by John Wray
“You’ve been expecting us for some time, I imagine,” Haven said.
“I’ll admit something to you,” said Orson. “I haven’t.”
“Ah!” said Haven, smiling good-naturedly, as if to show that he could take a joke. “So you deny that you have access to the future?”
“More strudel, Mr. Haven?” said Ursula, taking his plate.
“Thank you kindly, Mrs. Tolliver.” Haven dabbed at the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “Perhaps the time has come to state our business.”
Orson raised his eyebrows. Ursula focused her attention on the strudel. Haven radiated courtesy and calm.
“The Codex, Miss M., if you please.”
“The Codex,” the young woman echoed. A book was produced from a briefcase and set on the table.
“Ach, du Scheisse,” said Ursula under her breath.
“Since well before the three of us met,” Haven said, “my two, uh, colleagues and I have been fellow travelers. Like a great many other Americans, Mr. Tolliver, we’ve read your book and been affected by it.” He nodded to himself. “I say ‘affected,’ but a better descriptor might be ‘altered,’ or even ‘transformed.’”
“Reconfigured,” Johnson suggested. The woman mouthed a word that looked like reborn to Orson. His scalp started prickling again.
“We were affected by your book, Mr. Tolliver, as I’ve said. We intuited that it contained, uh, mysteries. We intuited this, and felt altered even by this as-yet-inchoate knowledge. But it wasn’t until the publication of the paperback edition, with its supplementary directives, that the way became clear.”
“Directives?” said Orson, shifting uneasily on the couch.
Haven opened the Codex to a crisply dog-eared page. “‘Science can offer you what no religion can,’” he read aloud. “‘Science does more than simply recount bygone miracles for credulous ears; science shows us its miracles, then explains them for us, and even, occasionally, brings new miracles about. Trust in science, dear reader—in empirical science—and you will live the existence that countless religions have promised: you will never walk alone. You will be part of a continuum of intelligence and rational thought that began with the first question man ever asked.’” He paused a moment. “Did you write those words, sir?”
“I may have,” Orson stammered, trying to dodge his wife’s triumphant stare. “But I think you kids—well, I think you might be placing undue emphasis—”
Haven waited, politely, for Orson to finish. When it became clear nothing more was forthcoming, he turned the page and kept reading.
“‘Science in the twentieth century—physics especially—has moved from the study of what we can see and judge with our five senses to things too vast and/or infinitesimal to perceive. This, in turn, has ushered in the most fascinating phase of scientific exploration in human history, one that challenges our commitment to science as never before. Common sense—on which we have always relied as our first defense against superstition—is no longer adequate. In fact, to see the world as the great minds of physics now see it, we, the scientific faithful, must be prepared to put our common sense aside.’”
“Now, right there,” Orson protested. “Right there, you see? You’ve got to be careful, you know, not to read too much into that. I’m not saying we should do away with common sense altogether, obviously.”
Haven squinted at him. “Obviously.”
“All right, then,” Orson muttered. “I just wanted to get that on the record.”
Johnson—who was taking down the conversation in what looked to be some form of shorthand—gave a squeak of assent. Haven picked up where he’d left off.
“‘Science hasn’t yet vanquished religion—not fully—but it will surely do so, given time. One day, perhaps very soon, a system will be developed: a system of applied philosophy (philosophy in the classic sense, meaning a passion for knowledge) that will distill the accomplishments of all human inquiry into the elixir that religion has repeatedly promised, but never achieved. If you must live by belief, in other words, believe in Science.’”
“I get it,” Orson said roughly (though he was enjoying the performance more than he was willing to let on). “You like the book. You agree with the afterword. No law against that, in this country at least. You’re all enlightened souls.” He glanced involuntarily at Ursula. “What I want to know is, what did you come to see me for? What’s your agenda, Mr. Haven? What have you got up your sleeve?”
“We mean to structure our lives according to the Codex’s principles,” Haven said. “To serve mankind as an example, by living an ethical, rational life.”
