The Lost Time Accidents

by John Wray

  “Halt! Wer da?” Ilse read from the uppermost card.

  This translates, roughly, as “Halt! Who goes there?” and Kaspar decided, after a brief fit of perplexity, that she was asking him the story of his life.

  “I was born in Moravia, Miss Card. My father was a gherkin manufacturer, fairly well off, with a passion for theoretical physics. The circumstances of his death—”

  “Es gibt keinen Ersatz für Verstand beim Oberkommando,” Ilse intoned. In German, this means “There can be no substitute for brainpower in the High Command.”

  “Excuse me?” said my grandfather.

  She frowned at him for an instant, then consulted the card. “Entschuldigung!” She said finally. “Wrong line.”

  “That’s quite all right, miss. If you’d care to switch to English, we might—”

  “Erzählen Sie mir nicht die ganze Geschichte; geben Sie mir eine Zusammenfassung.”

  “A summary of my life?” Kaspar let out a sigh. “That’s a rather tall order. Perhaps I should leave that to my grandchildren.”

  “You have grandchildren?” Ilse asked sharply, in English.

  “Not yet, no. But children, I have.”

  “I see,” she said, recovering her composure. “Aus wieviel Leuten besteht die Besatzung jenes Bombers?” (“How many people comprise the crew of that bomber?”)

  “I have two daughters—Enzian and Gentian. I had a wife, Sonja, who died in the course of our passage from Vienna. Her parents stayed behind, as did my brother.”

  “Die Flotte hat schwere Verluste gehabt.” (“The fleet has sustained heavy losses.”)

  He nodded. “Yes indeed, fräulein. We have.”

  Ilse blushed when he addressed her as “fräulein,” although there was nothing inappropriate about it, and Kaspar began to feel cautiously optimistic.

  * * *

  She brought him home two nights later—she rented a studio of her own, on the east side of town, another black mark on her record—and the game was taken up where they’d left off. They’d had a perfectly conventional date, slurping linguine con vongole at one of Buffalo’s countless Sicilian pasta parlors and making trite small talk in English; but as soon as the door closed behind them, Ilse gave a dark laugh, a different person entirely, and drew forth the cards with a flourish. From that moment on—until they were laid out, naked and exhausted, across the folding army cot she slept on—their spoken communication, according to my grandfather’s (wonderfully unexpurgated) diary, consisted exclusively of these strategic phrases:

  “Still halten!” (“Keep still!”)

  “Keinen Laut!” (“Don’t make a sound!”)

  “Hinlegen!” (“Lie down!”)

  “Schnell, hier herum!” (“Quick, this way!”)

  “Hände auf den Rücken!” (“Hands behind your back!”)

  Then, some minutes later:

  “Verstehen Sie diesen Apparat?” (“Do you understand this apparatus?”)

  And finally:

  “Die Vorkehrungen, Sie nach hinten zu schicken, sind getroffen.” (“The arrangements have been finalized to send you to the rear.”)

  Worldly though he ought to have been by this point in his duration, Kaspar reeled at Ilse’s easy lewdness, which made even Sonja (he would not think of her—not now) seem as genteel as a governess. It’s the middle of the century, grandpa, he told himself when it was over, not without a certain melancholy. Women are wearing men’s work shirts now, and telling us what they want in plain language, at least behind closed doors. They’re even fucking like men. I suppose it’s because of the war.

  For the first time in his experience, staring into the Victorian standing mirror at the foot of Ilse’s cot, Kaspar felt the involuntary defensiveness of the old. Meeting her, splendid and implausible though it was, had aged him overnight. But this was a small price to pay for such a stroke of preposterous fortune—he’d been on the cusp of his dotage already, after all—and he paid without the slightest hesitation.

  * * *

  Within the year, to his enduring amazement, Ilse had taken Kaspar’s name and all the worry that came with it, and on February 2, 1943—the same day, auspiciously enough, as the German surrender at Stalingrad—she bore him a plump-cheeked, walleyed baby boy. But the past wasn’t willing to set Kaspar free yet.

