by John Wray
“A little birdy, Genny? What’s that supposed to—”
“Not a birdy, exactly,” she’d said, smiling down at her plate.
“She told herself,” Enzie had muttered darkly. “She told herself, by God. And she believed it.”
His sisters’ unmooring hit him harder than his father’s death had done. He’d been resisting them both for the whole of his adult life, for no better reason than their irresistibility: they’d been preternatural to him, less elder sisters than de facto parents, less parents than agents of some arrogant, exacting cosmic will. But this had changed with Kaspar’s passing, changed radically and without warning, as if his dying breath had tripped some hidden wire. The twins may have been absolute rulers of the world they’d created, but their father—at least toward the end of his term—had been their sole remaining subject. They had no one left to rule now but themselves.
* * *
If any doubt persisted that the earth had shifted subtly on its axis—that the time, at least for Orson, was severely out of joint—his second escape from Buffalo erased it. He ought to have felt exhilaration at sidestepping Genny’s prophecy, or at least some modest measure of relief; instead he spent his first week back in Spanish Harlem in his star-spangled pajamas (a gift from Genny on his fifteenth birthday), drinking beer and feeling sorry for himself. The apartment smelled faintly of cat piss, he was sure of it, though he had no cats and neither did his neighbors. Maybe I’ll have cats in the future, he said to himself. Maybe I have cats right now, in dimension X/12. I’ll have to ask my sisters about that.
He let out a groan at this thought and crawled back into bed. The vertigo he’d picked up at the Odd Fellows Hall had grown sharper with time, and his lunatic family—Genny, especially—seemed to have permanently colonized his dreams. Worst of all, that awful run-in with Ewa had shone a new light on his Great Emancipation: his monomaniacal pursuit of the artist’s life seemed less an act of heroism, suddenly, than one of adolescent self-indulgence. He could be viewed as a dilettante, he realized: a privileged snob, a hack with delusions of grandeur, no different than the turtlenecked deep-thinkers he looked down on. His hometown had endured—had refused to expire, to implode, to break down into its component particles—in spite of the fact that he’d abandoned it. Just the opposite: in his absence, it seemed to have thrived.
The upshot of this new understanding was that, for the first time since he’d moved to New York City—for the first time since he’d hit puberty, in fact—my father couldn’t write to save his life. The trip home had only reinforced his resolve to make art for himself, not his sisters, and he stuck to his ban on time travel, going so far as to outlaw the mention of time in his stories altogether; far from setting him free, however, this last decision crippled him completely. He’d long since discovered that time (beyond its obvious importance) was wondrously useful as a descriptive tool, sometimes even as a metaphor: it was invaluable in writing about sex and robotics and beauty and the vastness of space, to name a few favorite topics. There was a catch, however, an unforeseen con, which was that sex and robotics and beauty and the vastness of space (not to mention love, and death, and even good old-fashioned human consciousness) seemed to Orson, more often than not, to be metaphors for writing about time.
My father began no fewer than thirty-nine stories that spring, some of which (“The Pumpless Pump,” “The Marsupial Light & Power Company,” “An Experiment in Gyro-Hats”) he kept in a drawer for the next forty years, which means he must have seen potential in them. The only story he actually finished, however—a six-page cavalcade of unsavoriness whose title, “In No Particular Odor,” pretty much says it all—was such a spectacular stinker that even DarkEncounters wouldn’t touch it. By August he’d thrown in the towel altogether.
For a few days he tried to teach himself tarock, sliding the cards lackadaisically around on the floor with his toes; but he was in no state to learn anything by then. He ranged farther and farther on his afternoon walks, less out of curiosity or a sense of adventure than to put off the return to his apartment. The hour before sunset—which had always been the most productive of his day—now found him shuffling in circles in Morningside Park, or in the rococo lobby of the Woolworth Building, or on the wooden walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Drifting brought on a numbness, a bearable remove from the facts of his duration, at least if he roamed far enough. For the first week he brought along a pocket notebook, in case inspiration should strike; then a folded sheet of stationery; then a napkin or a page torn from the Times. By September he’d stopped carrying even that.
