by John Wray
The chicken-sized turkey we ended up buying was our single concession to the holiday spirit. We ate it from sheets of tinfoil spread out on the counter, along with Triscuits and cans of Genessee Cream Ale.
“So what happens now?” I asked her, feeling worldly and urbane. “Will you guys get divorced?”
She laughed. “He hasn’t left me for a woman, Waldy. He’s left me for himself.”
“Does he really believe all that UCS horseshit?”
“I hope so, for his sake. Otherwise it won’t be very fun.”
“Maybe he’s trying to infiltrate the Iterants, to figure them out—to study them from the inside.” My voice had gone childish. “Maybe this is about the Accidents.”
“The Accidents?” She looked at me sharply. “Who’s been talking to you about that?”
“There’s a mystery about them—Orson told me that much. I know they’re supposed to be some kind of code, but no one understands what for. I know they’re why my great-grandfather died.”
The Kraut heaved a sigh. “If they’re code for anything at all, sweetheart, it’s self-delusion. For all the good that ridiculous phrase has done this family, it might as well have been written by a chimpanzee on a banana peel.”
“But don’t you think there’s a chance—”
“I’d rather talk about something else.” She pursed her lips. “Your future, for example.”
“Groan.”
“You’ll have to declare a major soon, and—”
“I’ve already declared a major.”
That surprised her. “What is it?”
“History.”
“History?”
I gave a solemn nod.
“History!” the Kraut repeated. “I’ll be damned.”
The relief in her voice was unmistakable. I hadn’t said writing or panhandling or gunrunning or—God forbid!—physics. I’d said the first thing that had popped into my head, Mrs. Haven, to tell you the truth. But I liked the sound of it.
“You’ll have to write some kind of thesis, won’t you?” the Kraut said, once she’d recovered her bearings. “The challenge of history, I’ve always thought, is that the field is so big. You’ve got millennia of stupidity and hysteria to choose from.”
“I’ve thought about that, too,” I told her. “I’m going to stick to the hysteria I know.”
“Very good,” she said, taking a thoughtful sip of her beer. “Write what you know.”
She was wondering what the hell that meant, of course, and so was I.
Looking back, it’s clear to me that I had this chronicle in mind already, though neither of us knew it at the time—at least not consciously. This was part of what made that weekend so extraordinary: we were able to chatter on about the future happily, to treat it as a glowing white unknown, free of any fear of its petrifying blankness. We had no need of tarock cards or exclusion bins. The one thing we knew about the future was that it was likely to be—that it had to be—different from the past. That was all we knew, Mrs. Haven, but it was enough.
It dawned on me gradually, as the hours and days passed, that my mother had plans of her own, and that some of them were intricately plotted; which could only mean she’d seen the end approaching. She wanted—after a twenty-year hiatus—to finish her doctorate, if possible at the University of Vienna. I bluffed my way through these conversations, nodding and frowning as if deep in thought, doing my best to hide my wonderment. The Kraut would be returning to Europe, she told me, and possibly not coming back. It occurred to me at one point—I think it was late Sunday morning, eating apricot palatschinken in the kitchen—that I’d never before seen her so happy.
“It’s for the best that he left, then,” I said tentatively. “I can’t see Orson moving to Vienna.”
The Kraut didn’t answer.
“He was a good father, basically,” I continued. “I know he meant well. But sometimes days would go by—more than days—when I didn’t understand a single word he said. He’s like—” I hesitated. “I don’t really know what. I guess he’s like Enzie and Genny.”
“You’re right,” said the Kraut. “He’s exactly like them.”
“That’s what I can’t figure out. Why is it that no one’s like Orson but Enzie and Genny, and no one’s like Enzie and Genny but him?”
She said nothing to that. But she looked as though she wanted to say something.
“You must have thought about this, Ursula. It must have occurred to you, some time or other, that there was—I mean, that there was kind of an unusual—”
The Kraut took my hand in both of hers and stared at me. “You’re too close to see it,” she said. “How could you see it? It’s all you’ve ever known.”
