John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“In the name of all that’s holy,” the Kraut repeated. She gave an airless little laugh. “What a funny choice of words. That must be it.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve been calling your father a prophet for years. What middle-aged man wouldn’t like the sound of that?”

Neither of us spoke for a time.

“Is there gas in your car?” she said, setting her knife down abruptly. When the Kraut decided a subject was finished, Mrs. Haven, she wrung its neck without remorse and tossed it in the river. There was no going back for her, only ahead. She was like the nineteenth-century chronoverse that way.

I nodded. “Half a tank.”

“Excellent! We need to buy a turkey.”

* * *

For reasons I can’t entirely describe, Mrs. Haven, those four days with the Kraut were as pleasant as any I’d passed in that house. For the first time since I’d been a toddler, the two of us had the place entirely to ourselves, an extended weekend’s worth of idle hours, and an almost mystical ability to see each other as we were. The quirks that had driven me bonkers for years — her way of looking past you when she spoke, her sitcom-Nazi accent, her earsplitting, glass-cutting laugh — now somehow had the opposite effect. I’d taken her for granted as a child, the way spoiled children will — she was so constant, so effective, so elemental that she was often hard to see. Orson had always been sharply in focus, never anywhere but front and center, the cardinal or potentate or dragon in the foreground of the painting; my mother, by contrast, was the fortress in the distance, or the range of sky-blue mountains, or the gauzy blue dome of the sky itself.

The chicken-sized turkey we ended up buying was our single concession to the holiday spirit. We ate it from sheets of tinfoil spread out on the counter, along with Triscuits and cans of Genessee Cream Ale.

“So what happens now?” I asked her, feeling worldly and urbane. “Will you guys get divorced?”

She laughed. “He hasn’t left me for a woman, Waldy. He’s left me for himself.”

“Does he really believe all that UCS horseshit?”

“I hope so, for his sake. Otherwise it won’t be very fun.”

“Maybe he’s trying to infiltrate the Iterants, to figure them out — to study them from the inside.” My voice had gone childish. “Maybe this is about the Accidents.”

“The Accidents?” She looked at me sharply. “Who’s been talking to you about that?”

“There’s a mystery about them — Orson told me that much. I know they’re supposed to be some kind of code, but no one understands what for. I know they’re why my great-grandfather died.”

The Kraut heaved a sigh. “If they’re code for anything at all, sweetheart, it’s self-delusion. For all the good that ridiculous phrase has done this family, it might as well have been written by a chimpanzee on a banana peel.”

“But don’t you think there’s a chance—”

“I’d rather talk about something else.” She pursed her lips. “Your future, for example.”

“Groan.”

“You’ll have to declare a major soon, and—”

“I’ve already declared a major.”

That surprised her. “What is it?”

“History.”

“History?”

I gave a solemn nod.

“History!” the Kraut repeated. “I’ll be damned.”

The relief in her voice was unmistakable. I hadn’t said writing or panhandling or gunrunning or — God forbid! — physics. I’d said the first thing that had popped into my head, Mrs. Haven, to tell you the truth. But I liked the sound of it.

“You’ll have to write some kind of thesis, won’t you?” the Kraut said, once she’d recovered her bearings. “The challenge of history, I’ve always thought, is that the field is so big. You’ve got millennia of stupidity and hysteria to choose from.”

“I’ve thought about that, too,” I told her. “I’m going to stick to the hysteria I know.”

“Very good,” she said, taking a thoughtful sip of her beer. “Write what you know.”

She was wondering what the hell that meant, of course, and so was I.

Looking back, it’s clear to me that I had this chronicle in mind already, though neither of us knew it at the time — at least not consciously. This was part of what made that weekend so extraordinary: we were able to chatter on about the future happily, to treat it as a glowing white unknown, free of any fear of its petrifying blankness. We had no need of tarock cards or exclusion bins. The one thing we knew about the future was that it was likely to be — that it had to be — different from the past. That was all we knew, Mrs. Haven, but it was enough.

It dawned on me gradually, as the hours and days passed, that my mother had plans of her own, and that some of them were intricately plotted; which could only mean she’d seen the end approaching. She wanted — after a twenty-year hiatus — to finish her doctorate, if possible at the University of Vienna. I bluffed my way through these conversations, nodding and frowning as if deep in thought, doing my best to hide my wonderment. The Kraut would be returning to Europe, she told me, and possibly not coming back. It occurred to me at one point — I think it was late Sunday morning, eating apricot palatschinken in the kitchen — that I’d never before seen her so happy.

“It’s for the best that he left, then,” I said tentatively. “I can’t see Orson moving to Vienna.”

The Kraut didn’t answer.

“He was a good father, basically,” I continued. “I know he meant well. But sometimes days would go by — more than days — when I didn’t understand a single word he said. He’s like—” I hesitated. “I don’t really know what. I guess he’s like Enzie and Genny.”

“You’re right,” said the Kraut. “He’s exactly like them.”

“That’s what I can’t figure out. Why is it that no one’s like Orson but Enzie and Genny, and no one’s like Enzie and Genny but him?”

She said nothing to that. But she looked as though she wanted to say something.

“You must have thought about this, Ursula. It must have occurred to you, some time or other, that there was — I mean, that there was kind of an unusual—”

The Kraut took my hand in both of hers and stared at me. “You’re too close to see it,” she said. “How could you see it? It’s all you’ve ever known.”

I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. “What is it,” I said carefully, “that I’m too close to see?”

“Don’t you understand yet, Waldy, that your family is mentally ill?”

* * *

I arrived back at Ogilvy flush with high-minded purpose, having managed to convince myself on the three-hour drive back from Buffalo that I was a budding connoisseur of human history. Tabitha and pot and social paranoia, not to mention the UCS in all its forms and guises, were the stuff of my personal past. I was determined to call my own bluff, to focus my fractured attention into a photon beam of sober inquiry: to get to work on my thesis immediately, or at least to start going to class.

All of which might actually have happened, Mrs. Haven, if C*F*P had only looked the other way.

I was six weeks into the kind of kitchen-sink cinema studies course (The Scl/erotic Muse: Introduction to Postwar European Cinema, 1944–78) that undergrads laboring under delusions of profundity generally take, when the answer to the riddle of my great-uncle’s disappearance — or a maddening complication of that riddle, depending on your point of view — was dropped into my lap as I sat in my dorm’s “media lounge,” sulking my way through yet another loveless Friday night. Hornbanger and I were halfway through The Damned , Luchino Visconti’s ’69 Nazisploitation campfest; he thought it “shredded”, my feelings were mixed. Hornbanger (who was about to drop out, had his bags packed already, was only waiting for his stipend check to clear) had just done two bumps of a flesh-colored powder that he claimed to have stolen from a birth-control clinic; I was brutally sober. My attention was starting to drift when a heavyset man with a passing resemblance to Reichsmarschall Goering shuffled grouchily across the mise-en-scène, scratching his back with the butt of his Luger. I sat up at once. The Goering look-alike, who appeared to be in early middle age, blinked nearsightedly into the camera for a second or two; then he adjusted his gun belt, which looked too small for him, and gave a halfhearted “Sieg Heil.”