John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“That is one chubby Nazi,” Hornbanger observed.

“That’s my great-uncle Waldemar Toula.”

“Say huh?”

I’d never seen Waldemar in the flesh, needless to say, but I’d spent hours examining the pictures of him reproduced in various histories of the Third Reich, and I’d identified him in a sepia-tinted portrait of the family in Znojmo. This portrait, in turn, had led to my greatest discovery: a photograph of my grandfather and his brother from their student days in Vienna — in front of the Schloss Belvedere, of all places — gawping into the camera like the starry-eyed yokels they were. Waldemar is a sight to behold in the snapshot, assured in his new-minted manhood — worlds more handsome than his elder brother, in spite of their identical shit-eating grins. His smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes, however, which seem unaccountably tired. I might not have recognized the world-weary Nazi in Visconti’s film if not for that photograph, liberated from a shoe box in our terminally cluttered garage. But knowing it as well as I did — having scrutinized it over and over, until it was rotogravured into my memory — there was no chance of mistaking the resemblance. Those flat eyes could belong to no one else.

* * *

I left school two weeks later, on the same day as Hornbanger. I didn’t drop out officially, didn’t make a show of it the way he did — I just left. My ancient Subaru refused to start, so I bummed a ride from him as far as Pittsburgh. You wouldn’t have known from Hornbanger’s looks that he was a metalhead, necessarily, but his driving style expressed it eloquently. He got us out of Ohio without switching lanes once, jerking his flat-topped head along to Cannibal Corpse and Deicide and Morbid Angel, running his dad’s late-model Taurus up the backsides of trucks like a heifer in heat. He dropped me off at a truck stop that featured a Taco Bell and a Dunkin’ Donuts grafted together into a two-headed hydra of dining convenience, still a novelty in the early nineties. It seemed as good a place to hitch a lift as any.

“So long, Tolliver. Good luck finding your pops.”

“I already know where to find him, Karl. But thanks.”

“I know where to find mine, too,” Hornbanger said, gunning his engine. “At the Seminole Rez in Tampa, playing slots. If things don’t work out on your mission, maybe you could liberate my dad instead. But I’m not holding my breath or anything.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I gave him a thumbs-up and stepped back from the car. It was late afternoon and the parking lot was hot and bluish gray and weirdly empty. Hornbanger did a few doughnuts, flashed me the devil horns, then rolled off at a surprisingly moderate speed. He had no one to impress anymore, Mrs. Haven, and neither did I.

I’d left school for the usual reasons, I suppose, but also for some I considered distinctive. I knew plenty of kids at Ogilvy whose mothers were naturalized U.S. citizens, for example, but I’d never heard of any of them choosing to reverse the procedure, and if anybody else’s father had been spirited away by a cult of long-haired, corduroy-sporting time fetishists, word of it had somehow passed me by. The clincher, however, was this: I’d become convinced, since seeing him waddle across that Cinecittà soundstage, that the Black Timekeeper of Czas had escaped the destruction of the Äschenwald camp, just as the conspiracy-theorists had claimed. But I went all those nutjobs one better, Mrs. Haven. I’d decided that he was still alive — here and now, at the complacent, listless end of the twentieth century — and that it was up to me, and only me, to hunt him down.

* * *

Three days later, at 10:43 EST, I found myself standing at an ivy-choked gate on a quaint country lane, debating whether or not to ring its fat brass bell. Above the bell hung a plate, even brassier and more expensive-looking:

THE UNITED CHURCH OF SYNCHRONOLOGY

∞

VILLA OUSPENSKY

I studied my reflection in the plate, adjusting my posture, taking deep breaths and stalling for time; time obliged, for once, and moved with tidal slowness. The gate was almost imperceptibly ajar. Beyond it, up a violet-green lawn — a color I’d never seen before in nature — stood a gingerbread house, in full view of the road. I passed through the gate without ringing the bell.

I had no burning desire to see my father, Mrs. Haven, least of all in that place, but I needed his help. I needed a hint of some kind, however grudging or clumsy — some small clue as to where to begin. Not that I felt pessimistic about my quest, strange to say: I felt pessimistic about everything else — as any self-respecting college dropout and/or child of a broken home should — but not that. I knew from the start that I’d find Waldemar. In a sense I’d always carried him within me.

No one met me on the lawn, or on the ∞-shaped drive, or even on the stoop of the villa, though I felt myself being observed. They let me ring the doorbell — fatter and brighter and brassier still — and made me wait just long enough to weaken my morale. Eventually an intercom sputtered and a woman’s voice asked me, somewhat frostily, to state my name and business.

“Waldemar Tolliver. I’m here to see my father.”

“Your father?” A southern accent, I decided, or possibly English. “And who might that be?”

“You know damn well who my father is.”

No response came. Everything seemed to hold still, from the sparrows in the bushes to the clouds above the trees. I’d just begun to ask myself whether I’d picked the wrong UCS outpost — whether the Kraut might have had bad intel about Orson, or I’d misunderstood — when the lacquered door swung inward with a smooth, hydraulic sigh, like the hatch of a spaceship, and a beautiful dark-eyed woman with hands of polished wax pulled me inside.

She was the whitest and most elegant woman I’d ever seen, Mrs. Haven, including the Kraut, who (as you know yourself) was as pale as a fish. Somehow she even gripped me elegantly. Her hands weren’t really made of wax, of course, although they looked — and even felt — as if they were. She seized me by the elbow and jerked me hard across the threshold, then receded holographically down a tastefully furnished hall, as if my presence there were no concern of hers. Her bare feet made no sound on the cream-colored runner. Before the latch had closed behind me she was gone.

I took a moment to steady myself. The experience had been appropriately cultish so far, which pleased me on some adolescent level. The air in the corridor seemed to hum very slightly, and I could feel the floor vibrating through the soles of my sneakers, although this might have been a trick of my nerves. The walls were smooth and bare and starkly lit. No one else was in sight. I took off my shoes for some reason — decorum, perhaps — and began creeping forward. The length of the hallway proved tricky to gauge in the flat, bloodless light. I expected to catch sight of the woman when I turned the first corner, but I found only a second length of hallway, as bare as the first, ending in another left-hand turn. It reminded me of something.

It reminded me of the corridor in Enzie and Genny’s apartment.

I pulled back around the corner and rested my head against the wall, breathing in stuttering sucks. All my false courage left me. I wanted to get out of there, Mrs. Haven. I’d made a terrible mistake. The floor was vibrating — I was sure of it now. It occurred to me then — how could I have overlooked it? — that there were no doors or windows in sight. The wall was shuddering behind me: I could feel it in my shoulders and my spine. I tried to recall what I’d just glimpsed around the corner. There might have been a sort of door — a small one, maybe six feet past the turning. But I was too unnerved to take another look.