It was on one of these daily forced marches—a little longer than most, perhaps, but in no way unusual—that he was catapulted clear of his despond. Aimless as his rambles seemed, they tended to take him downtown more often than up, and to Brooklyn more often than he could explain. He’d grown fascinated, in a numb sort of way, by the spatial dynamics between the two immense bridges, which lifted off from far-flung locations near the tip of Manhattan only to touch down in Brooklyn at virtually the same coordinates in space. Their geometry made his synapses fire in the same way that the tarock deck had done: an idea was being expressed—this time on the grandest possible scale—and though its meaning kept its distance he could feel it in his body, as a buzzing in his cortex and his spine.
The pie wedge of buildings enclosed by this confluence—which had precisely the same proportions as the triangle formed by the bridges’ great twinned arcs across the river—was one of the most obscure precincts in the city, bordered on two sides by stone-and-brickwork thoroughfares and on the third by the river itself. It had no name, only a postal code. The landlords and warehouse foremen were generally Hasidic, the workers Puerto Rican or Polish. At times Orson had the feeling that he was trespassing in some private and melancholy city, one that magically mirrored his own state of mind.
It was a tiny place really, less than twelve blocks all told, but each visit yielded up some new discovery. In spite of their grandiose names—Plymouth, Hudson, Gold, Pearl—the streets were narrow and dark, making unforeseen turns, often stopping short without the slightest warning. In the courtyard of an egg-yolk-colored building at the corner of Water and Gold, Buddhist monks played basketball on sunny afternoons, holding the hems of their vestments in one hand and dribbling with the other; from the roof of a rimless Buick at the foot of Jay Street, a Korean War veteran who answered to the name of “Mr. Bread” delivered lectures on Marxist ethics to indifferent passersby. Mr. Bread recognized Orson as a brother in literary arms, and paid him the compliment of sending him on the occasional errand to Brooklyn Heights, usually to pick up ointment for his perpetually bandaged shins. Adrift as he was, Orson happily obliged.
On the afternoon in question, in exchange for a bottle of aspirin, Mr. Bread gave my father a piece of advice. “Get a job,” he said, chewing the aspirin like candy. “Get a job, Tolliver, and get your hair cut. Not necessarily in that order.”
“I have a job,” said Orson. “I’m a writer.”
“A job,” Mr. Bread repeated.
“I’m surprised to hear that from you,” replied Orson. “Whatever happened to the great class struggle?”
“The time for revolution is not yet ripe.”
There was no arguing with that, Mrs. Haven, so he didn’t try.
“I’ve never had a job. A real one, I mean.”
Mr. Bread made a gesture—a comfortable twitch of the shoulders—to indicate the self-evidence of this statement.
“I might as well do something with my time, I guess, since I can’t seem to write. But I wouldn’t know where—”
“Power plant’s hiring. Security work. Nothing to do all day but sit on your culo and dream about Jackie Kennedy’s unmentionables.”
Orson narrowed his eyes. “Why don’t you take the job, if it’s such a hayride?”
“I have a job,” Mr. Bread said proudly. “I’m a writer.”
* * *
The Hudson/Gold Power Generating Sta
tion was a stone’s toss from Mr. Bread’s roadster. My father set out without much hope or ambition, straightening a borrowed paisley tie; he didn’t expect much, for various reasons, and by the time he knew better—as is often the case, Mrs. Haven, with blows to the head by the hammer of fate—there was nothing left to do but cry to heaven.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Orson heard himself shout.
He’d just rounded the corner of Plymouth and Gold—a quaint little cluster of houses, worlds removed from the warehouses and garment factories behind him—and had caught his first glimpse of the station. It was colossal, fortresslike, far more forbidding than he’d imagined; but he barely took in such mundane details. What knocked him sideways was the flickering sign, gaudy as a Times Square marquee, that hung suspended from its massive gate:
WELCOME TO THE HUDSON * GOLD POWER
GENERATING * STATION. 0062 HOURS
WITHOUT A LOST * TIME ACCIDENT.
