The Lost Time Accidents

by John Wray

  “You don’t have to be quiet,” came a voice. “I’m already awake.”

  A bunched, loglike mass near the headboard started twitching at this, like a sackful of mice. You’d think I’d be innoculated against surprise by this point, Mrs. Haven, but what I was seeing nearly dropped me to the floor. I clutched at the pipe to keep from falling over: it was scalding, and I snatched my hand back with a cry. But the pain passed at once, was flushed clear of my brain, because the thing under the covers had sat up.

  “It’s you, of course,” I murmured. “Who else could it possibly be?”

  I can’t explain how I knew that the thing on the bed was the man I’d been named for—Waldemar Toula, the Black Timekeeper of Äschenwald-Czas—but I was sure even before I’d seen its face. It had to be him, Mrs. Haven. And therefore it was.

  “I had an eyeglass somewhere,” he said, shivering slightly. He spoke in a damp, droning hiss, like steam issuing out of a pipe.

  “A what?”

  “Not an eyeglass—what’s the word—what’s the blessed word for it in English?”

  “A monocle,” I said, as though it were the most ordinary question in the world.

  Already my mind was recovering its equilibrium, finding a place for this latest impossibility in the same walk-in freezer where the others were kept. I’ve had practice integrating the unintegratable by now, after all. I felt no need to question the reality of what I was seeing.

  “You can’t do anything about this radiator, can you?” he said, letting the coverlet slip from his shoulders. “It’s banging loud enough to wake the dead.”

  Deliberately, quietly, my great-uncle came into focus. His face composed itself out of a field of charged mnemonic particles: I’m aware how this must sound, Mrs. Haven, but I don’t know how else to describe it. His body caught the light and held it strangely, as if he’d been assembled out of dust. He was dressed in a chalk-stripe suit of banker’s blue, but his jacket and his tie were badly creased, and his hair had the chopped, formless look of a military buzz cut gone to seed. He was smaller than he looked in photographs. I hadn’t expected his wheat-paste complexion, either, or the Parkinson’s-like trembling of his hands. He looked less like a fugitive from justice, all things considered, than a drunk who’d spent the night under a bush. This wasn’t the dapper Goering look-alike of 1938, or the headstrong physics prodigy of the first years of the century—it was the ailing, ragged indigent of Budapest during the famine, superimposed over faded snapshots of my father in his youth, and perhaps some spectral iteration of myself.

  “I want to know what’s happened to me,” I said. “I want to know who brought me here. And I want to know why.”

  Waldemar gazed past me at a soot mark on the ceiling. His pupils had an oily, milky cast.

  “You have me at a disadvantage,” he said finally. “My eyesight is poor and my memory’s worse. I don’t recall that we’ve been introduced.”

  If not for his delivery, Mrs. Haven, I might have believed him. But he spoke smoothly and mechanically—glibly, even—like a ventriloquist’s marionette.

  “I asked you a question,” I said, giving the footboard a kick.

  He nodded placidly. “Can I trouble you for a glass of water?”

  “How long have you been lying in this bed?”

  A look of relief crossed his face. “That I can tell you exactly. I’ve been counting the knocks, you see, to make the time go by.” He arched his back and heaved a drawn-out sigh. “I’d just made it to three hundred and eight when you arrived. Now I’ll have to start again from the beginning.”

  I thought for a moment. “So you’ve just gotten here.”

  “That’s true, I suppose.”

  “Where were you hiding before?”

  “Before—?”

  “That’s right, Uncle. Back when you were creeping around in the Archive, leaving clever little clues for me to find. Or can’t you remember that, either?”

  He smiled up at me now: a perfect idiot’s smile, almost flirtatious. “As the soul grows toward eternal life, Nefflein, it remembers less and less.”

  “Don’t you dare quote my great-grandfather’s notes to me.”

  He let out a bright, soggy snuffle at that—midway between a laugh and a snort of contempt. “Who has more right to quote a father than his son?”

  “You have no rights at all. Not with me.”