  In the late fall of 1942, a few months before his wedding to Ilse, a brown paper parcel arrived in Buffalo Bill’s mailbox, addressed to Konrad B. Toula, Professor of Physics, with a New Mexico return address. My grandfather, who had only the vaguest idea where New Mexico was, opened the parcel with caution—and for once his intuition was correct. The author of the letter was a man named Oppenheimer, who purported to be a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Even more surprisingly, he claimed to have read—in the original German—the only scholarly paper that Kaspar had ever published: a study of radioactive decay.

  Professor Oppenheimer had recently been appointed by the United States government to direct a project of considerable import to the national defense—or so he claimed—about which he could say nothing further by mail. Would Professor Toula (the use of his original surname irked my grandfather, for some reason) consider a visit to Los Alamos, where a state-of-the-art facility (the exact nature of which could, regrettably, not be gone into in writing) was in the final stages of completion? All expenses paid by Uncle Sam, of course.

  My grandfather was anything but impervious to flattery, especially from a colleague; he hadn’t thought of himself as a physicist since well before the Flight into Egypt, and it felt unexpectedly good. There was his betrothed to consider, of course, and his cousin Wilhelm, and his bosses at Kaiser’s, and the twins, who’d just begun attending a new school; on the other hand, Kaspar thought—admiring the Army Corps of Engineers letterhead and the pistachio-colored card stock it was printed on—it looked as though there might be money in it. Before he sat down to reply to the letter, Kaspar got out his AAA Atlas of America (a present from Ilse, who dreamed of a honeymoon road trip) and opened it to a map of the Southwest.

  * * *

  Imagining this moment—which has the distinction, unique in this history, of being significant because of what it didn’t lead to—I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if my grandfather had taken Oppenheimer up on his offer. It plays out in my mind in glaring Technicolor, a set of train tracks diverging with all the dizzying smoothness of those What if? stories my father used to churn out for the pulps. Ilse might have gone with him to New Mexico, might have agreed to postpone their wedding and support him in the long incubation of Fat Man and his plucky sidekick, Little Boy—then again, she might have angrily refused. There might have been no sparsely attended Cheektowaga wedding—no Orson, no me. The quest to decipher my great-grandfather’s notes might have ended with Kaspar, subsumed in the even more glorious quest to reduce our planet to a lump of frozen ashes. I’d never have materialized at my cousin’s party, Mrs. Haven, never have met you underneath that kitchen counter.

  What if?

  I picture my grandfather standing next to the All-Powerful Opp, his fists stuffed into his lab coat’s starched white pockets, observing the first H-bomb test at Trinity. Everyone is wearing cardboard 3-D glasses, for some reason, and nervously checking their Kaiserwerks watches. The priapic observation tower and the tiny men inside it are suddenly flooded by the flat gray light of nightmare, and for a nanosecond the landscape is completely stripped of shadow. In this version, it’s Kaspar, not Oppenheimer, who murmurs the notorious line from the Bhagavad Gita: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. The symmetry with his brother would then have been perfect: both would have contributed, however modestly, to the signature horrors of mankind’s most apocalyptic age.

  My grandfather was kind enough to spare our family that particular trauma, which would probably have mentally buggered his descendants until the (alleged) end of time; but the man who deserves the lion’s share of my gratitude is the same man whose letter to FDR
kick-started the Manhattan Project, and whose outlandish solution to the Michelson-Morley paradox sent Waldemar down the rabbit hole to Timekeeperhood in the first place. That’s right, Mrs. Haven. The name invoked by Oppenheimer at the close of his letter to Kaspar was none other than that of our family nemesis, the gorgon of Zurich, the destroyer of worlds: none other than the Patent Clerk himself.

  My grandfather respectfully declined.

  XVI

  THE CLOSEST MY FATHER ever came to writing about his childhood, Mrs. Haven, was the opening chapter of his second-to-last novel, Salivation Is Yours!, in which the origin of O2 the Perambulator is told in all its pornographic splendor. Orson was a seasoned purveyor of “starporn” by then, and could work almost anything into his plots, even genuine human emotion; working it into conversation, on the other hand—on birthdays, let’s say, or during family dinners—was something he preferred to leave to experts.

