by John Wray
* * *
Ogilvy College (“The Sorbonne of Butternut Country”) played its own modest role in the aforementioned grift, gamely parting its gates to those spurned by the Ivy League for their lack of ambition or pedigree. It had once been the Lake Erie terminus of a branch of the underground railroad, and thus had a time-honored tradition of comforting the wretched, which I’m not ashamed to say included me. I was foaming at the mouth when I arrived, in a fever to get my puberty behind me, to relinquish all rights and privileges pertaining to my Cheektowaga self. By my third semester I had clavicle-length hair and a “math rock” band that I played “tape loops” in (The Educated Consumers) and an elementary grasp of the principles of cause and effect—which came in handy, Mrs. Haven, because I’d also found a girl.
Every male of the species, I’m fairly sure, is flabbergasted by the first woman who doesn’t run from him in bug-eyed horror, and goes on to suffer a kind of blissful PTSD for months thereafter—but even after adjusting for my near-total lack of sexual intelligence (not to mention my overall state of shock), Tabitha Guy was inexplicable. She was ferally at ease in her own body, as if she’d never heard of either Testament; she was pale and plump and up for almost anything. She had hair in her armpits the color of honey. She was a black studies major. And out of some occult motive—some faux-political agenda, some inscrutable kink—she was willing to lower her overalls for me (her corduroy overalls!) in the lockable single-stall bathroom on the fourth floor of the Clay Undergraduate Library, less than an hour before I caught the bus home for Thanksgiving.
“You can give thanks for that, Tolliver,” she announced when it was over. “Waldy? Look at me, Waldy. How soon are you going to be sick?”
The loss of my virginity enlightened me on a number of points that everyone else seemed to know already, such as the fact that it’s possible, for short periods of time, to go agreeably insane. Thanksgiving break that year was an extended hallucinogenic odyssey for which all the necessary psychoactive compounds were produced by my own stunned metabolism. I remember only three things about it with any clarity: Orson’s forced-seeming cheer, the Kraut’s puzzling remoteness, and a letter to me from my aunts—the first one in years—that I used as a bookmark instead of opening. I might as well have spent that week inside of Enzie’s plywood crate.
Tabitha’s surrender stood as the defining singularity of my duration—at least until spring term started, when it practically became an hourly event. She surrendered to me on the futon of her “divided double” in the all-girls wing of Jodorowsky Hall; she surrendered in the coed showers of my dorm, cool and arch-backed and sudsy, like a hooker in a made-for-cable movie; she surrendered pretty much anywhere, in private and in public, without even considering it surrender. For my part, I partook ravenously, hysterically, certain that my luck was temporary. I was availing myself of some providential oversight, some dimple in the cosmic status quo, and I knew that a correction would be made before too long.
What I didn’t suspect, Mrs. Haven—not even in my wildest fits of adolescent mania—was that I would make the correction myself.
I can’t say when I first got wind of the Ogilvy Synchronology Society, known unofficially around campus—for appropriately cryptic reasons—as the Stuttering Few. No one took the SFs seriously except the SFs themselves, who took their society so excruciatingly seriously that they never spoke its name aloud or publicized their meetings. This was rote cult behavior, of course, but it also made practical sense: self-promotion was risky at Ogilvy, especially if you were into something geeky. The Ogilvy Middle-Earth Collective (the “Elfdiddlers,” in Ogilvy-speak) had learned this the hard way the previous spring. In the hope of attracting fresh blood to their weekly Helm’s Deep reenactments in the college arboretum, they’d plastered the campus in Celtic-lettered flyers:
HEAR YE! HEAR YE!
ALL YE STEADFAST OF BROADSWORD
AND NIMBLE OF BOW!
ALL YE YEOMEN OF VIRTUE!
THE HOUR IS AT HAND.
COME DO BATTLE WITH ORKS IN THE ARB.
All it had taken to undo their good work was one unbeliever with a Sharpie, a few idle hours, and the idea of prefacing ORKS with an uppercase D. The Elfdiddlers never recovered.