  “Don’t go putting on airs. We’re Familie, my boy. You ought to treat your flesh and blood with more respect.”

  A wave of sickness hit me when I heard those words, Mrs. Haven: a decade’s worth of shame and indignation, breaking free of the containing walls I’d built. I thought back to the day I’d first learned of my namesake’s existence, at an age when I still thought of my name—and of my family—as a thing to take pride in. I remembered the thrill that I’d felt, as a child, on those rare occasions when the Timekeeper was mentioned. I remembered the moment I’d finally grasped what he’d done.

  “What is it, Nefflein? You look a bit green at the gills.”

  I stood at the foot of the bed, fighting to maintain my balance, opening and closing my fists. “Ridiculous as it might sound,” I said, “I’ve imagined what would happen if we met.”

  “That’s not ridiculous in the slightest. Take a look—here the two of us are!”

  “That’s right, Uncle. Here we are, just as I pictured it.” I took in a breath. “And I told myself—I made a vow to myself—that if this day ever came, I’d carry out your sentence.”

  “What sentence would that be?”

  “The sentence of death.”

  His milky eyes widened. “Death, little Waldemar! Whatever for?”

  “For the crimes—” The blood roared in my ears. “For the crimes you committed at the Äschenwald camp.”

  “Ach!—for that. I thought perhaps for figuring out about the Accidents.” He snuffled again. “No one else could, you know.” He shook his head. “Certainly not your grandfather, that Yid-loving ass.”

  A surge of electricity shot through me as my fist met his jaw—the kind of prickling chill ghost hunters describe in their memoirs—and he fell backward with a satisfying thump. I felt grateful to him then, as I watched him scrambling to right himself: he was playing his part obligingly and well. But then something shifted, Mrs. Haven. Things fell out of proportion. The hissing built to a shriek as he drew himself upward: the bedsheets rose behind him like a jellyfish, billowing up until they darkened half the room. I saw him now as Marta Svoboda had seen him, as Sonja had seen him, as the prisoners at Äschenwald had seen him, and I felt the same unreasoning dread they must have felt. He took hold of me and bent me back until my shoulders touched the floor. His blank gray features overwhelmed my sight.

  “You should thank me,” he said. “Not everybody has your opportunities.”

  “Thank you? What do you mean?”

  “Who wouldn’t want to take his forefathers to task for their sins?” He wrapped himself around me like a shroud. “Who wouldn’t like a chance at playing judge and jury?”

  “If I execute you, Uncle, it won’t be for my own sake. It will be to take you out of circulation—to take you out of contention—so you can’t ever—”

  “Can’t ever what? Continue in this duration, living proof that the chronoverse can be manipulated—that time travel is possible? Who will benefit from this settling of accounts, Nefflein, aside from you yourself?”

  Silence fell for a moment. His face buzzed and flickered.

  “That won’t work on me, Uncle,” I said through clenched teeth. “No end can justify the means you used at Czas.”

  He was back in bed now, frail and docile again. But there was a new light in his clouded eyes, or so it seemed to me. “You’re a Toula,” he whispered. “Don’t try to deny it.”

  “That means nothing,” I hissed back. My voice was sounding more like his with every word I spoke. “Toula’s a name, that’s all—an empty noise, like Oppenheimer or Goering or Haven. Don�
�t treat it like some sort of magic spell.”

  He laughed and swung his legs over the footboard. “Let me ask you this, Nefflein. Can you be sure—can you be absolutely certain—that you’d have turned down the chance I was offered in that godforsaken camp? If you knew you were right, that you’d cracked the great riddle, that you stood on the cusp of true and tangible proof that the gates of chronology—of mortality itself—were close at hand and waiting to be forced? There was no other way, I can promise you that. Extremes had to be gone to: blood sacrifice made. There was no way short of death to force a breach.”

  I fell back from him dizzily, shaking my head. “That’s not science, Uncle. That’s witchcraft.”

  “Synonyms, Nefflein.” His voice had gone rapt. “Two words for approaching the nexus of things.”

