by John Wray
“The next translation happened just before the sun went down. It dropped me without warning onto a field of steaming tarmac: the parking area for a Soviet-administered sovkhoz the forest had been flattened to make room for. The year, I would soon learn, was 1959. I got my bearings quickly: fifties Poland, in certain respects, was not so different from the German Reich. I made my way to Warszawa in the guise of a Czech day laborer, hitching rides and doing odd jobs for my fare. The skills I’d learned in Budapest came back to me readily, and I made my living in the capital—once I finally arrived there—as a thief. My plan was to bribe my way over the border, and I was saving my złoty to that end when the next breach in the chronosphere occurred: forty-nine years backward, to June sixteenth, 1910. This was a considerable frustration, I have to confess. Crossing the border was no longer a problem—there wasn’t any border to speak of—but the money I’d saved was now worthless. I was thrown back, yet again, onto the kindness of strangers.
“It took me seven grueling weeks to reach Vienna. My idea had originally been to find my father and disclose myself to him, as the ultimate proof of his theory; or, barring that, to locate my twenty-one-year-old self and do the same. By the time I crossed into Moravia, however, my objective had changed. I had no memory, after all, of an encounter with my future self, and the dangers of tampering with so-called past events remained unknown. I decided to track Kaspar down instead—if possible at some point after our encounter at Trattner’s, in 1938. This was a great deal harder than you might suppose. I knew he would leave for America, of course; but I was a prisoner of 1908, remember, with no access, temporal or spatial, to his destination there.
“I’d been in Vienna less than three months, however—all praise to chance and fate and Providence!—when my predicament was rendered null and void. I was strolling along the Ringstrasse on a glorious late-October morning, dressed in a suit of saffron-colored twill, when a colorless curtain fell over the sun and the gravel beneath my wingtips turned to tar. No sooner had this occurred than a girl on a bicycle—a student at the university, wearing clothes that would have gotten her instutionalized, frankly, in 1908—clipped me with her handlebars and sent me flying. My twill suit was torn at the crotch and the shoulder; the girl was only slightly harmed in body—poor darling!—but thoroughly shaken in spirit. And her alarm only deepened, needless to say, when I asked politely what the year might be.
“‘Nineteen seventy-three,’ the girl stammered, then spent the better part of an hour trying to coax me to the hospital to test for a concussion. She gave up eventually, but only after I’d allowed her to buy me a new pair of trousers—the very ones I’m wearing now, in fact.
“I’d arrived at the ideal time and place to continue my search, and I went to the municipal archives that same afternoon. I was quickly able to establish that Kaspar had left Europe by a packet steamer, the Comtesse Celeste, bound for New York from Genoa by way of Spain. Sentimental numbskull though he was, I’d nevertheless expected my brother to have made a name for himself in the New World; imagine my surprise and dismay, if you can, when I found no mention of him in any of the papers. I cursed his lack of ambition, Nefflein, I can tell you. There was nothing for it, at that juncture, but to become an immigrant myself.
“I made my way by train to Naples, where the cheapest New York–bound steamers had once docked, and resolved to wait there to be knocked back to the first years of the century, when emigration to America was as simple as paying one’s fare. This took far longer than I’d anticipated: nearly seven years of my innate duration, during which span I completed no fewer than eighty translations. I saw Naples in ruins in 1945, after the brunt of the Allied invasion; I saw it forty-two years later, during a garbage crisis so extreme that it was agony to breathe. I grew to feel more at home in that great city than I had in any other, and would gladly have passed my whole duration there; but when my chance finally came—on May seventeenth, 1903—I seized it at once.
“I made the Atlantic crossing without a single breach—which was fortunate, Nefflein, considering that I was in the middle of the ocean—but I’d no sooner set foot on the pier at South Street than the air cleared of coke dust and a roar smote my ears and the sun disappeared behind a wall of steel and cinder block and glass. Never before had a translation struck so violently: it was as if a cliff had been thrown skyward by an earthquake. I wandered westward from the river in bewilderment, sporting clothing generations out of date. Luckily for me, this was Manhattan at the close of the twentieth century, and no one on the street looked at me twice.
