The Lost Time Accidents

Home > Other > The Lost Time Accidents > Page 44
The Lost Time Accidents Page 44

by John Wray


  * * *

  It was the Kraut who answered the door that fateful Saturday—not out of any sense of wifely decorum, but because Orson refused to come up from the basement. I was mature enough, at fifteen, to be disgusted by his prima donna act: I pictured him skulking down there in his “Myth Creation Station” (as he insisted on calling his office) with a glass of lukewarm rosé in his fist, listening to every move we made upstairs. What I wasn’t old enough to consider, I now realize, was that he might have been as terrified as I was.

  The only one who wasn’t terrified—not even remotely—was the Kraut. The bell had barely rung before she’d thrown the door open and advised our callers that Mr. Tolliver would be up presently; in the meantime there was coffee in the den. I took all this in from my post at the top of the stairs.

  “Come down here, Waldy,” the Kraut said without turning. “Kindly show our visitors where they can put themselves.”

  I’d never heard her use that tone of voice before: it was flat and metallic and brooked no objection. I came downstairs at once. She turned on her toes and marched off to the kitchen, leaving me alone with our guests, none of whom had so far said a word.

  There were three of them in the foyer, just as there had been in the Econoline, just as there had been almost sixteen years earlier, the first time they’d come to the house. Two were wearing white leather sneakers with baby-blue treads; one of them—the one in the center—had on a pair of yellow calfskin loafers. All three wore matching wide-wale corduroys, and I realized to my horror—in the precise instant, as C*F*P would have it, that my eyes and his eyes met—that I was wearing wide-wale corduroys myself.

  “Hello, pal,” the First Listener said. “I like your cords.”

  He said it softly, I remember, as though we were alone. His crimped hair was subtly frosted, making him look like a preacher in some California church—the kind with acoustic guitars and headset microphones and not much use for the actual Bible. He looked exactly the way he would look eight years later, standing over me in a sunlit Moravian alley, grinning and wiping the blood from his lips.

  “My dad’s in the basement,” I heard myself say.

  “We have a ‘thing’ for corduroy, too, as you can see. Can you guess why that is?”

  I shook my head woodenly.

  “Corduroy, being a material composed of a grouping of parallel lines, performs two services for its wearer simultaneously.” He held up two fingers. “The first is the practical service of keeping him (or her) warm, and shielding him (or her) from the elements, if inclement. The second is an ideological service, if you’ll pardon the expression. It reminds him (or her) of the multiplicity of timestreams running parallel to our own, and of the possibility of congruence between them.”

  I blinked at him. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Of course you hadn’t.” He patted my shoulder and slipped gracefully past me. “There are many things you haven’t thought of, Waldemar—not yet. You’re still early in your cycle, after all. But you’ll find yourself considering them soon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The den is just through here, as I recall.”

  My instinct was to stop him—to catch him by the scruff of his neck or the collar of his Eddie Bauer blazer (corduroy, of course)—but he was only doing as my mother had suggested. I followed him sullenly into the den.

  Haven draped himself across my father’s leopard-print armchair as though he dropped in all the time, while his escort (after a kind of ritual pause, during which I could actually see them counting under their breath) dropped synchronously onto the couch. I knew with absolute certainty, without being able to say how I knew, that the configuration was exactly the same as it had been in 1970, when the Fuzzy Fruits had made their shy debut. The only available seat was between the two mouth-breathers on the sofa, so I decided to stay on my feet. Haven wasn’t the least put out by this, as far as I could tell. It’s possible he took it as a gesture of respect.

  “Are you a Timestrider fan, pal? I’m guessing you are.”

  “I couldn’t care less about it.”

  “Is that right.”

  Silence fell. Haven let out a contented sigh every so often, smiling blandly at the walls and at the ceiling and at me. It was a victory lap for him, this visit; that much was clear.

  “Where’s your father, Waldy?”

  “My family calls me Waldy.”

  “I know that, pal. Where’s your—”

  “You’re not my family.”

