by John Wray
“We called at eight this morning, and again at half past ten. Anyone would think you didn’t care for our business.” She held a package in her arms, I now saw: a padded manila envelope, like those I’d seen at the Villa Ouspensky, on which UPS had been written in block letters with a Sharpie. She thrust it hurriedly into my hands. The look on her face, severe at the best of times, was nothing short of marrow-chilling now.
“I do want it,” I got out at last. “Your business, I mean. As a matter of fact—”
“Run along, then,” hissed Enzie. “And be careful. It’s a family heirloom.”
“I will, ma’am—of course.”
“Good. Now you’ll have to excuse us.” She scuttled back inside and shut the door.
I stood motionless on the landing, barely breathing, until I was sure she wasn’t coming out again; then I leaned against the wall and tried to think. Enzie and Genny were too otherworldly, somehow, for me to fear much for their safety, but the thought that we’d never spent a single moment together under anything approaching normal circumstances—that we’d never sat around a dinner table, or watched a movie, or compared notes about Orson and the Kraut—suddenly filled me with remorse. Why it hit me then and there, I couldn’t say; it wasn’t the ideal time or place, to put it mildly. Perhaps I sensed my chance had come and gone.
It was only after I’d snapped out of it and made my getaway, slinking off into the icebound afternoon, that it occured to me that the fridge-like object in the tarp had been the size and shape of the exclusion bin.
* * *
It might be overstating the case, Mrs. Haven, to say that my aunts’ envelope contained the whole of this account in capsule form; but it wouldn’t be overstating it by much. I took it straight to the Forty-Second Street Library—the beautiful main branch, the one with the lions—where I tore it open with the key to my Ogilvy dorm room. I’d barely made myself comfortable at one of the Rose Reading Room’s gargantuan tables before I saw that I’d been slipped a century.
Kaspar’s journals—eleven pocket notebooks crammed with dense, schoolboyish cursive—were first out of the envelope; then a copy of the Gottfriedens Protocols; then Enzian’s crude account of her grandfather’s work, written when she and Genny were still in their teens. Some juvenilia of my father’s—along with his second-to-last novel, Salivation Is Yours!—distracted me so completely that I overlooked the scrap of rag paper at the bottom of the pile until a few minutes before the building closed. By the time I came up for air it was a quarter past six, all the tables were empty, and a security guard with a sad yellow mustache was tugging at the collar of my coat.
The scrap of paper in question was a copy of Ottokar’s seminal riddle: the half page of alliterative, semiliterate gibberish that had started it all, written out in pencil in the Timekeeper’s precise, archaic hand.
The next thing I knew I was out on the street, blinking through thin, stinging rain at a power plant on the far side of the river, alive with a sense of consequence I’d never felt before. I was Waldemar Gottfriedens Tolliver, after all. I’d been given those names for a reason—Enzian and Orson (and even the Kraut herself) had told me so. It was my burden and birthright to close the great circle, to restore the Toula/Tollivers to what we’d been before Ottokar’s breakthrough: a family of inconsequential picklers. And I would do it, Mrs. Haven, if it killed me.
But first I had to find a place to sleep.
* * *
I knew only one person in the city aside from my aunts, and I called him from the first working pay phone I found. Van Markham was Buffalo Bill’s half sister’s grandson, and therefore some species of cousin to me, though I’d never really thought of him as family. But I was too hungry and wet, at that moment, to recollect exactly why this was.
“Equus Special Blend and Affiliated Products. Markham speaking.”
“Cousin Van! It’s Waldy Tolliver. I’m not sure if you remember, the month before last—”
“I remember you, Waldy. How did you get this number?”
“You gave it to me.”
The line went silent for a moment. “That sounds plausible.”
“What’s Equus Special Blend?”
“Let me answer your question with a question. What do you want?”
For once I felt grateful for Van’s bluntness. “I’m here in New York. I just dropped out of college.”
“Congratulations, cousin. Willkommen to actual life.”
“What I mean is, I don’t have a place to stay.” When he said nothing, I continued: “You’re the only person in town that I know.”
