John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“I’ve got a studio in midtown,” he said eventually. “I’m looking to rent it on a fixed semiannual plan, with a subsidiary lease, but there’s a problem with the bylaws of the building re: sublets. I could let you have it on a binightly basis, I suppose, seeing as how you’re flesh of my flesh.”

“A binightly basis,” I repeated. “Sounds great.”

“Since you’re family,” Van said, after a slight hesitation, “I won’t require a security deposit.” He didn’t seem to expect a reply. “Sixty-eight West Forty-Fourth. Meet me there in an hour.”

I asked him what the binightly rent might be, in dollar terms. My only answer was the solar wind.

* * *

“Ask me how things are going,” said Van. We were sitting in a Popeyes Chicken and Biscuits across the street from the apartment I was going to be renting, at forty dollars a night, to be paid in binightly installments. He hadn’t explained why I’d be paying him on a forty-eight-hour cycle — in person, in cash, preferably in ATM-fresh twenties — and I was too thankful and exhausted to object.

“Go ahead, Waldy. Ask me. I can tell that you’re dying to know.”

I pulled myself together. “Okay. How are things—”

“Gangbangers.”

“Gangbusters, I think you mean.”

“Gang bangers ,” my cousin repeated, with emphasis. “What do you think of that for a name?”

“That depends. What exactly are you selling?”

“Satisfaction,” Van said, smacking his lips.

“Unless the kind of satisfaction you’re talking about involves Glocks, secret handshakes, and drug deals gone wrong—”

“It does, in a way.” He narrowed his eyes. “And I’ll tell you another thing, cousin, though this is strictly classified. I’ve already found myself a backer.”

“That’s fantastic, Van. Congratulations. Now if you wouldn’t mind—”

“I’m telling you this for a reason , you jackass. Do you think I like to listen to myself talk?”

He seemed to view the question as hypothetical, so I let my attention drift — nodding amiably all the while — to take in the self-importantly stoned teens at the counter, the rain against the scratched and oily window, and a Möbius-strip-shaped dab of mayonnaise on the tabletop between us. I’d almost managed to forget where I was when my cousin dropped a name that ruined everything.

“What did you just say?”

He let out a titter. “Funny how things loop together, isn’t it? Who’d have thought the Iterants would want to horn in on the sensuality-enhancement industry?” He sighed happily. “But they’ve got to invest their cash the same as anybody else, I reckon.”

“How did they—” I took in a breath and counted slowly down from ten. “Who from the UCS contacted you?”

“What makes you think it wasn’t me doing the contacting?”

“They think you’re one of us , Van,” I said, fighting the urge to slap his smirking face. “That’s the reason they’re backing you — not that tarted-up horse piss you’re selling. There’s not a branch of this family they haven’t gotten their hooks into. First Enzie and Genny, then Orson, now you.” I clung white-knuckled to the edge of the table. “They haven’t hooked me, though — not yet. That’s why I need your help. I’ve got to—”

I cut my rant short when I noticed his expression. “You don’t believe me,” I muttered. “You’re not even listening.”

“I’m worried about you, Waldy.” He cleared his throat primly. “You can stay in my place for as long as you want — we’ll figure the payments out later. Get some rest. Watch some cable. Thirty-six is the vanilla porn channel, if memory serves. Thirty-seven is predominantly anal.”

I blinked at him, then at the keys he’d set down on the table. “You’re just like the others,” I said. “You think I’ve gone crazy.”

“Not at all,” Van assured me — but the look in his twitchy, bloodshot eyes said otherwise. “I’m leaving now, Waldy. Promise me you’ll get some fucking sleep.”

I watched him dart in his couture trench coat across the rain-slick pavement, relieved to have our rendezvous behind him, already intent on the next item of business. I envied him in that moment, Mrs. Haven, I have to admit. He nodded to his doorman, ducked briefly inside, then came back out with a package in his hands. His aviator glasses — mirrored, of course — matched his trench coat and expression perfectly. Only my cousin , I said to myself, would wear aviator glasses in a downpour . Then I looked at the package more closely.

It was a padded mailing envelope, crisp and marzipan-colored, identical to those I’d seen at the Villa Ouspensky. Van was cradling it as if it held a bomb.

* * *

Those next seven days passed like a dream, Mrs. Haven — or like a short, bumpy ride in the back of a van with packing tape covering its windows, driven by strangers wearing hazmat suits and Albert Einstein masks. I spent the week with the blinds drawn and the door double-locked and the telephone disconnected from the wall, living on stale ramen noodles and lukewarm tap water and cheese. I needed time with the package that Enzie had slipped me: time to ravel the threads and wires and light rays back into some kind of fabric, to reverse-engineer my family’s cataclysmic century. Things went on happening out in the world — horrendous things, mostly — and I was the last to find out. It was Heisenberg’s principle in all its dark glory: the observer affects the events he’s observing, no matter how many deadbolts he has on his door. I was changing, Mrs. Haven, and the chronosphere was changing with me.

I spread the contents of the package out in fan-shaped symmetry across the floor — like Ozymandias with his cards in The Excuse —and spent the first day sitting Indian-style on a cushion pulled down from the mildewy, beer-smelling couch, waiting for the universal Answer to arrive. It was inevitable, I suppose — or at the very least par for the course — that questions started pelting me instead.

They came slowly at first, almost bashfully; then faster and harder with each passing minute, until the floor and the sofa and the countertop were littered with scribblings on torn scraps of paper, feverish demands on one part of my brain by another. Enzie and Genny had clearly been trying to protect me at the General Lee, to keep my identity a secret from the Iterants; but what had the Iterants been doing there in the first place? What sort of a deal had been struck, and to whose benefit?

I was reading the entry in Kaspar’s diary — rereading it, to be accurate, for the seventeenth time — describing that horrific afternoon on which he’d discovered his brother in the Brown Widow’s attic, when a line suddenly stood out from the text surrounding it, like the wing of a butterfly caught in a stray beam of light:

You look funny down there, he called to me from the top of the wardrobe. You look like a cicada in a jar.

A cicada in a jar, I thought, turning the phrase over in my mind. It was then that I recalled a further point in the series, not in the diary but in my own experience, in the immediate past, so recent that the memory was still damp. The mural in Haven’s sanctum in the Villa Ouspensky: the one Miss Greer had allegedly painted. Those insects had been cicadas , not grasshoppers or cockroaches or ants. I hadn’t made the connection at the time — I hadn’t been sure — but I was sure of it now. And with that first modest link, that initial line drawn between a casual turn of phrase and its most extravagant, fantastic expression, I was suddenly attuned to other points in the sequence, other appearances, both in the documents littering the floor of Van’s apartment and in my own memory. It was a cicada that my great-uncle had been mesmerized by as a boy; it was a cicada I’d seen trapped under a glass at age ten, when Genny had shown me the Archive; and what else could the “little flying thing” have been that the twins had communed with as children? It had visited them every seven years, after all — in between, it had been “no-where and no-when,” as Enzie had put it in her diary. No wonder they’d given it Ottokar’s name.