  O2, firstborn son of StoKasTa, a sentient cloud of dark matter in the Centauri System, has the most monotonous childhood imaginable: he’s born, matures, and dies, time and time again, without ever escaping the womb. StoKasTa’s privates resemble those of any well-built woman, with three important distinctions: they’re made out of interstellar gas, they exist in eighteen dimensions (including D16, the dimension of smell) and they look like suburban Buffalo in the 1950s.

  StoKasTa’s birth canal, we are told, is a bona fide black hole, one whose “event horizon”—the gravitational boundary across which even light cannot escape—is always just beyond our hero’s reach. O2 himself is a pimply, awkward ectomorph with more than a passing likeness to my father; he’s fated to be torn to bits—“spaghettified,” in the unapologetically wacky parlance of black hole research—whenever he tries to make a break for it. Luckily for O2, he finds himself reincarnated after each annihilation; unluckily, he’s always reincarnated as himself.

  “I can’t really complain,” O2 says, which in his case is literally true—he’s a querelophobe, physically unable to express disatisfaction. “I can’t complain, really. But sometimes I’d like to.”

  In the course of his eighteen-year journey to the limits of his personal singularity, our hero encounters a series of equally wretched life-forms, all of whom have made the mistake of flying their spaceships too close to StoKasTa’s unmentionables: a dandified pleasure robot, a koala-faced mystic, and a two-headed hydra with “antifreeze eyes” against whom O2 has to battle in order to make his escape. Orson opted for blunt, C. S. Lewis–style allegory this time (instead of his default Tolkienish vison-questing) and the result makes for an uncomfortable read: a queasy one-to-one correspondence between fiction and fact. It’s easy to recognize Kaspar in the gibberish-spouting mystic (he was a little koala-shaped, in his later years), Wilhelm fits the robot to a T, and I have no doubt at all, given the shadow Orson’s sisters cast over his life, whom the hydra is supposed to represent.

  Considering the frustrations of his existence, Mrs. Haven, O2 is remarkably well adjusted. He has nothing against his mother (or Agawotkeech, as her vulva is locally known); he’d just like to see what the rest of the universe looks like. “This isn’t a bad place to grow up,” O2 tells the koala. “But by your one million, five hundred seventy-six thousand, seven hundred and seventy-eighth iteration, there’s not much in the way of novelty.”

  The koala nods sadly and wishes poor, doomed O2 all the best. The hydra, on the other hand, insists that the universe outside StoKasTa is simply more of the same, then tries to turn our hero’s skeleton to jelly by shooting psionic nerve blasts from the sockets of its eyes. Regretfully, O2 decapitates the hydra and continues his journey, knowing perfectly well that it’s pointless, but hoping—as he’s done 1,576,777 times before—that everything will turn out for the best. The “pleasurebot” catches up with him at Agawotkeech’s second-to-last bend and gives him a fist-sized ruby from a dainty zirconium purse. “My best days are behind me, or I’d come with you,” it sighs. “Precedents notwithstanding, you might actually have a shot this time. This ruby is a piece of geniune space stuff—not like this nebulaic stageset all around us. Put it in your mouth, just before you try to force a breach. It might give you a kick in the pants.”

  “Thank you, sir,” O2 answers, trying his best to sound enthusiastic. “I think I should point out, however, that you’ve told me this one million, five hundred—”

  “Don’t talk smart,” says the robot. “Look how far that got the koala.”

  By the time O2 finally draws near to the event horizon, he’s well into his adolescence, and his surrender to gravity, on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, has the desperate romance of teenage suicide. This time, however, as the robot has promised, things actually do turn out differently. The ruby catapults O2 to safety (for reasons that remain unclear, at least to me) and a passing starcruiser picks him up just as he runs out of breath.