“Aside from the Sisters Frankenstein, you mean.” I could picture him pursing his lips in distaste. “They’ve got a big-enough cave up in Harlem, don’t they? Or have they filled it with junk mail and cat food by now? On second thought, don’t answer that.”
“Something’s happened to them, actually. That’s why I’m calling. They wouldn’t let me into their apartment.”
“People/Feelings,” said Van.
People/Feelings was a phrase Van had coined, sometime before dropping out of college himself, to stand for all the things in life that bored him. It freed him to focus on matters of genuine import, i.e., his personal business ventures and sex. His term for himself, when actively engaged in these latter pursuits—which was practically his every waking hour—was Randy the Robot. Randy didn’t go in much for sentiment.
“I need you to put me up for a week,” I told him. “Ten days at the most.”
“Starting when?”
“Starting now.”
The silence that followed was cosmic. A ghostly interference came across the line: a faint, mournful crackle that could have been caused by gamma radiation or dark-matter accretion or the frantic buzzing of my cousin’s brain. I wasn’t bothered by the delay, particularly. The algorithm Van used in situations of this nature was complex.
“I’ve got a studio in midtown,” he said eventually. “I’m looking to rent it on a fixed semiannual plan, with a subsidiary lease, but there’s a problem with the bylaws of the building re: sublets. I could let you have it on a binightly basis, I suppose, seeing as how you’re flesh of my flesh.”
“A binightly basis,” I repeated. “Sounds great.”
“Since you’re family,” Van said, after a slight hesitation, “I won’t require a security deposit.” He didn’t seem to expect a reply. “Sixty-eight West Forty-Fourth. Meet me there in an hour.”
I asked him what the binightly rent might be, in dollar terms. My only answer was the solar wind.
* * *
“Ask me how things are going,” said Van. We were sitting in a Popeyes Chicken and Biscuits across the street from the apartment I was going to be renting, at forty dollars a night, to be paid in binightly installments. He hadn’t explained why I’d be paying him on a forty-eight-hour cycle—in person, in cash, preferably in ATM-fresh twenties—and I was too thankful and exhausted to object.
“Go ahead, Waldy. Ask me. I can tell that you’re dying to know.”
I pulled myself together. “Okay. How are things—”
“Gangbangers.”
“Gangbusters, I think you mean.”
“Gangbangers,” my cousin repeated, with emphasis. “What do you think of that for a name?”
“That depends. What exactly are you selling?”
“Satisfaction,” Van said, smacking his lips.
“Unless the kind of satisfaction you’re talking about involves Glocks, secret handshakes, and drug deals gone wrong—”
“It does, in a way.” He narrowed his eyes. “And I’ll tell you another thing, cousin, though this is strictly classified. I’ve already found myself a backer.”
“That’s fantastic, Van. Congratulations. Now if you wouldn’t mind—”
“I’m telling you this for a reason, you jackass. Do you think I like to listen to myself talk?”
He seemed to view the question as hypothetical, so I let my attention drift—nodding amiably all
the while—to take in the self-importantly stoned teens at the counter, the rain against the scratched and oily window, and a Möbius-strip-shaped dab of mayonnaise on the tabletop between us. I’d almost managed to forget where I was when my cousin dropped a name that ruined everything.
“What did you just say?”
He let out a titter. “Funny how things loop together, isn’t it? Who’d have thought the Iterants would want to horn in on the sensuality-enhancement industry?” He sighed happily. “But they’ve got to invest their cash the same as anybody else, I reckon.”
“How did they—” I took in a breath and counted slowly down from ten. “Who from the UCS contacted you?”
“What makes you think it wasn’t me doing the contacting?”
“They think you’re one of us, Van,” I said, fighting the urge to slap his smirking face. “That’s the reason they’re backing you—not that tarted-up horse piss you’re selling. There’s not a branch of this family they haven’t gotten their hooks into. First Enzie and Genny, then Orson, now you.” I clung white-knuckled to the edge of the table. “They haven’t hooked me, though—not yet. That’s why I need your help. I’ve got to—”
I cut my rant short when I noticed his expression. “You don’t believe me,” I muttered. “You’re not even listening.”
