John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Gentlemens and ladies!” the intercom warbled. “We regret to inform you the restaurant car is now open.”

“At least they’re honest about it,” you said, getting up.

* * *

The restaurant car was populated by hollow-eyed businessmen and little old ladies who looked pickled in aspic and spleen. The men in trench coats were there, hunched together at the starboard center table; we seated ourselves hard to port. I tried to commit their features to memory — in the event of a future investigation by Interpol — while you squinted down at the greasy plastic menu as if you could make it appetizing by sheer force of will. You must have succeeded, because you ordered a bowl of česnečka —Czech garlic soup — for each of us.

“Česnečka,” I said after a time. “I wouldn’t have thought—”

“They don’t seem to have any bourbon. How do you say ‘bourbon’ in Czech?”

The last time you’d ordered a bourbon had been on the airplane, after I’d explained the details of my plan. I knew what bourbon signified.

“Mrs. Haven,” I said, attempting to keep my voice steady. “Are you starting to have second thoughts?”

You smiled at me and took my hand in yours. “I had second thoughts the moment we met, Walter. That’s how I ended up here.”

If the happiness this gave me was short-lived, Mrs. Haven, it was also very close to absolute. I reminded myself that you’d abandoned home and country — not to mention your personal safety — to be sitting with me in that joyless dining car. As always when I considered this fact, I felt that a mistake had been made: the most glorious and historic mistake since our ancestors descended from the trees.

Our soup came and we ate it dutifully. It tasted of cabbage and socks.

“This is the slowest train I’ve ever been on,” you said between spoonfuls. “The Sensational Gatsby would have loved it.”

“I didn’t realize the Husband was a train buff,” I said, with what I hoped was a nonchalant air. “I’d have thought jet packs and hovercraft were more his thing.”

“He has a set of guidelines that he follows,” you said, watching the farmhouses and wheat fields gliding by. “He believes that time passes faster when you’re having fun.”

I hesitated, trying and failing to read your expression. You gazed out the window impassively.

“Most people think that,” I said. “About time passing, I mean.”

“They think it, maybe. But they don’t arrange their lives around the concept.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Richard is trying to decelerate time, Walter, by any means at his disposal.” You set down your spoon. “The most effective method he’s found, so far, is what he calls ‘autosuggestive psychostasis.’”

“I’m not familiar with that term.”

“He spends his days trying to achieve total boredom.”

I gave an awkward half smile at that, certain now that you were pulling my leg. Even as I did so, however, I remembered those static, empty days before I’d won you back, and how the hours had advanced with sublime, psychotropic precision.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Mrs. Haven—”

“I’d be happy to.”

“—but your husband buys and sells companies and cuts ribbons at galas and zips around the planet in a private jet. If he’s trying to live a boring life, he’s doing a piss-poor job of it.”

That made you smile a little, and I allowed myself to feel I’d won a modest victory; but the smile you gave seemed meant for someone else.

“The jet’s a time-share, Walter. But you’re right about one thing. This trip of ours would do the trick much better.”

* * *

Znojmo was damp and gray and alcoholic-looking when we pulled in, the way towns look in Czech New Wave films from the sixties. The Himmler twins stayed put in the restaurant car, sipping somnolently from steins of Pilsner Urquell; I watched them as the Divis rolled away. Time was moving slowly on that train indeed.

The platform, by contrast, seemed to empty instantaneously. The only person in sight by the time we’d gotten our bearings was a stooped teenager with a gigantic Saint Bernard in a seeing-eye harness. The dog was circling the boy — counterclockwise, of course — and the boy had no choice but to follow suit.

“Look at that kid, Mrs. Haven.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or burst out crying. You were halfway along the platform already, tilting your head to look up at the sky. “Come on, Walter!” you called. “It’s beginning to rain.” And it was.

We spent that next week in the Hotel Zrada on Republiky Square, living in high style on the UCS’s dime, littering the honeymoon suite with room-service trays and bottles of prosecco and sundry other forms of recreational debris, any of which would have looked right at home in Genny’s Archive. Our sideboard was soon populated by sweating mason jars of local gherkins: the riddle of my great-grandfather’s brining-room discovery couldn’t have interested you less, as far as I could tell, but brining itself seemed to fascinate you. While I dithered around town with a dated Czech phrase book and a list of addresses scavenged from century-old journals, you devoted yourself to the history of the pickle trade, spending hours in the kitchens of button-eyed babička s, lamenting the post — Cold War rise of the Polish okurka and parsing the mysteries of dill. You got around your lack of Czech in a way I never would have thought of: by refusing to acknowledge its existence. Within the week you were friends with half the grandmothers in town, it seemed, while I was no further along than I’d been in New York. I won’t deny it, Mrs. Haven — I was envious. There’s only so much Znojemské okurky a person can eat, no matter how his forebears made their living.

It was your interest in pickling, appropriately enough, that led us to Ottokar’s secret. After eight days of begging admission to every storehouse and factory and cellar my family had owned, I was ready to consign both my quest and my history — and even the Accidents themselves — to the far side of their own event horizon. Our suite at the Zrada was a pigsty by then: you’d hung the provided DO NOT MOLEST sign on the door handle when we checked in (“Present company excluded,” you’d whispered into my ear) and the cleaning staff had heeded it devoutly. It smelled of sex in those rooms for the first several days; later in the week, when things had soured between us, it smelled of old sex; finally even that faded, and it smelled of dirty sheets and pickled cabbage. A feeling of stagnation had set in between us, of fidgety pseudocalm, that scared me worse than any squabble could have done. Never before had we had so much time to observe each other, carbuncles and all, and I think we were both surprised by what we found. You had a way of running your tongue over your back teeth, for example, as though searching for food, and you tended to sulk over trifles. Worse yet, I found myself — especially since our disastrous audience with the Kraut — progressively less able to amuse you. Not to say that you seemed bored, Mrs. Haven: you were conspicuously, demonstratively chipper. But I began to pack my suitcase anyway.

“You want to leave already, Walter? We’re just getting settled.”

“I’ve done everything I can here. I give up.”

What I didn’t tell you — due to some obscure suspicion, perhaps, but more likely simply out of injured pride — was that I was beginning to have doubts about my mission. Even if I somehow managed to get my hands on Ottokar’s notes, what would they help me accomplish? How exactly would they enable me to find the Timekeeper, and what did I suppose would happen if I did? He was a mass murderer, after all, and I was a caretaker at an old folks’ home. I was dangerously out of my depth. Sobriety, if you want to call it that, was returning to my overheated brain.