The Lost Time Accidents

by John Wray

  “We’ll have to disagree on that point, I’m afraid. Genny and I went through the screenplay very carefully. The plot may be a little kindisch, but the words are all in order.”

  My father’s answer was so extravagantly filthy that it made my eyes water.

  “It was that woman who wrote the screenplay, Peanut. We just made sure that the science was correct.”

  “Science?” he bellowed. “You call that drivel science?”

  A hush fell instantly. Even Orson seemed to know he’d said too much. For all his contempt for my aunts’ theories, for all the fierceness of his opposition, I noticed again that he was wary of upsetting them too deeply. What’s he afraid of? I wondered. What have they got on him?

  It was fascinating to sit quietly in that devastated room, looking from face to face, waiting for hostilities to resume. These three people grew up in the same house, I found myself thinking. These three people were once dear to one another.

  “It’s what we believe, Peanut,” Genny murmured at last. “It’s what Enzie and I believe to be the truth. What else could we possibly call it?”

  “Have either of you seen the movie?” Orson gave a dull laugh. “What a stupid thing to ask. Of course you haven’t.”

  My aunts exchanged a puzzled look. “Why would we need to see it, Orson? We already know about the Accidents.”

  “What are the Accidents?” I said.

  All heads turned. Genny began to speak, then stopped herself; Enzie did the same. I couldn’t tell, at the time, whether the look on my father’s face was one of anger or bemusement or concern. Now I think that it was all of the above.

  “What are the Accidents?” I asked again.

  One by one they sighed and looked away. I’d posed the question, in all innocence, that defined them. Even my father’s rebellion, his duration-long evasion of his legacy, was no more than a way of restating the problem. Whatever the term may have meant in Ottokar’s brining room in Moravia in 1903, it had become synonymous, by the end of the century, with the dilemma of existence itself.

  * * *

  We pitched camp in the parlor that night, Orson and I, on a mattress made of bubble wrap and twine. I’d never slept in the same room as my father, much less under the same packing sheet. The experience was not a pleasant one.

  “Laugh and the world laughs with you,” he said as he blew out the candle. “Snore, son, and you sleep alone.”

  I didn’t appreciate the finer points of this joke—it seemed like standard-issue Tolliver cornpone to me—until he drifted off. The sounds he emitted over the next seven hours, Mrs. Haven, are impossible to render in prose. At least every ten minutes he seemed to suffer some sort of attack, and I was sure he was about to suffocate; the rest of the time he panted sadly—defeatedly, even—like an unfulfilled pervert. I found myself wondering what my father was dreaming about, which is never a good thing for a son to wonder. And as if all of that wasn’t bad enough, he kicked.

  It was after midnight when I gave up on sleep. I wasted a huge amount of effort getting out of bed with as little noise as possible—Orson would have slept through a putsch—and groped my way back out into the Archive. I rounded a corner, then a second, then a third. The tunnel straightened for five or six steps, then made an even sharper turning. I had no clear objective—I was too drowsy for that—but I must have had some expectation as to what I might find, because what I saw next somehow came as no surprise. I saw the outline of a door—high and narrow, with a beveled glass knob, a simulacrum of the doors at Pine Ridge Road—silhouetted by a thread of yellow lamplight. Most likely the kitchen, I said to myself. I pushed the door open.

  “Hello, Waldemar. Can’t you sleep?”

  “Hi, Aunt Enzie,” I said, shading my eyes against the sudden glare.

  She was sitting straight-backed at her desk with a look of calm forbearance on her face, a willingness to interrupt important work, if only for a moment. A pair of reading glasses rode low on her long equine nose, making her seem more like a mad scientist than ever. She had on a Pendleton shirt—an aubergine-and-yellow “shadow plaid”—with the sleeves rolled up high. Her colorless eyes were unblinking as ever. Her feet made fan-shaped dust marks on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m working,” she said. “Come on in, Waldemar. I could do with some company.”

  I approached the desk cautiously. The papers spread out before her were covered in formulas and algebraic proofs and phrases in a language that might have been Sanskrit.

