by John Wray
* * *
It was 08:17 EST when I dialed Menügayan’s number—not an hour when she was generally awake—and the phone rang sixteen times before she answered. Before she could say a word I told her everything. It was important to me that someone understand.
“Do you understand, Julia? My father had it right when he wrote The Excuse. Your consciousness is all the time machine you need. All that other nonsense—the notes, the calculations, even the exclusion bin—was a heap of pseudoscientific clutter. How on earth could I have missed it all this time?”
“Tolliver,” said Menügayan, “don’t call me again.”
“Don’t you see what this means? I have something to offer—something even Haven himself, with all his money and pull—”
“Is that right, Tolliver? You have something to offer? And what might that be?”
“I’ve just told you,” I said, struggling to keep the exasperation out of my voice. “I’ve figured out my aunts’ secret. I made a kind of half jump myself, it turns out, back when I was twelve. It’s the simplest thing, really. Now I need to tell Hildy. She asked me for a time machine once, but—idiot that I was—I thought she was joking. I just need to explain—”
“They were found this morning. Their jet was, I mean. It’s all over the news.”
“Where?” I stammered, so excited I nearly dropped the receiver.
“Different places.”
“Julia, just this once, I’d appreciate a simple—”
“Parts off of the coast of Dorset. Other parts near the Isle of Wight.”
“Not true,” I said. “You’re lying. That’s a lie.”
“Suit yourself.”
I’d been standing beside my aunts’ toilet—the only place in the apartment where their ancient cordless phone still got reception—and now I came to rest against its cushioned seat. I found myself staring at the watch on my wrist, a Warranted Tolliver Navigator, rated to a depth of fifteen fathoms. It showed 08:21 EST. I took it off and laid it on the floor.
“You’re not the only one who loved her,” said a faraway voice.
“She’s not dead, Julia. Not in any real sense. It’s a mistake, mathematically speaking, to think of the past—”
“Goodbye, Tolliver, you poor misguided nutter. It’s over, do you hear me? You’re excused.”
* * *
It was the Timekeeper, of all people, who came to my mind in those ultimate seconds of consensus time, and I’m not ashamed to say I thought of him with sympathy. As I laid out the few things I’d brought from my suitcase—a bottle of Foster’s the Australian had given me; your silver-bound edition of Strange Customs of Courtship and Marriage; Genny’s copy of The Shape of Time; the manuscript of this history, nearly finished—I thought of Waldemar in his bunker in Czas, hearing the sound of Soviet gunfire in the surrounding woods, taking his leave from a world in which his passions and ambitions had no future. I would never find out how he’d managed his jump, or what had happened to the body he’d abandoned—the Russians had taken it, most likely, and done things to it that had brought them some small sense of reparation. I was reasonably sure now that I’d been wrong about his cameo in Visconti’s The Damned, but I’d have liked to know at least that much for certain. I’d have asked him these questions, and plenty of others, if I’d succeeded in tracking him down—we’d have had a nice long chat, the two of us. But I wouldn’t have asked where he’d found the nerve to excise himself from time so brutally, or why he’d chosen such an absolute escape. I wouldn’t have had to ask, because I knew.
I drank a toast to him, Mrs. Haven, before I sat down in this chair and tripped the wire. There was no moral high ground where I was going—no agency, no consequence, no cause or effect. And still I hoped that I would find you there.
Monday, 08:47 EST
I dreamed that time was moving backward, Mrs. Haven. The universe had reached its point of maximum expansion and tipped back toward collapse, reversing direction from redshift to blueshift, from future to past, and the thermodynamic arrow shifted with it. Order increased with each instant, as certain renegade physicists have predicted it will, and in time those same physicists, long dead and forgotten, duly rose from their graves and reconstituted themselves and moved through life end-to-front, smoothly and effortlessly, like tourists sitting backward on a train.
Everything happened, Mrs. Haven, that had happened before. Rivers flowed uphill and trees shrank to seedlings and the overheated earth began to cool. Sounds gradually took form out of nothing and were cut off at the apex of their curves. Eggs returned to their chickens, bombs returned to their bombers, and effects flew home like bullets to their causes. The last became first and the first became last, though no one profited by the exchange. But I was grateful all the same—grateful even for that awful certainty—because I knew that you were coming back to me.