I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. “What is it,” I said carefully, “that I’m too close to see?”
“Don’t you understand yet, Waldy, that your family is mentally ill?”
* * *
I arrived back at Ogilvy flush with high-minded purpose, having managed to convince myself on the three-hour drive back from Buffalo that I was a budding connoisseur of human history. Tabitha and pot and social paranoia, not to mention the UCS in all its forms and guises, were the stuff of my personal past. I was determined to call my own bluff, to focus my fractured attention into a photon beam of sober inquiry: to get to work on my thesis immediately, or at least to start going to class.
All of which might actually have happened, Mrs. Haven, if C*F*P had only looked the other way.
I was six weeks into the kind of kitchen-sink cinema studies course (The Scl/erotic Muse: Introduction to Postwar European Cinema, 1944–78) that undergrads laboring under delusions of profundity generally take, when the answer to the riddle of my great-uncle’s disappearance—or a maddening complication of that riddle, depending on your point of view—was dropped into my lap as I sat in my dorm’s “media lounge,” sulking my way through yet another loveless Friday night. Hornbanger and I were halfway through The Damned, Luchino Visconti’s ’69 Nazisploitation campfest; he thought it “shredded”, my feelings were mixed. Hornbanger (who was about to drop out, had his bags packed already, was only waiting for his stipend check to clear) had just done two bumps of a flesh-colored powder that he claimed to have stolen from a birth-control clinic; I was brutally sober. My attention was starting to drift when a heavyset man with a passing resemblance to Reichsmarschall Goering shuffled grouchily across the mise-en-scène, scratching his back with the butt of his Luger. I sat up at once. The Goering look-alike, who appeared to be in early middle age, blinked nearsightedly into the camera for a second or two; then he adjusted his gun belt, which looked too small for him, and gave a halfhearted “Sieg Heil.”
“That is one chubby Nazi,” Hornbanger observed.
“That’s my great-uncle Waldemar Toula.”
“Say huh?”
I’d never seen Waldemar in the flesh, needless to say, but I’d spent hours examining the pictures of him reproduced in various histories of the Third Reich, and I’d identified him in a sepia-tinted portrait of the family in Znojmo. This portrait, in turn, had led to my greatest discovery: a photograph of my grandfather and his brother from their student days in Vienna—in front of the Schloss Belvedere, of all places—gawping into the camera like the starry-eyed yokels they were. Waldemar is a sight to behold in the snapshot, assured in his new-minted manhood—worlds more handsome than his elder brother, in spite of their identical shit-eating grins. His smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes, however, which seem unaccountably tired. I might not have recognized the world-weary Nazi in Visconti’s film if not for that photograph, liberated from a shoe box in our terminally cluttered garage. But knowing it as well as I did—having scrutinized it over and over, until it was rotogravured into my memory—there was no chance of mistaking the resemblance. Those flat eyes could belong to no one else.
* * *
I left school two weeks later, on the same day as Hornbanger. I didn’t drop out officially, didn’t make
a show of it the way he did—I just left. My ancient Subaru refused to start, so I bummed a ride from him as far as Pittsburgh. You wouldn’t have known from Hornbanger’s looks that he was a metalhead, necessarily, but his driving style expressed it eloquently. He got us out of Ohio without switching lanes once, jerking his flat-topped head along to Cannibal Corpse and Deicide and Morbid Angel, running his dad’s late-model Taurus up the backsides of trucks like a heifer in heat. He dropped me off at a truck stop that featured a Taco Bell and a Dunkin’ Donuts grafted together into a two-headed hydra of dining convenience, still a novelty in the early nineties. It seemed as good a place to hitch a lift as any.
“So long, Tolliver. Good luck finding your pops.”
“I already know where to find him, Karl. But thanks.”
“I know where to find mine, too,” Hornbanger said, gunning his engine. “At the Seminole Rez in Tampa, playing slots. If things don’t work out on your mission, maybe you could liberate my dad instead. But I’m not holding my breath or anything.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I gave him a thumbs-up and stepped back from the car. It was late afternoon and the parking lot was hot and bluish gray and weirdly empty. Hornbanger did a few doughnuts, flashed me the devil horns, then rolled off at a surprisingly moderate speed. He had no one to impress anymore, Mrs. Haven, and neither did I.