  O2 has had plenty of practice being a teenager, but none being an adult, which makes it hard for him to hold down a respectable job; on the other hand, millennia spent inside a cosmic vagina have furnished him with a finely tuned understanding of a woman’s wants and needs—which expertise he makes use of, regular as a timing cog, for the next hundred pages. In trademark Orson Card Tolliver style, no detail of the Perambulator’s amorous adventures is spared us, no matter how cringeworthy. My father sinned in all sorts of ways as an author, Mrs. Haven, but the sin of omission wasn’t one of them.

  * * *

  Salivation Is Yours! ends with the death of the protagonist’s mother, which is an interesting inversion, since Orson’s duration began with the death of his own. As a girl of eighteen, Ilse had been advised by an East Tonawanda gynecologist—himself a refugee from Vienna—that childbirth would place her in mortal danger. This may have been one reason for her reluctance to accept a suitor, or it may have had nothing to do with it; in any case, she seems to have concealed the fact from Kaspar. She died in great pain, three doors down from the nursery, recovering consciousness just long enough to scrutinize her son. Kaspar laid the newborn beside her—a scowling, beet-colored organism, obscenely robust—and she focused her bloodshot eyes on him and nodded.

  “What should we call this little singularity of ours?” Ilse rasped to the twins, who stood silently together at the foot of her bed, appraising the baby.

  “Let’s call him Orson,” said Enzie. “After the picture director.”

  “Because he has a fat face,” Genny added.

  “Orson,” said Ilse, smiling faintly at Kaspar. “Orson Card Tolliver. That has a nice ring.”

  Three days later she was buried in a small but sunny plot at Forest Lawn, and the baby—a contrarian from the start—was keeping Buffalo Bill’s household awake through the night. The stucco cottage, with all of its furnishings, was sold at a moderate loss. Kaspar’s last wisp of adventurousness had left him.

  * * *

  The fact that the motherless child Kaspar received in exchange for his bride would grow up to become an accomplished peddler of smut—and smut is what it is, Mrs. Haven, no question about it—is peculiar, given how the boy was raised. Kaspar had grown so committed to feeling old since meeting Ilse, had spent so many hours fretting over the future well-being of his young wife, that the possibility of outliving her had never crossed his mind. Had there been a self-pitying or vindictive bone in my grandfather’s body, he might easily have come to resent his new son; as it was, he simply kept him at a distance.

  Certain neighbors and acquaintances were shocked, after Ilse’s funeral, by Kaspar’s near-immediate resumption of work; but no one who knew him well questioned the depth of his grief. My grandfather may have been a reasonable man, blessed with mental fortitude and common sense, but he harbored a talent for guilt that went beyond all reason. He’d brought about his first wife’s death, he was sure, by failing to recognize the danger that his brother’s madness posed, and then by hauling her across the ocean; and his complicity in Ilse’s death was even clearer.

  Quietly,
imperceptibly, without confiding in a soul, Kaspar began to see relations between the sexes as a thing to be avoided. Though he lacked a tyrant’s nature, his pain made him a man to be deferred to: over time, visits to 153 Voorhees Avenue—even by other children—grew less and less frequent. The house became a lonely place, shrouded and somber, where conversation took place in a hush. The baby didn’t mind, of course, not knowing any better; and Enzian and Gentian didn’t mind—just the opposite, in fact—because they had the baby.

  * * *

  The baby entered their lives like a flood or a plague or the death of some biblical king: a twitch of God’s will that changed history forever. The twins had begun taking Torah instruction on Thursday afternoons and they were unafraid to think in sacred terms. Enzian suspected that she and her sister might themselves be a species of angel, seraphim put among men for a purpose both high-minded and obscure, in which case the baby was probably some sort of herald. Their stepmother had been a vague, muted thing, hard to bring into focus; the baby stood out electrically from his surroundings, beatific and bright, as if God’s fingertips rested on the crown of his head. Gentian was slightly less church-drunk than her sister, but she agreed that the baby was a creature of wonder. No one else paid attention—Kaspar seemed half-asleep most of the time, and Buffalo Bill had never had the slightest use for children—so care of the baby devolved onto them.