“It would be hard for me to argue with that, wouldn’t it?” Orson said, giving a tight little laugh. “That would mean disagreeing with myself!”
“We also plan to reestablish the antediluvian fraternal order of Philadelphia on a coral atoll off the coast of Hawaii,” the woman said. “We plan to live out all of our manifold iterations there, synchronously, so that we may finally experience death.”
“Tut, Miss Menügayan!” Haven said smoothly. “Let’s not burden our host with specifics.”
The silence that followed was highly subjective in nature. For Haven it was a tranquil intermezzo; for his colleagues, to judge by appearances, it was a breathless pause; for Ursula it was a span of blank bewilderment; for Orson it was the nightmarish silence of fate.
“How old are you?” he asked abruptly.
Haven smiled and ran a thumb across his downy upper lip. “In this iteration,” he said, “I’ve just turned twenty-six.”
“No offense, son, but you look about twelve.”
“I age at a reduced rate, Mr. Tolliver. I keep my metabolism at a minimum. I also try to keep out of the sun.”
Orson came to his senses and got to his feet. “I’m sorry, kids. What you say is certainly very stimulating, but I can’t join your society at the present time. Now if you’ll pardon—”
“Join us?” Haven said, breaking into a grin. The others were already laughing. “Join us, Mr. Tolliver? There’s no need for that. You’re the spiritual head of our entire movement.”
* * *
Orson stood in a kind of Greco-Roman squat for a while after his callers had left, replaying the conversation in his head; then he drifted back into the parlor and stared into space like a mongoloid, which was still an acceptable term at the start of the seventies. He reached for his meerschaum—he’d started smoking it the year before, as a publication day gift to himself—but set it down as soon as Haven came to mind. Gradually, grudgingly, the image of his personal evangelist withdrew, replaced by the recollection of what his wife had told him in the kitchen.
He glanced across the parlor at Ursula. She was sitting in his father’s old overstuffed chair, her posture characteristically perfect, her face a dappled field of light and shadow. He felt suddenly faint.
“I’m thinking about what you told me,” he said in a circumspect voice. “There’s a trick to understanding it, I’m sure. But right now it’s making me feel kind of funny.”
Ursula sighed. “There’s no trick to it, Orson.”
“There is a trick,” he said. “There’s got to be.” He studied her face. “It doesn’t seem to bother you at all.”
“I think it’s a wonderful thing to have happened.”
He shook his head slowly.
“Look here, Orson. You should have told me if this was a thing you were against—and you ought to have taken precautions. Enzie told me you were in favor of this, and I took her at her word.”
“That’s bullshit. You’ve never taken anybody at their word in your whole life.”
“Softly now, please.” Her English had gone subtly pidgin, the way it often did when she was angry. “Genny and I talked about this via telephone, and I did this with Enzie as well. I can’t believe one of them didn’t say so to you. Or maybe this is something you forgot.”
Orson took hold of the bridge of his nose and pinched it fiercely. “Something
I forgot?”
“Every idiot knows how to keep this from happening. You never once used a—”
“Hold it right there, Ursula. What have my sisters got to do with this? Was this something they planned?”
Ursula said nothing for a time. “You must know that I care about you, Orson.”
“Answer the goddamn question.”
“Your sisters have their reasons, always, for the little plans they make. I’m learning this myself. Why do you think they brought me to this place?”
Orson hesitated. “Because of school,” he said finally, though he knew, as he said it, that Enzie had cut all ties with the university years before. “Because of Enzie’s work, I mean. Out of a common interest in science.”
“I thought so, too,” Ursula said softly. “But I’ve revised my understanding.”
Orson said nothing for the time it took his dizziness to pass. She waited patiently for him to speak.
“There’s no escaping this family,” he murmured at last. “I thought that there was—I was sure that there was—the first time I left.” He looked at her. “I’ve learned my lesson now.”
“It’s about time, Mr. Tolliver.” She smiled. “Our due date is November seventeenth.”