I sat on the same train as everyone else, fighting my fear of all the black, empty aeons before I was born. The farther I traveled the younger I grew, and the younger I grew the less I could remember. The universe was contracting to a pinprick, the first singularity, a videotaped explosion playing coolly in reverse. I returned to you, Mrs. Haven, as I’d known that I would, and there was nothing either of us could do to stop it. Pain compressed to a spike, no differently than light or sound or thought, and vanished just as it became too much to bear.
We backed into each other on Masarykovo Square, returned the pages to Artur and regressed to Vienna, growing more confident and loving by the hour. I knew each event of my duration before it occurred—I saw it ever more clearly as it came hurtling toward me—but as soon as it happened my mind was flushed clean. Haven didn’t matter, Menügayan didn’t matter, because soon they’d be erased from the record, swept clear of the field, exactly as if they had never been. I drifted through Manhattan alone, just as desperate and dejected as before, though I knew our separate time lines were converging. It was terrible, Mrs. Haven, to have such definite knowledge, and to have it confirmed with each recurring scene. You were with me at the Xanthia, in the James A. Farley Post Office, at West Tenth Street and in my own bed. The silver book returned itself to sender and I followed it down to your basement apartment. I helped you put your clothes on, Mrs. Haven, growing more nervous with each button I did up. You pursued me back uptown to Union Square, never once turning your head to see where you were going. People fled from you on University, smiling and deferential, happy just to see you pass them by.
There was no stopping any of it, Mrs. Haven—no stopping it or altering its course. You were gone from me for a cloudy, leaden month, then you were mine: as close to mine as you would ever be. You lay down with me on the corkwood floor of Van’s bedroom and your backside chased me down his spiral stairs. We reached the kitchen door and slipped under the counter. You let go of my hand. The smile left your face as I left you behind. You covered your upper lip with your ring finger. Then all trace of you was gone, even from my memory, and I was free.
Time passed more slowly the farther I traveled. The music of the spheres grew louder by the day, by the hour, by the second, though like everyone else on earth I barely heard it. I was a man, then a teen, then a child, then a fertilized egg. That vast sepulchral symphony was all there ever was.
Then it ended, Mrs. Haven, because I’d come to the beginning of my dream.
Dear Mrs. Haven—
This morning, at 08:47 EST, I woke up to find myself excused from time.
I can picture you perfectly, reading this letter. You’ll be telling yourself I’ve gone stupid with grief, or that I’ve lost my mind—but my thinking has never been clearer. Believe me, Mrs. Haven, when I tell you that this is no joke. Time moves freely around me, gurgling like a whirlpool, fluxing like a quantum field, spinning like a galaxy around its focal hub—at the hub, however, everything is quiet.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kathleen Alcott, Jin Auh, Francis Bickmore, Charles Buchan, Eric Chinski, Ronald W. Clark, Brooke Costello, Elizabeth Cost
ello, Kathy Daneman, Doug Dibbern, Joanna Dingley, Matt Dojny, J. W. Dunne, Marion Duvert, Nathan Englander, Alexander Fest, Adam Foulds, Jessica Friedman, Laird Gallagher, J. Richard Gott, Sophie Gudenus, Bill Hall, Barbara W. Henderson, Edward Henderson, Corin Hewitt, Heinrich Höhne, Allan S. Janik, James Jeans, Christy-Claire Katien, Kirsten Kearse, Frank Kendig, Ursula LeGuin, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Ouspensky, Gary Panter, Sara Poirier, Sarah Sarchin, Akhil Sharma, Adrian Tomine, Thomas Überhoff, Jared Whitham, Nicolas Williams, Anni Wünschmann, Peter Wünschmann, Andrew Wylie.
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the American Academy in Berlin, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Santa Maddalena Foundation for invaluable assistance in the completion of this book.
ALSO BY JOHN WRAY
The Right Hand of Sleep
Canaan’s Tongue
Lowboy
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Wray is the author of Lowboy, Canaan’s Tongue, and The Right Hand of Sleep. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007. A citizen of both the United States and Austria, he lives in New York City. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Copyright © 2016 by John Wray
All rights reserved
First edition, 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wray, John, 1971–
The lost time accidents / John Wray. — First edition.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-0-374-28113-7 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4299-4452-6 (e-book)
I. Title.
PS3573.R365 L67 2016
813'.54—dc23
2015023346
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Frontispiece
Dear Mrs. Haven
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
Acknowledgments
Also by John Wray
A Note About the Author
Copyright