by John Wray
“Okay, Orson. I’m listening.”
This time there was no hesitation. He wanted me to keep “a healthy degree of distance” from his sisters in the future, for reasons he assumed I understood. He made no explicit mention of Enzie’s mental state, or of Genny’s peculiarities, or even of the condition of the apartment; he made no mention—needless to say—of reconnaissance missions in the chronosphere. It struck me then, watching him squirm and fidget, how much that brief visit had changed him. Leaving Buffalo, he’d been as righteous and judgmental as a prophet; now, for better or worse, all his passion was spent. For the first time in my duration, Mrs. Haven, I thought of my father as old.
It therefore came as a relief—or at least as a welcome distraction—when the Econoline van made its move.
I saw it coming before he did, but I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. There was a precision to the Econoline’s gambit—a purposeful, tactical smoothness—that held me mesmerized. By the time I’d grasped what was happening it had pulled alongside us.
“Don’t look at them, Waldy,” Orson hissed through his teeth.
The oddest thing about the people in the van, I remember, was the absence of expression on their faces. Even as they leaned toward us, drawing complex sets of symbols in the air, there was a kind of dazed indifference about them. The woman especially—the only one of the three who wasn’t wearing a Red Sox cap—had a face as dead as a receptionist’s.
“What are they doing?” said Orson, eyes fixed on the road.
“Moving their hands, mostly. I think they’re trying to cast some sort of spell.”
“They want us to pull over.”
“How do you know?”
He returned my look wearily. “Because this has happened before.”
For the next fifteen minutes the van baited us, sometimes pulling ahead, sometimes letting us pass, but never dropping out of sight completely. Then, at exit 23 (Albany/Delmar) it braked, smooth and deliberate as ever, and curved away from us into the trees. It hadn’t been a Hollywood car chase, exactly—we’d only broken the speed limit twice, and not by much—but it had been something. A warning, I decided. I felt curiously calm, all things considered. I understood that what had happened was unusual, even bizarre; but it seemed no weirder to me, on that particular morning, than any other feature of the grown-up world.
“Those were Iterants, huh?”
Orson gave a slight start, as though he’d forgotten I was in the car. “Of course.”
“Why didn’t they do anything?”
“They did all sorts of things. They did plenty.”
“I saw the woman flapping her hands, and the guys with the caps—”
“They were orbiting us.”
“What?”
“They were orbiting us. Each time they passed our car, then switched to the right lane, then slowed down and passed us again, they completed one circuit. They were interfering with the linearity of our progress—calling attention to the bias inherent in our perceptions of spacetime. Done well, this can lead to a kind of short-term temporal confusion.”
I couldn’t help but notice, as my father held forth, that he sounded like an Iterant himself. “How do you know all this?”
He smiled. “I guess you could say I’ve read the literature.”
“What literature?” He was worrying me now. “I’ve never seen you—”
“The technique I just described,” said my father, “is from the opening paragraph of ‘The Emperor of If.’ The term I coined for it is ‘chronojamming.’ It was the last thing I wrote that my sisters approved of.” He let out a sigh. “They’re close readers, those Fuzzy Fruits. I’ll give them that.”
I pondered this for a minute. “What did Enzie and Genny do for them? For the Iterants, I mean. Why were their names in the Timestrider credits?”
“Haven and his goons dropped in on them about a year ago. They talked about my books, then asked all sorts of other questions, though they never made it farther than the coatrack.” He shook his head. “God knows how they got Enzie to spill about her research, but they did. That’s what worries me most.”
“But why should that worry you? I thought you said that Enzie was a—”
“A crackpot. That she is, without a doubt.”
“Then what difference does it make what she told them?”
He frowned and said nothing. I fiddled with the handle of the glove compartment while I waited for his answer. The look in his eyes was one I seemed to recognize.
“Do you need to stop at a rest area, Orson?”
“What I’m about to tell you, Waldy, is probably going to sound a bit outré. I want you to promise that you won’t pass it on to your mother. Will you promise me that?”
