The Lost Time Accidents

by John Wray

  XVIII

  ON A CHALK-COLORED Sunday in early October, four years to the day after heading downstate, my father caught sight of something in a Lexington Avenue shop window that stopped him in his tracks. Things stopped him in his tracks all the time on his walks—stockinged calves, pipe smoke, even the occasional stoplight—but this event was of a different order. The item in question was a pack of playing cards, slightly taller and wider than a standard poker deck, browned along the edges and speckled with age. Orson gawked through the glass for a while, took a few aimless steps, then stepped quickly into the shop. The shopkeeper, a white-bearded Czech who looked of roughly the same vintage as the cards themselves, and was shockingly disheveled even for a junk dealer (though just about right for a physicist, Orson thought), scooped the pack up unceremoniously into his tobacco-stained fingers, as though it had no particular value, and passed it to my father with a sigh.

  “What’s your trouble, grandpop?” said my father, whose manners hadn’t been done any favors by the move to New York. “Don’t you care for my looks?”

  “It’s not cards to read the future with. Tarock, it’s called—not tarotové karty. A game only. Try to tell the future and you’ll see.”

  “See what, exactly?”

  The Czech made no reply. Orson gave him his most hard-boiled squint.

  “Who said anything about the future, anyhow?”

  “No one plays this game anymore,” said the shopkeeper. “Not around here.” He coughed into his beard. “There used to be clubs.”

  Orson flipped the topmost card over: a face card, identical to the one he’d seen through the window. Heavier than a poker card, and cut from stiffer stock. “My grandfather used to play this game,” he said. “What’s this first one—the joker?”

  “No jokers in tarock,” harrumphed the shopkeeper.

  “What’s the name of this card, then?”

  “I don’t know in English.”

  “Then tell me in German. Or in Czech. Whichever.”

  The old man shrugged his shoulders. “In French it was called L’excuse.”

  Orson frowned and brought the card up to the light. A wavy-haired man in what might either have been the costume of a soldier or a harlequin held a saucer-shaped hat on which another man, dressed in the same gaudy outfit, was dancing. This dancer, who was roughly squirrel-sized, held a hat in his own hand, no bigger than an espresso cup, into which the wavy-haired man was pointing, as if there were something of significance inside. The effect was agreeably dizzying, like tracing the curve of a Möbius strip. The image itself was like a Möbius strip, come to think of it: an infinite loop with a twist in the middle. It represented something—that much was clear—though God alone knew what that thing might be.

  “Where were these cards made?”

  “I don’t know,” said the shopkeeper. “Vienna, maybe.”

  “How do you play?”

  “It goes counterclockwise.”

  “Counterclockwise,” said Orson. He thought for a moment. “I was reading something about that just this morning. It’s supposed to be the direction the Milky Way spins.”

  “That,” said the shopkeeper, “depends on who’s looking. You never heard of relativity?”

  Orson held up the fool. “How much do you want for this card?”

  “For the card I want nothing. For the deck, twenty bucks.”

  The price was outrageous—a three-course dinner at the Old Homestead Steak House—but my father paid it. He was a young man of means, after all.

  “It’s not for telling the future,” the Czech repeated, stuffing the bills into his jacket pocket. “You heard me, smarty kalhoty? No moneys back.”

  * * *

  The truth was that Orson badly needed a glimpse of the future just then. He’d arrived in New York flush with the sense of clairvoyance all bright young men have, confident of the world’s submissiveness; the world, however, had seen no pressing reason to oblige. Ewa Ruszczyk’s cousin had told him to “go fry a duck” when he’d shown up at Forty-Second Street, then kicked the door shut in his face, and the next four years had been a series of variations on this theme. The city was mysteriously indifferent to his fate.

