John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

I stopped there a moment, punch-drunk with shock. The shopkeeper said something to me but I ignored him.

Police Emergency Squad 6 used crowbars and axes in trying to force their way into the apartment, but the reinforced door proved impassable. It was 12:10 P.M. before Patrolman LaMont Barker forced his way through the picture window at the fourth-story front.

He disappeared from view for several moments, then returned and called down, “There’s a D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) here.” Detective Ali Lateef climbed the ladder to inspect the body. He reported that the dead woman was in a sitting position, dressed only in a Pendleton shirt. The emaciated body was tentatively identified as Enzian by Willis James Buckram, a neighbor. At 3:45 P.M. Medical Examiner Roger C. Erfect reported that the woman had been dead for fourteen hours.

There was no sign of Gentian Tolliver in the building, no indication of how she entered or left the apartment on her heretofore regular shopping trips to buy food and medication for her sister. The entire foyer of the apartment, to a distance of sixteen feet from the door’s interior side, was packed with bundled newsprint from ceiling to floor, to a total weight of seventeen and one-half tons.

“NEPHEW” SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING

A search has been initiated in all five boroughs for Waldemar Tolliver, the sisters’ nephew, who was last seen at 2078 Fifth Avenue one week ago. He is believed to remain at large in New York City.

There was more — an attempt to catalog the apartment’s astonishing contents, interviews with the neighbors, disgustingly explicit (and grossly exaggerated) forensic details — but I’ll do both of us a favor, Mrs. Haven, and skip all of that. Once I’d gotten over my panic at the thought of being wanted by the NYPD, I found myself more intrigued by what the article omitted than by the few anemic facts that it contained. What had the medical examiner (the suspiciously named Roger C. Erfect) determined to be the cause of death? Why was no mention made of the army of Iterants I’d seen on my last visit, but such elaborate mention made of me? Why, come to think of it, was “nephew” in quotation marks? And where on earth had Genny disappeared to?

The answer to the last of these mysteries wasn’t long in coming, Mrs. Haven, though it raised more questions than it laid to rest.

“What you got there’s from yesterday,” the shopkeeper said. “I won’t charge you for that.” He handed me a newer, fatter paper from a stack beside the register.

BODY OF GENTIAN TOLLIVER FOUND

Eight-Hour Search of Junk-Filled

Home Believed Fruitless — Then

a Puzzling Discovery

CROWD GATHERS IN STREET

The police searched the junk-filled home of the Tolliver sisters at 2078 Fifth Avenue for eight hours yesterday, but found no trace of Gentian Tolliver, missing since Thursday. Just as the apartment was being sealed, however, her body was found, in a location that had been inspected repeatedly in the course of the day.

“It (Tolliver’s body) was just inside the door of the library, the first room to the right off the hall, under a writing desk,” said Detective Ali Lateef of the 23rd Precinct. “It was covered by newspapers, but it should have been obvious,” said another member of the force, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This was a room we’d covered twice. The second time was just two hours earlier.”

Neither officer volunteered an explanation for the oversight.

I went up to Harlem that same day, in spite of the risk, for reasons I still don’t fully comprehend. The frost of the week before had thawed, leaving the park looking the way I imagined the forest around Czas must have looked after the Wehrmacht and the Soviets had left: muddied and broken and bereft, with bits of garbage strewn about like evidence of some lost civilization. There were still a few bored-looking loiterers outside my aunts’ building, but the crowd had dwindled to a morbid handful. The show had already moved on.

One man, who claimed to be a researcher for 1010 WINS news radio, was summarizing the events of the day in a high, nasal voice, but nobody seemed to be listening. If there were cops around, I couldn’t pick them out. The windows on my aunts’ floor seemed blocked from the inside, except for the sixth from the left — the bathroom window, I was guessing — which was open in spite of the damp. I was gripped by the urge to duck under the POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS tape — I could say I was a tenant, if anyone asked — but I had the good sense to resist it. The 1010 WINS guy was the only one who noticed.

“Too late, buddy,” he said, grinning at me in a way that made me want to kick him in the shins. “Everything worth taking’s already gone.”

* * *

The annals of art and science , writes Kubler, like those of bravery, record only a handful of the many great moments that have occurred. When we consider the class of these great moments, we are usually confronted with dead stars. Even their light has ceased to reach us. We know of their existence only indirectly, by their perturbations, and by the immense detritus of derivative stuff left in their wakes.

As I walked the sixty-odd blocks from Harlem to midtown, it seemed that a flickering beam of my aunts’ light still reached me; but though I could feel it on the back of my neck and the palms of my hands — especially when my eyes were closed — it illuminated nothing. The mess they’d left behind them would have delighted Professor Kubler, no doubt, but I had little hope of finding meaning there. There was too much of everything, Mrs. Haven, and not enough of me.

* * *

I made it back to Forty-Fourth Street a few minutes before midnight, knock-kneed and dizzy with hunger, my mind a humid, hypothermic blank. I’d meant to call the Kraut as soon as I got in — even to contact Orson, if I could — but I ended up facedown on the couch. I fell asleep instantly, without the slightest preamble, and started awake just as the sun came up. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, reverberating cruelly off the tilework, and a man was sitting on my windowsill.

“I’m dreaming,” I said to the man.

“You might want to get that,” he answered, in an accent I couldn’t pin down.

I rolled off the sofa and got to my feet. The ringing was becoming unendurable. My visitor wore a threadbare tweed jacket, a dented gray homburg, and greasy-looking yellow calfskin gloves. The overall effect, Mrs. Haven, was seedy. He looked only vaguely like Waldemar Toula — he was too young, for one thing, and his face was unnaturally wide — but I knew he could be no one else. He was waiting to kill me, or to answer my questions, or to take me with him to eternity. But first I had to stop the phone from ringing.

I lurched into the kitchen and grabbed the receiver. I’d meant to hang up right away, but something happened.

“Collect call from the year 2718. Will you accept the charges?”

“What do you want, Van? It’s late—”

“It’s early,” the man in the living room told me.

“It’s early , you mean,” Van said, stifling a yawn. “But I’m awake, for some reason, so I thought I’d check in. How did you spend your summer vacation?”

It took me a moment to answer. “I have to tell you something, Van. Something terrible. Enzie and Genny are dead.”

“I know that, Waldy. That’s why I called. You’re not the only one who reads the paper.”

“How stupid of me. Of course not. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have—”

“You have what , exactly? A job? A date? An uninvited guest?”

I glanced involuntarily over my shoulder. “Actually—”

“There’s a reason I’m calling, believe it or not. I won’t take up much of your time.”