The Lost Time Accidents

by John Wray

  I needed a bucket of Popeyes.

  I made it through the building’s faux-Soviet lobby and across Forty-Fourth Street without incident, unless you count one near-collision with a taxi, one actual collision with a UPS dolly, and some dubious looks from the doorman, a red-bearded Sikh. I ducked into Popeyes, placed my order politely, then hit the ATM next door to liquidate the next installment of my college fund. I’d come to a decision the previous night: I’d figured out my next move, and it was a doozy. The plane ticket alone, according to my calculations, would cost all I had left in the bank.

  I was still standing at the ATM ten minutes later, my arms outstretched as if in supplication. Its screen had just informed me, in no uncertain terms, that not a dime of Orson’s cash would be forthcoming. It had informed me of this sixteen times in a row, and the people behind me—eight of them, the last time I’d checked—were starting to run low on Christian feeling. When the machine finally opted to swallow my card, leaving me with nothing but my driver’s license and my Ogilvy ID, the woman behind me nudged me with her purse. “Here’s a dollar,” she whispered. “Go buy yourself a Snickers. Then get yourself a motherfucking job.”

  For want of any other option, Mrs. Haven, I took her advice. I went back into Popeyes and canceled my order and brought her dollar to a bodega at the corner of Forty-Fourth and Sixth. I spent it on a Mars bar, not a Snickers, and ate it while I browsed morosely through the Times. Which is how, within fifteen minutes of reconnecting with the outside world, I found out that Enzie was gone.

  * * *

  ENZIAN TOLLIVER, HARLEM RECLUSE, FOUND DEAD AT 62

  Police Require Two Hours to

  Break into 5th Ave. Home,

  Booby-Trapped with Junk

  SISTER FAILS TO APPEAR

  BY WILLIAM HALL

  Enzian Tolliver was found dead yesterday in her decaying tenement apartment at 2078 Fifth Avenue, but the legend of the reclusive Tolliver twins persists.

  Her sister, Gentian, devoted to the frail and aging Enzian, may still be in the seven-room apartment, her home since 1969, although it is now boarded shut. There was no sign of her yesterday, despite the police activity at her home.

  The circumstances surrounding the death of 62-year-old Enzian, rarefied as the flower both she and her sister were named for, are as mysterious as the life the two eccentric sisters lived on the unfashionable upper reaches of Fifth Avenue, at the Harlem terminus of Central Park.

  UNKNOWN MALE CALLER GAVE TIP

  A mysterious telephone call to Police Headquarters yesterday morning reported that there was a dead woman at 2078 Fifth Avenue. The caller gave his name as Waldemar Toula, a deceased uncle of the sisters. Police believe that it may in fact have been Waldemar “Jack” Tolliver, the sisters’ nephew, who reportedly is visiting the city.

  * * *

  I stopped there a moment, punch-drunk with shock. The shopkeeper said something to me but I ignored him.

  * * *

  Police Emergency Squad 6 used crowbars and axes in trying to force their way into the apartment, but the reinforced door proved impassable. It was 12:10 P.M. before Patrolman LaMont Barker forced his way through the picture window at the fourth-story front.

  He disappeared from view for several moments, then returned and called down, “There’s a D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) here.” Detective Ali Lateef climbed the ladder to inspect the body. He reported that the dead woman was in a sitting position, dressed only in a Pendleton shirt. The emaciated body was tentatively identified as Enzian by Willis James Buckram, a neighbor. At 3:45 P.M. Medical Examiner Roger C. Erfect reported that the woman had been dead for fourteen hours.

  There was no sign of Gentian Tolliver in the building, no indication of how she entered or left the apartment on her heretofore regular shopping trips to buy food and medication for her sister. The entire foyer of the apartment, to a distance of sixteen feet from the door’s interior side, was packed with bundled newsprint from ceiling to floor, to a total weight of seventeen and one-half tons.