“Sure.”
He nodded to himself for a while, exactly like Ben the Seer in the scene in Timestrider II when the Timestrider finds out that he’s secretly a prince. I concentrated on the little plastic handle.
“I’m not a physicist, thank Christ. I’m just a writer. I have no use for Enzie’s quote-unquote ‘work,’ and I don’t subscribe to her ideas about the timestream.” He chewed on his lip. “But that doesn’t make my sisters any less dangerous—especially for you.”
“For me?” I said, feeling more like the Timestrider than ever. My fingers closed on something cool and metallic in the glove compartment.
“Listen to me, Waldy. There’s a reason why we’ve been to Harlem so few times in all these years. When you were first born, we took you down to your aunts—”
I brought the object in my hand up to the light. It was a pair of nail clippers, the kind designed to double as a key chain, missing its nail-file attachment.
“—and Enzie said she had the perfect name for you. I asked her what she’d come up with, and she smiled at me for the first time since I’d run away from home. Then, when she told me what the damn name was—”
I reached into the glove compartment a second time and retrieved a balled-up Kleenex. I turned it this way and that, noting every detail, looking down at it as if from a great height. I dropped it into the molded plastic pocket of the door, where it came to rest between a scrap of tinfoil and a capless ballpoint pen.
“—I protested, of course. The Kraut raised no objection—keeping the peace, as always—but I wanted at least to know why. ‘Tradition,’ Enzie said. ‘It’s a family name.’ But that didn’t cut it with me. ‘Why him and not someone else?’ I demanded. ‘Why call him Waldemar and not me?’”
“Orson—”
“I’ll tell you what she said to that, Waldy. It gives me the creeps, but I’ll tell you.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Please don’t get—”
“Enzie looked into my eyes with real regret. ‘We couldn’t name you Waldemar,’ she told me. ‘We’d have liked to so much, Orson, but we couldn’t. It wasn’t up to you to close the circle.’”
I could barely make out my father’s voice now, or the rumble of the road, or anything but a deep, hydraulic hiss—the sound I’d heard inside the whitewashed box. Things around me went black but their outlines stayed bright, the way the sun looks at the height of an eclipse. The sensation was a new one to me, without precedent in my experience, but I never doubted what was happening. It was up to me, and no one else, to close the circle. I was remembering what was going to happen next.
Monday, 09:05 EST
“What does it feel like?” I asked the Timekeeper.
“What does what feel like, Waldy?”
I watched him as he lay on the bed, popping sprouts into his mouth as if they were gumdrops, smacking his dewy lips with satisfaction. He genuinely seemed to find the things delicious.
“Chrononavigation,” I got out finally.
“That’s an awfully big word. Did those Jewy aunts of yours teach you that?”
“Time travel,” I said, biting back my disgust.
“Ah!” He worked himself upright, keeping his glaucoma-clouded eyes on mine. “I was wondering when
you’d think to ask me that.” He bobbed his head, leering in just the way I’d been afraid of. “Are you certain you won’t have a sprout?”
If he were a product of my own mind, I thought, I should be able to make him put those things away. If this were a dream—if I knew I was dreaming—I ought to be able to do it.
“All right, then.” He set the container aside. “I’ll tell you, Nefflein, if you ask me nicely.”
I steadied myself. “What does it feel like, Uncle?”
“Excellent question!” He frowned and pressed his fingertips together. “You feel nothing at all, strange to say, while it’s happening. Your eyes and ears and ganglia are still open to stimulus, of course, but it takes time—however minuscule a span—to communicate sense impressions to the brain, and you’ve excused yourself from time, for the time being.” He snuffled.
“Go on.”
“When you arrive at the transfer point—the interzone, the place of exchange—that’s when your sense impressions catch up. You sit stricken and dumb for the length of time it takes to process them. Every inch of skin, exposed or not, has been chapped and burned with interdimensional cold—the coldest cold, Nefflein, that you can possibly imagine. You thank chance and fate and Providence for the transfer point’s existence, for its warmth and its calm. I can promise you that.” He sighed. “Then you take your bearings, select an entry point, and start again.”
