The Lost Time Accidents

by John Wray

  He was moving his lips, Mrs. Haven, exactly like the fanboys in front of us. He was reciting each line of dialogue a beat before it happened.

  The Timestrider’s krono-kruiser had just marooned him on Cxax in the primordial past, when the surface of the planet was still a bubbling swamp, and he was trying to raise his ship out of the muck. A Cxaxian mystic—a hairless gray koala in a rumpled-looking kilt—was trying to convince him not to bother. The kruiser, according to the koala, was entirely unnecessary.

  “Have you not understood?” whispered my father.

  “Have you not understood?” said the koala, twitching its animatronic ears. “You travel through time all your life: into the future at the rate at which you age, and into the past each time that you remember.”

  The Timestrider expressed impatience with the koala’s plan of action. The Horizoners slurped their Mountain Dews in bliss.

  “There is only the brain, after all,” said my father.

  “There is only the brain,” the koala intoned. “But the brain, after all, is enough. Your consciousness is all the time machine you need.”

  “ROWWWGGGHHHHRRR,” said Orson, propelling his stocky body toward the screen. The fanboy whose seat he was clambering over let out a shriek and pitched sideways, spilling his drink into the orangutan’s lap; the orangutan let out a roar that drowned out my father and the movie and everything else and practically ripped his seat out of the floor. Orson was a row and a half past him by then, balancing on someone’s armrest, but the giant had no trouble catching up. A saucerlike object spun lazily across the screen, and I recognized it, after a stupefied instant, as the orange hunter’s cap. By the time the lights came on, the giant had my father pinned to the floor between rows five and six—which was exactly where the EMTs found him, sixteen and a half minutes later, staring up at the ceiling like a corpse.

  By that time the manager had apologized to everybody and distributed vouchers good for any later showing in that same theater, and the goon and his cohorts had disappeared. The theater was still full of people, bunched in loose clumps of intrigue, unwilling to believe the show was over. My understanding of what had happened was roughly as follows: my father had whipped the whole theater up into a homicidal rage, then settled on the only exit strategy that would save him from being disarticulated. He’d had a coronary.

  Orson was conscious for most of the brief, choppy ride to the ICU, gripping my wrist and gazing up into my panic-stricken face, as though we’d traded one film genre for another. He had a message for me—a message of vital importance—as fathers in movie ambulances tend to do. He tried to lift his head to tell it, to the considerable irritation of the EMTs. In the hope of calming him, I told him I loved him; he shook his head and gave a breathless groan. The transition from blockbuster to low-budget family weepie was now complete. I told him I loved him again, taking care to enunciate clearly.

  “At this point, son, you mostly seem to be annoying him,” the nearest EMT said. I looked down at my father, who blinked his eyes twice in agreement.

  “Okay, Orson,” I said. “I get it.” I didn’t get it, of course. I took his trembling hand in both of mine.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until the next morning, after the bypass, that my father told me what was on his mind.

  “I want you to go see the rest of that movie.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I want you to watch the whole thing, Waldy, right to the end.” His voice was diminished and hoarse, which somehow made it more authoritative. “Don’t even blink until the houselights come back on.”

  “Orson, I’m not sure I—”

  “Pay special attention to the closing credits. Then come back here and tell me what you saw.”

  You might think it would be easy to interrogate a cardiac patient—they can’t run off, for one thing—but they have the moral high ground, Mrs. Haven, whether they deserve it or not. It was 11:15 EST when Orson gave me my marching orders; at 12:45 I was watching the opening credits of Event Horizon (do you remember them, Mrs. Haven? The way they scrolled toward the audience out of the vastness of space, gilded and silent, like hearing-impaired subtitles for the voice of God?) from the same seat I’d sat in the evening before. Quite a few people in the audience looked familiar, including a man, two rows up, who appeared to be wearing the helm of invisibility; but I did my best to tune out all distractions. I was seeing the movie with different eyes now, on the lookout for hidden messages and codes.