XXI
“Good” or “bad” entrances, Kubler writes, are more than matters of position in a sequence. Every birth can be imagined as set into play on two distinct wheels of fortune: one governing the allotment of its temperament, the other ruling its entrance into the sequence. When a specific temperament interlocks with a favorable position, the fortunate individual can extract from the situation a wealth of previously unimagined consequences.
This achievement may be denied to other persons, as well as to the same person at a different time.
Though by no means the religious type, Ursula accepted her pregnancy (after due deliberation) as the will of the powers that be. My father’s take was somewhat more complex. For a long list of reasons, Orson had decided not to have children, not ever, and he was certain—as certain as he could be, without recalling a specific conversation—that Ursula had tacitly agreed. Among his reasons were: Ursula’s unfinished doctorate, global overpopulation, the small but persistent possibility of a thermonuclear strike by the Soviet Union, loss of sleep, crib death, his own questionable suitability for fatherhood, shit-sodden diapers, the educational crisis, the Vietnam War and childbirth-related changes to the morphology of the uterine wall. Ursula’s mother had once told her that time accelerated wildly for a mother once her baby was born; this idea had made her shiver, she’d once confessed to her husband, with a kind of voluptuous horror. Parenthood struck them both, Orson had always assumed, as an investment with a dubious return. What sane person could disagree with that?
* * *
I always find myself skipping the chapters of biographies that deal with the subject’s childhood—the dog bites, the rickets, the portentous aversion to breast milk—so I think I’ll spare posterity the bother. I came as a surprise to my parents, maybe even a shock, but they adjusted to my presence gracefully. I was considered “promising” in the standard sort of way, though I can’t recall why; I was loved, in the standard sort of way, at least by my doting, long-suffering mother. I liked to drink the vinegar in the pickle jar, I remember. I threw a ball like a girl. I made a landscape out of boogers on the wall beside my bed.
Orson loved me too, I believe, by his Orson-ish lights—but there wasn’t anything standard about it. Either he saw me, Mrs. Haven, or he didn’t. This seemed mostly to depend on how his writing was going, but it also had to do with something else: something grand and adult and hard to visualize, like the stock market or virgin birth or barometric pressure. On days when I was visible to him, he’d make up a story in which I was the conquering hero, or try to get me to throw a ball properly (which I hated), or drive me to the movies in his mustard-yellow Buick. On days when he didn’t, he’d walk past me—through me, if I wasn’t careful—as if I were a trick of the light.
Memory is a politician, Mrs. Haven, as every historian knows: a manipulative, pandering appeaser. Firsthand witness though I am, inaccuracies are creeping into this account. It’s likely, for example, that my father took me to the movies a handful of times at the most—I can’t remember more than one such trip, in fact, no matter how I try. But that solitary memory, from my last year of grade school, is vivid and well-lit and sharply in focus, as traumatic recollections tend to be.
The movie in question was Event Horizon, the third installment of the blockbuster Timestrider franchise. Orson had a knee-jerk aversion to Hollywood sci-fi, and a particular loathing for time-travel films; but my mother and I had joined forces this time, and we broke his resistance together. The “Kraut”—as Orson had taken to calling her—did it because my father had been in a nasty mood all week, and his bitching was driving her crazy; I did it because I needed a ride. It’s hard to say why Orson gave in, Mrs. Haven, but I do have a guess. He sensed an opportunity to rant.
Ranting was Orson’s preferred form of recreation for the whole of the eighties, and the Buick was his venue of choice. The satisfaction he took in watching his victim writhe in slack-jawed desperation, unable to escape without bodily harm, was the most compelling evidence I’d found (at that admittedly tender age) for the existence of natural evil. “Current events” set him off most dependably, but he could work up a respectable head of steam on virtually any topic: I once heard him hold forth, to one of the Kraut’s acquaintances from the Cheektowaga PTA, on the perils of middle-aged motherhood.
“The kids just don’t come out right,” he’d confided to Judy O’Shea. “If you don’t believe it, Judy, take a look at me.”
