John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

It grew as quiet in that bathroom as in an exclusion bin.

“That’s impossible, Artur,” I heard myself answer. “Ottokar said so himself in his letter: Today it has happened .” I gripped the sink for support. “ The Lost Time Accidents , he says. Not once but three times. What kind of joke is that? Both of his sons were convinced, not to mention his—”

“It was a comedy, that’s all. A kind of a game.” He pulled a battered notebook from his pocket. “Marta liked to hear nonsense. She says in this book, in this journal, that he read poems to her at their tête-à-têtes — smallish comedies, with simple puzzles in them. On this day he was late, so he took a special effort to please her. The puzzle, in this case, was one of repeated first letters. How do you say this? The first letter of each of the words?”

I stared at him a moment. “Alliteration? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes! I mean this exactly! Go and look at his note. For each ‘literation,’ count the number of alphabet stops from the repeated letter. Bim bam boom , for example, would be three stops— B to C to D —do you see? — so D would be the beginning of the message. And so on, Mr. Walter, getting one letter for each grouping.”

“That’s a parlor trick, Artur.” My head felt light again. “That’s a game that you’d play with a child.”

He grinned to himself in his unseeing way. “The message to Marta was one single word. Can you guess which it was?”

I shook my head slowly. He sat up with a triumphant little snort.

“ Fenchelwurst , Mr. Walter. From the Germanic language. It means, I think, a kind of fennel sausage.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, Artur.”

“Take this book, Mr. Toula!”

I swatted the book from his hands. “Why are you telling me this? What do you want from me? Why did you follow me here?”

“To be honest,” he mumbled, “I did a bad thing.”

But by that point, Mrs. Haven, I was barely listening. I couldn’t accept what I was hearing — not on that day, in the state I was in. It took all my self-control to keep from hitting him.

“It may have some kind of code in it,” I said. “That may be true. But there are other sentences, aren’t there? There are whole passages with no alliteration. Those passages must have some other meaning — they wouldn’t be in there otherwise.” I looked at him. “Would they?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Walter,” Artur said quietly. A look of something like compassion crossed his face.

“You have to realize, Artur, that my family has been trying to make sense of this ‘comedy,’ as you call it, for the last hundred years. The last hundred years, do you understand me? People have wasted entire life spans trying to extract meaning from it. Crimes have been committed, Artur. All to answer this one riddle.”

Artur scratched his nose, considering what I’d told him.

“But why?”

In place of a reply, my tongue found the hollow where my molar had been. I thought of you, Mrs. Haven, and of your husband, and of his airplane, and of the whole belief system that had sprung, however crookedly, from a few words scribbled on a sheet of paper.

“What about the mathematics?” I said, sinking down onto the tiles. “What about the algebra — the third page, that proof? Are you going to tell me that was nonsense, too?”

“No,” Artur said, looking suddenly frightened. “No. That proof was not a portion of the vtip .”

“Then even if you’re telling me the truth — even if the letter is gibberish, a meaningless joke — that still leaves the math. And don’t tell me Ottokar wrote that for his mistress.”

Artur bowed his head. “That’s the second thing I have to tell. That leaves the math, as you say. But I made certain changes.”

I’ll confess to you, Mrs. Haven, that I could have killed him then. I sat on my hands to keep them from closing around his dumpling-colored neck.

“Certain changes?” I said.

He bobbed his head quickly. “Before I brought the box — when I was listening to you through the wall. I stood the ∞s up straight — all of them. I turned them into eights.”

“Why did you do that, Artur?”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. “I told you,” he said. “I did not care for that woman.”

Monday, 09:05 EST

It’s been seven sleep cycles since I saw the Timekeeper. I’ve been making regular expeditions to the bedroom and the kitchen, his usual haunts — but the contents of the fridge remain constant, and there’s been no change in his imprint on the bed.

Chances are good, Mrs. Haven, that he’ll never come back. With every iteration he’s looked more spent, less recognizable, like a joke that grows more garbled with each telling. His travels through the chronosphere seem to be distorting his body, buckling and inflating it grotesquely; or maybe it’s my perception that’s distorting. There seems to be no way for me to tell.

By now, I’m guessing, you’ve decided that I’ve imagined Waldemar, called him into being as a tonic for my loneliness and lust for resolution: that the distortions I’m seeing are caused by my imperfect memory, forced to recall his features time and time again, like the dubbing and redubbing of some overplayed cassette. It’s the likeliest explanation, I can’t deny that — but its likelihood no longer troubles me. After all, Mrs. Haven, I called you into being the same way.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about my family by setting down this history, it’s that the zone of so-called objectivity — whatever, and wherever, and whenever that may be — has always been a foreign country to us. But the great compensation of madness, as every madman knows, is that it keeps its victim company. If my own brain gave birth to the Timekeeper, in other words, why should I scorn him for it? Who’s to say that it makes him less true?

AT LONG LAST, MRS. HAVEN, college happened.

Back in Orson’s day — as he never tired of reminding me — a towheaded American youth of no particular ambition could sidestep higher education altogether and still be regarded as sentient; by the time I left for college, even aspiring pheromone dealers were expected to earn their BAs. This was less for educational purposes, according to my father, than as a means of establishing credit: in late twentieth-century America, he argued, you existed in proportion to your debt.

My freshman-year roommate, Karl Hornbanger, carried Orson’s argument to its logical extreme, proposing to the registrar that he assume debt directly in exchange for his diploma, dispensing with his coursework altogether. “They call them ‘credits’ for a reason, Tolliver,” he used to say, as we were falling asleep on our rubberized sanitarium-surplus mattresses. “The truth is right there in the open, beating the air with its giant batwings, for anyone with the soup-and-nuts to look.” Hornbanger dropped out of school eighteen months later (which didn’t surprise anyone) to work in foreclosures in Miami-Dade. By all accounts he leads a happy life.

* * *

Ogilvy College (“The Sorbonne of Butternut Country”) played its own modest role in the aforementioned grift, gamely parting its gates to those spurned by the Ivy League for their lack of ambition or pedigree. It had once been the Lake Erie terminus of a branch of the underground railroad, and thus had a time-honored tradition of comforting the wretched, which I’m not ashamed to say included me. I was foaming at the mouth when I arrived, in a fever to get my puberty behind me, to relinquish all rights and privileges pertaining to my Cheektowaga self. By my third semester I had clavicle-length hair and a “math rock” band that I played “tape loops” in (The Educated Consumers) and an elementary grasp of the principles of cause and effect — which came in handy, Mrs. Haven, because I’d also found a girl.