  “Why are you still working, Aunt Enzie? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Ach! The hour makes no difference here. It takes me a great deal of effort, Nefflein, to hunker down and set my mind to thinking. I need quiet and dark.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then smiled to herself. “I’ll tell you a secret, Waldy—I have a tendency to put things off. I like to watch the hands of the clock go round. I’m addicted, you might say, to the passage of time.”

  “So am I,” I said, mostly out of politeness. But I realized, as I said it, that the statement was true. It gave me pleasure to feel wasted minutes pass.

  Enzian’s smile widened. “You’re a Tolliver, Nefflein. Time is our shared disorder.”

  “My father says it’s our fetish.” I hesitated. “Your fetish, I mean.”

  “Your father ought to know.” She turned back to her papers. “Do you happen to know what a ‘fetish’ is?”

  I watched her for a moment. “Something bad.”

  “Not necessarily. Something important.” She gathered up the papers and flipped them over one by one, precisely and smoothly, like a dealer at a blackjack table. I noticed an actual deck of cards at her elbow, warped and discolored with age. Then my eyes fell on the object in the center of the room.

  “What’s that?”

  “Hmm?” she said without turning.

  I raised my arm and pointed.

  “Why don’t you go and see?”

  I rallied my courage and stepped past the desk. The blankness of the thing had somehow kept it hidden. It looked like a steamer trunk, or a refrigerator box, or a crudely made and freshly whitewashed casket. There were no knobs or buttons that I could detect: no hinges, no levers, no markings on the outside at all. The hair stood up on my forearms when I went to touch it, as if the air around it were electrified. I felt younger than thirteen now—much younger. I felt about six.

  “Go on, Waldemar,” said Enzie. “It won’t bite.”

  I ran my hand along a corner of the thing—it sat on sawhorses, and came up to my armpits exactly—then drummed against it lightly with my thumb. A dusting of whitewash came off on my skin. It dawned on me that Enzie had built it herself, and that it was connected to the “research” she was doing. The embarrassment I felt on her behalf came close to pity.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” she said, rising from the desk and joining me.

  “What is it?”

  She took in a breath. “It’s an exclusion bin.”

  “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “There’s no shame in that, Waldemar.” She nodded. “You might say it’s a kind of time machine.”

  Given everything I knew about my aunts, of course, this was no more than I ought to have expected. At regular intervals throughout my childhood I’d pictured them at work on some vast contraption, a vaguely starship-shaped confusion of wires and transistors and throbbing Tesla coils; I’d abandoned this daydream a few years before, around the time I’d stopped believing in centaurs and alien abduction. But now I’d have to reconsider everything. I was standing next to Enzie in her workshop in the middle of the night in Spanish Harlem, resting my right hand on an impossibility.

  It looked nothing like the machine that I’d envisioned—nothing at all—which was precisely what convinced me it was real. I’d have been skeptical of flashing lights and pulsing panels, but I didn’t question this. There was nothing to question. My aunt undid a hidden catch and its top swung creakingly u
pward, like the hood of a go-kart. There was nothing—or next to nothing—inside: just a graphite-colored layer of some spongy material that might have been Nerf, enclosing what looked to be (and in fact, on closer inspection, actually turned out to be) a reclinable Naugahyde seat. There was no denying what I was looking at any longer. Enzie’s “exclusion bin” was a white plywood crate, roughly three feet by seven, with a secondhand car seat inside it.

  “I’m going to ask you to do me a kindness,” Enzie said into my ear. “I’m going to ask you to get inside this apparatus. Will you do that for me?”

  I should have countered her question, Mrs. Haven, with a few of my own. I should have asked why she wanted me to climb inside the “apparatus,” and what might happen to me if I did. Instead I nodded gravely, like a prizefighter about to be pushed out of his corner, and did as she asked.

  The interior smelled of Windex and vinyl and—faintly—of something like cloves. It smelled, in other words, like a used car. The seat was too big for me, squeaky and cool, and the blood rushed to my head as I lay back.

