by John Wray
“Fact?” I said. “This seems about as far from fact as anything he wrote. There’s no attempt at scientific—”
“Of course not, Waldy.” She shook her head impatiently. “That’s not the kind of fact I’m thinking of.”
Something in her voice made me uneasy. “I’m not sure what other kind of fact there is,” I said.
The expression on her face had settled as I read my father’s story—had grown both milder and more fixed—and I recognized it now for what it was. It was regret.
“It saddens me to hear that, Waldy. More than you can know.”
“For Christ’s sake, Ursula, just tell me what you mean!”
“Only that I look at that little fable from time to time, when I’m in a mood to consider the past. It helps me understand why Orson left. It’s about the lust for influence over the timestream, of course, but more than that: it’s about vanity, and arrogance, and the compulsion to turn inward, in pursuit of some private mystery, at the risk of everything that you hold dear. And if you don’t see your father in that, or your aunts, or your grandfather, or all the rest of that family you’re so obsessed with, then this can only mean one thing—you’ve fallen victim to the mystery yourself.” She knelt beside me now and took my hand. “That was one point your father and I always agreed on, even when things were at their worst. We wanted to keep you away from that mystery, Waldy. As far away from it as possible.”
It was clear to me now that she knew why I’d come. More than that: it was clear that she knew—or that she thought she knew—how the quest I’d set out on would end. Orson’s parable had been a kind of test—a test I’d evidently passed with flying colors. If I was my great-grandfather’s rightful successor, I was also his doomed and psychopathic son’s. Another willing vessel for the Syndrome.
“Listen to me, Ursula. This isn’t what you think. I’m not my father.”
“That’s right, Waldy. Or his father, either.” She let go of my hand. “Or the man you were named for. Please don’t forget that.”
She seemed frail to me suddenly, fragile beyond her years. I resolved to come clean about my hunt for Waldemar, no matter how severely it might shock her. But my chance came and went.
“Two men stopped by this morning. They were looking for you.”
“What kind of men?” I said, thinking right away of Haven’s goons. “Did they look at all Polish?”
“Everyone looks Polish in this city—or Hungarian, or Serbian, or Czech.” She parted the blinds and surveyed the street outside, surreptitious as a gangster in a noir. “These men had on trench coats and glasses and black leather gloves. They looked like officers of the Gestapo.”
For an instant I wondered whether the onionlike strata I’d peered into over the past few days had become permeable, allowing Nazis from 1938 to shadow me in the Vienna of the present; then I saw the Kraut smiling at me over her shoulder.
“They didn’t look like Gestapo, Waldy. Not really. Don’t take everything I say so seriously.”
Before I could answer her, Mrs. Haven—not that I had an answer to give—you made your ill-fated debut. You arrived fresh from the Graben boutiques, in a powder-blue trench coat and green loden jodhpurs and lipstick-colored knee-high riding boots. I’d longed for this meeting, as all lovers do, eager for my mother’s bright-eyed blessing; you hadn’t been there more than a minute, however, before I realized how vain my hopes had been. There was nothing I could do, at that point, but watch as you confirmed her worst suspicions.
“What is it you do?” asked the Kraut, after you’d told her how much you admired the carpet. You really were trying your best.
“I’m between jobs at the moment,” you answered. “I guess I’m your son’s bodyguard.”
The Kraut returned your smile gravely. “You’ll want to dress a bit more neutrally for that.”
“Not a Secret Service type of bodyguard,” you told her. “The personal kind. Personal bodyguards can wear anything they want.”
“Is that so?” said the Kraut, looking to me as if for confirmation.
We stayed a remarkably long time, all things considered. You were patient and gracious and friendly and brave. As we were leaving—you were ahead of me, Mrs. Haven, already halfway down the stairs—my mother caught me lightly by the arm.
“Don’t go to Znojmo, Waldy. There’s nothing for you there.”
“I’m not going to Znojmo,” I answered, though of course I was going to Znojmo. Znojmo is where everything begins.
