John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Hello, pal,” the First Listener said. “I like your cords.”

He said it softly, I remember, as though we were alone. His crimped hair was subtly frosted, making him look like a preacher in some California church — the kind with acoustic guitars and headset microphones and not much use for the actual Bible. He looked exactly the way he would look eight years later, standing over me in a sunlit Moravian alley, grinning and wiping the blood from his lips.

“My dad’s in the basement,” I heard myself say.

“We have a ‘thing’ for corduroy, too, as you can see. Can you guess why that is?”

I shook my head woodenly.

“Corduroy, being a material composed of a grouping of parallel lines, performs two services for its wearer simultaneously.” He held up two fingers. “The first is the practical service of keeping him (or her) warm, and shielding him (or her) from the elements, if inclement. The second is an ideological service, if you’ll pardon the expression. It reminds him (or her) of the multiplicity of timestreams running parallel to our own, and of the possibility of congruence between them.”

I blinked at him. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Of course you hadn’t.” He patted my shoulder and slipped gracefully past me. “There are many things you haven’t thought of, Waldemar — not yet. You’re still early in your cycle, after all. But you’ll find yourself considering them soon.”

“What do you mean?”

“The den is just through here, as I recall.”

My instinct was to stop him — to catch him by the scruff of his neck or the collar of his Eddie Bauer blazer (corduroy, of course) — but he was only doing as my mother had suggested. I followed him sullenly into the den.

Haven draped himself across my father’s leopard-print armchair as though he dropped in all the time, while his escort (after a kind of ritual pause, during which I could actually see them counting under their breath) dropped synchronously onto the couch. I knew with absolute certainty, without being able to say how I knew, that the configuration was exactly the same as it had been in 1970, when the Fuzzy Fruits had made their shy debut. The only available seat was between the two mouth-breathers on the sofa, so I decided to stay on my feet. Haven wasn’t the least put out by this, as far as I could tell. It’s possible he took it as a gesture of respect.

“Are you a Timestrider fan, pal? I’m guessing you are.”

“I couldn’t care less about it.”

“Is that right.”

Silence fell. Haven let out a contented sigh every so often, smiling blandly at the walls and at the ceiling and at me. It was a victory lap for him, this visit; that much was clear.

“Where’s your father, Waldy?”

“My family calls me Waldy.”

“I know that, pal. Where’s your—”

“You’re not my family.”

This was unquestionably the boldest thing I’d said in my duration thus far, but it didn’t have the effect that I’d intended. Haven grinned at the mouth-breathers, showing his teeth; they tittered and nodded, as if I’d just stood up on my hind legs and barked.

“Right you are, pal,” said Haven. “Nicely put.”

He closed his eyes and gave a happy shiver. When he looked at me again I had the sense that something about his face had changed — that his jaw was slightly heavier, or that his eyes had taken on a different tint. I wondered where the hell my father was.

“It doesn’t really matter where the Prime Mover is,” said Haven, as if I’d been speaking aloud. “We didn’t come to see him, after all.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, cursing the quaver in my voice. “Of course you came to see the Prime — of course you came to see Orson. My father, I mean.”

Haven shook his head. “That’s the funny thing, Waldy — we didn’t. We came to see you.”

The Kraut rematerialized at that instant, for some reason holding a Warranted Tolliver egg timer, and announced that my father would be receiving his callers downstairs. Haven thanked her politely and got to his feet. I kept perfectly still, staring fixedly down at the sphincterish spots on the leopard-print armchair, watching the imprint of the First Listener’s backside gradually disappear. By the time I’d recovered my composure he was gone.

LESS THAN AN HOUR after the Kraut’s whispered warning, I was sitting in an open second-class car of the Václav Divis Regional from Vienna to Brno, looking past your freckled shoulder at the men across the aisle. Both of them were wearing trench coats, I noticed, and expensive-looking leather driving gloves. The Kraut was right: everyone in this part of Europe looked like a member of the Gestapo.

But no sooner had I had this thought, Mrs. Haven, than the various doubts I’d been suppressing wriggled up into the light. Could that really have been what the Kraut had said? It wasn’t true, of course — the only people who looked like members of the Gestapo were the trench-coat-wearing men across the aisle. My mother was a rational woman, as far as I knew: the single levelheaded member of our family. Why on earth would she have told me that you, of all people, “wished me ill”? Either her brain chemistry had shifted radically or I’d made a grievous error — the most grievous one, by far, of my duration. I could think of no other hypothesis.

To calm myself, I brought out the postcard of Znojmo and studied it, imagining the two of us already there. I recited its doggerel under my breath like a charm:

“A gherkin from the land of Znaim

Is mightier than the Hand of Time;

Its savory brine, at first so sour

Grows sweeter with each Passing Hour.”

I glanced at you when I was done, to see whether the spell was having any effect — but you looked lost to the world, Mrs. Haven, or at least lost to me. Some flywheel had shifted; some cog had been thrown. You didn’t seem to see the men in the trench coats, or perhaps you were making an elaborate show of not seeing them. Maybe that in itself was proof of some sort of conspiracy. But you’d never looked more beautiful to me.

“What are you thinking about, Mrs. Haven?”

Slowly — unwillingly, it seemed — your eyes met mine. “If you really want to know, Walter, I’m not feeling so great about myself.”

“He doesn’t need you. You told me that, remember? He’ll barely even notice that you’re gone.”

You smiled abstractedly and shrugged your shoulders. “I wasn’t thinking about him.”

“Is it me, then? Were you thinking about me?”

A blank moment passed. “Of course not,” you said. But I’d already gotten my answer.

“Listen to me, Mrs. Haven. I know you think I’m leading you on some kind of goose chase across Central Europe — maybe even that I’ve lost my mind — but I’ve got to get my family behind me. Can you understand that? I want the past to be past : to stop spinning in circles, to stop sucking me in, to let me make my own goddamn decisions. I’m in love with you, Mrs. Haven, and I want to start over.” I took in a breath. “For the first time that I can remember, I have a feeling that the future might be—”

“I don’t want to talk right now,” you said, pressing your hands to your face. “Not about your family, not about your goose chase, and most of all — for God’s sake! — not about the future.” You let your hands fall and turned to the window. “Could you leave me alone until dinner?”

I bobbed my head jerkily, digging my nails into the armrests of my seat. “Of course I can do that.”

“Thank you, Walter.”

It was cold in the car, cold enough to see your breath, and your woolen skirt crackled like a Tesla coil each time you rearranged your legs. You rearranged your legs often — for my benefit, perhaps, or for the benefit of the men across the aisle — and the counterclockwise spirals on your vintage patterned stockings emphasized your haunches in a way that made my forehead start to cramp. You steadfastly refused to meet my eye. The trees outside the window blurred and bowed.