by John Wray
“He’s a teenager now,” Kaspar said equably. “Not a tot anymore. There are more important things, for a boy of his age, than the study of the nature of time.”
For a moment it seemed that Enzian wouldn’t answer. “That’s what he said. But what on earth could be more important?”
Gentian came in just then, a dish towel in one hand and a cup of Ostfriesen BOP in the other. Kaspar whispered his answer into Enzian’s ear.
“Papa!” she said, bringing a hand to her mouth. “I’m astonished that you even know that word!”
“I know it in three languages,” he said matter-of-factly. “English, German, and Czech. If I didn’t, sweetheart, you might well not exist.” He looked from one of his daughters to the other. “You girls need to get out of the house more often.”
“That’s just what I want to talk about,” said Enzian.
* * *
The following autumn, on September 5, 1956, Enzian attended her first lecture in the Physics Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo. She was older, at twenty-seven, than a number of her instructors, and she was the only woman in the whole department; but such trivialities were no concern of hers. She kept her time on campus to a minimum, but even so, the hours away from her sister were bitter. Harder still was the pretense her studies demanded: the need to dissemble, to parrot her professors’ orthodoxies, to feign interest in theories that were of no use to her. My aunt had developed her own ideas about the physical world by that time, some of which would have made even Waldemar blush. She was rattled and drained when she came home at night, as though on furlough from some grim but crucial conflict—which was exactly what she considered her coursework to be.
Hostilities commenced in the second month of Principles of Physics. Things had gone smoothly till then: she’d familiarized herself with those areas, like Laplace’s theory of determinism and Newton’s early work in optics, that she’d missed in her self-education. (She particularly liked the idea, which she’d never once thought of, that physics often seems to violate common sense because our common sense evolved to explain things on a human scale—the scale of things that we can touch and see and hear—whereas physics deals with everything in the universe, from the subatomic to the infinite.) By the time the class had arrived at Michelson and Morley, however, my aunt had begun to get antsy. The lecturer, an archetypically tweedy Scotsman with a tendency to stammer when excited, had barely rounded the headland of the twentieth century when he found himself in shark-infested seas.
The topic was Philip Lenard’s work on photoelectrics, which had never posed a problem for the Scotsman before. Lenard had been an opponent of relativity from the start, in part because it rendered his pet theory—that everything in the universe is suspended in an invisible substance, the “luminiferous ether”—not only obsolete but silly. Using the technique known as Occam’s razor, which cuts away all the elements of a theory that aren’t essential—the fat and the gristle, conceptually speaking—Einstein and his cohorts had dispensed with the ether, and found that the universe ran perfectly well without it. Little wonder, then (the Scotsman continued) that Lenard had ended up a rabid Jew-baiter. As Max Planck once wrote to his colleague, Sir James Jeans—
“Excuse me, Mr. Urquhart,” said Enzian, raising her hand.
Urquhart glanced up in alarm. “What is it, Miss Tolliver? Are you unwell?”
“Not me,” she replied. “Mr. Occam.”
“Mr. Occam?” echoed the Scotsman, struggling to master his stammer.
“His razor.” Ignoring the tittering around her, Enzian pressed on. “Occam’s principle is to cut away everything that’s unnecessary, isn’t that so? To strip each theory back down to its bones?”
“That is correct, Miss Tolliver. Now, if you’ll permit me—”
“Seems to me you’d lose a lot of meat that way.”
Urquhart opened his mouth and closed it. “A lot of meat, Miss Tolliver?”
“That’s right.” Enzian was smiling her private smile now, the one she used only with her father and Genny. “Where do all those theories go, that Occam shaves away? How many tasty tidbits are we missing?”
Monday, 09:05 EST
I’ve been nursing a suspicion for at least three sleep cycles, Mrs. Haven, without the confidence to set it down. There have been too many coincidences, especially lately—too many barely perceptible changes to my surroundings, too many relevant books poking up from the trash, too many mnemonic prompts left out where I was sure to find them. I may be cut off from the timestream in this junk-filled mausoleum, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m alone.