“There’s nothing for you there,” she repeated. Then, more quietly: “You can still escape, you know. It’s not too late.”
“Walter?” you called from the courtyard.
My mother and I looked at each other then, full in the face, more frankly than we’d done since I was small. I realized with a jolt that I was taller than she was by at least half a foot. When on earth had that happened? The realization made me want to sit down on the stairs and cry. It seemed to signify something terrible about the world: something that couldn’t—or mustn’t—be put into words. And I could see, looking down into her startled, anxious face, that my mother felt exactly the same way.
“Walter?” you called again.
“Don’t worry about me, Ursula. I’m trying to—”
“I’m going to tell you something, Waldy, and I want you to listen to me closely. I love you with all my heart, and I want you to live a long and happy life.”
“I love you too, Ursula. And I want you to know, no matter how I might sometimes act, that I—”
The Kraut shook her head and pressed a finger to my lips. “Watch that woman closely,” she whispered. “Don’t trust her an inch.”
I pushed her hand away. “Please, Ursula—”
“Don’t trust her, Waldy. Do you hear me? She wishes you ill.”
Monday, 09:05 EST
I found Waldemar on the kitchen counter this morning, legs crossed underneath him, humming to himself with a mouth full of sprouts. The sound had invaded a dream I’d been having—my mother singing to me while she iced an enormous jet-black, bell-shaped birthday cake—and I’d awoken with a jerk, slowly gotten my bearings, then noticed that the humming hadn’t stopped. I followed it cautiously out to the kitchen. Any lingering sweetness I might still have felt was expunged by the sight of my great-uncle perched on that counter like an opossum, munching and smacking his lips, with a look of craven pleasure on his face. Here is a man, Mrs. Haven, who can make even vegetarianism seem unwholesome.
“There you are, Nefflein. I was hoping I’d wake you.”
“I was dreaming.” I rubbed my eyes, still abstracted with sleep. “I thought you were my mother.”
“I’m flattered by the comparison. Charming woman, Ursula.”
That gave me a turn. “How would you know?”
“From your history, of course. Such a diverting read! I liked the honeymoon chapter especially.” He wagged a finger at me. “But you haven’t made the changes that I asked for.”
“There’s a reason for that.”
“Yes?”
“Sonja Silbermann didn’t go home with you that night. That was a lie, Uncle, and an obvious one.”
He stopped chewing long enough to heave a measured sigh. “History belongs to the victors, Waldy, as the saying goes. You’re the historian in this family—not me. I won’t argue the point.” A hard laugh escaped him. “Just think if I were to write the story of my life! Do you imagine that the critics would be kind?”
“I don’t imagine they’d be kind at all.”
He shrugged his hunched shoulders. “You ought to know best.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Aren’t you my personal biographer?” He snuffled. “My Boswell? My number one fan?”
“I’m not your goddamn Boswell, you lunatic. I’d like nothing better than to erase you—every last trace of you, everything you’ve ever said, or done, or thought—out of existence.”
“I see!” he said, barely con
taining his mirth. “But if that’s the case, Nefflein, why am I still here?”
The violence I’d felt when I first discovered him—how many sleep cycles ago was it?—returned with a roar. I took a step toward him.
“Get down off that counter.”
“Time passes more swiftly at this elevation,” my great-uncle answered, stuffing a fistful of sprouts into his mouth. “The nearer to the surface of the earth one is, the lower the frequency of the light waves; and the lower the frequency of the light waves—”
“The longer it takes time to pass.”
“Well put, Waldy Junior! You sound like a Toula at last.”
“I’m a Tolliver,” I said. “Not the same thing at all.”
Waldemar shrugged again. Something he’d said had gotten under my skin, Mrs. Haven, though it took me a moment to see what it was.
“Time isn’t passing,” I told him. “Not here.”
“That’s your game, is it?” He let out a snuffle. “Not to worry! I won’t spoil your fun.”