  “I’d never have done what you did in that camp. I’d have found some way out. I’d have cut myself free—”

  “What was that?” He took a dragging step toward me, his hand to his ear, leering sightlessly into the dark. “I can barely hear you, little Waldy. You’ll have to speak up.”

  “Why are you here?” I stammered. “How in God’s name did you end up in this place?”

  To my surprise this question stopped him cold. He looked confused for an instant, blinking down at the floor.

  “I don’t know,” he said softly. “An accident of some sort. I can’t seem to recall.”

  I watched his face for a time. I saw no cunning there.

  “I can’t either,” I told him.

  He said nothing to that. I propped myself against the wall between the doorway and the bed and waited for my body to recover. The horror of my situation was clear to me now: more convincing by far than the man on the bed, or the room we were in, or the labyrinth of trash to every side. The Timekeeper kept himself still, his dead eyes wide open, staring sadly past me into empty space.

  XIX

  LATER THAT NIGHT, in his empty apartment at the corner of 109th and Fifth Avenue (in a tenement house with the unlikely name of the General Lee), Orson laid out the cards, all fifty-four of them, in a crescent on the floor beside his desk. The power was out, a not-uncommon state of affairs in Harlem, and the six tallow candles he’d lit and stuck into bottles of Yuengling Draft bathed the scene in an appropriately pre-Enlightenment glow. He’d taken out a book from the library that he had no intention of returning—Tarock für Trotteln, by Yitzak W. Yitzak—and he read the introduction and first chapter before so much as glancing at the cards. The rules were still opaque to him, as much due to Herr Yitzak’s schnapps-addled prose as to anything else; but the history of the game held him entranced.

  As its name implied, the deck was derived from the tarot, which had infiltrated Europe from Egypt in the late Rennaissance. The origin of the Sküs, however—the joker-like card that had first caught my father’s attention—was a mystery. No such card existed in the Arab tradition, or in any other deck of the ancient world. The game of tarock predated the use of the cards for occult purposes by three centuries, though certain cards—the Sküs among them—were rumored to have been made use of by alchemists (no one quite knew how) to gain access to the wisdom of past ages. The fool on the Sküs had taken many forms over the centuries, from bearskin-sporting hobo to lute-strumming courtier to urchin to dwarf; the illustration on Orson’s deck, however, was the only one to display that curious, Escher-like circularity.

  He brought the book nearer to the light and kept reading, concentrating on the fool card now. In tarock, the Sküs (L’excuse in French) is the deck’s highest trump, but it has no rank or value of its own. Alone among the trumps, L’excuse has no number: its power emerges only in challenge to another card. Orson began to understand its appeal for him now, since he often felt that way about himself.

  He took the card from the floor and regarded it fondly. Like the Sküs, he was a born contrarian, and—like the fool on the card, like madmen and jesters and clowns throughout the ages—the nonsense he spouted could serve, if used artfully, as a vessel for ideas that couldn’t otherwise be spoken. He thought of Enzian at the university, and of Waldemar before her, and of what little he understood about his “mad” grandfather’s work. “The fool,” he muttered to himself, staring down at the card, “ought to be on our family crest.”

  What Orson didn’t realize—not on that first evening; not yet—was that he would be the one to put it there.

  * * *

  The telephone rang at Pine Ridge Road a few days later, and Genny went to answer it, thinking it must be someone from Warranted Tolliver Timepieces. It was the first time that the phone had rung all week.

  “I’m working on something,” said the caller before she could speak.

  “Peanut! Is that you? Enzie and I were just saying—both of us—how nice it would be to hear from you. It’s not as though we can call you up, you know.”

  “I know that, Genny. I’ll get a telephone soon. Then you can call me whenever you want.”

  “Well! We’d certainly appreciate that.” She hummed to herself for a moment in the odd, nervous way she had when she was pleased. “You’re working on a story, did you say?”

  “I’m working on a novel.”

  “A novel! My goodness, Peanut! What about?”