The idea of someone else in these catacombs, laying out a bread-crumb trail for me while I’m asleep, gives me the fantods, for obvious reasons; but I can’t deny it also gives me hope. As I wrote in my ledger of credits and debits:
But someone must have put me here, and provided me with these books and writing materials—ergo, someone wants me to complete my history. And that person may also have the means to set me free.
I’ve held back till now, Mrs. Haven, out of uncertainty and lack of evidence. But something has just happened—a few minutes ago, before I started this entry—that’s convinced me I’m right.
* * *
I awoke from my most recent spell of semiconsciousness to the knowledge that something had changed. It was dark in the room—smoothly, blankly, two-dimensionally dark—and as usual I heard almost nothing. I felt my adrenaline surge as I groped for the lamp, terrified that I’d been blinded in my sleep: I yanked on its chain, then again, then again, but the dark only thickened. Sliding to the floor, I followed the cord of the lamp with my fingers, crawling through the blackness on all fours, praying that I’d somehow pulled it from the wall. I seemed to be crossing a wide, pitching space, like a seasick passenger on the deck of some great cruiser. I had to burrow through a loose drift of magazines and milk cartons and shoe boxes to uncover the socket; when I did, I found the cord firmly plugged in. This may seem like a minor point, Mrs. Haven, but it struck me like a swell of icy water. The only explanation left was that the bulb had blown, and I had no replacement. The thought of passing each coming night with nothing but my claustrophobia for company was more than I could bear. I sank back against a stack of ceiling tiles and sobbed.
As I was making my way back, however, I had a stroke of improbable luck. Just as my hand reached the base of the lamp, my fingers brushed against something cool and round and light, and set it spinning. A lightbulb! I was too overjoyed to ask how it had gotten there, or why I hadn’t noticed it before. I brought it to my ear and shook it gently.
Unbelievably, miraculously, the bulb was intact. I let out a groan of thanksgiving and got to my feet, guiding myself upward by the stem of the lamp. I hesitated briefly at the top, held back by a sudden misgiving: that the power to the apartment had been cut.
The implications of this made me slightly woozy. Is it possible that my temporal isolation operates in one direction only—that the timestream can still affect me, even though I’ve been excised from time? With this troubling thought I roused myself from my reverie and reached up, under the lampshade, to unscrew the dead bulb and replace it.
But there was no bulb to replace, Mrs. Haven. There was no bulb in the socket of the lamp.
As I stood motionless with the lamp stem in my right hand and the lightbulb in my left, hearing nothing but my own dumbfounded wheezing, something gradually impinged on my awareness. I’d been conscious of it for some time, in the way that I was conscious of the clothing I wore, or of the floor beneath my feet: I’d sensed it without giving it a thought.
Someone else was in the room, close beside me in the darkness, breathing in time with my breath.
I let out a squeal, choked and childlike, that died almost before it left my throat. There was someone else there. Someone was trying to match me breath for breath, to hide in my biorhythm, and was almost succeeding. I turned around slowly, keeping my hand on the lamp stem,
and guided the bulb into the empty socket. I was facing him now. I seemed to feel his scentless breath against my skin.
“I want to know who you are,” I said into the blackness.
I gave the bulb one full turn. The ghostly breathing seemed to have stopped, or to have conformed to my own more precisely. I turned it again.
“I want to know who you are,” I repeated. “I want to know why you’re doing this to me.”
A great distance away, at the margin of hearing, a board seemed to creak.
“Show yourself!” I shouted, giving the bulb a third and final twist.
My mistake, I see now, was to keep my eyes open as the light came on. I recoiled backward into the card table, knocking half the pile of books onto the floor, then doubled over and dug my palms into my eyes. A stream of burning afterimages roiled across my sight, in one of which I saw—or thought I saw—a human figure. But by the time my sight had cleared the room was empty.
