John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Waldy and I have been up to no good,” Enzie said with a wink.

“Is that so.”

“You were snoring,” I told him. “Snore and you sleep alone. You told me that.”

My father said nothing. Genny appeared in the doorway with a mug of green tea — her bum leg had mysteriously improved — and he took it from her and slurped from it morosely. My aunts beamed at each other as though they’d just won the Heisenberg Prize.

We said our goodbyes not long after, the Buick idling feebly in the smoky Harlem dawn. My aunts smiled down at us from their tattered whorehouse curtains while we waited in the cold, expecting the engine to die each time it stuttered. Orson didn’t glance up at them once. Some point of honor had been settled — apparently in Enzie’s favor — and from the look of things I’d been the catalyst. But what had I actually done? I’d let her lock me up in a box, then drifted off for a time, as anyone might have. Where was the betrayal in that?

“Have fun in high school, Waldy!” Genny shouted as we pulled away. “Kiss the little girls and make them cry!”

* * *

The next two hours with Orson passed in a kind of mutual brain-squeamishness, both of us circling the same unmentionable event, like diplomats on the morning of a coup. I was grateful for the city’s drab distractions, its freeways leading to bridges leading to gridlocked toll plazas leading — eventually, as if against their better judgment — to the traffic-choked interstate. After batting us around for a while, the city abruptly grew bored, and its sprawl gave way to cinder-colored scrub. Orson wanted to talk, I could tell, but I was too worn out to do his talking for him. I was fiddling with the handle of the glove compartment — which had been broken since I could remember — when he suddenly sat up and cleared his throat.

“I want to talk to you about your aunts, Waldy. As you’ve probably noticed—”

“Aunt Enzie says she named me. Is that true?”

I expected him to deny it, but he did no such thing. “Not just Enzie. The two of them together.”

“Why did you let them do that?”

“I don’t know.” Orson adjusted the rearview mirror, squinted over his shoulder, made a sour face, then nudged the mirror back. “I owed them something, I guess. And I like the thought of things moving in circles.” He shook his head slowly. “I’m my sisters’ brother, Waldy, sad to say.”

“Moving in circles? What is that supposed to—”

“See that van behind us?”

“Huh?”

“That white van back there. I don’t care for the cut of its jib.”

I sized up the vehicle in question: a shabby Econoline two-door, no different than a dozen others we’d passed on the highway that morning. I was old enough to know when my father was stalling, but there was no rush: we had hundreds of miles left to drive. I slouched down in my seat and let him stall.

“I want to talk to you about your aunts,” he repeated.

“Okay, Orson. I’m listening.”

This time there was no hesitation. He wanted me to keep “a healthy degree of distance” from his sisters in the future, for reasons he assumed I understood. He made no explicit mention of Enzie’s mental state, or of Genny’s peculiarities, or even of the condition of the apartment; he made no mention — needless to say — of reconnaissance missions in the chronosphere. It struck me then, watching him squirm and fidget, how much that brief visit had changed him. Leaving Buffalo, he’d been as righteous and judgmental as a prophet; now, for better or worse, all his passion was spent. For the first time in my duration, Mrs. Haven, I thought of my father as old.

It therefore came as a relief — or at least as a welcome distraction — when the Econoline van made its move.

I saw it coming before he did, but I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. There was a precision to the Econoline’s gambit — a purposeful, tactical smoothness — that held me mesmerized. By the time I’d grasped what was happening it had pulled alongside us.

“Don’t look at them, Waldy,” Orson hissed through his teeth.

The oddest thing about the people in the van, I remember, was the absence of expression on their faces. Even as they leaned toward us, drawing complex sets of symbols in the air, there was a kind of dazed indifference about them. The woman especially — the only one of the three who wasn’t wearing a Red Sox cap — had a face as dead as a receptionist’s.

“What are they doing?” said Orson, eyes fixed on the road.

“Moving their hands, mostly. I think they’re trying to cast some sort of spell.”

“They want us to pull over.”

“How do you know?”

He returned my look wearily. “Because this has happened before.”

For the next fifteen minutes the van baited us, sometimes pulling ahead, sometimes letting us pass, but never dropping out of sight completely. Then, at exit 23 (Albany/Delmar) it braked, smooth and deliberate as ever, and curved away from us into the trees. It hadn’t been a Hollywood car chase, exactly — we’d only broken the speed limit twice, and not by much — but it had been something. A warning, I decided. I felt curiously calm, all things considered. I understood that what had happened was unusual, even bizarre; but it seemed no weirder to me, on that particular morning, than any other feature of the grown-up world.

“Those were Iterants, huh?”

Orson gave a slight start, as though he’d forgotten I was in the car. “Of course.”

“Why didn’t they do anything?”

“They did all sorts of things. They did plenty.”

“I saw the woman flapping her hands, and the guys with the caps—”

“They were orbiting us.”

“What?”

“They were orbiting us. Each time they passed our car, then switched to the right lane, then slowed down and passed us again, they completed one circuit. They were interfering with the linearity of our progress — calling attention to the bias inherent in our perceptions of spacetime. Done well, this can lead to a kind of short-term temporal confusion.”

I couldn’t help but notice, as my father held forth, that he sounded like an Iterant himself. “How do you know all this?”

He smiled. “I guess you could say I’ve read the literature.”

“What literature?” He was worrying me now. “I’ve never seen you—”

“The technique I just described,” said my father, “is from the opening paragraph of ‘The Emperor of If. ’ The term I coined for it is ‘chronojamming.’ It was the last thing I wrote that my sisters approved of.” He let out a sigh. “They’re close readers, those Fuzzy Fruits. I’ll give them that.”

I pondered this for a minute. “What did Enzie and Genny do for them? For the Iterants, I mean. Why were their names in the Timestrider credits?”

“Haven and his goons dropped in on them about a year ago. They talked about my books, then asked all sorts of other questions, though they never made it farther than the coatrack.” He shook his head. “God knows how they got Enzie to spill about her research, but they did. That’s what worries me most.”

“But why should that worry you? I thought you said that Enzie was a—”

“A crackpot. That she is, without a doubt.”

“Then what difference does it make what she told them?”

He frowned and said nothing. I fiddled with the handle of the glove compartment while I waited for his answer. The look in his eyes was one I seemed to recognize.

“Do you need to stop at a rest area, Orson?”

“What I’m about to tell you, Waldy, is probably going to sound a bit outré. I want you to promise that you won’t pass it on to your mother. Will you promise me that?”