John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

TV helped for a while, until it suddenly didn’t; and the same with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and pornography and pot. Within a month I was gripped by the life-or-death need, well known to junkies and AA members (and regular garden-variety obsessives), for something louder than the whinging of my brain. Which is how I came to be sitting cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room one Saturday night — moderately high and bored out of my skull, but too afraid of my own thoughts to fall asleep — staring down at the unopened letter from Enzie and Genny that I’d been using as a bookmark. I opened it, Mrs. Haven, and it worked right away. By the second time through I wasn’t even stoned.

Dearest Waldemar!

Nearly six years have passed since your visit to Harlem: enough time to do a bit of growing up. How much you’ve grown since that time? this is what we’ve been wondering. Your father has sent us picturesone small picture of you, unfortunately something out of focus. You look, as far as we can tell, like an American adult — meaning rather too “fleischig.” Remember to keep fit for the little girls!

But we’re interested in other manner of changes, your aunt Enzie and I. Can you think for yourself yet, Waldemar, or are you still your father’s “schlemiel”? This is one thing we are curious about. For this reason we include a little “Märchen.”

An old man goes to sleep one night and has a funny dream.

He dreams that he arrives at his workplace, ready to begin the day’s business, and finds his desktop strewn with cherry pits. There are pits in the drawers, on the floor, even under his heels.

Once the desk has been cleared, the old man’s work goes well. It goes so well, in fact, that after only a few hours he gives himself a holiday. He takes his lunch as usual, savoring every bite, then goes for a walk along a cobbled street, congratulating himself on his success.

A car surprises him in the dream, and he wakes up.

A few hours after waking, the man arrives at his workplace and finds his desktop strewn with cherry pits. One of his assistants (a teenaged boy!) has left them there.

Another man might prefer to dismiss these events — to attribute them to happenstance, or to an attack of nerves, or even to mystical sight. This old man does none of these things. He approaches the problem as a man of science would. There is meaning hidden here, and he will find it.

He has had such dreams before, he begins to recall. He has always chosen to dismiss them, as everyone else does, since such dreams are offensive to Reason. But this time the old man has a different idea. What if — he asks himself — this thing that has happened is not, in fact, odd or uncommon at all? What if it’s not a freakish occurrence, but an everyday one? What if it happens to all of us, virtually every night, while we’re asleep?

What if the Universe is, as other men of science have conjectured, spread out across Time as well as Space? What if the partial view we have — a view with the Future mysteriously missing, kept from the ever-expanding Past by the rolling windowpane we call the Present — is the effect of a mentally imposed barrier, one that functions only while we are awake?

This might explain the dream of the cherry pits, the old man thinks. He was seeing into the Future while he dreamt, as the driver of an automobile looks across a bridge that he has yet to cross.

Applying the principle of Occam’s razor, he now pares his theory down to its essentials. If, in fact, the Universe is — as some scientists claim — composed of at least four dimensions, why can we fully perceive only three? What if the Attention of the dreamer, obeying no rules but the rules of association and chance, travels back and forth across the Present/Past membrane at will?

The longer he considers this point, the more absurd it seems that our movement should be restricted in this so-called Fourth Dimension, when we enjoy such freedom in the others. If we travel with the prevailing wind through Time, like children adrift in the hold of a pilotless yacht, it can only be, he decides, because we haven’t learned to take our bearings yet. The sea, after all, looks the same in every direction — it’s easy to find oneself sailing in circles. Why should our voyages through the chronosphere be any different?

The old man is taking his afternoon stroll when this idea arrives, and its significance is clear to him at once. It represents the summit of his rational duration. His discovery will shake the scientific world to its foundations.

He is ambling over the cobblestones, congratulating himself on this stroke of good fortune, when a car comes rolling up the street and kills him.

If you understand this much, Waldemar, you might be old enough. Are you old enough, finally? If you are then come along and see us.

ET & GT

IN THE FALL of my third year at Ogilvy, Mrs. Haven, my father joined the Church of Synchronology. We didn’t find out until later, the Kraut and myself, because he didn’t stick around to clue us in. My mother had gone down to the basement one wet November afternoon, to check for flooding in the boiler room, and also to bring Orson the weird red South African tea (Redbush? Roy’s Bus? Rouge-Bouche? ) that he always insisted on drinking, only to find the door of his office wide open and its floor and bookshelves in a shocking state. The shelves were dust-free and immaculate, the drafting table had been neatly clapped together, and the purple shag rug with the Möbius-strip pattern actually looked as if it might have been shampooed. The man she was married to would have been appalled. She stood transfixed in the doorway with her mouth hanging open, swaying lightly in place, like a scientist who’s had a sudden breakthrough. She felt sure, in that moment, that she’d never see Orson again.

In later years, the Kraut would come to wonder how her husband could have vanished so utterly, with a roomful of books and papers and typewriters, in the course of a day she’d spent almost entirely at home; but at the time the question barely crossed her mind. She called the police but hung up as soon as the dispatcher answered, feeling ashamed without quite knowing why. She called me at Ogilvy and left a rambling message, full of cleaning tips and Cheektowaga gossip, that made no mention of my father’s disappearance. What surprised her most, she told me afterward, was her relative composure. Being a woman of science, she put this down to denial, and braced herself for the inevitable hair-tearing, teeth-gnashing hysterics.

She was still waiting, two and a half weeks later, when I arrived home for Thanksgiving.

I found her at the kitchen counter, the picture of bland domesticity, peeling a heap of fingerling potatoes. “ There you are, Waldy,” she said. “Orson’s gone.”

Somehow I understood her instantly. “To Znojmo?” (A visit to his father’s birthplace — followed, if all went well, by application for political asylum in the Czech Republic — had been a hobbyhorse of Orson’s recently.)

She smiled to herself and kept peeling. “I doubt it.”

“Where to, then? To Harlem?”

“I’ve spoken to your aunts — both of them. They haven’t heard from him in months.” Her smile stiffened slightly. “They suggested I might try the Fuzzy Fruits.”

“That can’t be true,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

The Kraut didn’t answer. She was still, at just past forty, a singularly beautiful woman, at least to me. It was painful to see her so chastened.

“Why the hell would he want to go there ? Why to the Iterants, in the name of all that’s holy?”