The world went unnaturally quiet: he heard nothing but the humming of high-tension wires and the rush of blood to his bewildered brain. A man in his thirties, in security grays, took his measure from the window of a hut.
“Sign needs changing,” the man said. “We’re way past sixty-two.”
“What exactly—” said Orson, then ran out of breath. “What exactly is a lost time accident?”
“Sixty-two hours isn’t even three whole days. Today’s what—Tuesday? Tuesday the seventeenth?”
Orson managed to nod.
“There you go,” said the guard. “It’s been three weeks at least.”
“I still don’t understand—”
“What are you here for, son? You one of them power freaks?”
“Not at all,” Orson answered, holding up both his hands. “I’m not sure what that means, to be honest. I’m here about the job.”
The guard pursed his lips. “And what job would that be?”
“Well—” He hesitated. “Your job, I guess.”
The guard scrutinized him for a full minute, which is a long time to look someone dead in the eye without saying a word. His cap, which was peaked and black and seemed slightly too tight, put Orson more in mind of a school-bus driver than an agent of the law.
“The night shift, I’m thinking,” the guard said finally.
“The night shift,” Orson said. “Sure.”
“I work days.”
“Okay.” Orson nodded. “Do you think—”
“They’re not seeing people at present. Later on, maybe.”
“How much later?”
The guard stared at him blankly.
“I’m sorry, but I was given to understand—”
“I can’t let you in at this time,” the guard said, not unkindly. “You can wait on that chair over there.”
Orson followed his gaze to a low wooden stool, the kind shoeshine boys sat on, propped against the chain-link fence. “Okay, then,” he said.
“Okay, then,” said the guard.
“What’s a lost time accident?”
The guard nodded shrewdly. “Best to ask them inside.”
“Fair enough,” said Orson. He stood still for a moment, then leaned sideways and peered through the gate.
“Go ahead and try it, if you’re tempted. Keep one thing in mind, though—I take my work seriously.”
“What?” said Orson. “No, no! I wasn’t thinking—”
“And I’m just the first guard. There’s others inside, and they’re not as sweet-natured as I am.”
“I had no intention—”
“This here is Hudson Gate. The next gate is Compound; the third one’s Facility. I may not look like much, but you should see the guy at Compound.” The guard shook his head. “The guy at Facility even scares me.”
Orson sat down on the little stool.
“Now you’re using your bean,” said the guard.
* * *
Over the next several hours, watching the sun decline behind the station’s soot-streaked ramparts, Orson came nearer to grasping the concept of infinity than he ever had before. To increase time’s velocity, he told the guard what little he knew of his family’s past, from his grandfather’s discovery in Znojmo to his father’s escape from Vienna. He hoped to get the guard to reciprocate, perhaps even to divulge the secrets of the Hudson/Gold Power Generating Station, or at least of its cryptic marquee; but his hope was in vain. The guard listened to his stories willingly—appreciatively, even—but he met each question about the station with a noncommital smile.
My father began to imagine himself sitting propped against that chain-link fence for the remainder of his extension into the fourth dimension, fashioning a life for himself with only the guard and the river for company. He saw himself growing progressively slacker and more hunched as his body conformed to the stool, waiting for word from the station that never arrived. After fifty-odd years he’d simply wither away to nothing; before he expired, however, he’d beckon to the guard, who would kneel down to receive his dying words. How can it be, he would gasp, that in the half century I’ve spent sitting next to this gate, no one else has ever tried to enter?
He was in the middle of deciding what the answer might be when the guard stepped to the gate and waved him in. To his disappointment, the interview took place in a Quonset hut a few yards inside the fence, not within the facility proper. It consisted of exactly six questions, the last of which was whether he’d ever done time. Before he’d even gotten his bearings, he was back at the guardhouse with a brown paper bundle in his hands. He hadn’t been told what the bundle contained, but he was guessing a uniform, a flashlight, and a cap that would make him look more like a school-bus driver than an agent of the law.