I’d have managed to ignore the Ogilvy Synchronology Society altogether, I think, if it hadn’t been for Tabitha Guy. It happened by the ruthless whim of C*F*P: as Tabitha and I reclined on her mattress one midwinter evening, both of us smug and sweat-soaked and (temporarily) immortal, I noticed a dog-eared pamphlet on the floor. Its bottom half was wedged under the bedframe, and the author’s name—in a Celtic-looking font, if I remember correctly—was badly smudged, but its title was plain, even in the lava lamp’s slithering light:
THE HOUR IS AT HAND.
THE HOUR ***ALWAYS*** IS AT HAND.
& SO CAN YOU!
The jumbled-clock symbol of the UCS was stamped underneath, not quite centered on the page, but I didn’t need to see it. I could smell an Iterant a mile away by then, Mrs. Haven, if the wind was blowing right. Or so I’d always let myself believe.
“What’s this?” I said to Tabitha, as nonchalantly as I could. She scratched one honey-colored armpit and emitted a coo.
“Tabitha. Hey.”
“I’m trying to sleep, bunny. What do you want?”
I jerked the pamphlet free of the mattress, biting back my paranoia, and laid it across the humid sheet between us. “I asked you about this—” I hesitated, not sure what to call the thing. “This literature.”
“Oh! That,” she said, yawning. Her yawn struck me as false: it seemed too athletic, too studied. “I’ve been meaning to show that to you, actually. There’s some trippy shit in there.”
I’d told Tabitha nothing about my history with the Iterants. This wasn’t because I distrusted her, necessarily, but because of the vow I’d sworn to bury the teenaged iteration of Waldy Tolliver alive, along with his retainer and his collection of Timestrider memorabilia and the green knickerbockers his parents had dressed him up in before he was old enough to reason for himself. I was less a “new man” at college, psychosocially speaking, than a man who’d demolished his identity and reassembled the rubble along wildly incongruous lines, thereby becoming both his own executioner and his own parent. (Unlikely as this sounds, the Church of Synchronology preaches that just such a wonder is possible, once the time-consuming—and costly—Seventeenth Level of Iteration has been reached.) But we tamper with the weft of the universe at our peril, Mrs. Haven, as I was about to discover. I was beginning to suspect that the Tolliver/Toulas had had things backward from the very beginning: we’d brought our combined wills to bear on escaping our past, when the future was the thing we should have run from.
* * *
I didn’t tell Tabitha about the Iterants the night I found that pamphlet, either, though it would have been the perfect occasion. I didn’t tell her over the course of that next week, during which period I grew steadily more guarded and suspicious; and I didn’t tell her that following Saturday—exactly seven days from our first and only conversation about the UCS—when I suggested that we “spend some time apart.”
I felt sick to my stomach as I watched the meaning of that hateful phrase register on her lovely face; but I also felt jaded and cosmopolitan, master of my emotions—the tragic, stiff-lipped, self-denying hero. This is what adults do, I assured myself coolly. In reality I was terrified, hopelessly out of my depth, gnawed to ribbons by a frantic, all-purpose jealousy that had no fixed target and therefore applied to everything I saw. Tabitha Guy had been an Iterant all along: I saw that clearly now. Why else would someone so exquisite have allowed my piggish fingers to besmirch her?
* * *
Right or wrong, Mrs. Haven, the rest of sophomore year confirmed this theory nicely. Girls recoiled from me as if I still had green knickerbockers on, or my entire face were covered in lipstick, or I’d invited them to fight dorks in the Arb. Friends ran out of patience with my customized blend o
f paranoia and self-pity almost instantly—with the exception of Hornbanger, who never listened to me very closely—and before long I was spending my nights in the periodicals reading room on the third floor of Clay, combing back issues of Galaxy Science Fiction for mentions of my father and trying not to think about the lockable single-stall bathroom one flight up. Galaxy loathed the works of Orson Card Tolliver—it hated all of his books, soft- and hard-core alike—with a dedication I found oddly soothing. (Sample quote: “Mr. Tolliver writes his novels for the ages. The ages between five and eleven.”) After a couple of weeks, however, even the periodicals reading room began to lose its charm.
