John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

The door swung loudly open before I could touch it. What I saw next stopped all speculation cold: dozens of bustling strangers, coming and going through those once-majestic rooms, burrowing like moles or dwarves or termites through my aunts’ beloved Archive. Enzie and Genny — who’d let virtually no one cross their threshold since the Nixon administration, who’d set booby traps and cut all ties to keep the world at bay — suddenly had a house full of guests.

It was Genny, smiling tightly, who received me at the door.

“You certainly took your time,” she snapped, before I could say a word.

“What do you—”

“Enzie!” she called over her shoulder, standing squarely in the doorway, as if I’d come to repossess the sofa. “Enzie! That person is here.”

I couldn’t see much over Genny’s white, Andy Warhol — ish bob, but what I managed to glimpse struck me speechless. Shabby young men and women with clipboards and archivists’ gloves were jostling and whispering to one another in the hallway behind her, scribbling notes with thick, expensive-looking pens. The theatrical decreptitude of their outfits clashed wildly with the businesslike air of the proceedings, not to mention their Mormon-ish hairstyles, and instantly put me in mind of the hobo downstairs. It was obvious that he’d been coming from my aunts’ apartment — but what could he have wanted with poor Genny’s fridge? And why was everyone dressed like extras in some dust-bowl reenactment?

“ There you are,” said Enzie, squeezing out into the hall. Her tone was peculiar, self-conscious and stilted, as though put on for the benefit of someone on the far side of the door.

“I’m sorry,” I heard myself mumble. “I didn’t know—”

“We called at eight this morning, and again at half past ten. Anyone would think you didn’t care for our business.” She held a package in her arms, I now saw: a padded manila envelope, like those I’d seen at the Villa Ouspensky, on which UPS had been written in block letters with a Sharpie. She thrust it hurriedly into my hands. The look on her face, severe at the best of times, was nothing short of marrow-chilling now.

“I do want it,” I got out at last. “Your business, I mean. As a matter of fact—”

“Run along, then,” hissed Enzie. “And be careful. It’s a family heirloom.”

“I will, ma’am — of course.”

“Good. Now you’ll have to excuse us.” She scuttled back inside and shut the door.

I stood motionless on the landing, barely breathing, until I was sure she wasn’t coming out again; then I leaned against the wall and tried to think. Enzie and Genny were too otherworldly, somehow, for me to fear much for their safety, but the thought that we’d never spent a single moment together under anything approaching normal circumstances — that we’d never sat around a dinner table, or watched a movie, or compared notes about Orson and the Kraut — suddenly filled me with remorse. Why it hit me then and there, I couldn’t say; it wasn’t the ideal time or place, to put it mildly. Perhaps I sensed my chance had come and gone.

It was only after I’d snapped out of it and made my getaway, slinking off into the icebound afternoon, that it occured to me that the fridge-like object in the tarp had been the size and shape of the exclusion bin.

* * *

It might be overstating the case, Mrs. Haven, to say that my aunts’ envelope contained the whole of this account in capsule form; but it wouldn’t be overstating it by much. I took it straight to the Forty-Second Street Library — the beautiful main branch, the one with the lions — where I tore it open with the key to my Ogilvy dorm room. I’d barely made myself comfortable at one of the Rose Reading Room’s gargantuan tables before I saw that I’d been slipped a century.

Kaspar’s journals — eleven pocket notebooks crammed with dense, schoolboyish cursive — were first out of the envelope; then a copy of the Gottfriedens Protocols; then Enzian’s crude account of her grandfather’s work, written when she and Genny were still in their teens. Some juvenilia of my father’s — along with his second-to-last novel, Salivation Is Yours! — distracted me so completely that I overlooked the scrap of rag paper at the bottom of the pile until a few minutes before the building closed. By the time I came up for air it was a quarter past six, all the tables were empty, and a security guard with a sad yellow mustache was tugging at the collar of my coat.

The scrap of paper in question was a copy of Ottokar’s seminal riddle: the half page of alliterative, semiliterate gibberish that had started it all, written out in pencil in the Timekeeper’s precise, archaic hand.

The next thing I knew I was out on the street, blinking through thin, stinging rain at a power plant on the far side of the river, alive with a sense of consequence I’d never felt before. I was Waldemar Gottfriedens Tolliver, after all. I’d been given those names for a reason — Enzian and Orson (and even the Kraut herself) had told me so. It was my burden and birthright to close the great circle, to restore the Toula/Tollivers to what we’d been before Ottokar’s breakthrough: a family of inconsequential picklers. And I would do it, Mrs. Haven, if it killed me.

But first I had to find a place to sleep.

* * *

I knew only one person in the city aside from my aunts, and I called him from the first working pay phone I found. Van Markham was Buffalo Bill’s half sister’s grandson, and therefore some species of cousin to me, though I’d never really thought of him as family. But I was too hungry and wet, at that moment, to recollect exactly why this was.

“Equus Special Blend and Affiliated Products. Markham speaking.”

“Cousin Van! It’s Waldy Tolliver. I’m not sure if you remember, the month before last—”

“I remember you, Waldy. How did you get this number?”

“You gave it to me.”

The line went silent for a moment. “That sounds plausible.”

“What’s Equus Special Blend?”

“Let me answer your question with a question. What do you want?”

For once I felt grateful for Van’s bluntness. “I’m here in New York. I just dropped out of college.”

“Congratulations, cousin. Willkommen to actual life.”

“What I mean is, I don’t have a place to stay.” When he said nothing, I continued: “You’re the only person in town that I know.”

“Aside from the Sisters Frankenstein, you mean.” I could picture him pursing his lips in distaste. “ They’ve got a big-enough cave up in Harlem, don’t they? Or have they filled it with junk mail and cat food by now? On second thought, don’t answer that.”

“Something’s happened to them, actually. That’s why I’m calling. They wouldn’t let me into their apartment.”

“People/Feelings,” said Van.

People/Feelings was a phrase Van had coined, sometime before dropping out of college himself, to stand for all the things in life that bored him. It freed him to focus on matters of genuine import, i.e., his personal business ventures and sex. His term for himself, when actively engaged in these latter pursuits — which was practically his every waking hour — was Randy the Robot. Randy didn’t go in much for sentiment.

“I need you to put me up for a week,” I told him. “Ten days at the most.”

“Starting when?”

“Starting now.”

The silence that followed was cosmic. A ghostly interference came across the line: a faint, mournful crackle that could have been caused by gamma radiation or dark-matter accretion or the frantic buzzing of my cousin’s brain. I wasn’t bothered by the delay, particularly. The algorithm Van used in situations of this nature was complex.