“Well, Mr. Tolliver, I must say—I mean, I don’t necessarily think—”
“The ideal time for conception, biologically speaking, is between twelve and fourteen years of age. That’s when the womb is at its most resilient. And please don’t even ask about the sperm.”
On this particular ride, as I might have expected, Orson had his crosshairs trained on Hollywood, and he dug in before we’d even cleared the driveway. “What’s pathetic to me, Waldy, is the wish-fulfillment quality of it all. Never mind the fact that navigating the timestream, hither and thither, is as easy in these flicks as passing gas; the medium has its conventions, I appreciate that. But ninety-nine percent of time-travel movies take it for granted that you can change whatever you want about the present—never mind the future—just by diddling a little with the past. It’s obvious that physics means zilch to these jerk-offs, and logic seems to count for even less. The past is the past, son. It’s done with. You keep that in mind.”
“I don’t know, Orson. I saw Timestrider Two last year, and I thought the whole Uncertainty Drive thing was pretty boss.”
“They’ve gotten to you, haven’t they,” Orson said, scrutinizing me closely. “They’ve injected their parasitic spores into your brain.”
“Keep your eyes on the road, Orson.”
“ROWWWGGGHHHHRRR,” said my father, rolling his eyes back and baring his teeth. By the time we pulled up at the Mohawk 6 Multiplex we were debating the pros and cons of an NCAA team spending its off-season on planets with stronger gravitational fields, like Saturn or Venus. A good rant never failed to cheer him up.
* * *
The first third of Timestrider III: Event Horizon passed without incident. Though Orson was sporting the fluorescent orange hunter’s cap he put on whenever he was trying to keep a low profile—his “helm of invisibility,” he called it—I occasionally managed to forget he was there. An anxious, goosenecked loner from the suburbs, three weeks shy of thirteen, I was in the demographic sweet spot for the franchise, and I loved every pulsing, booming, logic-flouting minute. The rows in front of us had been commandeered by the Timestrider faithful: sixteen-year-old fanboys in frosted jeans and Iron Maiden T-shirts, already on their seventh or eighth viewing, mouthing along with the dialogue like grandmas in church. With the notable exception
of a pustule-necked orangutan who could barely squeeze himself into his seat, they looked as spindly and insecure as I was. Whenever the Timestrider pulled out his cryophoton blade—which was every fifteen seconds or so—they gave one another sweaty-palmed highfives. I was beholding my personal future, Mrs. Haven, and I’m not ashamed to say I liked the look of it.
The fanboys bugged the bejeezus out of Orson—the redheaded bruiser especially—but he made a concerted effort to keep calm. He seemed to be enjoying the spectacle: the battle for the icebound insurgent stronghold on Cxax, for instance, actually made him lean forward, and Marduk the Minuteman’s hourglass-shaped starcruiser earned a grudging grunt of approbation. “Interesting aproach to ballistics,” he muttered. “No egregious anomalies yet.”
From my father, Mrs. Haven, this was high praise indeed. He confined himself to scoffing during the swordfights—they were pretty hokey, I have to admit—and covering his eyes when the Timestrider and Countess Synkronia kissed. I did the same thing, being twelve, but I remember wondering at his prudishness. I was about to ask him about it, in fact, when he jerked his head back in a kind of spasm and shouted something filthy at the screen.
“Orson! What the hell are you—”
“Did you hear that?” he stammered. “Did you hear that, Waldy? Am I fucking dreaming?”
“Would you please sit down, Orson? You’re embarrassing—”
“Shut up and listen!”
Reluctantly, stiffly, he let me pull him down into his seat. The Horizoners glared back at us for as long as they could stand to, which thankfully wasn’t more than a few seconds. Orson’s eyes were open wider than I’d ever seen them, and his mouth was moving in a toothless, senile way. That reminded me of something—something I’d just recently thought of, or seen—but it wasn’t until I turned back toward the screen that it hit me.