  It pains me to admit it, Mrs. Haven, but la vie bohème was wasted on my father. According to his letters home, he spent his first twelve months in a cold-water studio on Christopher and Seventh, just three doors down from the Village Vanguard, without ever once looking inside. He didn’t go in for jazz (“the musical equivalent of aftershave,” he said to me once) and marijuana made him laugh at things that weren’t funny. He kept to himself for the most part, eating tepid knishes on piss-smelling benches and sulking in secondhand bookshops; his acquaintances ranged from hopheads to wallflowers to bottom-tier grifters (“ectoplasmic hookworms,” in Orson-speak), none of whom he actually liked. The Village was at its sociohistoric apogee in those years—its most self-obsessed and manic and debauched—but Orson might as well have stayed in Cheektowaga.

  To be fair to my father, he logged his due share of hours in the coffee shops, notebook in hand, and he did give dissipation a go every once in a while, in a halfhearted way; but he’d chosen the only neighborhood in America, it seemed, where wealth was considered a social disease. The first girl he’d told about his inheritance—late one Saturday night, at the Kettle of Fish—had spit in his lager and lifted his wallet. What was worse, when he’d finally caught up with her a few nights later, holding court on the very same barstool, she hadn’t been a bit apologetic.

  “You’re a Jew, Tolliver. You’ve got plenty of lettuce.”

  “I’m actually not Jewish, technically speaking,” he’d found himself mumbling, which hadn’t been what he’d meant to say at all.

  “Don’t try to flimflam me, Lord Fauntleroy. Your sisters used to read you to sleep with the Talmud.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “You did,” she’d said, turning back to her grog. “Last Saturday night. Right before you started bawling like a baby.”

  An error had been made, Orson decided: a miscalculation, either in his estimation of the Village or in the Village’s estimation of him. He’d had only the vaguest of hopes for his life as an artist—Rothko-like puffs of color, too diffuse to call daydreams—but the city’s indifference had snuffed even those. Peers and fellow travelers were hard to find, girlfriends next to impossible. Literary pretensions were derided—excoriated, really—in the Bleecker Street cafés: not because they seemed bold, but because everybody and his mother had literary pretensions. Girls who cared about books went for Sexton and Sartre; science fiction, according to their boyfriends (novelists all, naturellement), was for Ukrainian immigrants and nose-picking teens. Orson got his own nose bloodied more than once in defense of the genre, and inevitably staggered home in tears, which only served to prove the boyfriends’ point. Ambition and talent (and lettuce) notwithstanding, my father was still, by anyone’s yardstick, a teenager himself.

  It was only to be expected, given this state of affairs, that Orson pined for big-boned, sloe-eyed Ewa Ruszczyk; but the predictability of his loneliness depressed him even more. He was a writer, and allergic—or so he flattered himself—to the marzipan-like odor of cliché. Ewa had decided, at the last possible instant, not to run away with Orson. The last he’d heard, she was “going steady” (hateful phrase!) with a thirty-year-old ROTC recruiter. He’d expected so much more of her. Who was his audience now?

  On his last night in Buffalo, by way of a consolation prize, Ewa had picked him up in her father’s Montclair and driven him out to the Bird Island pier, where she’d folded down the backseat, spread out a camping blanket, and proceeded to undress herself completely—socks, barrette, sugar-free chewing gum and all. He’d been picturing her naked body at fifteen-minute intervals for the better part of a year, in every conceivable attitude; but this once, Mrs. Haven, his imagination had failed him. She was even downier than he’d imagined, and her breasts were heavier, which was glorious and
frightening at once. The skin there was pale, almost bluish, which surprised him most of all—he’d expected her to be golden brown all over. Commit this to memory, Orson, he’d said to himself, as she pulled him down onto the blanket. If you retain one single hour of your duration, make it this.

  * * *

  My father did have one great advantage over his beret-sporting, bop-listening, café-haunting literary rivals, Mrs. Haven, which was that he actually wrote. He was churning out stories, in fact, at a clip that would have sent even Philip K. Dick fumbling for his inhaler. “Plexiglass Children,” “The Curious Splotches,” “BIEHXIXHEIB,” and “The Voyage of the Silver Esophagus,” to name just a few: some of Orson’s best-known stories date from his self-imposed exile on Christopher Street. Beatnik snobs notwithstanding, these were sci-fi’s boom years, and the hunger of the pulps was never slaked. His dirty work sold more quickly and made him more money, but even his respectable material (“your dry-pussy stories,” as his DarkEncounters editor so decorously put it) managed to see the light of day from time to time. He referred to defeat, in his diary, as “eating a death biscuit,” and saved his rejection slips with the masochistic relish of a natural-born hack.