  “No cause for alarm,” Enzie said, resting her palm on the crown of my head. “It’s likely that nothing will happen.”

  “Where am I going?” I heard myself croak.

  “Nowhere at all. This isn’t a rocket ship, as you can see. The first task of the scientist, Waldemar, is to ask the appropriate question.”

  I sank into the seat—it was cracked at the corners, I noticed, and oddly deflated—and watched as she lowered the lid. The appropriate question arrived half a second too late.

  “When?” I said, just as the light disappeared.

  I remember a sharp rush of panic, then a sudden, inexplicable calm; I remember how absolute the blackness was, and how remarkably little this scared me. Incredibly, the silence was as total as the darkness. Touch remained, but without hearing or sight it seemed stripped of its context, a vestigial trait, an x coordinate without a y or z. I’d been cautioned to expect “nothing”—and I should have been prepared for it, science fiction addict that I was—but the nothing I’d imagined was a vastly different animal than the nothing I was being swallowed by.

  I say “animal,” Mrs. Haven, because it soon became a living thing to me. I felt its weight against my open eyes; I inhaled its musk; with time I even came to hear it breathing. The silence was so consummate that my brain began to manufacture sounds. They came on mildly enough, as a hubbub of faraway squeaks; soon, however, they built—gently but irresistibly—to a thundering wall of antic background hiss. From time to time it was possible to make out voices, though what they said was gibberish, like the voices one hears before falling asleep.

  That was all, Mrs. Haven, for the first long, lightless stretch of nothingness. Then the images came.

  Like the noises, they started as liminal blips, imagined as much as perceived, then gradually took on form and definition. Those first abstract shapes and color fields bore little or no relation to my state of mind, as far as I could tell—my sense of self, in fact, seemed to have been expunged. But if I was as blank as the darkness around me, as empty of thought or intention, I was also just as charged with possibility.

  When the first of these vague shapes was brought into focus, I felt a cold jolt of excitement; my excitement, however, was brief. The image before my mind’s eye was of a pair of pocket nail clippers, the kind designed to double as a key chain, missing its nail-file attachment. As visions go, this was about as thrilling as a balled-up Kleenex—which turned out to be the next thing that I saw. The Kleenex was followed by a pellet of crumpled silver foil, which was followed, after a brief delay, by a capless ballpoint pen. I could have seen as much in Orson’s glove compartment.

  My sight went black after that, then violet, then green, then bluish white; then dim and flat and colorless again. Awareness returned to me slowly, and a sense of confinement that seemed independent of sight or touch or any sense at all. My scalp and feet and tongue began to tingle. I could feel claustrophobia sweeping toward me through the dark, and had just taken in air to yell when the catches were thrown and the lid was pulled up and Enzie’s shining eyes peered into mine.

  “What was it, Waldemar? What did you see?”

  “I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t really have—”

  “Describe it to me.”

  I blinked at her. “Nothing, I guess.”

  “Of course you saw nothing,” she said impatiently. “It’s an exclusion bin. But what did you see after that?”

  I took a long time to answer. I was groggy and anxious and deeply confused, and what I’d seen seemed far too trivial to mention. “Not much,” I mumbled.

  She stared hard at me. “You are Waldemar Tolliver, son of Orson, son of Kaspar, son of Ottokar Gottfriedens Toula?”

  I looked away from her and shrugged.

  “I fail to understand,” she said, apparently to herself. Then, in a kindlier voice: “Perhaps it’s too soon yet. You’re still a child.”

  “Okay,” I said, still dodging her questioning look. “Sorry.” Now that the whole thing was over I felt the same embarrassment I’d felt before. What had she been expecting—flying saucers and mushroom clouds and backward-running clocks? What had she needed me for anyhow? I climbed out of the bin and looked around me with a sinking heart. The room was better lit than I recalled: brighter and smaller and more full of junk. It looked less like a mad scientist’s laboratory, suddenly, than the basement workshop of a pensioner.

  “Genny will fix you breakfast,” said my aunt. “You’ve lost some sleep, of course, but you’ll catch up. You can sleep in the back of the car on your way home.”