  This was unquestionably the boldest thing I’d said in my duration thus far, but it didn’t have the effect that I’d intended. Haven grinned at the mouth-breathers, showing his teeth; they tittered and nodded, as if I’d just stood up on my hind legs and barked.

  “Right you are, pal,” said Haven. “Nicely put.”

  He closed his eyes and gave a happy shiver. When he looked at me again I had the sense that something about his face had changed—that his jaw was slightly heavier, or that his eyes had taken on a different tint. I wondered where the hell my father was.

  “It doesn’t really matter where the Prime Mover is,” said Haven, as if I’d been speaking aloud. “We didn’t come to see him, after all.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, cursing the quaver in my voice. “Of course you came to see the Prime—of course you came to see Orson. My father, I mean.”

  Haven shook his head. “That’s the funny thing, Waldy—we didn’t. We came to see you.”

  The Kraut rematerialized at that instant, for some reason holding a Warranted Tolliver egg timer, and announced that my father would be receiving his callers downstairs. Haven thanked her politely and got to his feet. I kept perfectly still, staring fixedly down at the sphincterish spots on the leopard-print armchair, watching the imprint of the First Listener’s backside gradually disappear. By the time I’d recovered my composure he was gone.

  LESS THAN AN HOUR after the Kraut’s whispered warning, I was sitting in an open second-class car of the Václav Divis Regional from Vienna to Brno, looking past your freckled shoulder at the men across the aisle. Both of them were wearing trench coats, I noticed, and expensive-looking leather driving gloves. The Kraut was right: everyone in this part of Europe looked like a member of the Gestapo.

  But no sooner had I had this thought, Mrs. Haven, than the various doubts I’d been suppressing wriggled up into the light. Could that really have been what the Kraut had said? It wasn’t true, of course—the only people who looked like members of the Gestapo were the trench-coat-wearing men across the aisle. My mother was a rational woman, as far as I knew: the single levelheaded member of our family. Why on earth would she have told me that you, of all people, “wished me ill”? Either her brain chemistry had shifted radically or I’d made a grievous error—the most grievous one, by far, of my duration. I could think of no other hypothesis.

  To calm myself, I brought out the postcard of Znojmo and studied it, imagining the two of us already there. I recited its doggerel under my breath like a charm:

  “A gherkin from the land of Znaim

  Is mightier than the Hand of Time;

  Its savory brine, at first so sour

  Grows sweeter with each Passing Hour.”

  I glanced at you when I was done, to see whether the spell was having any effect—but you looked lost to the world, Mrs. Haven, or at least lost to me. Some flywheel had shifted; some cog had been thrown. You didn’t seem to see the men in the trench coats, or perhaps you were making an elaborate show of not seeing them. Maybe that in itself was proof of some sort of conspiracy. But you’d never looked more beautiful to me.

  “What are you thinking about, Mrs. Haven?”

  Slowly—unwillingly, it seemed—your eyes met mine. “If you really want to know, Walter, I’m not feeling so great about myself.”

  “He doesn’t need you. You told me that, remember? He’ll barely even notice that you’re gone.”

  You smiled abstractedly and
shrugged your shoulders. “I wasn’t thinking about him.”

  “Is it me, then? Were you thinking about me?”

  A blank moment passed. “Of course not,” you said. But I’d already gotten my answer.

  “Listen to me, Mrs. Haven. I know you think I’m leading you on some kind of goose chase across Central Europe—maybe even that I’ve lost my mind—but I’ve got to get my family behind me. Can you understand that? I want the past to be past: to stop spinning in circles, to stop sucking me in, to let me make my own goddamn decisions. I’m in love with you, Mrs. Haven, and I want to start over.” I took in a breath. “For the first time that I can remember, I have a feeling that the future might be—”

  “I don’t want to talk right now,” you said, pressing your hands to your face. “Not about your family, not about your goose chase, and most of all—for God’s sake!—not about the future.” You let your hands fall and turned to the window. “Could you leave me alone until dinner?”