“Somewhere in Chinatown I picked a drunk’s pocket and took the money into a corner shop—a bodega, I should say—for something to eat. My first meal in the United States, I’m pleased to report, was a chicken cutlet sandwich on a roll. I examined that morning’s edition of The New York Times as I ate, and found that I could follow most of the pieces, especially those that dealt with civic matters. The date was still the seventeenth of May—my birth month, as you may recall—which struck me, for some reason, as auspicious. And in this I was not disappointed.
“On page one of the Metro section—page B1 of the paper in toto—I came across an article that led me here, to this very apartment. I remember its headline, Nefflein, word for word. Can you guess what it was?”
* * *
“Can you guess what it was?” my great-uncle repeated.
I sat forward, blinking and rubbing my eyes, as though I’d just been jolted from a trance. “I have no idea.”
He privileged me with an indulgent smile. “Enzian Tolliver, Harlem Recluse, Found Dead at Sixty-Two.”
“So that’s how you got here? The Times gave you the address?” The blood rushed to my head. “Are you telling me you walked up here from South Street?”
“Not at all. I took the M4 bus.”
I stared into his face to see if he was joking. It was no help at all. It was barely a face.
“You never found your brother, then. My grandfather, I mean.”
“On the contrary! I saw him just two weeks ago, innately speaking. And those potty aunts of yours. And your father, of course. And our friend Richard Haven.”
“You’re lying again. How could you have been to all those times, not to mention those places? You’d have been found out by now. You’d have been—”
“There was some danger of that, admittedly.” The smile crept back into his features. “I had to choose my confidants with care.”
“Your confidants? What do you—”
“I haven’t devoted the last two innate decades of my existence to the pursuit of this family through the chronosphere, Nefflein, for recreational purposes. There remained important work to be done—groundbreaking work.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “There still does.”
“What sort of work?”
He looked up at me fondly. “Even the greatest experiment, as any researcher can tell you, is of value only if its results are reproducible. It had to happen a second time, Waldy. Another excision.” He sighed and took my shaking hand in his. “I had need—to put it bluntly—of an heir.”
“A test subject, you mean. A guinea pig.”
“Call it by whatever name you like.”
My hand prickled strangely in his grip, like a dead limb returning to life, and the tunnel began revolving counterclockwise. He tightened his grip. “You’ve done wonderfully, Nefflein—better than I dared to hope. We’re all of us so very proud of you.”
“More lies,” I managed to sputter. “How could you have found all those people? How could you have known where to go, never mind when to go there? No hall of records could have told you that.”
This question pleased him better, Mrs. Haven, than anything I’d thought to ask him yet.
“Why would I need a hall of records, Nefflein, when I have your book?”
“My book?”
He nodded. The Archive around us was starting to blur. I freed my hand from his and pressed it to the floor.
“So tha
t’s why you come here.” I shook my head slowly. “To read the next installment of the story.”
“And to see you, of course, Waldy. You’re the most important Tolliver of all.”
“Don’t say that to me, Uncle. I’m nothing. I’m a failure.”
“A failure, my boy? You’re a triumph! Didn’t you set down this history—this testament—now virtually complete? Didn’t you emancipate yourself from the chronosphere, using nothing but tenacity of will? Aren’t you the last of us, the best of us, the one whose role it was to close the circle? Without you to remember us—to invoke us—how could we continue to exist?”
Strange to say, Mrs. Haven, I believed what he said. I felt no anger toward him any longer—he was too diminished, too ruined, and I was too drunk on the answers he was giving. There was no further use in denial: the writing of this narrative has been my reason for existing. Despite my love for you, regardless of the anguish it has caused me, I never truly had another. I needed an audience, a receiver, and I found one in you. If you exploited me, Mrs. Haven—if you used me, ruthlessly, for your own ends—the truth is that I used you in return.