  “It’s about time, believe it or not. A variation on what Ouspensky calls ‘Möbius time’ in The Hydra-Headed Hourglass. The basic idea is that time, which seems to be running straight ahead from any given point—just as the earth seems flat, from any one perspective—might in fact be ‘feeding back’ into itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail. If that snake were long enough—it would have to be really gigantic, of course—it might appear straight, because the curve wouldn’t be visible, you see? Like a Möbius strip, that has either one side or two, depending on how you choose to think about it. It’s chronologic time considered as a kind of sleight-of-hand trick, really. I got the idea from a deck—”

  “Where are you calling from, Peanut? You sound fuzzy.”

  Orson cleared his throat. “From a pay phone.”

  “You really must get a line of your own. Is it cold where you are?”

  “Not as cold as in Buffalo.”

  “It’s important to eat, you know, when it gets cold. You need calories to help you keep warm. Have you been taking the vitamin caplets I sent?”

  An awkward pause ensued.

  “Genny, can I talk to Enzie now?”

  “Of course you can, Peanut! How silly of me! I’ll go get her.”

  But Enzian, as usual, turned out to be indisposed.

  * * *

  To the end of his days, my father viewed The Excuse as his proudest achievement, and it was a milestone for him without question: both his first published novel and his last attempt to keep within the bounds of decency. He wrote the first eleven chapters in a trance, narcotized by the story he was spinning, by the radical idea that lay hidden behind it, and by his fervent belief that the fruits of his labor would free him of the family curse forever. The Excuse was no antiseptic exercise, no half-baked scientific treatise smeared with narrative frosting, as the bulk of his fiction had been. It was no more and no less, Mrs. Haven, than a reckoning—in extravagant, ham-fisted, desperate terms—with the Syndrome itself.

  Ozymandias Hume, the book’s protagonist, is the scion of an haute-bourgeoisie family whose fortune was made in the licorice trade, but whose clandestine passion—passed from generation to generation, like a weakness for drink—is the use of the tarock deck to tell the future. Virtually any game can be used to foretell events, he believes, if it’s played in reverse, or counterchronologically; but the game of tarock is especially well suited, on account of being intended to run counterclockwise, and of displaying the follies of mankind so bluntly on its picture cards. (Ozymandias’s grandfather made this discovery a half century earlier, we’re told in a flashback, during a postcoital game with his clandestine lover, the chief of police of Merthyr Tydfil, in Wales. As he threw down his trump—L’excuse
over La lune—a vista of living, dancing symbols rose before him, and he saw himself lying dead in the street, with the chief of police standing over his body, smoking pistol in hand. Horrified, he ended their affair on the spot and rushed home to his wife. His lover shot him the next time he left the house.)

  Before this nameless grandfather’s violent end, the secret of the cards was passed down to his daughters, Cassandra and Yrsyla Hume. The sisters, both of whom went on to master what they simply called “the Game,” used their father’s discovery to opposite ends. Yrsyla, the elder, became embroiled in Welsh separatist politics, while Cassandra, the more practical of the two, made a nice little pile as a gambler, using each hand she played to predict its own outcome. Cassandra eventually bought herself a ranch in Australia, and bore her illiterate, Adonis-like foreman a series of sons; after the disaster of the Great War and the collapse of the Cymru Fydd movement, Yrsyla disappeared without a trace.

  The Excuse opens grandiosely, in Australia’s Gibson Desert. Ozymandias, Cassandra’s youngest son, is coming into his maturity, surrounded by half-witted prospectors and drunken Aborigines and missionaries who regard all forms of recreation—even waltzing—as abominations in the sight of God. His parents are dead, but Ozymandias is carefully looked after by two elder brothers, Ralph and Gawain, neither of whom have inherited their mother’s gift. It’s assumed, given his talent, that he’ll take up the family mantle; Ozymandias, however, has ideas of his own. As he grows toward adulthood, he develops a passion for the ranching life: he dreams of moving deeper into sheep country, where the range is still free, and of making his name as a breeder. But the gift of clairvoyance, he soon discovers, has one potentially lethal catch. Once given, it has to be used.