  “NEPHEW” SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING

  A search has been initiated in all five boroughs for Waldemar Tolliver, the sisters’ nephew, who was last seen at 2078 Fifth Avenue one week ago. He is believed to remain at large in New York City.

  * * *

  There was more—an attempt to catalog the apartment’s astonishing contents, interviews with the neighbors, disgustingly explicit (and grossly exaggerated) forensic details—but I’ll do both of us a favor, Mrs. Haven, and skip all of that. Once I’d gotten over my panic at the thought of being wanted by the NYPD, I found myself more intrigued by what the article omitted than by the few anemic facts that it contained. What had the medical examiner (the suspiciously named Roger C. Erfect) determined to be the cause of death? Why was no mention made of the army of Iterants I’d seen on my last visit, but such elaborate mention made of me? Why, come to think of it, was “nephew” in quotation marks? And where on earth had Genny disappeared to?

  The answer to the last of these mysteries wasn’t long in coming, Mrs. Haven, though it raised more questions than it laid to rest.

  “What you got there’s from yesterday,” the shopkeeper said. “I won’t charge you for that.” He handed me a newer, fatter paper from a stack beside the register.

  * * *

  BODY OF GENTIAN TOLLIVER FOUND

  Eight-Hour Search of Junk-Filled

  Home Believed Fruitless—Then

  a Puzzling Discovery

  CROWD GATHERS IN STREET

  The police searched the junk-filled home of the Tolliver sisters at 2078 Fifth Avenue for eight hours yesterday, but found no trace of Gentian Tolliver, missing since Thursday. Just as the apartment was being sealed, however, her body was found, in a location that had been inspected repeatedly in the course of the day.

  “It (Tolliver’s body) was just inside the door of the library, the first room to the right off the hall, under a writing desk,” said Detective Ali Lateef of the 23rd Precinct. “It was covered by newspapers, but it should have been obvious,” said another member of the force, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This was a room we’d covered twice. The second time was just two hours earlier.”

  Neither officer volunteered an explanation for the oversight.

  * * *

  I went up to Harlem that same day, in spite of the risk, for reasons I still don’t fully comprehend. The frost of the week before had thawed, leaving the park looking the way I imagined the forest around Czas must have looked after the Wehrmacht and the Soviets had left: muddied and broken and bereft, with bits of garbage strewn about like evidence of some lost civilization. There were still a few bored-looking loiterers outside my aunts’ building, but the crowd had dwindled to a morbid handful. The show had already moved on.

  One man, who claimed to be a researcher for 1010 WINS news radio, was summarizing the events of the day in a high, nasal voice, but nobody seemed to be listening. If there were cops around, I couldn’t pick them out. The windows on my aunts’ floor seemed blocked from the inside, except for the sixth from the left—the bathroom window, I was guessing—which was open in spite of the damp. I was gripped by the urge to duck under the POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS tape—I could say I was a tenant, if anyone asked—but I had the good sense to resist it. The 1010 WINS guy was the only one who noticed.

  “Too late, buddy,” he said, grinning at me in a way that made me want to kick him in the shins. “Everything worth taking’s already gone.”

  * * *

  The annals of art and science, writes Kubler, like those of bravery, record only a handful of the many great moments that have occurred. When we consider the class of these great moments, we are usually confronted with dead stars. Even their light has ceased to reach us. We know of their existence only indirectly, by their perturbations, and by the immense detritus of derivative stuff left in their wakes.

  As I walked the sixty-odd blocks from Harlem to midtown, it seemed that a flickering beam of my aun
ts’ light still reached me; but though I could feel it on the back of my neck and the palms of my hands—especially when my eyes were closed—it illuminated nothing. The mess they’d left behind them would have delighted Professor Kubler, no doubt, but I had little hope of finding meaning there. There was too much of everything, Mrs. Haven, and not enough of me.

  * * *

  I made it back to Forty-Fourth Street a few minutes before midnight, knock-kneed and dizzy with hunger, my mind a humid, hypothermic blank. I’d meant to call the Kraut as soon as I got in—even to contact Orson, if I could—but I ended up facedown on the couch. I fell asleep instantly, without the slightest preamble, and started awake just as the sun came up. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, reverberating cruelly off the tilework, and a man was sitting on my windowsill.

