The Lost Time Accidents

by John Wray

  “I’m coming with you, Walter,” you announced.

  Ecstatic as I was, Mrs. Haven, it never crossed my mind to ask you why.

  Monday, 09:05 EST

  I woke up in this chair with my fists on the floor and my shirt damp with drool, too groggy to move, and enjoyed a brief interlude of thick-brained thoughtlessness before I remembered what I’d found in my aunts’ bed. I lurched to my feet, expecting to see the Timekeeper behind me; I had no idea when our encounter had ended, or how I’d found my way back, or why on earth I’d let him get away. But I’ve been a coward since birth, Mrs. Haven: spooked by my own shadow, retiring and skittish, forever a half step too late. You understood this from the start—I know that now. I must have been so easy to deceive.

  I took up my time-honored position at the card table and thanked C*F*P for it, glancing over my shoulder now and again, just to make sure. My dim little nook with its warped dome of trash had never looked so comfortable and safe. I sat quietly for what seemed like a significant amount of Wt, waiting for my fingers to stop shaking. Then I collected my wits and went to work on the chapters you’ve just finished reading, exactly as if I were still alone.

  Already it seemed impossible that I’d seen what I’d seen—that I’d spoken with Waldemar, to say nothing of knocking him down; but my sense memories of that cramped, twilit room and of what had taken place there were as vivid as any since my exile here began. The explanations for what I was experiencing had been reduced, as far as I could reckon, to two. Either (1) I was just as divorced from consensus reality as my great-uncle had always been reputed to be, or (2) consensus reality (along with chronology) was a hoax; in other words, Waldemar had been right all along. But why take shelter in the past tense as I write this? There’s no safety in that. Either both of us are insane, Mrs. Haven, or neither of us are. And in either case I’m bound to him forever.

  He was gone when I made my way back to the bedroom—somehow I’d known he’d be gone—but he’d left behind a note for me to find. I couldn’t help noticing that even our handwriting has features in common: both of us are left-handed, our letters curve rightward, and we share what Orson liked to call the “Tolliver twitch.”

  Nefflein!

  First you will pardon my English. I’ve had Leisure, in my Ramblings, to have practice with my Spelling, but it remains the Language of my Schooling-days. You didn’t know we had English, your opa and I? Our father decided. Those were Schools in those times, let me tell you! Remarkable schools. Then Kaspar for some reason switched to Czech.

  It strikes me as desirable that you regard me as Human—“als ein Mensch”—so that you may regard Yourself likewise. A Human, Nefflein, with all the customary human Frailties. Perhaps this is a Thing that I can teach you.

  It’s an Accident that brought us here, both of us, to these x/y/z/T coordinates—you won’t believe this, I think. But this simply proves how Much you have to learn. There are only Accidents, after all, or Happenstances: only *C*, in other words—no *F* or *P*. But it’s just as true to say that no such thing as Happenstance exists, since it can never exist by itself. The Word only has a meaning when opposed to Something else. Don’t you agree? Not unlike that playing Card of yours—the “Sküs.”

  I’ve been leafing through your History, of course. How could I resist? The tone, I think, is a Success—not too frumpy, not too certain of itself—but I have a few minor corrections. I’ve written up a List, Nefflein, and trust you will have no objections. I find it helps to make the Time go by.

  ERRATA

  pg 29—The Apartment house on Mondscheingasse may currently be painted a “brilliant yellow,” but in 1905, if Memory serves, its color was a ghastly jaundiced Mauve.

  pg 29—I was not in the Habit of cleaning between the slats in the floor of our Apartment with “a fork expressly altered for that purpose.” I made use of a sharpened graphite Pencil.

  pg 32—I should like to state, for the Historical Record, that I was never a Patron of the Café Jandek. Bilch, the Source of my Brother’s information, was well known as a Gossip and a Thief.

  pg 68—I’ve left this Erratum for last, both in deference to Chronological Order (ho! ho!) and to give it the Pride of Place that it deserves. In the second Paragraph, you write (very fetchingly):

  “She (Sonja Silbermann) rose from the bench and walked straight to her front door without looking back. It was slightly ajar, just as she’d left it, and she slipped inside and pushed it shut behind her. Waldemar made no move to follow.”