I considered what he’d told me. “Tell me more about that place.”
“The transfer point? Ah. Well.” He closed his eyes. “The transfer point is marvelous. I don’t quite know how to describe it. Nothing ever happens there—time doesn’t appear to be passing—but there is time, of a certain kind. Transfer Time, I like to call it. You can breathe and see and think, but nothing happens.”
“Nothing happens,” I murmured. “Just like where we are now.”
He nodded. “You can stay there as long as you like, and you won’t age a day. Entry points are all around, evenly and conveniently spaced, waiting on your pleasure and convenience. To me it’s always seemed like the depths of a wood, mild and peaceful and quiet, with shallow, perfect pools between the trees. It takes a while to recover your senses, as though you’re gradually rising out of sleep, and you never manage to wake up completely. The temptation is great to remain there, in that beautiful limbo, forever.”
I stared at him when he’d finished. He returned my look affably.
“A peaceful patch of woods,” I said. “With little pools inside it.”
He shrugged.
“Can I ask something else?”
“I shall answer with pleasure.”
“How do you reenter the timestream?”
“Nothing’s simpler than that. You lower yourself into one of the pools. You’ll come out in some other world, some other universe, some other time.”
“The Magician’s Nephew.”
“Beg pardon?”
“The Magician’s Nephew,” I repeated through clenched teeth. “My favorite book when I was ten years old. You’re describing a place in chapter seven called the Wood Between the Worlds. You’re describing it exactly, down to the slightest detail.”
“Right you are, Nefflein!” He snuffled again. “You’ll have to allow me my fun. I like to tell you what you want to hear.”
“Is anything you’ve told me true? Have you ever time-traveled at all?” I stood over him now. “Answer me, Uncle! Do you even exist?”
He grew thoughtful at that, and his eyes lost the last of their light.
“It’s painful,” he said.
“What does that mean? What’s painful?”
“It’s a leave-taking from things,” he went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “The pain comes beforehand, of course—but especially after. While it’s happening you feel nothing at all.”
The mischief drained out of his features as he spoke, and I saw how time-ravaged he was. He looked ready to crumble into a pile of ash, like a Hollywood vampire in the first ray of dawn.
“The pain is more than anyone deserves,” he said in a whisper. “Like the pain of ordinary loss, but compacted—accordioned together. There’s just one thing that makes it bearable.”
I kept my eyes trained on his face, searching for any hint of deceit. I couldn’t help it, Mrs. Haven. I believed him.
“What is it, Uncle? What is that one thing?”
“You forget, Nefflein,” he said, bowing his head. “You forget.”
XXIV
MY HIGH SCHOOL YEARS, Mrs. Haven, are another period I’d rather skip. I was bullied no more than any other ectomorphic stammerer with a time-travel obsession would have been, I’m assuming, but the comfort this brought me was slim. My first and only pre-collegiate experience with girls—a few hours spent guzzling Schlitz and watching The Day the Earth Stood Still with my next-door neighbor Esther Fletcher-Suarez—was a defeat on par with the destruction of the United States Marines by Klaatu’s giant robot. When I asked if I could kiss her, Esther—whose pecan-brown face was covered in colorless down, soft and nearly invisible, like the rind of a kissable kiwi—excused herself politely, covered her entire face in lipstick (ears included), and locked herself in the bathroom until I’d left the house.
Orson was in the TV room when I got home, eating Wheat Thins and watching the NBA draft. I’d always assumed that my father possessed privileged, hard-won knowledge of the opposite sex, and I decided to ask him where I’d gone awry. He had opinions about every other aspect of “the Human Experiment,” as he liked to call it. Why not about this?
“That sounds like quite a life event, Waldy,” he said when I’d finished. “I’m happy you had a nice time.”
“You’re happy I what?”