  At the one-hour mark, the notebook I’d brought contained only the following:

  “ANDRO” = ROBOT

  PHOTON BLASTER “BULLETS” = REALISTIC??

  It happened every so often that Orson forgot and/or ignored the fact that I was still a child, so the sensation of near-total inadequacy I was experiencing was nothing new. For once, however, it seemed vitally important not to fail. This was partly because Orson was in intensive care, of course, but also because the Timestrider trilogy fell squarely within my microscopic zone of expertise. All I thought about between the ages of nine and fourteen was science fiction; even my filthiest onset-of-puberty fantasies featured “contact”—so to speak—with other worlds. Which is just to say, Mrs. Haven, that I was my father’s son. If I couldn’t give an accurate summary of Timestrider III: Event Horizon, no one could.

  It turned out I needn’t have worried. No sooner had the Timestrider escaped the clutches of the Empiricist forces by punching a random set of coordinates into his krono-kruiser and hitting “jump” than a suspicion began to tug at my awareness. The first half of the movie had been devoted to combustion of various types, punctuated by swordfights and gunfights and cleavage; as soon as the time-travel sequences kicked in, however, I felt the blood rush to my head. I hadn’t yet reached the age at which I would start to pester Orson about our family history, but I’d scavenged enough over the years to recognize a correspondence between spacetime (as the Tollivers defined it) and the kronoverse our hero voyaged through. Both were based on the notion that the timestream is curved; curved in such a way, in fact, that it forms a ring, or possibly a sphere. Given this curvature of time, it ought to be possible to take shortcuts across it, geometrically speaking, by traveling along its chords; this (as I’d soon learn) was what my aunt Enzian had come to believe, and what she was experimenting with, at that very moment, in her rooms in the General Lee. It was also, coincidentally or not, how the Timestrider’s krono-kruiser (which looked like nothing so much as an enormous, globe-shaped pulpit) took him on his rumbling, flashing jaunts from Now to Then.

  From that point forward, it was as though two movies were being projected onto the interior of my skull—both the climactic conclusion of the Timestrider trilogy and a spectral companion piece, flickering in and out of focus, made for a purpose I’d grasped only one thing about: my family was both its audience and its subject. In that final hour, surrounded by Coke-slurping strangers in that oversold, sticky-floored theater, I felt what paranoid schizophrenics report experiencing during pyschotic episodes: the suspicion that the actors were speaking directly to me.

  Psychiatrists refer to this phenomenon as “delusions of reference,” Mrs. Haven, but there were no delusions in play in the Mohawk 6 that afternoon. I’d heard my own father reciting the actor’s lines, after all, less than twenty-four hours before. There was a riddle in that, a mystery I was still too young to solve; but I had no doubt that I’d crack the code in time. As a twelve-year-old boy, I saw the world of adults in precisely those terms—as a series of time-coded, self-solving riddles—and in this particular instance I was right. I didn’t have to wait longer than the closing credits.

  * * *

  I rushed from the Mohawk 6 back to Buffalo General as fast as the NFTA bus would carry me, bursting at the seams with self-importance. Orson was having something done to him involving gauze and electrodes when I got there, so I was forced to cool my heels out in the hall. I kept my back to the wall and my eyes on the floor, struggling to choke bac
k my excitement. For whatever reason—urgency? fear? an adrenaline spike?—my senses were as sharp as a raccoon’s. I heard the nurse’s crepe-soled shoes against the crackling ancient vinyl and saw and smelled things that I’d rather not remember. Finally Orson’s door opened and the nurses filed out. I found him wide awake and restless.

  “Well, Waldy?” he gasped. It seemed to me now, in my paranoid state, that he was gasping on purpose, on the off chance that the premises were bugged.

  “I did it,” I whispered.

  “Good boy. What have you got?”

  “The Insurgency won, Orson. Just like you said.”

  He gave a sigh and let his eyes fall closed. “That’s wonderful, Waldy. Huzzah for the cosmos. Is that all?”