I took another step forward. He was just out of reach.
“Get down from there, Uncle. Tell me where you’ve been since I last saw you.”
“That would take some telling. After all, ten years have passed since then.”
I saw now that he looked a decade older, perhaps even more: his straw-colored hair had gone gray at the temples, his hands were liver-spotted, and his face was blotched and scored with tiny rifts. The cause seemed to be more than mere aging—his body looked distorted in ways that the passage of time alone could not account for. My head began to spin.
“Are you saying I’ve been trapped here for a decade?”
“Time doesn’t pass for you!” he crowed, laughing openly now. “That was my understanding.”
I covered my ears and shut my eyes and wished him gone with all my strength of will. When I looked again he was right there on the counter.
“Enough of this childishness! We have work to do together, you and I. The future is knocking, Nefflein, whether you choose to notice it or not.”
“We don’t have any future,” I gasped. “You’re diseased, Waldemar, and I’m well. Do you hear me? We’re not the same person.”
The smile left his face. “You’re repeating yourself.”
“Does that bother you, Uncle? I’ll say it again. We’re not the same.” To my own surprise I broke into a grin. “God, that feels good to say. Four simple little words. We’re not the same.”
He studied me a moment. “May I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Who on earth suggested that we were?”
I brought my face close to his, unafraid and triumphant. Then I felt my mind go hot and blank.
“But it’s obvious,” I stammered. “Anyone could see—I mean, our family—your name—”
“I’m curious, that’s all,” he said, lowering his feet to the floor. “I’ve certainly never implied that we were fellow travelers—far from it!—and you’ve gone to great pains to assure me our kinship means nothing. Your father and mother, to judge by your memoirs, kept my existence a secret; and those matzo-chewing aunts of yours—may Jehovah preserve them!—seem to have viewed you as a guinea pig for their sad little experiments, which most assuredly is not how they saw me. All of which raises the question”—here he smiled and draped an arm around me—“who was it, Waldy Junior, who planted the half-baked notion of our spiritual and moral equivalence in your antsy little brain?” He brought his body weightlessly against my own. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think it came from no one but yourself. You sense our connection with the sureness of instinct. You feel it in your muscles and your bones.”
“You’re here to drive me insane,” I said, hiding my face in my hands. “I understand that now.”
“There’s something else you’d like to ask. Why don’t you ask it?”
“I don’t want anything from you.”
“I disagree, Nefflein. I think that you do.”
I steeled myself, expecting some new jeer—but his expression was solemn.
“Can you get me out of here?” I heard myself whisper.
“I thought you’d never ask!” he said. “I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because I’m not the person who did this to you, Waldy.” He regarded me sadly. “I’m not the reason you’re here.”
“You’re lying. Who else could possibly have done this?”
He shook his head. “It’s no use. You’re not listening.”
“Go away,” I said, starting to weep.
I sank to the floor and pressed my forehead to my knees. I should have felt shame for breaking down in front of him—for allowing him to see me at my weakest—but I felt none at all. Why was that?
I heard him curse under his breath as he arranged himself beside me.
“I want to get out of this place,” I said.
“I don’t believe you.”
I looked up at him. “What do you mean by that?”
He shook his head a second time, regretfully and slowly.
That jarred something loose inside me, Mrs. Haven. I spun around and caught him by the shoulder. There was no electric charge now, no tingling, no phantom chill. He felt almost as real to me as my own body.
“You come and go,” I said. “Tell me how.”
“I got here the same way you did, Waldy. There’s no difference between us.”
I wanted to strangle him by his antiquated collar, to shake him until the truth came tumbling out; instead I asked him again, as calmly as I could, to explain how I’d been exiled to this place.
“Waldy!” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Can it be you really don’t recall?”
My mind gave a twitch as I tried to reply. It was there, Mrs. Haven, at the edge of the light: the memory of my final instants in the timestream. It was there but it refused to show itself. I shut my eyes and held my breath and waited.