“I’m worried about you, Waldy.” He cleared his throat primly. “You can stay in my place for as long as you want—we’ll figure the payments out later. Get some rest. Watch some cable. Thirty-six is the vanilla porn channel, if memory serves. Thirty-seven is predominantly anal.”
I blinked at him, then at the keys he’d set down on the table. “You’re just like the others,” I said. “You think I’ve gone crazy.”
“Not at all,” Van assured me—but the look in his twitchy, bloodshot eyes said otherwise. “I’m leaving now, Waldy. Promise me you’ll get some fucking sleep.”
I watched him dart in his couture trench coat across the rain-slick pavement, relieved to have our rendezvous behind him, already intent on the next item of business. I envied him in that moment, Mrs. Haven, I have to admit. He nodded to his doorman, ducked briefly inside, then came back out with a package in his hands. His aviator glasses—mirrored, of course—matched his trench coat and expression perfectly. Only my cousin, I said to myself, would wear aviator glasses in a downpour. Then I looked at the package more closely.
It was a padded mailing envelope, crisp and marzipan-colored, identical to those I’d seen at the Villa Ouspensky. Van was cradling it as if it held a bomb.
* * *
Those next seven days passed like a dream, Mrs. Haven—or like a short, bumpy ride in the back of a van with packing tape covering its windows, driven by strangers wearing hazmat suits and Albert Einstein masks. I spent the week with the blinds drawn and the door double-locked and the telephone disconnected from the wall, living on stale ramen noodles and lukewarm tap water and cheese. I needed time with the package that Enzie had slipped me: time to ravel the threads and wires and light rays back into some kind of fabric, to reverse-engineer my family’s cataclysmic century. Things went on happening out in the world—horrendous things, mostly—and I was the last to find out. It was Heisenberg’s principle in all its dark glory: the observer affects the events he’s observing, no matter how many deadbolts he has on his door. I was changing, Mrs. Haven, and the chronosphere was changing with me.
I spread the contents of the package out in fan-shaped symmetry across the floor—like Ozymandias with his cards in The Excuse—and spent the first day sitting Indian-style on a cushion pulled down from the mildewy, beer-smelling couch, waiting for the universal Answer to arrive. It was inevitable, I suppose—or at the very least par for the course—that questions started pelting me instead.
They came slowly at first, almost bashfully; then faster and harder with each passing minute, until the floor and the sofa and the countertop were littered with scribblings on torn scraps of paper, feverish demands on one part of my brain by another. Enzie and Genny had clearly been trying to protect me at the General Lee, to keep my identity a secret from the Iterants; but what had the Iterants been doing there in the first place? What sort of a deal had been struck, and to whose benefit?
I was reading the entry in Kaspar’s diary—rereading it, to be accurate, for the seventeenth time—describing that horrific afternoon on which he’d discovered his brother in the Brown Widow’s attic, when a line suddenly stood out from the text surrounding it, like the wing of a butterfly caught in a stray beam of light:
You look funny down there, he called to me from the top of the wardrobe. You look like a cicada in a jar.
A cicada in a jar, I thought, turning the phrase over in my mind. It was then that I recalled a further point in the series, not in the diary but in my own experience, in the immediate past, so recent that the memory was still damp. The mural in Haven’s sanctum in the Villa Ouspensky: the one Miss Greer had allegedly painted. Those insects had been cicadas, not grasshoppers or cockroaches or ants. I hadn’t made the connection at the time—I hadn’t been sure—but I was sure of it now. And with that first modest link, that initial line drawn between a casual turn of phrase and its most extravagant, fantastic expression, I was suddenly attuned to other points in the sequence, other appearances, both in the documents littering the floor of Van’s apartment and in my own memory. It was a cicada that my great-uncle had been mesmerized by as a boy; it was a cicada I’d seen trapped under a glass at age ten, when Genny had shown me the Archive; and what else could the “little flying thing” have been that the twins had communed with as children? It had visited them every seven years, after all—in between, it had been “no-where and no-when,” as Enzie had put it in her diary. No wonder they’d given it Ottokar’s name.