I’d left school for the usual reasons, I suppose, but also for some I considered distinctive. I knew plenty of kids at Ogilvy whose mothers were naturalized U.S. citizens, for example, but I’d never heard of any of them choosing to reverse the procedure, and if anybody else’s father had been spirited away by a cult of long-haired, corduroy-sporting time fetishists, word of it had somehow passed me by. The clincher, however, was this: I’d become convinced, since seeing him waddle across that Cinecittà soundstage, that the Black Timekeeper of Czas had escaped the destruction of the Äschenwald camp, just as the conspiracy-theorists had claimed. But I went all those nutjobs one better, Mrs. Haven. I’d decided that he was still alive—here and now, at the complacent, listless end of the twentieth century—and that it was up to me, and only me, to hunt him down.
* * *
Three days later, at 10:43 EST, I found myself standing at an ivy-choked gate on a quaint country lane, debating whether or not to ring its fat brass bell. Above the bell hung a plate, even brassier and more expensive-looking:
THE UNITED CHURCH OF SYNCHRONOLOGY
∞
VILLA OUSPENSKY
I studied my reflection in the plate, adjusting my posture, taking deep breaths and stalling for time; time obliged, for once, and moved with tidal slowness. The gate was almost imperceptibly ajar. Beyond it, up a violet-green lawn—a color I’d never seen before in nature—stood a gingerbread house, in full view of the road. I passed through the gate without ringing the bell.
I had no burning desire to see my father, Mrs. Haven, least of all in that place, but I needed his help. I needed a hint of some kind, however grudging or clumsy—some small clue as to where to begin. Not that I felt pessimistic about my quest, strange to say: I felt pessimistic about everything else—as any self-respecting college dropout and/or child of a broken home should—but not that. I knew from the start that I’d find Waldemar. In a sense I’d always carried him within me.
No one met me on the lawn, or on the ∞-shaped drive, or even on the stoop of the villa, though I felt myself being observed. They let me ring the doorbell—fatter and brighter and brassier still—and made me wait just long enough to weaken my morale. Eventually an intercom sputtered and a woman’s voice asked me, somewhat frostily, to state my name and business.
“Waldemar Tolliver. I’m here to see my father.”
“Your father?” A southern accent, I decided, or possibly English. “And who might that be?”
“You know damn well who my father is.”
No response came. Everything seemed to hold still, from the sparrows in the bushes to the clouds above the trees. I’d just begun to ask myself whether I’d picked the wrong UCS outpost—whether the Kraut might have had bad intel about Orson, or I’d misunderstood—when the lacquered door swung inward with a smooth, hydraulic sigh, like the hatch of a spaceship, and a beautiful dark-eyed woman with hands of polished wax pulled me inside.
She was the whitest and most elegant woman I’d ever seen, Mrs. Haven, including the Kraut, who (as you know yourself) was as pale as a fish. Somehow she even gripped me elegantly. Her hands weren’t really made of wax, of course, although they looked—and even felt—as if they were. She seized me by the elbow and jerked me hard across the threshold, then receded holographically down a tastefully furnished hall, as if my presence there were no concern of hers. Her bare feet made no sound on the cream-colored runner. Before the latch had closed behind me she was gone.
I took a moment to steady myself. The experience had been appropriately cultish so far, which pleased me on some adolescent level. The air in the corridor seemed to hum very slightly, and I could feel the floor vibrating through the soles of my sneakers, although this might have been a trick of my nerves. The walls were smooth and bare and starkly lit. No one else was in sight. I took off my shoes for some reason—decorum, perhaps—and began creeping forward. The length of the hallway proved tricky to gauge in the flat, bloodless light. I expected to catch sight of the woman when I turned the first corner, but I found only a second length of hallway, as bare as the first, ending in another left-hand turn. It reminded me of something.
It reminded me of the corridor in Enzie and Genny’s apartment.
