John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

I’d asked her what she meant by that, and she’d smiled down at me in her daft, sunny, Genny-ish way. “Let me put it differently, Schätzchen. Entropy increases with time, people say. Fair enough. But there’s one point — one minor detail — they forget to consider. Entropy increases with time for a reason. Can you guess what it is?”

I’d thought hard for a while, then confessed that I couldn’t.

“Because we choose to measure time in the direction in which entropy increases. Now run along and tell Enzie her coffee is ready.”

I sat up in my bunk, banging my head against the flaking ceiling. I’d had an idea, Mrs. Haven, and it couldn’t wait. I climbed out of bed and struggled into my jeans and dug the envelope Enzie had given me out of my suitcase. The key to my aunts’ apartment was inside, wedged down in the bottom left-hand corner. The Husband’s goons had taken most of the rest, but that no longer mattered. The key itself was all I needed.

The sun was still low when I got to the General Lee. The only person on the street was a man in an electric wheelchair and a peach-colored fedora, running slalom around two yellowing ginkgos — first the one, then the other — in tribute to the symbol for infinity. I gave him the last dollar in my wallet, and he looked up at me with watery, grandfatherly concern. “You take care now,” he said. Something about me must have worried him.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, taking me by the wrist. “I’ll see you tomorrow, you hear?”

Police tape still barred my aunts’ door, but it was sagging and dusty, like the velvet rope to an abandoned club. It took me a few tries to inveigle the key into the lock, and another half-dozen to coax the corroded deadbolt into sliding. The door jammed after less than half a foot: I could work my way in sideways, but my suitcase had to stay out on the landing. I took out what I needed — a few books, my toothbrush, the notes for my history, the manuscript itself, a refillable tortoiseshell pen that I’d bought on the flight from Vienna — and left all the rest. It was daylight by then, a clear autumn morning, and the clatter of cooking carried brightly up the stairwell. It was strange to imagine the neighbors at breakfast, to picture them nestled in their dining nooks, complacent in their chronologic serfdom. I pitied them, Mrs. Haven, but I envied them more. The apartment before me was dark as a tomb.

* * *

Within four steps I was forced into a crouch, plowing headfirst through the ruined Archive, and in no time I was on my hands and knees. The reek of mold and rot was overpowering. And there was another smell underneath, thicker and more pungent the farther I crawled, but never strong enough for me to guess its source: a heavy smell, fetid and sour, like the musk of an animal’s cage.

Gradually my eyes adjusted to the gloom. I thought at first that the roof had fallen in, or one of the load-bearing walls; then I recalled what I’d read in the Times. They’d found Genny under a landslide of newsprint, immobilized but not crushed, a wire looped around her bare left foot. She’d tripped it by accident, the police speculated: she’d forgotten, in a moment of absentmindedness or panic, the location of one of her traps. Enzie had been less than ten feet away when the landslide was triggered — dead already, most likely, though possibly not. The chronology was hazy, forensically speaking, which would of course have pleased my aunts no end. Rats and cockroaches had gotten to them both.

I was slithering forward now like some prehistoric fish, both arms pressed against my sides. Just as beauty lies in the eye of the beholder , the Patent Clerk wrote, so does each man carry with him his own space and his own time. The garbage bearing down on me grew heavier, denser, expelling the breath from my body. My mouth and windpipe were becoming furred-over with dust. It’s dizzying to think of seeing into the future, Walter , you said to me once. Why isn’t it dizzying to see into the past?

The question made me light-headed, Mrs. Haven, and I welcomed the feeling. I gave up struggling, gave up breathing altogether, let gravity have its sluggish way with me. I was being pushed through the tunnel peristaltically now, like a morsel through the bowels of some great snake. There was no point in resisting. There was no need to use my arms or legs at all.

* * *

I found myself in a low, dome-shaped chamber, its roof tapering upward like the impression left by an enormous bell. The walls looked cut from a solid mass of envelopes and photocopies and Styrofoam bricks, like a hidden money pocket in a book; light came through one of three small openings at the level of my knees. The floor to my right was exposed, inexplicably dustless, and I could just make out the bottom of a green enameled door. My aunts’ bathroom door had been green, I remembered. The opening to my left — the one a weak gray light was coming through — must lead to what had once been Genny’s parlor. That left the third one unaccounted for.

I examined it carefully, unsure how to proceed. Four books had been removed from a row of Encyclopedia Americana , volumes 22 (Photography to Pumpkin) through 37 (Trance to Venial Sin), leaving a gap the size of a post office box. A single book set crosswise kept the portal from collapsing: a hardcover copy of Plotinus’ Ladder by Orson Card Tolliver, cheaply bound in imitation suede. I spun in a deliberate circle, straining to see in the feeble light, then turned to face my father’s book again. Of the countless things embedded in those walls, Mrs. Haven, it alone looked placed there by design.

As the soul grows toward eternal life , wrote Plotinus, we remember less and less.

I gripped its spine, took in a wheezing breath, and pulled it free.

Once the dust had cleared and my fit of hacking had subsided and I’d worked myself out from under the avalanche that pinned me, I saw that half the dome had fallen in. There was barely enough space to sit upright, and the tunnels to either side had disappeared; the way ahead of me, however, was open and clear. It was darker than the tunnel I’d come through, but it was wider as well, and high enough that I could walk upright. Soon, I was guessing, I would reach the turning in the corridor: the one I’d found by accident at seven years of age. It had been that corridor I’d thought of a few hours before, half-asleep in my bunk at the hostel. I’d remembered its darkness, so unlike the darkness of night — as different from night as Enzie and Genny had been different from other human beings. And something else had come to me, Mrs. Haven, as I made my way up to Harlem through the cold.

There had been no mention of that corridor in any of the papers.

* * *

I’d guessed correctly, of course — my father’s book had not been placed at random. It marked the event horizon of this history, the point of no return, and as soon as I passed it I felt C*F*P guiding me in. The tunnel veered leftward, then upward, then plummeted down — or so it seemed in the blackness — then upward and leftward again. I should have been afraid, Mrs. Haven, but what I felt was an ecstatic helplessness. I ended up in the library, or in the place the library had been. The walls fell away from my fingers and the ceiling receded and the air became less thick with dust. The darkness was immaculate, almost viscous to the touch. I knelt and ran my fingertips across the warped parquet: the first thing they encountered was a socket in the floor, and the second was a snarled electric cord. I plugged it in without the slightest hesitation.

A standing lamp next to me stuttered to life, which I’d have wondered at if I’d had any wonder left. I was in another bell-shaped chamber, twice the size of the first, with more than enough space for the armchair and the table it contained. A stack of books sat nearby, though I couldn’t read their spines from where I stood. A length of copper wire curled downward from the ceiling to the chair, ending in a graceful, thumb-sized loop. Even before I’d opened the letter I found on the table, before my eyesight had adjusted to the sudden crush of light, I’d realized what the bell-shaped room was for. It was for me, Mrs. Haven. It was time to bring this history to a close.