  I quite enjoyed your treatment of this Scene—the detail of the Chestnut Trees and the oilcloth-draped Bugatti in particular!—and have only two Objections worth recording. Silbermann’s sedan was a Citroën, not a Bugatti. And Sonja did, in fact, accompany me home on the Evening in question. I could never have left the Chronosphere without her.

  XX

  MY FATHER DISCUSSED his second homecoming with me exactly once, after a relentless campaign of emotional blackmail on my part, and even then—more than thirty years post-factum—he gave me no more than a few stale crumbs. He got his jollies playing the grand old man of letters in his later years, and there were certain episodes of his personal history that he trundled out for anyone who’d listen, gumming them over like the stem of his god-awful pipe; but his return to Buffalo was not among them.

  The reason for his reticence, Mrs. Haven, most likely isn’t what you think. He felt no regret at putting Manhattan behind him, and even less at breaking his self-important teenage oath to turn his back on his hometown forever; he was the first to acknowledge, in later years, that the move had brought him luck and happiness. The source of his silence was simpler than that. For the first time since he’d struck out on his own—the first time in what he thought of as the years of his maturity—he’d made a decision without understanding why.

  Enzie and Genny had manipulated him—he knew that, of course. But he went along willingly, even eagerly, as though his sisters’ scheme had been his own idea. His desire for self-determination seemed to have abandoned him since his illness: where he’d once been defiant, he now felt conciliatory, at times even meek. In logistical terms the switch happened cleanly, with decorous precision, like castling in a friendly game of chess. Warranted Tolliver Timepieces, Inc., still required the occasional presence of a warranted Tolliver, if only for the sake of appearances; and 308 Pine Ridge Road was vacant and at his disposal. He could finish his book there, in the cubby that had incubated his earliest stories, and the uneasiness he’d no doubt feel at finding himself back where he’d started—just as Ewa Ruszczyk had predicted in the Odd Fellows Hall—would make him work faster and better. He’d be lonely, of course, but no more so than he’d been in Spanish Harlem. His solitude would help to keep him focused. He was regressing, he knew, but regression has one great advantage: the advantage of precedent. Whatever else it might bring, he reasoned, life in Buffalo wouldn’t hold much in the way of surprises.

  On this last point, however, Orson’s sisters had a few trumps left to throw.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, my father climbed the steps of 308 Pine Ridge Road in an advanced state of dishevelment, dragging his battered yellow steamer trunk behind him. His shirt was misbuttoned and his face was unshaven and his hair stood out straight in the back, where his headrest on the train had ionized it. He’d returned home for one reason only, after all—to get his book finished—and his seediness was both a reminder and a caution: a message to neighbors and friends (if he had any left) to leave him in peace. Like untold writers before him—science fiction writers, especially—he’d begun to fancy himself a lone mystic, a hermit of sorts, and Pine Ridge Road was now his hermitage. It was just as possible to be a mystic in the suburbs, after all, as on some mountain in the wilderness. Retreat was the main thing: withdrawal from the struggle. What mattered was that you were left alone.

  Orson unlocked the door in a rush, buzzing with anticipation, and pushed it gently open with his foot. Dust revolved in the
air—the lazy, protozoan dust of wooden houses—and the afternoon sun turned the foyer the color of beer. It had been more than a decade, to the best of his reckoning, since he’d had that house completely to himself. He estimated the hour at four o’clock—half past at the most—and went to check the mantel clock, but found it stopped at 08:27 EST. An omen of some kind, no question about it, but for the moment its meaning escaped him.

  He set his trunk down at the foot of the stairs and stood, beguiled and delighted, listening to the house shift and settle around him. If a single object had been added or removed since he’d left for New York, the change was too minute for him to see. Nine years had come and gone without a trace. There was something deliciously morbid in that: something unnatural, even perverse. I could never have predicted this, he thought. Not this changelessness.

