John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“What is it, Uncle? What is that one thing?”

“You forget, Nefflein ,” he said, bowing his head. “You forget.”

MY HIGH SCHOOL YEARS, Mrs. Haven, are another period I’d rather skip. I was bullied no more than any other ectomorphic stammerer with a time-travel obsession would have been, I’m assuming, but the comfort this brought me was slim. My first and only pre-collegiate experience with girls — a few hours spent guzzling Schlitz and watching The Day the Earth Stood Still with my next-door neighbor Esther Fletcher-Suarez — was a defeat on par with the destruction of the United States Marines by Klaatu’s giant robot. When I asked if I could kiss her, Esther — whose pecan-brown face was covered in colorless down, soft and nearly invisible, like the rind of a kissable kiwi — excused herself politely, covered her entire face in lipstick (ears included), and locked herself in the bathroom until I’d left the house.

Orson was in the TV room when I got home, eating Wheat Thins and watching the NBA draft. I’d always assumed that my father possessed privileged, hard-won knowledge of the opposite sex, and I decided to ask him where I’d gone awry. He had opinions about every other aspect of “the Human Experiment,” as he liked to call it. Why not about this?

“That sounds like quite a life event, Waldy,” he said when I’d finished. “I’m happy you had a nice time.”

“You’re happy I what?”

“Want my opinion? You ought to feel honored. It’s probably not every guy she puts on lipstick for.”

“You’re right,” I said. “The other guys she probably makes out with.”

“It was a courtship display, that’s all. A little conjugal theater.” He turned the sound back up on the TV. “Try to put the experience in perspective. It’s not like she’s your first sexual partner.”

“That’s true, Orson,” I said, feeling farther from him than I’d ever felt. “She’s definitely not that.”

We watched the draft for a while. A man named Crumbs had just been drafted by the Heat. The Kraut was doing some late-evening baking in the kitchen: a strudel, to judge by the smell. This usually meant that there had been a fight.

“Mom’s making a strudel,” I said. “What’s that about?”

“No idea.” Orson sighed and hit the mute. “That reminds me. We’ve got some guests coming this weekend.”

“Guests,” I said. “Of course.” We never had guests.

“All right then, son. Glad we had this little mano a mano.”

I kept my gaze trained on the side of his head, telepathically commanding him to turn and meet my eye. He picked his nose and grimaced at the screen.

“Who are the guests, Orson?”

“Haven and some of his people.”

This was said in a casual tone, as though they came to dinner every weekend.

“Haven and some of his people,” I repeated. “The Iterants. The Fuzzy Fruits.”

“Correct.”

I stared at him in dumbstruck silence.

“Don’t give me shit, Waldy. The Kraut’s already run me through the grinder.”

I settled back into the couch, feeling the beer in my bloodstream reassert itself. The sounds from the kitchen were louder now, the aroma more sweet: cinnamon and filo dough and apples. I wanted to lay my head in the Kraut’s floury, buttery lap.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s Haven after?”

“My name,” answered Orson, puffing his chest out involuntarily. “My name and endorsement.”

“Why?”

“As you no doubt recall, my writings form the template—”

“That’s not what I meant. Why would you give it to him?”

“You know that, too,” he said, though with slightly less bluster. “Because of my sisters.” He avoided my look. “He’s promised to leave them alone.”

* * *

In the handful of years since we’d last seen my aunts, my father and I had discussed that momentous night exactly once, and then only because the Kraut had forced us to. Orson steered clear of the topic for classically Orson-ish reasons, ranging from denial to peevishness to injured pride; I avoided it because it creeped me out. Each time I tried to make sense of what had happened, both in Enzie’s “exclusion bin” and after, I felt an abyss open under my feet. I was too young to be asked to do the things my aunt had asked of me. Odd as my childhood had been — and eccentric, God knows, as my family remained — I’d been raised in a rational household, one in which the laws of science ruled. But my childhood had ended with that trip to Harlem. There are more things in heaven and on earth than reason accedes to, Mrs. Haven, and there was no forgetting what I’d experienced at the General Lee.

I’d heard the story of the Fuzzy Fruits’ first visit a hundred times by then, and I’d seen the First Listener’s tense, athletic face in magazines; even once — extremely briefly — on the news. It was a face better suited to torch-lit trials in some hidden star chamber than to the exigencies of modern-day PR, and no amount of styling gel or cosmetic dentistry could change that. Regardless of what he was doing, no matter how candid or innocuous the photo, Haven always looked as though he’d just stopped screaming. But it wasn’t his inquisitor’s face that disturbed me most deeply, or his army of ghoulish true believers, either. It was the fact that I didn’t have a clue what he wanted — what he wanted from us , from my family — and the further fact that Orson seemed to know, but wouldn’t say.

He changed the subject whenever I asked, or turned up the volume on the TV, or glowered at something just over my shoulder, as though a cicada-sized Haven were hovering there. I didn’t buy any of his jabber about the Iterants needing his “endorsement”: Synchronology was the fastest-growing religion in the United States, bar none, and it wasn’t shy about it. Orson was more useful shut away in Cheektowaga than he would have been in any kind of spotlight. The most profitable prophet is a dead one, Mrs. Haven, ecclesiastically speaking. Those who overstay their welcome start to stink.

* * *

It was the Kraut who answered the door that fateful Saturday — not out of any sense of wifely decorum, but because Orson refused to come up from the basement. I was mature enough, at fifteen, to be disgusted by his prima donna act: I pictured him skulking down there in his “Myth Creation Station” (as he insisted on calling his office) with a glass of lukewarm rosé in his fist, listening to every move we made upstairs. What I wasn’t old enough to consider, I now realize, was that he might have been as terrified as I was.

The only one who wasn’t terrified — not even remotely — was the Kraut. The bell had barely rung before she’d thrown the door open and advised our callers that Mr. Tolliver would be up presently; in the meantime there was coffee in the den. I took all this in from my post at the top of the stairs.

“Come down here, Waldy,” the Kraut said without turning. “Kindly show our visitors where they can put themselves.”

I’d never heard her use that tone of voice before: it was flat and metallic and brooked no objection. I came downstairs at once. She turned on her toes and marched off to the kitchen, leaving me alone with our guests, none of whom had so far said a word.

There were three of them in the foyer, just as there had been in the Econoline, just as there had been almost sixteen years earlier, the first time they’d come to the house. Two were wearing white leather sneakers with baby-blue treads; one of them — the one in the center — had on a pair of yellow calfskin loafers. All three wore matching wide-wale corduroys, and I realized to my horror — in the precise instant, as C*F*P would have it, that my eyes and his eyes met — that I was wearing wide-wale corduroys myself.