The Timekeeper coughed and sighed and licked his tattered lips. I wondered if he’d been as outspoken with Enzie, or with Kaspar, or with my poor father.
“Who else did you visit? Who among them knew that you were there?”
“Only your aunts, when they were little girls.” He snuffled. “And Haven, of course.”
“Why Haven, for God’s sake? What did you tell him?”
“Whatever nonsense came into my head.”
I thought for a moment, then gave a weak laugh. “I suppose that explains a few things.”
“I did what was necessary, Nefflein. No more and no less. To be frank, he was beginning to intrude.”
I wasn’t sure what this meant, Mrs. Haven, and I didn’t ask. The spinning of the Archive seemed to lessen.
“How is it coming?” he said, his voice suddenly shy. “Your history, I mean. Have you made any progress?”
“Just a chapter about Enzie and Genny. I doubt you’ll find it useful.”
He gave a wolfish grin and pinched my cheek. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
XXVII
I LEFT THE VILLA OUSPENSKY in worse shape, Mrs. Haven, than when I’d gone in. The fact of Orson in that place, surrounded by a swarm of beehived, pastel-skirted zombies, was destabilizing enough; but Miss Greer’s whispered warning had thrown me completely. I’d shown up with a theory—an absurd one at best—and she’d done the one thing I’d been unprepared for. She’d confirmed it.
For the whole of my childhood, I’d pictured the timestream as a flickering tunnel we all move through together—everyone who’s ever lived, or ever will—like passengers on a fairground logjam ride. After that last trip to Harlem, try as I might to repress it, I’d come to view the timestream as a magical streetcar of sorts, one that could move either forward or back. And now the revelation about my great-uncle—the possibility that he was traveling through both time and space at whim, in lines both straight and crooked, like a bishop or a knight around a chessboard—had transformed the timestream into a vast and roadless thicket, shadowy and dense in all directions, full of numberless places to hide. Even the term timestream now expressed a dated concept: an infinite array of streams flowed outward in every conceivable direction, it seemed, from any given moment. And Waldemar had access to them all.
The Timekeeper wasn’t likely to take kindly to my meddling, family ties notwithstanding—but that wasn’t my greatest fear. The concept itself was what frightened me most: the concept and all it implied. It gnawed at the margins of my well-being over the next few days, especially at night. At times it seemed a modest notion, almost trifling; at others it swelled to the dimensions of a nightmare. If there was suddenly more than one set of rails to move along—if the logjam ride of my childhood was in fact some universal junction, with countless radiating tracks—once I changed course, what was there to bring me back?
Though I believed what Orson’s nurse/lover/jailer had told me, Mrs. Haven, I chose to ignore her advice. My next move was clear: to determine the nearest point in the future the Timekeeper was likely to visit—both its temporal coordinates and its spatial ones—then go to that x/y/z/t intersection and kill him. Of all the innumerable descendants of SS war criminals, I alone still had the chance to bring my forebear to the ultimate account. I didn’t need to comb the chronosphere to accomplish my objective, either: the flow of what Orson liked to call “consensus time” would lead me to him. One hurdle remained, though, and it was a big one. I had to learn enough about my great-uncle, a man I knew next to nothing about, to predict both when and where he’d turn up next.
There was no way around it: I had to see Enzie and Genny.
I’d kept clear of my aunts for as long as I could—out of loyalty to Orson, I suppose, and possibly some sense of self-protection—but Orson’s power over me was at an end. My grandfather had turned his back on the role he’d been given—and so, in his way, had my father—but I had no intention of repeating their mistakes. If there was one quality that separated the Timekeeper and the Iterants (and the Patent Clerk himself, for that matter) from the wretched of the earth, it was this: they acted, Mrs. Haven, and the rest of us sad, frightened bumblers were acted upon.