  “Nine years,” Orson said to the stillness. “Nine years and no time at all.”

  He took off his peacoat and hung it on the mahogany head of the banister, whose burnished roundness made him think—as it had when he was small—of an old man’s bald crown. He slipped out of his loafers, then out of his socks. His feet stank agreeably. He crossed the frayed Persian carpet, feeling its coarseness against his instep, and laid his palm against the kitchen door. He felt the urge to strip completely—a thing he’d never once done in those rooms—and saw no earthly reason to resist it. Starting tomorrow I’ll write naked, he said to himself. That ought to keep the brush salesmen away.

  The rumbling of his stomach brought him back into the present. There was bound to be food of some kind in the kitchen: canned corn or beets or string beans, maybe even a jar of preserved eggs. They were a family of picklers, after all. He pulled up his shirtfront and patted his belly and opened the door with his knee. A girl in a snow-white dashiki was eating a sandwich at the kitchen counter.

  “Shalom,” said the girl.

  “Jesus Christ!” said my father.

  “As you prefer,” she replied.

  He stood frozen in en garde position, half upright, half crouching, his right hand braced against the door behind him. The girl had the palest face he’d ever seen—a genteel, almost medieval shade of ivory—framed by distinctly Continental-looking glasses. Everything about her was so wildly implausible that the unlikelihood of her presence in his childhood kitchen slipped his mind completely.

  “This is my house,” he said finally.

  “You must be Orson, then! Such a relief.” She spoke with an accent, a thick one, but he could take in only one thing at a time. Her hair was black and thick and spherical, a topiary cropped into the shape of a planet. He’d never seen curls that curly outside of a Little Orphan Annie comic strip.

  “I wasn’t expecting anybody,” said Orson. “To be here, I mean.”

  “I can see that,” she said, glancing down at his feet. From anyone else this might have seemed teasing, even flirtatious, but not from this girl. She was tracking him as closely as a sniper.

  He tucked his shirttails back into his jeans. “What’s your name? I wasn’t informed—”

  “Ursula.” Her accent softened slightly. “I’m in the second bedroom past the stairs.”

  “Do you mind if I sit down, Ursula? I feel a bit woozy.”

  “Please.”

  “My sisters didn’t tell me you were here, you understand. In this house. I wasn’t expecting anybody.”

  “You’ve said that already.”

  He hesitated. “Were you expecting anybody?”

  “Oh, yes. They told me at the start.”

  Orson rested his elbows on the counter and attempted to think. “When was this, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “When was what?”

  “When—when exactly—did my sisters let you know that I’d be coming?”

  She pulled one of her geometrically precise curls into her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. “The morning I got here,” she said. “Six weeks ago today.”

  * * *

  Ursula was not a projection of my father’s libido, or a comic-strip character, or a pleasure android from the distant future. She was an exchange student from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (which, as C*F*P would have it, had been cofounded by the Patent Clerk a few decades earlier) working on her Ph.D. in chemistry—and on her English—at the State University of New York at Buffalo. It was a mystery to Orson how she’d come to Cheektowaga, of all places, and the idea of Enzie and Genny taking in boarders, Israeli or otherwise, was so contrary to his conception of his sisters that his conscious mind refused to entertain it. But it didn’t much matter, Mrs. Haven, by what back alley of circumstance she’d arrived at his house. As long as Ursula continued to occupy the second bedroom past the stairs, he had no further questions for the court.

  She turned out to be older than she looked, to his considerable relief; and she seemed to accept his attentions as a matter of course, which he wasn’t quite sure how to feel about. Her girlish gravitas at their first meeting had not been a form of politeness—she was to remain, for the entirety of their shared duration, the most poker-faced woman he knew. In spite of Orson’s twenty-six years, moreover, it was clear that any awkwardness would be coming from his side of the counter, not hers. Within a week he knew the details of her doomed love affair with a young Mossad operative, and of its sequel with a middle-aged Tel Aviv dentist; he knew what she would and wouldn’t do in bed well in advance of their first kiss (which was unexpectedly helpful, like taking a sample test before the true exam). Science fiction interested her—even, in a sense, excited her—which surprised him most of all: he’d resigned himself to the idea that Ewa Ruszczyk was the only girl this side of Alpha Centauri who’d ever read his work.