  I held back for a moment, aware that I was toying with my father. I was savoring his attention—his desperation, really—knowing all too well that it was temporary. His chest rose and fell under the papery hospital sheets; a vein in his neck twitched in time to his heartbeat. I had the sudden conviction, feeling my own pulse quicken, that if I stared long enough at that vein it would explode.

  “I’ve also got this.” I laid my notebook on the bed beside him.

  “Show me.”

  I flipped to the relevant page and held it up. Printed there, all in caps, was the very last line of the credits:

  SPONSORED BY THE U.S. CHURCH OF SYNCHRONOLOGY

  Orson glanced at it quickly, then pushed it away. It was obviously what he’d been expecting. I remember feeling vaguely disappointed.

  “As soon as I get out of this organ-harvesting center,” he muttered, “we’re going to pay a visit to your aunties.”

  Monday, 09:05 EST

  This entry may turn your stomach, Mrs. Haven, but the possibility no longer worries me. I’m still writing for an audience of one, still bearing witness, as I’ve done since the beginning; but sometimes I wonder. Someone will read this, I’m certain of that. But my audience might not be you—or “you”—at all. It could even be the Timekeeper himself.

  My relief at his disappearance didn’t last longer than a single sleep cycle. Once it registered that I was alone again—more alone, if possible, than I’d been before I found him—the old heaviness dropped down on me at once. The singularity was tightening its hold, taking advantage of my discouragement; but I knew the heaviness was just a symptom.

  The cause of it was clear to me. I missed him.

  This isn’t as perverse as it sounds, Mrs. Haven. I feel no sympathy for my great-uncle, let alone love. He’s a sociopath, a criminal, a monster—I have no doubt of that. But I was possessed of two ambitions before being banished to this place: (1) to arrive at a reckoning of my family’s crimes, by finishing this history; and (2) to reckon with them, perhaps even atone for them, by whatever sad, belated methods I could find. And I can no longer deny, Mrs. Haven—not now, having met him at last—that Waldemar holds the key to them both.

  My strength gradually returned as I reviewed chapter XXI, and I began venturing, slowly and tentatively, back into the Archive. But not once in a half-dozen forays—two of them as far as my aunts’ bedroom—did I find the slightest trace of Waldemar. It was as though all evidence of him had been deliberately erased: no imprint on the bed, no bantering notes, no mnemonic triggers left out in the tunnels. I never would have thought a place so packed with junk could seem so empty. I had nothing but my history to keep me company, and my history wasn’t enough: not when the Timekeeper himself might be in the next room.

  Finally, on what I’d resolved would be my very last pilgrimage to that claustrophobic chamber, I found him waiting for me on the bed.

  He was sitting with his back against the headboard and his legs splayed in a V across the sheets, unpacking a grimy olive-colored satchel. Its contents seemed as random as anything out in the Archive: a bicycle pump, a length of wire, a tarnished old key, a handful of cherry pits in a cracked glass beaker. He took no notice of me until I cleared my throat.

  “There you are, Waldy,” he said absently, holding the satchel upside-down and shaking it. “You have some questions for me, I imagine.”

  I hadn’t been aware of having any questions. Nothing came to my mind.

  “What was that, Nefflein?”

  “Are we the same person?”

  Again he seemed barely to hear me. He was more corporeal than when I’d seen him last, but also tighter-skinned—somehow inflated-seeming—as though his viscera and flesh were pressurized.

  “Those things you did,” I said. “At the Äschenwald camp.”

  He set the satchel aside. “What about them?”

  I hesitated. “Am I like you?”

  “What a curious question. In what sense do you mean?”

  I did my best to hold his milky gaze. “If your theory is right—if chronological time is a hoax—then why should your guilt have been passed on to me? Why should I care what happened at Czas, or Vienna, or anywhere else? Why can’t I forget?”

  I’d expected him to react with surprise, perhaps even anger; instead he cocked his head and grinned at me.

  “I’ve been wondering what brought you here, Nefflein. Now I understand.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “The past is a torment to you, the present is grim, and the future—from what I can see—scares you out of your wits. Is it any wonder you’ve excused yourself from time?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it.