“It’s no use,” I said finally. “I can’t remember.”
“Let me ask you this,” he said softly. “Have you tried simply getting up and walking out the door?”
His face began to blur as he said this, to lose definition—but his expression was sincere, almost beseeching. He was right, Mrs. Haven. I’d never once attempted to escape. I pictured my aunts’ massive door, long since dropped from its hinges, cobbled together out of trash-can lids and drywall studs and casement frames from gutted Harlem brownstones. What need could they have had for such a barrier? What forces had it been constructed to withstand? Was the chronoverse in suspension on the landing outside, sucking against the door like space against an air lock, waiting silently to readmit me?
I pushed past Waldemar into the Archive. Its length seemed greater than I remembered—immeasurably greater—but I was used to the apartment’s tricks by then. I noticed in passing a ream of UCS stationery, a book of Czech folktales, and a balsa-and-playing-card model of the General Lee. When I came to the door I drew myself up, pulled in a steadying breath, and reached for the first bolt.
* * *
“Nefflein,” my great-uncle said gently. “Answer me, Nefflein. Do you hear my voice?”
I placed myself by smell before my eyes came open. I was flat on my back on my aunts’ immense bed, the one with the strangely carved headboard and discolored sheets. It was morning outside, to judge by the brightness, and I wondered—as I so often had before—how the light of chronologic day could reach me. This time, however, I remembered a joke Orson had once told me about singularities. It’s no problem at all, physics-wise, to enter a black hole: an event horizon is an easy thing to cross. Problems only arise if you should reconsider.
“What am I doing on this bed?”
“I brought you here, Nefflein. You had an accident.”
I watched the dust roll and coagulate above me. “It’s possible I’m going to be sick.”
“That might be for the best.”
I waited for the nausea to pass. It took
a while.
“What happened to me?”
“I found you facedown at the door to the apartment. Your idea must have been to open it. Apparently you had second thoughts.”
“Second thoughts? I collapsed on the floor!”
“That’s right,” he said, snuffling. “This concludes your lesson for today.”
“What lesson, for God’s sake?”
He gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder. “I told you that you didn’t want to leave.”
XXIII
GIVEN WHAT YOU KNOW about my two earlier visits to the General Lee, Mrs. Haven, you can probably guess that my feelings the third time—a month after my father’s Timestrider-induced coronary—were mixed. Orson had ranted less than usual on the drive down, speaking mostly in grunts, so I’d had plenty of time to sort through my memories of my aunts’ apartment, and the wonders—or alleged wonders—that had transpired there. The difference between ages seven and thirteen is enormous (the difference, really, between an overgrown toddler and a miniature taxpaying citizen) and I viewed my younger self with prim disdain. Five years after the episode in the dark at the bend in the hallway, it was my informed thirteen-year-old opinion that I’d dreamed the best parts of it up.
They’d found me facedown on the floor, after all, blubbering and shivering with fever. I’d barely recognized Orson, who’d fed me some aspirin and rushed me straight home. My aunts had failed to prevent our departure: there’d been no sorcery, no kidnapping, no human sacrifice. If my father displayed any emotion at all on the drive back to Buffalo—as far as I can recall—it was boredom. The status quo had reasserted itself so unconditionally that I’d found myself doubting, as the months and years passed, that we’d driven down to see my aunts at all.
But none of my considered thirteen-year-old opinions, however blasé, could stave off a spasm of anxiety as we rang the General Lee’s epileptic buzzer, or an equal and opposite thrill of excitement as the lobby lamps sputtered to life. There remained zones of magic in the world, apparently, and 109th Street was one. (It didn’t hurt that enchantments in folktales, both benign and horrific, have a habit of coming in threes.) Orson kicked the lobby door open without waiting to be buzzed in, shot me a look that I couldn’t account for, then steered me upstairs, gripping me by the shoulder, as though afraid that I might try to run away. He’s reconsidered their offer, I found myself thinking. He’s going to sacrifice me after all.