  Occasionally he sent a draft home to his sisters, accompanied by a note—half disclaimer, half challenge—instructing them to stop reading as soon as they got bored. Enzian took him at his word, rarely mentioning his writing in her matter-of-fact replies; Genny praised them to the stratosphere (“Just so promising, Peanut! A virus spread by a computer? Who on earth would have thought!!!”), which was somehow even more disheartening. He was selling regularly now to Preposterous! Stories, and to second-tier pulps with names like Dodecahedron and If; but a sense of failure dogged him all the same. He tore open each envelope from Enzie eagerly, hoping in spite of himself for a word of encouragement, only to read yet another detailed account of Kaspar’s dementia, which by this point was advancing by the hour.

  Orson had vowed to himself to remain in the Village until his twentieth birthday or until he got famous, whichever came first; but after a year and a half, from one day to the next, he packed his yellow steamer trunk (the same trunk Sonja had used, half a lifetime before, for her collection of white linen gowns) and migrated five miles north, to Spanish Harlem. The reason for this move remains obscure. It may have been that he felt like an expatriate there, surrounded by sprawling Puerto Rican and Dominican families, and that he found the feeling liberating; maybe he simply liked the lower rent. Or possibly—and this isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds—he’d caught a glimpse of his future at last, Mrs. Haven, and he knew that resistance was useless.

  Kaspar died on November 5, 1964—the same month, according to legend, that Luchino Visconti began work, half a world away, on the screenplay of his masterpiece The Damned. It was also the year, appropriately enough, in which Irwin Shapiro of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology made use of astronomical radar (whatever that is) to measure the reduction in the speed of light rays traveling through the gravitational field of the sun, and found it in perfect accord with relativity’s predictions. (The deeper my research has led me into the history of my family, Mrs. Haven, the more this tripartite coincidence strikes me as the punch line to an elaborate vaudeville routine—but more on this later.) Genny informed Orson, by telegram, that their father had died in his sleep; in reality his last hours had been spent in precisely that state—at the mathematical midpoint between waking and dreaming—to which he’d devoted the final decade of his life.

  Dying, Newton once wrote, is a polite undertaking, by definition the most self-effacing of acts; but even so, my grandfather’s demise was something of a pièce de résistance. He laid down his burden with so little fuss, in fact, that Enzian, who was sitting beside him on the chesterfield, noticed nothing until Genny called them to dinner. She’d been helping him to organize the photographs he’d brought from Vienna—the same parcel of blanched, water-stained images Orson had once attempted to make sense of. In all the years they’d lived at Pine Ridge Road, Enzian had never seen him look at them once; just that morning, however, he’d insisted they bring them into strict chronological order. They’d barely begun before his eyes had fallen closed.

  Now she brought Genny in from the kitchen and they examined their father together. Neither had ever seen a cadaver, but they both knew they were looking at one now. A few errant snapshots lay curled in the crotch of his trousers, an improvised fig leaf in sepia and gray; moments before, they’d been rustling in time to his breath. Nothing out of the ordinary had occurred—no gasp, no thunderclap, no sudden chill—but the body had been utterly tranformed. It was evidence now, proof that something was missing, like the depression in a wheat field where a deer has spent the night.

  For the first time since either could remember, the twins avoided looking at each other. Enzian had the impression—though she’d been back from the university for hours—of having come home an instant too late. Gentian felt a sudden urge to laugh.

  “He’s got to the end of his term,” she said finally.

  “He seems to have,” said Enzian. “Yes.”

  “What do we do? Do we call the police?”

  “If you care to. But first we call Orson.”

  “But Enzie,” said Genny, laughing in spite of herself. “He doesn’t even have a telephone!”