  “Here’s a piece of advice, Waldy. If you’re looking for causes—”

  “I don’t want your advice. I want you to answer my question.”

  “No need to shout!” He held up both his hands in mock surrender. “It’s important to keep in mind, first of all, that Äschenwald was a means to me only. The end—as you well know—was otherwise.” He shifted indolently on the bed. “If you’d had my reasons … then yes. Perhaps you might have acted as I did.”

  He coughed twice—loudly and hackingly—into his fist, then waited to hear what I would ask him next.

  “What were your reasons?” I said, as he’d known that I would.

  “I can’t hear you, Nefflein. Come closer.”

  I leaned forward. “Tell me what your reasons were.”

  “For what?”

  “For the Gottfriedens Protocols. For Äschenwald. For all of it.”

  He replied without the slightest hesitation.

  * * *

  “In Budapest during the year of the famine I found myself, for a time, without a roof over my head, so I made my home in Népliget Park, in the company of some three hundred other starving wretches. People were eating the bark off the trees, digging holes in the frozen ground to pass the night in, slitting each other’s throats for a spoonful of cream. I did as the worst did—the ones who survived. But I was farther from myself than the others, at a greater remove from the man I’d once been, so I did more of it, Nefflein. And I did it better.

  “My victims were Gypsies and Jews, for the most part—the reason was simply that they were nearby—and eventually my talents came to the attention of a certain order. The members of this order clothed me and fed me, and I accepted their patronage. I rose in their ranks, as a man of initiative will, and in time I was called to Berlin. I judged myself fortunate in this, as my patrons’ influence was waxing by the hour. I saw the future in them, Nefflein, and I was not disappointed.

  “Gestures were required to consolidate my position: a measure of violence, as one might expect, but also a great deal of clerical work, for the most part pertaining to the propagation and diffusion of fear. The interests I represented during that time have come to have a reputation for viciousness, but the vast majority of them were timid men, conventional and unimaginative, and as such—given the tenor of the times—frightened within an inch of their lives. In such a field I found it easy to get on.

  “I was under no illusion, when offered the directorship of the Äschenwald facility, that my scientific work was of importance to Berlin—but I realized the
post would serve my needs. I’d been privileged with certain insights into the nature of time during my period of near-starvation in Népliget Park, and I’d waited almost twenty years to put them to the test. I saw the camp as a place of work: a research station, no more than that, but the only one I was likely to be granted. Compared with what I knew—what I’d known for two decades, more surely even than I knew my name—nothing else had weight or definition.

  “Should a present-day scientist, for example here in America, when hot on the heels of a discovery—the discovery, say, of a cure for mental illness—refuse funding from his government, on account of its collusion with homicidal Third World regimes, or the bombing of Hiroshima, or its many costly, bloody foreign wars? Think carefully, Nefflein, before you reply. The subjects of my protocols suffered the same privations I myself had suffered—extremes of cold and hunger, prolonged exposure to darkness—and were granted the same insight I’d received. The dreams they dreamed in their captivity approximated death, and the state they existed in by the end of their trials—at the attenuated margin of existence, only vestigially conscious, suspended between oblivion and life—was a kind of perpetual dream.

  “Dreams are one key to the Accidents—the surest key, perhaps—but I hadn’t discovered this. Not at that point in consensus time.

  “I had no concern for my personal welfare when the Soviets came, but I knew that my research was at an end. With the Red Army less than six hours distant, I ordered all outbuildings razed, regardless of whether or not the trials they housed had reached completion. I did this at the cost of adequate defense of the camp, which resulted in the death of most of my subordinates, and of course a great number of prisoners. Just one potential test subject remained; fortunately, one was all I needed. An absolute breach this time. A full excision from the timestream. My only fear was that the camp would fall before I’d accomplished the breach—but they were in no rush, the Soviets. They razed Äschenwald to the ground, methodically and slowly, beginning with the buildings where we’d run our final trials. They were good enough, Nefflein, to cover the last of my tracks. I’m beholden to them for that service.”