  “I’m dreaming,” I said to the man.

  “You might want to get that,” he answered, in an accent I couldn’t pin down.

  I rolled off the sofa and got to my feet. The ringing was becoming unendurable. My visitor wore a threadbare tweed jacket, a dented gray homburg, and greasy-looking yellow calfskin gloves. The overall effect, Mrs. Haven, was seedy. He looked only vaguely like Waldemar Toula—he was too young, for one thing, and his face was unnaturally wide—but I knew he could be no one else. He was waiting to kill me, or to answer my questions, or to take me with him to eternity. But first I had to stop the phone from ringing.

  I lurched into the kitchen and grabbed the receiver. I’d meant to hang up right away, but something happened.

  “Collect call from the year 2718. Will you accept the charges?”

  “What do you want, Van? It’s late—”

  “It’s early,” the man in the living room told me.

  “It’s early, you mean,” Van said, stifling a yawn. “But I’m awake, for some reason, so I thought I’d check in. How did you spend your summer vacation?”

  It took me a moment to answer. “I have to tell you something, Van. Something terrible. Enzie and Genny are dead.”

  “I know that, Waldy. That’s why I called. You’re not the only one who reads the paper.”

  “How stupid of me. Of course not. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have—”

  “You have what, exactly? A job? A date? An uninvited guest?”

  I glanced involuntarily over my shoulder. “Actually—”

  “There’s a reason I’m calling, believe it or not. I won’t take up much of your time.”

  “Listen,” I said, passing a hand over my face. “I can’t—”

  “Normally, Waldy, this would be People/Feelings territory. But nothing about what happened to those aunts of yours was normal. Therefore—”

  “They were your aunts, too, the last time I checked.”

  “Once removed,” Van said tartly. “Don’t go changing the subject. It’s been bothering me all week, what to do about you.”

  “About me? I don’t—”

  “You’re depressed,” Van declared. “And why wouldn’t you be? Your parents have split, you’ve just dropped out of college, and the bodies of your father’s only sisters, the people you’d come all the way from Ohio to visit—for Christ knows what reason—have just been dug out from under seventeen tons of—”

  “Enough!” I said, turning to check on my visitor, who suddenly was nowhere to be seen. “What’s the answer, Van? What’s your brilliant solution? What are you going to do about me?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I’m going to throw you a party.”

  Monday, 09:05 EST.

  The Timekeeper just left, Mrs. Haven, for the very last time. We’ve gotten what we hoped for from each other. He doesn’t need me any longer, because I’ve helped him to see how this history ends—and I don’t need him, either. I’ve finally remembered for myself.

  I was sitting at my usual station, revising my next-to-last chapter, when the air heaved a sigh and pulled soundlessly back, disclosing the crown of my great-uncle’s head. He was pushed through the skin of this world, Mrs. Haven, like a baby pushed out of a birth canal. He dropped onto the floor with a damp, muted thump, barely clearing the table, then lay facedown on the parquet. The coat he was wearing hung off of him strangely. I got up and went to him and turned him over.

  I should have been prepared, Mrs. Haven, for what I saw next. He was coming apart, warping and buckling, like a plastic plate held over a fire. It seemed impossible that he could speak, but he did speak. He forced his lips apart and spoke my name.

  “What is it, Waldemar?” I said. “What can I do?”

  He asked me to help him raise his head and I obliged. I could feel his deformities through the jacket’s threadbare tweed, and what I felt there made my stomach twist.

  “Where are you coming from, Uncle?” I pulled him up by the shoulders. “The Forty-Fourth Street apartment?”

  He moved his head in what I took to be a nod.

  “What were you there for? Did you have something to tell me? Was it something important?”

  His head jerked again, downward and to the left. I was suddenly less sure that he was nodding. It might have been a gesture of denial, or of helplessness, or simply a spasm of pain.

