John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

Strange to say, Mrs. Haven, I believed what he said. I felt no anger toward him any longer — he was too diminished, too ruined, and I was too drunk on the answers he was giving. There was no further use in denial: the writing of this narrative has been my reason for existing. Despite my love for you, regardless of the anguish it has caused me, I never truly had another. I needed an audience, a receiver, and I found one in you. If you exploited me, Mrs. Haven — if you used me, ruthlessly, for your own ends — the truth is that I used you in return.

The Timekeeper coughed and sighed and licked his tattered lips. I wondered if he’d been as outspoken with Enzie, or with Kaspar, or with my poor father.

“Who else did you visit? Who among them knew that you were there?”

“Only your aunts, when they were little girls.” He snuffled. “And Haven, of course.”

“Why Haven , for God’s sake? What did you tell him?”

“Whatever nonsense came into my head.”

I thought for a moment, then gave a weak laugh. “I suppose that explains a few things.”

“I did what was necessary, Nefflein . No more and no less. To be frank, he was beginning to intrude.”

I wasn’t sure what this meant, Mrs. Haven, and I didn’t ask. The spinning of the Archive seemed to lessen.

“How is it coming?” he said, his voice suddenly shy. “Your history, I mean. Have you made any progress?”

“Just a chapter about Enzie and Genny. I doubt you’ll find it useful.”

He gave a wolfish grin and pinched my cheek. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

I LEFT THE VILLA OUSPENSKY in worse shape, Mrs. Haven, than when I’d gone in. The fact of Orson in that place, surrounded by a swarm of beehived, pastel-skirted zombies, was destabilizing enough; but Miss Greer’s whispered warning had thrown me completely. I’d shown up with a theory — an absurd one at best — and she’d done the one thing I’d been unprepared for. She’d confirmed it.

For the whole of my childhood, I’d pictured the timestream as a flickering tunnel we all move through together — everyone who’s ever lived, or ever will — like passengers on a fairground logjam ride. After that last trip to Harlem, try as I might to repress it, I’d come to view the timestream as a magical streetcar of sorts, one that could move either forward or back. And now the revelation about my great-uncle — the possibility that he was traveling through both time and space at whim, in lines both straight and crooked, like a bishop or a knight around a chessboard — had transformed the timestream into a vast and roadless thicket, shadowy and dense in all directions, full of numberless places to hide. Even the term timestream now expressed a dated concept: an infinite array of streams flowed outward in every conceivable direction, it seemed, from any given moment. And Waldemar had access to them all.

The Timekeeper wasn’t likely to take kindly to my meddling, family ties notwithstanding — but that wasn’t my greatest fear. The concept itself was what frightened me most: the concept and all it implied. It gnawed at the margins of my well-being over the next few days, especially at night. At times it seemed a modest notion, almost trifling; at others it swelled to the dimensions of a nightmare. If there was suddenly more than one set of rails to move along — if the logjam ride of my childhood was in fact some universal junction, with countless radiating tracks — once I changed course, what was there to bring me back?

Though I believed what Orson’s nurse/lover/jailer had told me, Mrs. Haven, I chose to ignore her advice. My next move was clear: to determine the nearest point in the future the Timekeeper was likely to visit — both its temporal coordinates and its spatial ones — then go to that x/y/z/t intersection and kill him. Of all the innumerable descendants of SS war criminals, I alone still had the chance to bring my forebear to the ultimate account. I didn’t need to comb the chronosphere to accomplish my objective, either: the flow of what Orson liked to call “consensus time” would lead me to him. One hurdle remained, though, and it was a big one. I had to learn enough about my great-uncle, a man I knew next to nothing about, to predict both when and where he’d turn up next.

There was no way around it: I had to see Enzie and Genny.

I’d kept clear of my aunts for as long as I could — out of loyalty to Orson, I suppose, and possibly some sense of self-protection — but Orson’s power over me was at an end. My grandfather had turned his back on the role he’d been given — and so, in his way, had my father — but I had no intention of repeating their mistakes. If there was one quality that separated the Timekeeper and the Iterants (and the Patent Clerk himself, for that matter) from the wretched of the earth, it was this: they acted, Mrs. Haven, and the rest of us sad, frightened bumblers were acted upon.

Not me , I swore to myself. Not anymore. I was through pretending not to be a Tolliver.

* * *

Manhattan was in the grip of a cold snap the day I arrived, the iciest first of May on record, and the Boathouse and Nutter’s Battery lay fixed under a scrim of frozen rain. I sat on the stone wall of the park for a while, watching the trees flash and rustle, putting off my next move as long as I could. There was no sign of anything suspicious across the way: just a steady stream of grim, time-mired locals. I was shivering and my legs were going numb. It was time to cross the street and ring the buzzer.

Before I could do that, however — before I’d even crossed Fifth Avenue — I was treated to a piece of vaudeville. A silhouette caught my eye through the General Lee’s doors, then a flurry of movement; a few seconds later, just as I reached the curb, a hobo shuffled out onto the pavement. I use the term hobo , Mrs. Haven, because no other word suits the case. His toes jutted out from the tips of his boots and his pants were held up by duct-tape suspenders and his five o’clock shadow had the sheen of burnt cork. He turned toward me in a kind of dust-bowl soft-shoe, the steely glint of hardship in his eye. I expected him to cuss at me, or dance a jig, or possibly to hit me up for change. Instead he asked if I could hold the door.

There were two more drifters in the lobby, it turned out, standing on either side of what looked to be a refrigerator wrapped in a tarp. They were more presentable than their friend, but only barely. The three of them hoisted the thing without the least sign of effort and steered it neatly out onto the curb. The man in the suspenders thanked me and slipped me a dollar. I left them on the ice-encrusted stoop, apparently waiting for their ride, which I could only assume was a Model T Ford.

Hobos and refrigerator boxes aside, something was different about the General Lee — I sensed it as a tightness in the hollow of my chest. Had I been an older man, I might have put this down to hypertension; if I’d been a paranoiac, to airborne pathogens or smog or cosmic rays. As it was, I chose to blame it on anxiety, and urged my body up the darkened stairwell. But something was different.

My nerve failed me again when I reached my aunts’ door. Orson and I had stood on that same water-stained landing nearly a decade earlier, I remembered, on the night that had ended my childhood. We’d hesitated then, too, and with good reason. I remembered Orson’s obvious discomfort, and his clumsy attempts to conceal it — I’d seen him embarrassed so rarely. He’d been afraid on that visit, I realized now: that had been the source of his embarrassment. That I might look at him and recognize his fear.