On the floor behind my armchair, within arm’s reach of the Archive, a fractured snow globe glittered in the light. It had held water once; now it held only soot. I looked closer and discovered a postapocalyptic Forty-Second Street, the block just east of Grand Central, as desolate and caked with grime as this apartment. The Chrysler Building jutted like a starship from the dust.
XVII
AMBITIOUS AS SHE WAS in her blank, brutal way, Enzian had never pictured herself out in the world—out among the ignorant, the time-bound, the conventionally human—and least of all in the role of messiah. This wasn’t due to any doubt as to her own charisma (she’d been blessed with an almost fanatical belief in her suitability for pretty much everything) but because she herself had decided, nearly two decades earlier, that her brother would be the one to play that part. Not decided, she reminded herself. Nothing had been decided, not then or ever. Only foreseen.
Orson kept his distance from her now, whether out of anger or embarrassment she couldn’t have said; and her disappointment was still so severe, so painful to her, that it was safer for them both if he kept clear. The contract between them had been straightforward and fair—generous, really—and he had broken it. If Enzian had had her way—if Kaspar hadn’t opposed her with the last of his vitality—she’d have turned her brother out into the street.
Kaspar was fading perceptibly, growing smaller and more diffuse each time she looked, like the traveler waving from a moving train in the classic physics problem. There was a geometry to her father’s enfeeblement, a mathematical precision that suited them both, and which allowed her to observe its progression without losing her head to sentiment or panic. The heavy hair of which he’d always been so vain, and which had kept its chestnut color well into his sixties, now showed the shape of his skull when the light was behind it, and his square plowman’s shoulders had started to slump. He’d never been a handsome man—even Enzian knew that—but he’d somehow seemed more manly for his plainness. Now the sexlessness of old age had engulfed him. His hearing was failing, he’d taken to falling asleep at the dinner table, and she could hear his labored breathing through the bedroom wall at night. The end of Kaspar’s term was fast approaching.
What Gentian’s thoughts were with regard to this fact, or to her sister’s decision to take up the Tolliver mantle, or to any of the other upheavals at Pine Ridge Road that year, was far more difficult for Enzian to discern. Which is not to say there weren’t certain clues.
“By the way,” Gentian said, as she was clearing the table one evening. “Your friend came to the window last night. I let him in. We had ourselves a little heart-to-heart.”
Enzian, who’d just come down from tucking Kaspar into bed, cocked her head at her sister. “What’s that, Genny? Which friend? I have no—”
“Ottokar.”
“I don’t understand. Little Ottokar, the Ungeziefer? From back when we were girls?”
Gentian nodded without looking up. “We thought about waking you, of course, but you’d been up so late studying for that ballistics midterm. He’ll be back soon, though. He said so.”
Gentian’s manner was as matter-of-fact as ever: her voice betrayed no urgency, no acknowledgment that what she was saying was in any way unusual. She might have been talking about one of Orson’s classmates, or about Calvin Huber, the man who read the gas meter each month—though in that case she’d have been a bit more flustered. She had a schoolgirl’s crush on Calvin Huber.
“It’s 1957, Genny,” Enzian said at last. “We’re twenty-eight years old.”
“Do you want to hear what Ottokar had to tell me?”
Enzian could count on one hand the number of times she’d been at a loss for words with her sister. “You?” she said finally. “What Ottokar had to tell you?”
Gentian gave an absent little nod.
“What was it?”
“He’s proud of you, Enzie.” Gentian smoothed down her apron. “Just like the rest of us are.”
Enzian felt herself redden. “Well! That’s kind of you to say, Genny. I’d been hoping—”
“Yes, Enzie. Of course. But you’re making a terrible mistake.”
Everything hushed as she said this—all the manifold small workings of the house. Enzian could feel the hush against her ears, cool and flat, as if the room had been depressurized. Then slowly—one by one, it seemed—the noises returned. She heard her father cough and turn in bed.