Not me, I swore to myself. Not anymore. I was through pretending not to be a Tolliver.
* * *
Manhattan was in the grip of a cold snap the day I arrived, the iciest first of May on record, and the Boathouse and Nutter’s Battery lay fixed under a scrim of frozen rain. I sat on the stone wall of the park for a while, watching the trees flash and rustle, putting off my next move as long as I could. There was no sign of anything suspicious across the way: just a steady stream of grim, time-mired locals. I was shivering and my legs were going numb. It was time to cross the street and ring the buzzer.
Before I could do that, however—before I’d even crossed Fifth Avenue—I was treated to a piece of vaudeville. A silhouette caught my eye through the General Lee’s doors, then a flurry of movement; a few seconds later, just as I reached the curb, a hobo shuffled out onto the pavement. I use the term hobo, Mrs. Haven, because no other word suits the case. His toes jutted out from the tips of his boots and his pants were held up by duct-tape suspenders and his five o’clock shadow had the sheen of burnt cork. He turned toward me in a kind of dust-bowl soft-shoe, the steely glint of hardship in his eye. I expected him to cuss at me, or dance a jig, or possibly to hit me up for change. Instead he asked if I could hold the door.
There were two more drifters in the lobby, it turned out, standing on either side of what looked to be a refrigerator wrapped in a tarp. They were more presentable than their friend, but only barely. The three of them hoisted the thing without the least sign of effort and steered it neatly out onto the curb. The man in the suspenders thanked me and slipped me a dollar. I left them on the ice-encrusted stoop, apparently waiting for their ride, which I could only assume was a Model T Ford.
Hobos and refrigerator boxes aside, something was different about the General Lee—I sensed it as a tightness in the hollow of my chest. Had I been an older man, I might have put this down to hypertension; if I’d been a paranoiac, to airborne pathogens or smog or cosmic rays. As it was, I chose to blame it on anxiety, and urged my body up the darkened stairwell. But something was different.
My nerve failed me again when I reached my aunts’ door. Orson and I had stood on that same water-stained landing nearly a decade earlier, I remembered, on the night that had ended my childhood. We’d hesitated then, too, and with good reason. I remembered Orson’s obvious discomfort, and his clumsy attempts to conceal it—I’d seen him embarrassed so rarely. He’d been afraid on that visit, I realized now: that had been the source of his embarrassment. That I might look at him and recognize his fear.
The door swung loudly open before I could touch it. What I saw next stopped all speculation co
ld: dozens of bustling strangers, coming and going through those once-majestic rooms, burrowing like moles or dwarves or termites through my aunts’ beloved Archive. Enzie and Genny—who’d let virtually no one cross their threshold since the Nixon administration, who’d set booby traps and cut all ties to keep the world at bay—suddenly had a house full of guests.
It was Genny, smiling tightly, who received me at the door.
“You certainly took your time,” she snapped, before I could say a word.
“What do you—”
“Enzie!” she called over her shoulder, standing squarely in the doorway, as if I’d come to repossess the sofa. “Enzie! That person is here.”
I couldn’t see much over Genny’s white, Andy Warhol–ish bob, but what I managed to glimpse struck me speechless. Shabby young men and women with clipboards and archivists’ gloves were jostling and whispering to one another in the hallway behind her, scribbling notes with thick, expensive-looking pens. The theatrical decreptitude of their outfits clashed wildly with the businesslike air of the proceedings, not to mention their Mormon-ish hairstyles, and instantly put me in mind of the hobo downstairs. It was obvious that he’d been coming from my aunts’ apartment—but what could he have wanted with poor Genny’s fridge? And why was everyone dressed like extras in some dust-bowl reenactment?
“There you are,” said Enzie, squeezing out into the hall. Her tone was peculiar, self-conscious and stilted, as though put on for the benefit of someone on the far side of the door.
“I’m sorry,” I heard myself mumble. “I didn’t know—”