  I bobbed my head jerkily, digging my nails into the armrests of my seat. “Of course I can do that.”

  “Thank you, Walter.”

  It was cold in the car, cold enough to see your breath, and your woolen skirt crackled like a Tesla coil each time you rearranged your legs. You rearranged your legs often—for my benefit, perhaps, or for the benefit of the men across the aisle—and the counterclockwise spirals on your vintage patterned stockings emphasized your haunches in a way that made my forehead start to cramp. You steadfastly refused to meet my eye. The trees outside the window blurred and bowed.

  “Gentlemens and ladies!” the intercom warbled. “We regret to inform you the restaurant car is now open.”

  “At least they’re honest about it,” you said, getting up.

  * * *

  The restaurant car was populated by hollow-eyed businessmen and little old ladies who looked pickled in aspic and spleen. The men in trench coats were there, hunched together at the starboard center table; we seated ourselves hard to port. I tried to commit their features to memory—in the event of a future investigation by Interpol—while you squinted down at the greasy plastic menu as if you could make it appetizing by sheer force of will. You must have succeeded, because you ordered a bowl of česnečka—Czech garlic soup—for each of us.

  “Česnečka,” I said after a time. “I wouldn’t have thought—”

  “They don’t seem to have any bourbon. How do you say ‘bourbon’ in Czech?”

  The last time you’d ordered a bourbon had been on the airplane, after I’d explained the details of my plan. I knew what bourbon signified.

  “Mrs. Haven,” I said, attempting to keep my voice steady. “Are you starting to have second thoughts?”

  You smiled at me and took my hand in yours. “I had second thoughts the moment we met, Walter. That’s how I ended up here.”

  If the happiness this gave me was short-lived, Mrs. Haven, it was also very close to absolute. I reminded myself that you’d abandoned home and country—not to mention your personal safety—to be sitting with me in that joyless dining car. As always when I considered this fact, I felt that a mistake had been made: the most glorious and historic mistake since our ancestors descended from the trees.

  Our soup came and we ate it dutifully. It tasted of cabbage and socks.

  “This is the slowest train I’ve ever been on,” you said between spoonfuls. “The Sensational Gatsby would have loved it.”

  “I didn’t realize the Husband was a train buff,” I said, with what I hoped was a nonchalant air. “I’d have thought jet packs and hovercraft were more his thing.”

  “He has a set of guidelines that he follows,” you said, watching the farmhouses and wheat fields gliding by. “He believes that time passes faster when you’re having fun.”

  I hesitated, trying and failing to read your expression. You gazed out the window impassively.

  “Most people think that,” I said. “About time passing, I mean.”

  “They think it, maybe. But they don’t arrange their lives around the concept.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Richard is trying to decelerate time, Walter, by any means at his disposal.” You set down your spoon. “The most effective method he’s found, so far, is what he calls ‘autosuggestive psychostasis.’”

  “I’m not familiar with that term.”

  “He spends his days trying to achieve total boredom.”

  I gave an awkward half smile at that, certain now that you were pulling my leg. Even as I did so, however, I remembered those static, empty days before I’d won you back, and how the hours had advanced with sublime, psychotropic precision.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Mrs. Haven—”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  “—but your husband buys and sells companies and cuts ribbons at galas and zips around the planet in a private jet. If he’s trying to live a boring life, he’s doing a piss-poor job of it.”

  That made you smile a little, and I allowed myself to feel I’d won a modest victory; but the smile you gave seemed meant for someone else.

  “The jet’s a time-share, Walter. But you’re right about one thing. This trip of ours would do the trick much better.”

  * * *

  Znojmo was damp and gray and alcoholic-looking when we pulled in, the way towns look in Czech New Wave films from the sixties. The Himmler twins stayed put in the restaurant car, sipping somnolently from steins of Pilsner Urquell; I watched them as the Divis rolled away. Time was moving slowly on that train indeed.