“What mistake am I making?”
“Oh! He never said that,” Genny singsonged, gliding off into the kitchen.
* * *
Enzian had plenty of worries in her debut year as a physicist, from her father’s poor health to her brother’s defection to her sister’s unchecked eccentricity; but material concerns were not among them. Through some dark, occult bargain she never quite grasped—and which thrilled and alarmed her in equal measure—Warranted Tolliver Timepieces, Inc., grew in inverse proportion to Kaspar’s decline. Whatever it was he’d been doing from sunrise to sunset in his drop-ceilinged office downtown, he’d been doing it preposterously well. It would stand as the crowning irony of my grandfather’s irony-bedeviled duration that the most unilateral of his withdrawals from the world was the most richly rewarded venture of his life.
Buffalo Bill, to be fair, deserved some of the credit. Given careful supervision, he’d proven to be a gifted business manager and a virtuosic salesman—not that too much virtuosity was called for. For the first time in U.S. history, teenagers had money to spend on whatever flashy baubles caught their fancy, and wristwatches were a safe but potent sign of independence. Business had expanded quietly over the past decade—so quietly, in fact, that Kaspar’s children hadn’t paid it much attention. On a certain Saturday morning of that pivotal autumn, however—on one of the rare occasions when all of his offspring were in sight at the same time—he assembled them in the front hall. He let out a slow breath, as though resigning himself to something beyond his control, then sat down on the fourth step of the stairs.
“Kinder, I have news. We’re millionaires.”
None of the children said a word. Orson leaned against the door with his coat halfway buttoned, and Gentian and Enzian stood watching their father intently, apparently gauging the likelihood of his tumbling downstairs. It was enough to make him wonder whether anyone had heard him.
“Last time I checked,” said Orson guardedly, “I had less than fifteen dollars in the bank.”
“Check again, son.”
“But Papa, what’s the meaning of this?” Gentian got out eventually.
“Don’t look so angefressen, Genny. You’d think I’d just told you we were millions in debt.”
“Why are you telling us this, Papa?” said Enzian. “Why now?”
“When ought I to have told you, Enzie? Before we had the money?”
This was not the tableau Kaspar had envisioned. He looked on, feeling inexplicably sheepish, as Orson’s eyes met Enzie’s for the first time in months. Under any other set of circumstances he’d have been overjoyed; as it wa
s, he was simply confused, a sensation he’d long since come to feel at home in. Enzian took a half step toward the staircase, apparently to get a closer look at him. She didn’t seem impressed by what she saw.
“You’ve deposited money into each of our savings accounts? Am I understanding you correctly?”
“I’ve set up three trusts,” Kaspar answered, glad to have something concrete to discuss. “The money has been invested for you. Partly in the company, partly in government bonds.”
“How much is in my trust?”
Kaspar hesitated, but only for an instant. “Half a million dollars.”
“What about mine?” said Orson.
“I put the same amount in each.”
He watched the fact of it sink in. His children’s perplexity—more than that: their efforts to hide it from him, and from one another—brought him a certain private satisfaction. Orson was particularly interesting: he stared furiously at a wrinkle in the entryway runner, as if trying to straighten it using the power of his mind. I’ve known this boy for his entire life, Kaspar said to himself. But he couldn’t seem to make himself believe it.
“When can we use the money?” said Orson.
“When you come of age, of course,” Enzian answered. But Orson kept his eyes fixed on his father.
Kaspar shrugged. “I have nothing to say about that. The trusts are in your names, children, not mine. You can draw from them whenever you choose.”
Orson nodded for a time. He might have been nodding at what he’d just heard, but it was obvious to his father that he wasn’t. He was nodding to give himself courage.
“I have an announcement.”
Kaspar had no gift of clairvoyance, but on that day—for what reason, he couldn’t have said—he finally beheld his son and understood him. Orson was about to say something that he’d been rehearsing for weeks, perhaps even longer.
“I’m going to New York City.”