“Want my opinion? You ought to feel honored. It’s probably not every guy she puts on lipstick for.”
“You’re right,” I said. “The other guys she probably makes out with.”
“It was a courtship display, that’s all. A little conjugal theater.” He turned the sound back up on the TV. “Try to put the experience in perspective. It’s not like she’s your first sexual partner.”
“That’s true, Orson,” I said, feeling farther from him than I’d ever felt. “She’s definitely not that.”
We watched the draft for a while. A man named Crumbs had just been drafted by the Heat. The Kraut was doing some late-evening baking in the kitchen: a strudel, to judge by the smell. This usually meant that there had been a fight.
“Mom’s making a strudel,” I said. “What’s that about?”
“No idea.” Orson sighed and hit the mute. “That reminds me. We’ve got some guests coming this weekend.”
“Guests,” I said. “Of course.” We never had guests.
“All right then, son. Glad we had this little mano a mano.”
I kept my gaze trained on the side of his head, telepathically commanding him to turn and meet my eye. He picked his nose and grimaced at the screen.
“Who are the guests, Orson?”
“Haven and some of his people.”
This was said in a casual tone, as though they came to dinner every weekend.
“Haven and some of his people,” I repeated. “The Iterants. The Fuzzy Fruits.”
“Correct.”
I stared at him in dumbstruck silence.
“Don’t give me shit, Waldy. The Kraut’s already run me through the grinder.”
I settled back into the couch, feeling the beer in my bloodstream reassert itself. The sounds from the kitchen were louder now, the aroma more sweet: cinnamon and filo dough and apples. I wanted to lay my head in the Kraut’s floury, buttery lap.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s Haven after?”
“My name,” answered Orson, puffing his chest out involuntarily. “My name and endorsement.”
“Why?”
“As you no doubt recall, my writings form the template—”
“That’s not what I meant. Why would you give it to him?”
&nbs
p; “You know that, too,” he said, though with slightly less bluster. “Because of my sisters.” He avoided my look. “He’s promised to leave them alone.”
* * *
In the handful of years since we’d last seen my aunts, my father and I had discussed that momentous night exactly once, and then only because the Kraut had forced us to. Orson steered clear of the topic for classically Orson-ish reasons, ranging from denial to peevishness to injured pride; I avoided it because it creeped me out. Each time I tried to make sense of what had happened, both in Enzie’s “exclusion bin” and after, I felt an abyss open under my feet. I was too young to be asked to do the things my aunt had asked of me. Odd as my childhood had been—and eccentric, God knows, as my family remained—I’d been raised in a rational household, one in which the laws of science ruled. But my childhood had ended with that trip to Harlem. There are more things in heaven and on earth than reason accedes to, Mrs. Haven, and there was no forgetting what I’d experienced at the General Lee.
I’d heard the story of the Fuzzy Fruits’ first visit a hundred times by then, and I’d seen the First Listener’s tense, athletic face in magazines; even once—extremely briefly—on the news. It was a face better suited to torch-lit trials in some hidden star chamber than to the exigencies of modern-day PR, and no amount of styling gel or cosmetic dentistry could change that. Regardless of what he was doing, no matter how candid or innocuous the photo, Haven always looked as though he’d just stopped screaming. But it wasn’t his inquisitor’s face that disturbed me most deeply, or his army of ghoulish true believers, either. It was the fact that I didn’t have a clue what he wanted—what he wanted from us, from my family—and the further fact that Orson seemed to know, but wouldn’t say.
He changed the subject whenever I asked, or turned up the volume on the TV, or glowered at something just over my shoulder, as though a cicada-sized Haven were hovering there. I didn’t buy any of his jabber about the Iterants needing his “endorsement”: Synchronology was the fastest-growing religion in the United States, bar none, and it wasn’t shy about it. Orson was more useful shut away in Cheektowaga than he would have been in any kind of spotlight. The most profitable prophet is a dead one, Mrs. Haven, ecclesiastically speaking. Those who overstay their welcome start to stink.