  The platform, by contrast, seemed to empty instantaneously. The only person in sight by the time we’d gotten our bearings was a stooped teenager with a gigantic Saint Bernard in a seeing-eye harness. The dog was circling the boy—counterclockwise, of course—and the boy had no choice but to follow suit.

  “Look at that kid, Mrs. Haven.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or burst out crying. You were halfway along the platform already, tilting your head to look up at the sky. “Come on, Walter!” you called. “It’s beginning to rain.” And it was.

  We spent that next week in the Hotel Zrada on Republiky Square, living in high style on the UCS’s dime, littering the honeymoon suite with room-service trays and bottles of prosecco and sundry other forms of recreational debris, any of which would have looked right at home in Genny’s Archive. Our sideboard was soon populated by sweating mason jars of local gherkins: the riddle of my great-grandfather’s brining-room discovery couldn’t have interested you less, as far as I could tell, but brining itself seemed to fascinate you. While I dithered around town with a dated Czech phrase book and a list of addresses scavenged from century-old journals, you devoted yourself to the history of the pickle trade, spending hours in the kitchens of button-eyed babičkas, lamenting the post–Cold War rise of the Polish okurka and parsing the mysteries of dill. You got around your lack of Czech in a way I never would have thought of: by refusing to acknowledge its existence. Within the week you were friends with half the grandmothers in town, it seemed, while I was no further along than I’d been in New York. I won’t deny it, Mrs. Haven—I was envious. There’s only so much Znojemské okurky a person can eat, no matter how his forebears made their living.

  It was your interest in pickling, appropriately enough, that led us to Ottokar’s secret. After eight days of begging admission to every storehouse and factory and cellar my family had owned, I was ready to consign both my quest and my history—and even the Accidents themselves—to the far side of their own event horizon. Our suite at the Zrada was a pigsty by then: you’d hung the provided DO NOT MOLEST sign on the door handle when we checked in (“Present company excluded,” you’d whispered into my ear) and the cleaning staff had heeded it devoutly. It smelled of sex in those rooms for the first several days; later in the week, when things had soured between us, it smelled of old sex; finally even that faded, and it smelled of dirty sheets and pickled cabbage. A feeling of stagnation had set in between us, of fidgety ps
eudocalm, that scared me worse than any squabble could have done. Never before had we had so much time to observe each other, carbuncles and all, and I think we were both surprised by what we found. You had a way of running your tongue over your back teeth, for example, as though searching for food, and you tended to sulk over trifles. Worse yet, I found myself—especially since our disastrous audience with the Kraut—progressively less able to amuse you. Not to say that you seemed bored, Mrs. Haven: you were conspicuously, demonstratively chipper. But I began to pack my suitcase anyway.

  “You want to leave already, Walter? We’re just getting settled.”

  “I’ve done everything I can here. I give up.”

  What I didn’t tell you—due to some obscure suspicion, perhaps, but more likely simply out of injured pride—was that I was beginning to have doubts about my mission. Even if I somehow managed to get my hands on Ottokar’s notes, what would they help me accomplish? How exactly would they enable me to find the Timekeeper, and what did I suppose would happen if I did? He was a mass murderer, after all, and I was a caretaker at an old folks’ home. I was dangerously out of my depth. Sobriety, if you want to call it that, was returning to my overheated brain.

  If we’d left Znojmo then—right away, that same night—I might even have made a full recovery.

  “It’s been a bad week, Walter.” You nodded to yourself. “I’ve been up all night thinking about it. Maybe coming here was a mistake.”

  “Coming where? To Znojmo?”

  “To Europe.”

  I stared down into my suitcase, unable to speak. The problem, of course, was that a part of me agreed. You saw as much and smiled at me forlornly.

  “Do you remember euphasia, that word we invented? The feeling you get, coming out of a theater, that the movie you’ve been watching is still going on—still playing everywhere around you—even though it’s actually over?” You nodded to yourself. “I think we might both have euphasia now.”

 

‹ Prev