  True to Tolliver tradition, it was Ursula, not Orson, who finally brought the beaker to a boil. The year was 1969, after all, not 1904, and my father’s shyness bordered on effrontery. Although he wrote compulsively and virtuosically about fornication, Mrs. Haven—or perhaps for precisely that reason—he’d done precious little himself. Ursula seized him by the scruff of the neck, as if he were a kitten; there was something feral about her in that moment, and Orson’s first thought was that she meant to tear his throat out with her teeth. The body that had appeared so childlike seemed another body altogether when he held it in his hands, and by the time she was naked (which was not too long after) the last traces of girlishness had vanished. She left her clothes on the floor of the kitchen—he himself, laughably, was still fully dressed—and led him through the swinging door into the parlor. The goose bumps on her forearms and on her meaty blue-white haunches made him feel oddly top-heavy, and he followed her with his arms outstretched, to catch himself if he should start to fall.

  A fire was burning in the parlor grate. When had that happened? He stared into the flames for what seemed a great while, struggling to recapture his calm. She undressed him as he stood there, taking her time about it, efficient and completely at her ease. He cursed himself for a coward and a fool. When she’d finished he took stock of himself, prepared for the worst, and found himself heroically aroused.

  “There now,” Ursula purred. She was squatting in front of him, appraising him frankly, her left hand resting lightly on his hip. “There now, Mr. Tolliver. Let’s see if you can guess what happens next.”

  “I’ve got a general idea,” said Orson. “I write smut for a living, remember.”

  “This isn’t DarkEncounters, Mr. Tolliver. I want to do the thing, not fantasize about it.”

  “For your information, I take pride in the fact that my stories are accurate, from a technical standpoint, down to the slightest—”

  “Shh,” she told him, bending slightly forward. “No excuses.”

  * * *

  It was only afterward, when they were lying together in front of the inexplicable sui generis fire—Ursula denied having started it, and why on earth should she do that?—that he realized how much of her history she’d been keeping to herself. She’d been born in Barkai, on a bona fide kibbutz; her
mother had taken her to Vienna at age three to meet her goyishe father, and they’d lived there for the next eleven years. Her father had left Austria long before, they discovered, and no one could say where he was. At first they’d stayed on in hope of word from him, then because they couldn’t afford the passage back; then because her mother, still a beauty, had remarried. Ursula was happy in Vienna, and too young to mind so much about her father, but her mother grew pinched and silent and peculiar. The second husband was a drinker, and the marriage ended badly. Soon after that, they moved to Tel Aviv.

  “What happened next?” said Orson.

  “America happened,” she said, smiling strangely. “You happened.”

  They lay with their legs entangled, staring dumbly at the fire.

  “Sometimes I think it might be better to have less family,” said Orson, “than to have too much.”

  “You’re thinking of your sisters, I suppose.”

  “What do you think of them?”

  She considered his question. “They’re verdreht, I think, but they mean well. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m worried about them, to tell you the truth. They’ve always been—verdreht, like you say, but over the past few years—since I went away, I mean, to New York City—”

  “Yes?”

  “They’ve become more than that.” He let out a breath. “Insanity runs in my family.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “No babies for us, then!” said Orson, attempting a joke.

  Ursula didn’t laugh.

  “About my sisters—”

  “Yes?”

  He frowned into the fire. “I don’t know how to put this.”

  “Just say it.”

  “They think that they can see into the future.”

  Ursula turned to face him then, resting one of her small, thick-nippled breasts against his arm. “They can see into the future,” she said matter-of-factly. “Haven’t you noticed that yet?”