John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

I lowered my throbbing head onto the couch. Was the cicada somehow significant to Waldemar’s argument for rotary time — as a symbol of the overlooked, perhaps, or of the meandering, or of the cyclical? Or was it simply the Timekeeper’s totem, a fetish he left behind him at every point of the chronosphere he visited, like a dirty drawing on a bathroom stall?

I’d taken the critical step, Mrs. Haven: the leap from the rational to the occult. But none of the above, beguiling though it was, brought me nearer to cracking the fundamental conundrum, the one from which all the others arose, and without which they subsided into nothing. Physical time travel, especially into the past, has long been regarded as an impossibility. How had Waldemar — indigent, paranoid Waldemar, embittered and embattled and patently mad — succeeded where so many better men had failed? What sliver of his grotesque, rabid, mystical pseudotheory had ultimately turned out to be true?

Dreams had something to do with it, according to my aunts: dreams and subjectivity, and the inexorable influence of the observer. The secret of Enzie’s homemade time machine, in other words. What was an “exclusion bin,” in effect, but an objectivity filter? I’d seen into the future myself, after all, using nothing but a whitewashed plywood box. Was it possible that Waldemar’s madness, far from being a hindrance, had brought him some sort of advantage? Could the breach of consensus reality be a preliminary step — perhaps even a precondition —to escaping from consensus time?

I reached this inductive toehold again and again in the course of that week, in relative psychological comfort; but whenever I tried to move past it, to find the next step, my brain would begin to feel greasy and hot and penned in by my skull, like a tin of pâté left out in the sun. Orson had tried to shield me from this punishing, frightening, hazardous mental state for the bulk of my childhood — he’d told me as much at the Villa Ouspensky. But it was too late, Mrs. Haven. It had been too late forever.

* * *

Time is a nightmare , wrote Theodore Sturgeon — hero of West Village coffee-shop Orson— that madmen have always felt themselves at home in. The problem with time, Sturgeon argues, is that it’s too boundless a concept — too fever-dream nightmarish, too all-pervasive, too sublime — for us to wrap our feeble primate brains around. Saint Augustine struggled with time all his life; Newton, in his arrogance, reduced it to a constant; Nietzsche tied it into pretzel knots to make it submit to his mania, then ultimately scrapped it altogether. And the harder I tried, in the course of that week, to distill the contents of my aunts’ package into a single explicable truth, the more inclined I was to follow his example.

What then, is time? writes Augustine. If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.

What confounded me most about the Accidents was the lack of unanimity about them. Everyone who’d tried to crack the rebus of Ottokar’s discovery had come up with his or her own inimitable answer, often contradicting all the rest. My namesake had discovered impunity there: a sovereign solution, accountable only to itself, that could be warped to accommodate every possible question, to rationalize every crime. My grandfather, understandably enough, had come to view them as a conduit to madness. And to Enzie and Genny, after their mother’s death, the puzzle of the Accidents became nothing less than the window frame — the only one they didn’t fill in, or brick up, or shutter over — through which they watched and understood the world. For my part, Mrs. Haven, I was tempted to view my great-grandfather’s legacy as a window, as well: a blank pane of glass — sometimes letting light through, sometimes throwing it back — in which we’d discovered nothing but our own monkey-like reflections.

The glass-pane notion was a seductive one, for obvious reasons: it would have allowed me to dismiss the whole mess and head back to Ogilvy, or to Cheektowaga, or to some cottage in the country, as Nietzsche had done, and spend the rest of my duration shaving horses. There was only one catch, Mrs. Haven. My projection theory might have explained Enzie and Genny and Kaspar, and even, with a bit of fiddling, Ottokar himself; but Waldemar had actually succeeded. Waldemar, the worst of all of us, had broken free.

If no one asks of me , said Augustine, I know.

* * *

By the end of the sixth day I was out of ramen noodles, and the only cheese I had left—“Processed Manchego,” according to the packaging; exactly the sort of thing Van would eat — was making the roof of my mouth itch. I was sick to death of sifting through the ashes of my paternal lineage in search of the keys to the chronoverse. What I needed had been clear to me since I’d woken up that morning, bug-eyed and antsy, at 07:45 EST.

I needed a bucket of Popeyes.

I made it through the building’s faux-Soviet lobby and across Forty-Fourth Street without incident, unless you count one near-collision with a taxi, one actual collision with a UPS dolly, and some dubious looks from the doorman, a red-bearded Sikh. I ducked into Popeyes, placed my order politely, then hit the ATM next door to liquidate the next installment of my college fund. I’d come to a decision the previous night: I’d figured out my next move, and it was a doozy. The plane ticket alone, according to my calculations, would cost all I had left in the bank.

I was still standing at the ATM ten minutes later, my arms outstretched as if in supplication. Its screen had just informed me, in no uncertain terms, that not a dime of Orson’s cash would be forthcoming. It had informed me of this sixteen times in a row, and the people behind me — eight of them, the last time I’d checked — were starting to run low on Christian feeling. When the machine finally opted to swallow my card, leaving me with nothing but my driver’s license and my Ogilvy ID, the woman behind me nudged me with her purse. “Here’s a dollar,” she whispered. “Go buy yourself a Snickers. Then get yourself a motherfucking job.”

For want of any other option, Mrs. Haven, I took her advice. I went back into Popeyes and canceled my order and brought her dollar to a bodega at the corner of Forty-Fourth and Sixth. I spent it on a Mars bar, not a Snickers, and ate it while I browsed morosely through the Times . Which is how, within fifteen minutes of reconnecting with the outside world, I found out that Enzie was gone.

ENZIAN TOLLIVER, HARLEM RECLUSE, FOUND DEAD AT 62

Police Require Two Hours to

Break into 5th Ave. Home,

Booby-Trapped with Junk

SISTER FAILS TO APPEAR

BY WILLIAM HALL

Enzian Tolliver was found dead yesterday in her decaying tenement apartment at 2078 Fifth Avenue, but the legend of the reclusive Tolliver twins persists.

Her sister, Gentian, devoted to the frail and aging Enzian, may still be in the seven-room apartment, her home since 1969, although it is now boarded shut. There was no sign of her yesterday, despite the police activity at her home.

The circumstances surrounding the death of 62-year-old Enzian, rarefied as the flower both she and her sister were named for, are as mysterious as the life the two eccentric sisters lived on the unfashionable upper reaches of Fifth Avenue, at the Harlem terminus of Central Park.

UNKNOWN MALE CALLER GAVE TIP

A mysterious telephone call to Police Headquarters yesterday morning reported that there was a dead woman at 2078 Fifth Avenue. The caller gave his name as Waldemar Toula, a deceased uncle of the sisters. Police believe that it may in fact have been Waldemar “Jack” Tolliver, the sisters’ nephew, who reportedly is visiting the city.