  I was about to point out that Orson and I weren’t likely to be leaving right then, not at two in the morning, when I realized why everything seemed changed. There was a skylight above us—a peaked gray rabbit hutch of wood and chicken wire and frosted glass—and the first pale light of day was seeping through it.

  “What time is it, Aunt Enzie?”

  She gave me no answer. A sense of unreality broke over me: I held my hands up to my eyes, half expecting to be able to see through them. I’d have estimated my time in the exclusion bin at less than twenty minutes, half an hour at the most. It should have been the middle of the night.

  “What time is it?” I said again. “How long was I in there?”

  For the space of a breath my aunt stayed as she was, smiling an odd little unamused smile. Then she took up a ledger and ran her finger down a row of scribbled entries. It was only then, seeing the obvious pleasure my bewilderment gave her, that I remembered Orson’s jokes about her lack of human feeling. But there was nothing flat or robotic in my aunt’s expression now. If anything there was too much feeling in it.

  “Three hours, forty-one minutes, and thirty-seven seconds,” she announced. “That’s an awful lot of not much, Waldemar.”

  * * *

  We found Orson awake in the parlor, sitting on a corner of our little makeshift bed, the packing blanket draped across his shoulders. I could see right away that he’d guessed what had happened. He looked at me as though we’d never met.

  “There you are, Waldy,” he said. “I’d been wondering.”

  “Waldy and I have been up to no good,” Enzie said with a wink.

  “Is that so.”

  “You were snoring,” I told him. “Snore and you sleep alone. You told me that.”

  My father said nothing. Genny appeared in the doorway with a mug of green tea—her bum leg had mysteriously improved—and he took it from her and slurped from it morosely. My aunts beamed at each other as though they’d just won the Heisenberg Prize.

  We said our goodbyes not long after, the Buick idling feebly in the smoky Harlem dawn. My aunts smiled down at us from their tattered whorehouse curtains while we waited in the cold, expecting the engine to die each time it stuttered. Orson didn’t glance up at them once. Some point of honor had been settled—apparently in Enzie’s favor—and from the look of things I’d been the catalyst.
But what had I actually done? I’d let her lock me up in a box, then drifted off for a time, as anyone might have. Where was the betrayal in that?

  “Have fun in high school, Waldy!” Genny shouted as we pulled away. “Kiss the little girls and make them cry!”

  * * *

  The next two hours with Orson passed in a kind of mutual brain-squeamishness, both of us circling the same unmentionable event, like diplomats on the morning of a coup. I was grateful for the city’s drab distractions, its freeways leading to bridges leading to gridlocked toll plazas leading—eventually, as if against their better judgment—to the traffic-choked interstate. After batting us around for a while, the city abruptly grew bored, and its sprawl gave way to cinder-colored scrub. Orson wanted to talk, I could tell, but I was too worn out to do his talking for him. I was fiddling with the handle of the glove compartment—which had been broken since I could remember—when he suddenly sat up and cleared his throat.

  “I want to talk to you about your aunts, Waldy. As you’ve probably noticed—”

  “Aunt Enzie says she named me. Is that true?”

  I expected him to deny it, but he did no such thing. “Not just Enzie. The two of them together.”

  “Why did you let them do that?”

  “I don’t know.” Orson adjusted the rearview mirror, squinted over his shoulder, made a sour face, then nudged the mirror back. “I owed them something, I guess. And I like the thought of things moving in circles.” He shook his head slowly. “I’m my sisters’ brother, Waldy, sad to say.”

  “Moving in circles? What is that supposed to—”

  “See that van behind us?”

  “Huh?”

  “That white van back there. I don’t care for the cut of its jib.”

  I sized up the vehicle in question: a shabby Econoline two-door, no different than a dozen others we’d passed on the highway that morning. I was old enough to know when my father was stalling, but there was no rush: we had hundreds of miles left to drive. I slouched down in my seat and let him stall.

  “I want to talk to you about your aunts,” he repeated.