I lowered my throbbing head onto the couch. Was the cicada somehow significant to Waldemar’s argument for rotary time—as a symbol of the overlooked, perhaps, or of the meandering, or of the cyclical? Or was it simply the Timekeeper’s totem, a fetish he left behind him at every point of the chronosphere he visited, like a dirty drawing on a bathroom stall?
I’d taken the critical step, Mrs. Haven: the leap from the rational to the occult. But none of the above, beguiling though it was, brought me nearer to cracking the fundamental conundrum, the one from which all the others arose, and without which they subsided into nothing. Physical time travel, especially into the past, has long been regarded as an impossibility. How had Waldemar—indigent, paranoid Waldemar, embittered and embattled and patently mad—succeeded where so many better men had failed? What sliver of his grotesque, rabid, mystical pseudotheory had ultimately turned out to be true?
Dreams had something to do with it, according to my aunts: dreams and subjectivity, and the inexorable influence of the observer. The secret of Enzie’s homemade time machine, in other words. What was an “exclusion bin,” in effect, but an objectivity filter? I’d seen into the future myself, after all, using nothing but a whitewashed plywood box. Was it possible that Waldemar’s madness, far from being a hindrance, had brought him some sort of advantage? Could the breach of consensus reality be a preliminary step—perhaps even a precondition—to escaping from consensus time?
I reached this inductive toehold again and again in the course of that week, in relative psychological comfort; but whenever I tried to move past it, to find the next step, my brain would begin to feel greasy and hot and penned in by my skull, like a tin of pâté left out in the sun. Orson had tried to shield me from this punishing, frightening, hazardous mental state for the bulk of my childhood—he’d told me as much at the Villa Ouspensky. But it was too late, Mrs. Haven. It had been too late forever.
* * *
Time is a nightmare, wrote Theodore Sturgeon—hero of West Village coffee-shop Orson—that madmen have always felt themselves at home in. The problem with time, Sturgeon argues, is that it’s too boundless a concept—too fever-dream nightmarish, too all-pervasive, too sublime—for us to wrap our feeble pr
imate brains around. Saint Augustine struggled with time all his life; Newton, in his arrogance, reduced it to a constant; Nietzsche tied it into pretzel knots to make it submit to his mania, then ultimately scrapped it altogether. And the harder I tried, in the course of that week, to distill the contents of my aunts’ package into a single explicable truth, the more inclined I was to follow his example.
What then, is time? writes Augustine. If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.
What confounded me most about the Accidents was the lack of unanimity about them. Everyone who’d tried to crack the rebus of Ottokar’s discovery had come up with his or her own inimitable answer, often contradicting all the rest. My namesake had discovered impunity there: a sovereign solution, accountable only to itself, that could be warped to accommodate every possible question, to rationalize every crime. My grandfather, understandably enough, had come to view them as a conduit to madness. And to Enzie and Genny, after their mother’s death, the puzzle of the Accidents became nothing less than the window frame—the only one they didn’t fill in, or brick up, or shutter over—through which they watched and understood the world. For my part, Mrs. Haven, I was tempted to view my great-grandfather’s legacy as a window, as well: a blank pane of glass—sometimes letting light through, sometimes throwing it back—in which we’d discovered nothing but our own monkey-like reflections.
The glass-pane notion was a seductive one, for obvious reasons: it would have allowed me to dismiss the whole mess and head back to Ogilvy, or to Cheektowaga, or to some cottage in the country, as Nietzsche had done, and spend the rest of my duration shaving horses. There was only one catch, Mrs. Haven. My projection theory might have explained Enzie and Genny and Kaspar, and even, with a bit of fiddling, Ottokar himself; but Waldemar had actually succeeded. Waldemar, the worst of all of us, had broken free.
If no one asks of me, said Augustine, I know.
* * *
By the end of the sixth day I was out of ramen noodles, and the only cheese I had left—“Processed Manchego,” according to the packaging; exactly the sort of thing Van would eat—was making the roof of my mouth itch. I was sick to death of sifting through the ashes of my paternal lineage in search of the keys to the chronoverse. What I needed had been clear to me since I’d woken up that morning, bug-eyed and antsy, at 07:45 EST.