“Welcome to the Hudson/Gold Power Generating Station,” the guard told him gravely, packing his personal effects into a Chiquita banana crate that he’d been using as a footstool. “I trust you’ll take your work here seriously.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the next guardhouse in. Can’t have two bugs in one jar.”
“But you’re here in the daytime,” said Orson. “I’ll be working nights.”
“Can’t have two bugs in one jar,” the guard repeated, as though Orson were forgetting his manners.
“Two bugs,” Orson mumbled. “Okay.”
“Did you find out about the lost time accidents?”
To his shock Orson realized he’d forgotten to ask. “I thought I might hold off for a while,” he replied. “Until I get my bearings.”
“Fair enough. When you figure it out, be sure to let me know.”
Orson squinted at him. “You mean you don’t know, either?”
“It doesn’t seem to mean much,” said the guard. “Just a fancy way of saying the system’s conked out. The house of cards falls down on them every once in a while, and the management needs a term for that—a technical term—to make it sound more like an act of God. It’s nothing more than an excuse, if you ask me.”
Orson went quiet for a moment. “An excuse?”
Monday, 09:05 EST
I searched the tunnels all day, Mrs. Haven, with nothing to show for it by sundown but a cramp. It’s never occurred to me how easy it would be to hide an object—any object, even a human being—in the coils and convolutions of the Archive. Who’s to say the chambers I’ve discovered are the only ones here? I have only the blurriest sense of where one room ends and the next one begins, after all. I’m using decades-old memories to navigate by.
Sensing the next sleep cycle approaching, I began yanking objects out of the walls at random, hoping to uncover hidden chutes and galleries; instead I had to dig myself out from under landslides of VHS cassettes and take-out trays and Sharper Image catalogs. As exhaustion set in, I found myself asking a question I’d never thought to ask before: What if these grottoes and trenches came about not by accident, as a by-product of my aunts’ dementia, but as part of some larger design?
This idea had just hit—I was lying on the kitchen floor at the t
ime, massaging a crick in my neck—when a sound carried in from the Archive. It was the real thing, Mrs. Haven, not a subsonic hum or a liminal whir or the grannyish complaining of my bowels: a series of knocks, as if someone were testing a wall or a door—or possibly even the floor—for points of entry. It seemed whole rooms away, but these walls swallow sound, as I’ve mentioned before. It might almost have been close enough to touch.
I dropped onto my belly like the cockroach I’m becoming and scrabbled slowly forward, pausing every few feet to make sure the sound hadn’t stopped. It was coming from somewhere to my right, I was certain of that, but pinpointing it was maddeningly tricky. When at last I reached the spot where the knocking was sharpest, I attacked the wall in such a frenzy that the ceiling should have fallen on my head. The detritus was packed more haphazardly there, like a spot of slightly mealier decay in an already badly rotten set of teeth, and in no time I’d exposed a narrow door. Its knob made a crack when I turned it, as though it had been painted shut from the inside, and the knocking grew brighter. It was coming from a radiator pipe—that was obvious now. The door gave a pop, like the report of an air gun, and I toppled in.
I found myself in a dust-choked recess, barely wider than my spread arms, the bulk of which was taken up by an enormous bed. There was no space to spare between the bed and the walls, not even the width of a finger: it must have been brought into the room in sections and assembled inside, like a ship in a bottle. An entire family—grandparents, parents, grandchildren and all—could have passed the night in it without discomfort. The knocking was coming from a heating pipe beside it, just as I’d guessed.
How to explain what happened next, Mrs. Haven? The urge overtook me, filthy though that great bed was, to climb over the footboard and hide under its covers. I’d never encountered so totemic an object, Tolliver-wise: I imagined my elders sleeping between those varnished bedboards—all the heroes and the villians of this history of mine, from Enzie to Kaspar to Ottokar himself—and felt a genealogical ache to join them there. However this monstrous object had come to be shoehorned into that cramped and airless chamber, it had traveled across a vast expanse of time and space to do so. It was possible that generations of my forefathers had been born in that bed, and even likelier that some of them had died in it. But in spite of this thought—or because of it, maybe—I wanted to wrap myself up in those sheets.