I pulled back around the corner and rested my head against the wall, breathing in stuttering sucks. All my false courage left me. I wanted to get out of there, Mrs. Haven. I’d made a terrible mistake. The floor was vibrating—I was sure of it now. It occurred to me then—how could I have overlooked it?—that there were no doors or windows in sight. The wall was shuddering behind me: I could feel it in my shoulders and my spine. I tried to recall what I’d just glimpsed around the corner. There might have been a sort of door—a small one, maybe six feet past the turning. But I was too unnerved to take another look.
It meant something—it had to—that the interior of the Iterants’ headquarters was laid out like the Archive, but what it meant was beyond me. I knew no more than this: that the arrangement of Enzie and Genny’s rooms was connected to something secret, or was possibly the expression of that secret; and that this secret was a vital and ominous one, at least in relation to me. If Haven had discovered what that secret was—or had access to someone who did, such as Orson—but I stopped myself there. It was better not to attempt to guess what that might mean.
When I forced myself to round the corner a second time, still shaken and woozy, the white lady was waiting. There had been a door—narrow and knobless and low—and we passed through it, into a kind of winter garden. Its ceiling was of glass, like the roof of a greenhouse, and the space itself was small and shadowless. There were couches arranged in a ring—she led me to one of them, and sat down beside me—but I took in almost nothing, in those first dazed moments, but the mural covering the room’s eight walls.
“Well, Mr. Tolliver? How do you like the decor?”
I opened my mouth and gave a sort of peep. The mural was done in thin washes of paint—so thin that the plaster’s imperfections showed through—with the most delicate of brushes. Running counterclockwise, it depicted all the great theorists of time, from Herodotus to Newton to Stephen J. Hawking. The entire hall of fame and infamy stood assembled on those walls: everyone I’d ever heard Orson disparage or praise. The figures were rendered in one-to-one scale, precise as Audubon engravings, their hands and faces more alive than any photo could have been. They looked so human, in fact, that it took me a moment to see what was wrong about them.
Each figure had the head and the limbs of a man—or a woman, in a handful of cases—and the glossy, reddish body of an insect.
“What is this place?”
“Oh.”
We gazed up at the mural for a time.
“Quite a feast for the eyes, isn’t it? Most people who see it—not that there are many of them, mind you—tend to be rather impressed.” She parted her pale lips and stared at my own, as if in expectation of a kiss. “Are you impressed, Mr. Tolliver?”
“Can I see my father now?”
“Let me ask you a question. Why do you want to see him?”
“I’m his son.”
She patted my knee. “Sons like to visit their fathers now and again. That’s perfectly in order.” She turned back to the mural. “I should tell you, however, that the Prime Mover hasn’t received any visitors in quite some time.”
“If you’re trying to stop me—”
“I have no intention of trying to stop you, Mr. Tolliver.”
She led me back out of the room, moving with a dreamlike lack of effort, and I seemed to follow her in the same way. There were people in the corridor now: young men and women in tweeds and pastels, carrying clipboards and padded manila envelopes and sheaves of yellow paper. We went up a steep flight of stairs, then another, then another, and arrived at a low attic room. The man I found there, reclining in a La-Z-Boy beside a dormer window, bore a remarkable resemblance to my father. He waited for the woman to go, then smiled at me and asked me how I was. I said I was doing okay.
“I knew you’d be coming, Waldy. And now here you are!”
He placed a sly sort of emphasis on the word knew, I remember, as if he’d been informed of my approach by a network of spies, or predicted it by means of calculus, or seen it reflected in a mystic pool.
“My name isn’t Waldy,” I heard myself answer. “I changed it after you ditched us.” I racked my brain for a moment. “It’s Jack.”
His only response was a shrug. He had my father’s blunt features, he smelled like my father, and he was wearing a shirt I must have seen a thousand times—but something was off. He wasn’t as Orson-ish, for want of a better word, as he ought to have been. He sat there so passively, utterly sapped of authority, like a codger in some cut-rate nursing home. He looked a decade older than he was.