TV helped for a while, until it suddenly didn’t; and the same with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and pornography and pot. Within a month I was gripped by the life-or-death need, well known to junkies and AA members (and regular garden-variety obsessives), for something louder than the whinging of my brain. Which is how I came to be sitting cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room one Saturday night—moderately high and bored out of my skull, but too afraid of my own thoughts to fall asleep—staring down at the unopened letter from Enzie and Genny that I’d been using as a bookmark. I opened it, Mrs. Haven, and it worked right away. By the second time through I wasn’t even stoned.
Dearest Waldemar!
Nearly six years have passed since your visit to Harlem: enough time to do a bit of growing up. How much you’ve grown since that time? this is what we’ve been wondering. Your father has sent us pictures one small picture of you, unfortunately something out of focus. You look, as far as we can tell, like an American adult—meaning rather too “fleischig.” Remember to keep fit for the little girls!
But we’re interested in other manner of changes, your aunt Enzie and I. Can you think for yourself yet, Waldemar, or are you still your father’s “schlemiel”? This is one thing we are curious about. For this reason we include a little “Märchen.”
An old man goes to sleep one night and has a funny dream.
He dreams that he arrives at his workplace, ready to begin the day’s business, and finds his desktop strewn with cherry pits. There are pits in the drawers, on the floor, even under his heels.
Once the desk has been cleared, the old man’s work goes well. It goes so well, in fact, that after only a few hours he gives himself a holiday. He takes his lunch as usual, savoring every bite, then goes for a walk along a cobbled street, congratulating himself on his success.
A car surprises him in the dream, and he wakes up.
A few hours after waking, the man arrives at his workplace and finds his desktop strewn with cherry pits. One of his assistants (a teenaged boy!) has left them there.
Another man might prefer to dismiss these events—to attribute them to happenstance, or to an attack of nerves, or even to mystical sight. This old man does none of these things. He approaches the problem as a man of science would. There is meaning hidden here, and he will find it.
He has had such dreams before, he begins to recall. He has always chosen to dismiss them, as everyone else does, since such dreams are offensive to Reason. But this time the old man has a different idea. What if—he asks himself—this thing that has happened is not, in fact, odd or uncommon at all? What if it’s not a freakish occurrence, but an everyday one? What if it happens to all of us, virtually every night, while we’re asleep?
What if the Universe is, as other men of science have conjectured, spread out across Time as well as Space? What if the partial view we have—a view with the Future mysteriously missing, kept from the ever-expanding Past by the rolling windowpane we call the Present—is the effect of a mentally imposed barrier, one that functions only while we are awake?
This might explain the dream of the cherry pits, the old man thinks. He was seeing into the Future while he dreamt, as the driver of an automobile looks across a bridge that he has yet to cross.
Applying the principle of Occam’s razor, he now pares his theory down to its essentials. If, in fact, the Universe is—as some scientists claim—composed of at least four dimensions, why can we fully perceive only three? What if the Attention of the dreamer, obeying no rules but the rules of association and chance, travels back and forth across the Present/Past membrane at will?
The longer he considers this point, the more absurd it seems that our movement should be restricted in this so-called Fourth Dimension, when we enjoy such freedom in the others. If we travel with the prevailing wind through Time, like children adrift in the hold of a pilotless yacht, it can only be, he decides, because we haven’t learned to take our bearings yet. The sea, after all, looks the same in every direction—it’s easy to find oneself sailing in circles. Why should our voyages through the chronosphere be any different?
The old man is taking his afternoon stroll when this idea arrives, and its significance is clear to him at once. It represents the summit of his rational duration. His discovery will shake the scientific world to its foundations.
He is ambling over the cobblestones, congratulating himself on this stroke of good fortune, when a car comes rolling up the street and kills him.