  * * *

  Orson missed the interment but arrived home in time for the memorial service, which was starkly lit and full of fish-faced strangers. It was held in the banquet hall of the Western New York Chapter of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, of which Kaspar turned out—to almost everyone’s amazement—to have been a member for twenty-two years. Orson kept to the back of the drop-ceilinged hall, humming to drown out the saccharine service; he tried to identify a single person in the room aside from his sisters and his uncle Wilhelm, but apparently Cheektowaga’s population had been swapped, during his absence, for a race of glassy-eyed automatons. That gave him the idea for a story, a good one, but he couldn’t get it clear—not at his father’s memorial service, no matter how emphatically he hummed. He slipped out midway through a eulogy by someone in a mud-colored toupee. Wilhelm was next, but the years hadn’t been kind to him, either—and in any case the story wouldn’t wait.

  The contours of its plot were already starting to blur as Orson backed out of the hall, a sensation that never failed to rack him with anxiety. He shouldn’t have come, he realized: not to that god-awful service, not to Pine Ridge Road, not to Buffalo at all. The criminal returns to the scene of the crime, as every self-respecting genre jockey knows, at which point he gets locked up for life—if he’s lucky—or frizzled to death in the electric chair.

  The fern-cluttered foyer was empty aside from Orson and a woman of about his age, with the stony, joyless look of a person who did something unappreciated for a living. She was standing with her arms tightly crossed, smoking one of those mentholated cigarettes that were all the rage in 1964, and ashing onto the potted fern behind her. Orson recognized her at once, though he counted down from ten, for precautionary reasons, before he dared to speak her name aloud.

  “Hello, Ewa.”

  “Welcome home, Orson. Thanks for getting in touch.”

  There was a harshness to her that he couldn’t explain. “Genny told me you got married,” he said—and realized, as he said it, what the unappreciated thing must be. “You’ve got a kid, am I right? A daughter?”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Orson. You don’t want to talk about my daughter. Children make your tonsils itch.”

  What could she resent me for? Orson thought. Trying to talk her into leaving Cheektowaga? Not trying hard enough? What gives her the right? Indignation washed over him, quickly followed by pity—but the back of his throat began to itch regardless. At least I’m not sobbing, he thought. At least I’m not begging her to take me back. But he found, to his own astonishment, that the thought held no appeal for him. The itching in his throat was all he felt.

  �
��I’ll never understand why—”

  “Why what, Orson?”

  “Why you never got away from here.”

  “Is that right.”

  “That you didn’t come with me—I can understand that, I guess. But that you stayed in this—in this place—”

  “We can talk about it once you’ve gotten settled,” Ewa said, smiling. It wasn’t a well-intentioned smile. It seemed more like a leer of victory.

  “Settled? What does that—”

  “After you move back, I mean. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about it then.”

  “Move back?” said Orson, his mind going blank. “I’m not going to move back, Ewa. Where did you hear—”

  “Your sister told me.”

  Orson’s scalp started to prickle. “Jesus Christ. I knew Enzie was nuts, but where she got that idea—”

  “It wasn’t Enzie that told me.”

  “What—” He closed his eyes. “It wasn’t? You mean—”

  “That’s right, city boy. It was Genny.”

  That yanked the rug out from under him completely. He shook his head and gave a frightened sneeze.

  “I guess we’ll be seeing each other around,” said Ewa, flicking her cigarette into a corner. “I’m looking forward to it. You can tell me about your fabulous career.”

  “I’m never,” Orson got out finally. “I’m never moving back here.” But his voice was drowned out by polite applause.

  * * *

  Orson left the next morning on the 20th Century Limited, the earliest possible train, after a night unlike any he’d passed with his sisters before. Enzie, normally so austere, had sat slumped at the dinner table, staring at her pork chop as if expecting it to speak; Genny had been giddier than ever, babbling about all and sundry, barely able to sit still long enough to eat. Orson had studied her closely, trying to puzzle out the meaning of what she’d told Ewa Ruszczyk. The only explanation Genny had offered—grudgingly, it had seemed to him—was that “a little birdy” had told her he’d be moving home.