  “Tell me what I can do. Can I bring you some water?”

  His head lolled forward and he took my arm and gripped it. I was surprised by the strength in his hands. His ruined mouth twitched and came open.

  “What was that, Uncle? I didn’t quite hear.”

  He pulled me closer, slowly and irresistibly, until I was within a hair’s breadth of his face. It took all my self-control to keep from retching. His breath smelled of dust and old newsprint: the dead, airless smell of the Archive.

  “Read me the last one, Nefflein. Close the loop.”

  I went back to my armchair, relieved to get away from him, grateful to have been asked a thing that lay within my power. I read the last chapter to him, taking care to enunciate clearly, unsure whether his ravaged ears could hear me. You’ll say he deserved what he got, Mrs. Haven, and most likely you’re right—but still it was a grievous thing to watch him suffer. The chapter was a long one and I read it slowly. His name was mentioned more than once, in the most damning of terms, which seemed to give him some small satisfaction. When I’d finished he forced his eyes open as best he could, turned his head in my direction and beckoned me to him. He was saying something almost inaudibly, repeating it with each exhalation, and I knelt down next to him to make it out. It was a request, Mrs. Haven—the last request he’d ever make of me. I let him say it a dozen times, then as many times again, to make sure there was no misunderstanding. Then I squatted beside his right shoulder, braced a knee against his collarbone, and brought my hands together at his neck.

  Disfigured though he was, Mrs. Haven, his life took a long time to leave him. He put up no resistance, even lifted his chin to help my hands find purchase, but the force that had deformed him had tautened his skin, and it took all my strength to press his windpipe shut. The live-wire sensation returned to my palms, and my own throat seemed to close along with his, but I didn’t let go until the thing was done. I’d foreseen this, after all, and I knew how it ended. Waldemar had said it himself long before, in his last conversation with Sonja. The ultimate Lost Time Accident is death.

  It was at this instant, watching the Timekeeper’s body resolve itself into its component particles, that I remembered how I’d fallen out of time. I hadn’t fallen at all, Mrs. Haven. I’d jumped.

  IT WAS MENÜGAYAN, fittingly enough, who broke the news about your disappearance. After a week in Vienna being ministered to by the Kraut (who’d managed, by a heroic effort of will, to conceal her relief at how things had turned out) I got a standby seat on a direct flight to Newark, rode a series of progressively more malodorous buses into Manhattan, and found a hostel in Chelsea that I could just barely afford. I kept away from West Tenth Street, for obvious reasons, but eventually I dialed your neighbor’s number. I could tell right away, by her grun
ted “Who’s this?” that she was even more depressed than usual. I assumed the reason must be Haven’s triumph.

  “I need to see you, Julia. I need to ask—”

  “Tolliver?”

  “Of course it’s me. I’ve come back.”

  No response.

  “What is it?” My throat went tight at once. “Is this line not safe?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. What do you want?”

  “To see you, that’s all.” When no answer came, I said, “I shouldn’t have run away, Julia. I should have listened to you. I should have trusted in your plan, even though you never told me what it was. Now something terrible has happened, the worst possible thing, and I need your advice. Can I meet you somewhere?”

  Her breath came through the line in a low, toneless whistle, as if she were falling asleep.

  “All right, Tolliver,” she said finally. “Come on over.”

  “Over there? Are you crazy? The last time I saw Haven—”

  To my bewilderment she gave a stony laugh. “Shut up and get over here, Tolliver. It’s never been safer.”

  “Listen to me, Julia. I don’t think—”

  She set down the receiver with a bang.

  * * *

  I knew your brownstone was vacant as soon as I saw it. No one had been home for weeks and the place had been gutted. Menügayan confirmed this when I asked her.

  “I grokked that something pesado had gone down as soon as those movers showed up. They didn’t leave beans behind, either—just some Klimt posters down in the basement.” She shuddered. “Piles of them, actually. Hideous stuff.”