If you understand this much, Waldemar, you might be old enough. Are you old enough, finally? If you are then come along and see us.
ET & GT
XXVI
IN THE FALL of my third year at Ogilvy, Mrs. Haven, my father joined the Church of Synchronology. We didn’t find out until later, the Kraut and myself, because he didn’t stick around to clue us in. My mother had gone down to the basement one wet November afternoon, to check for flooding in the boiler room, and also to bring Orson the weird red South African tea (Redbush? Roy’s Bus? Rouge-Bouche?) that he always insisted on drinking, only to find the door of his office wide open and its floor and bookshelves in a shocking state. The shelves were dust-free and immaculate, the drafting table had been neatly clapped together, and the purple shag rug with the Möbius-strip pattern actually looked as if it might have been shampooed. The man she was married to would have been appalled. She stood transfixed in the doorway with her mouth hanging open, swaying lightly in place, like a scientist who’s had a sudden breakthrough. She felt sure, in that moment, that she’d never see Orson again.
In later years, the Kraut would come to wonder how her husband could have vanished so utterly, with a roomful of books and papers and typewriters, in the course of a day she’d spent almost entirely at home; but at the time the question barely crossed her mind. She called the police but hung up as soon as the dispatcher answered, feeling ashamed without quite knowing why. She called me at Ogilvy and left a rambling message, full of cleaning tips and Cheektowaga gossip, that made no mention of my father’s disappearance. What surprised her most, she told me afterward, was her relative composure. Being a woman of science, she put this down to denial, and braced herself for the inevitable hair-tearing, teeth-gnashing hysterics.
She was still waiting, two and a half weeks later, when I arrived home for Thanksgiving.
I found her at the kitchen counter, the picture of bland domesticity, peeling a heap of fingerling potatoes. “There you are, Waldy,” she said. “Orson’s gone.”
Somehow I understood her instantly. “To Znojmo?” (A visit to his father’s birthplace—followed, if all went well, by application for political asylum in the Czech Republic—had been a hobbyhorse of Orson’s recently.)
She smiled to herself and kept peeling. “I doubt it.”
“Where to, then? To Harlem?”
“I’ve spoken to your aunts—both of them. They haven’t heard from him in months.” Her smile stiffened slightly. “They suggested I might try the Fuzzy Fruits.”
“That can’t be true,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”
The Kraut didn’t answer. She was still, at just past forty, a singularly beautiful woman, at least to me. It was painful to see her so chastened.
“Why the hell would he want to go there? Why to the Iterants, in the name of all that’s holy?”
“In the name of al
l that’s holy,” the Kraut repeated. She gave an airless little laugh. “What a funny choice of words. That must be it.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’ve been calling your father a prophet for years. What middle-aged man wouldn’t like the sound of that?”
Neither of us spoke for a time.
“Is there gas in your car?” she said, setting her knife down abruptly. When the Kraut decided a subject was finished, Mrs. Haven, she wrung its neck without remorse and tossed it in the river. There was no going back for her, only ahead. She was like the nineteenth-century chronoverse that way.
I nodded. “Half a tank.”
“Excellent! We need to buy a turkey.”
* * *
For reasons I can’t entirely describe, Mrs. Haven, those four days with the Kraut were as pleasant as any I’d passed in that house. For the first time since I’d been a toddler, the two of us had the place entirely to ourselves, an extended weekend’s worth of idle hours, and an almost mystical ability to see each other as we were. The quirks that had driven me bonkers for years—her way of looking past you when she spoke, her sitcom-Nazi accent, her earsplitting, glass-cutting laugh—now somehow had the opposite effect. I’d taken her for granted as a child, the way spoiled children will—she was so constant, so effective, so elemental that she was often hard to see. Orson had always been sharply in focus, never anywhere but front and center, the cardinal or potentate or dragon in the foreground of the painting; my mother, by contrast, was the fortress in the distance, or the range of sky-blue mountains, or the gauzy blue dome of the sky itself.