the Toula/Tolliver orbit, she was perhaps the least brazen—which by no means signifies that she was tame. My grandfather met her in the most prosaic place in town: the German/Yiddish section of Cosgrove’s Book & Vitamin Emporium, across the street from the state university. She had on dungarees—a noteworthy sight on a woman in forties Buffalo—and a man’s flannel shirt with its sleeves rolled up high, something downright unheard-of. A list of books had been scrawled across her forearms in blue ballpoint ink. Kaspar had always had a weakness for tomboys—I suppose, Mrs. Haven, that it runs in the family—but what sealed his fate was her incongruousness: the quality she had of seeming both furtive and entirely at her ease, as though she slept in some back alcove of the store. The parallels to his meeting with Sonja were striking, but my grandfather paid them no mind. He was eager by then for an event with no precedent, no through-line to the past, and he knew that he’d found one at last. The slight, brown-skinned woman before him could never be Sonja—would never have wanted to be her—and Kaspar thanked C*F*P for it. The years of seeing his dead wife in every well-intentioned face were over, and Ilse was the captivating proof.
She was older than he’d first supposed, newly turned thirty-four, and considered unmarriageable by everyone who knew her, on account of what was generally referred to as her “willfulness.” Willfulness wouldn’t have bothered my grandfather much—he was used to that from Sonja, and even more so from the twins—but he found Ilse eager to prove the town wrong. She accepted his attentions gratefully, slumped and sad-bodied though he’d become, and bore the twins’ blank-eyed indifference—and Wilhelm’s suspicions—with consummate patience and grace.
Which is not to say, Mrs. Haven, that there weren’t a few surprises hidden down her dungarees.
Unless you were planning on being dropped behind enemy lines, German was an unpopular interest to have in those days—even a dangerous one—but Ilse was studying it for no other reason, she informed Kaspar shyly, than its beauty. She was learning the language by means of an Air Force–issued set of flash cards entitled “Military German Lingo,” packed with phrases designed to help paratroopers subjugate the Hun. On their first evening out—at Parkside Candies Soda Fountain & Sweet Shoppe, on Main Street—Ilse fanned out the cards on the sticky glass-topped table as though she planned to read his fortune from them. Kaspar’s English was serviceable by then, more or less, but Ilse insisted on German. That was what she’d brought the cards for, after all.