John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

DEAREST WALDEMAR! NOW YOUVE ARRIVED.

NOW YOUVE ARRIVED & WE CANT CALL YOU “WALDY” ANY LONGER. ENZIE & I AGREE. YOURE ONE OF US NOW. YOURE NO MORE ONE OF “THEM” FOREVER AFTER.

YOU MIGHT THINK IT CRUEL THAT WE SENT YOU TO ZNOJMO WHEN WE HAD WHAT WE NEEDED RIGHT HERE. PERHAPS IT WAS CRUEL. BUT YOU HAD TO FIND SOMETHING WALDEMAR — TO FIND SOMETHING & LOSE ALL THE REST. THIS WAS VERY IMPORTANT. IF YOU HADNT LOST SOMETHING — EVERYTHING YOU MIGHT SAY — YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE COME.

TO COME HERE WALDEMAR YOU MUST LEAVE YOUR DURATION BEHIND.

WHAT TO DO NEXT IS SIMPLE. YOUVE JUMPED ONCE BEFORE AFTER ALL. REMEMBER HOW YOU DID IT THEN. REMEMBER CLIMBING INTO THE BIN. REMEMBER THE QUIET & THE DARK & THE THINGS THAT CAME AFTER. REMEMBER EVERYTHING FALLING AWAY. FRIGHTENING YES! BUT A JUMP ALWAYS IS. SIT RIGHT HERE AT THIS TABLE & MAKE YOURSELF EASY. THEN CLOSE YOUR EYES. THEN LET IT COME DOWN.

PLEASE TO FORGIVE US WALDEMAR. & PLEASE TO UNDERSTAND. ALL YOU EVER HAD TO DO WAS THIS. TO CLOSE YOUR EYES.

There was no signature, no closing endearment. The words ended where the sheet of paper did. I set it down carefully, as if the letter itself might be a kind of trip wire, and looked around me with enlightened eyes.

My mistake, Mrs. Haven, had been to think of Enzie’s work in terms of science. I’d always viewed that apartment, and even its contents, as a kind of protective exoskeleton around her research — and I’d both been right and missed the point completely. The truth of that non-place was sad and uncanny and beautiful to the exact degree that my aunts’ lives had been.

A fragment of the “ Märchen ” they’d once sent me came to mind:

What if the Attention of the dreamer, obeying no rules but the rules of association and chance, travels back and forth across the Present/Past membrane at will?

Its meaning was clear to me at last, or clear enough. By tunneling through those rooms in a counterclockwise spiral — the form of certain pharaonic crypts, of the game of tarock, of Oppenheimer’s famous fallout shelter blueprint — and packing them with light-and-sound-absorbing trash, my aunts had created a sensory and symbolic dead zone as effective as any deprivation chamber: an amplification corridor for travels back and forth across the Barrier, a particle accelerator of dreams. The Archive wasn’t simply some whimsy of Genny’s, or a fortress to sequester Enzie’s work: it was the work itself. Which was why, when Haven and his Iterants stole Enzie’s exclusion bin, it did so little for them. They’d taken a potted plant and missed the forest.

* * *

It was 08:17 EST when I dialed Menügayan’s number — not an hour when she was generally awake — and the phone rang sixteen times before she answered. Before she could say a word I told her everything. It was important to me that someone understand.

“Do you understand, Julia? My father had it right when he wrote The Excuse . Your consciousness is all the time machine you need. All that other nonsense — the notes, the calculations, even the exclusion bin — was a heap of pseudoscientific clutter. How on earth could I have missed it all this time?”

“Tolliver,” said Menügayan, “don’t call me again.”

“Don’t you see what this means? I have something to offer — something even Haven himself, with all his money and pull—”

“Is that right, Tolliver? You have something to offer? And what might that be?”

“I’ve just told you,” I said, struggling to keep the exasperation out of my voice. “I’ve figured out my aunts’ secret. I made a kind of half jump myself, it turns out, back when I was twelve. It’s the simplest thing, really. Now I need to tell Hildy. She asked me for a time machine once, but — idiot that I was — I thought she was joking. I just need to explain—”

“They were found this morning. Their jet was, I mean. It’s all over the news.”

“Where?” I stammered, so excited I nearly dropped the receiver.

“Different places.”

“Julia, just this once, I’d appreciate a simple—”

“Parts off of the coast of Dorset. Other parts near the Isle of Wight.”

“Not true,” I said. “You’re lying. That’s a lie.”

“Suit yourself.”

I’d been standing beside my aunts’ toilet — the only place in the apartment where their ancient cordless phone still got reception — and now I came to rest against its cushioned seat. I found myself staring at the watch on my wrist, a Warranted Tolliver Navigator, rated to a depth of fifteen fathoms. It showed 08:21 EST. I took it off and laid it on the floor.

“You’re not the only one who loved her,” said a faraway voice.

“She’s not dead, Julia. Not in any real sense. It’s a mistake, mathematically speaking, to think of the past—”

“Goodbye, Tolliver, you poor misguided nutter. It’s over, do you hear me? You’re excused.”

* * *

It was the Timekeeper, of all people, who came to my mind in those ultimate seconds of consensus time, and I’m not ashamed to say I thought of him with sympathy. As I laid out the few things I’d brought from my suitcase — a bottle of Foster’s the Australian had given me; your silver-bound edition of Strange Customs of Courtship and Marriage ; Genny’s copy of The Shape of Time ; the manuscript of this history, nearly finished — I thought of Waldemar in his bunker in Czas, hearing the sound of Soviet gunfire in the surrounding woods, taking his leave from a world in which his passions and ambitions had no future. I would never find out how he’d managed his jump, or what had happened to the body he’d abandoned — the Russians had taken it, most likely, and done things to it that had brought them some small sense of reparation. I was reasonably sure now that I’d been wrong about his cameo in Visconti’s The Damned , but I’d have liked to know at least that much for certain. I’d have asked him these questions, and plenty of others, if I’d succeeded in tracking him down — we’d have had a nice long chat, the two of us. But I wouldn’t have asked where he’d found the nerve to excise himself from time so brutally, or why he’d chosen such an absolute escape. I wouldn’t have had to ask, because I knew.

I drank a toast to him, Mrs. Haven, before I sat down in this chair and tripped the wire. There was no moral high ground where I was going — no agency, no consequence, no cause or effect. And still I hoped that I would find you there.

Monday, 08:47 EST

I dreamed that time was moving backward, Mrs. Haven. The universe had reached its point of maximum expansion and tipped back toward collapse, reversing direction from redshift to blueshift, from future to past, and the thermodynamic arrow shifted with it. Order increased with each instant, as certain renegade physicists have predicted it will, and in time those same physicists, long dead and forgotten, duly rose from their graves and reconstituted themselves and moved through life end-to-front, smoothly and effortlessly, like tourists sitting backward on a train.

Everything happened, Mrs. Haven, that had happened before. Rivers flowed uphill and trees shrank to seedlings and the overheated earth began to cool. Sounds gradually took form out of nothing and were cut off at the apex of their curves. Eggs returned to their chickens, bombs returned to their bombers, and effects flew home like bullets to their causes. The last became first and the first became last, though no one profited by the exchange. But I was grateful all the same — grateful even for that awful certainty — because I knew that you were coming back to me.

I sat on the same train as everyone else, fighting my fear of all the black, empty aeons before I was born. The farther I traveled the younger I grew, and the younger I grew the less I could remember. The universe was contracting to a pinprick, the first singularity, a videotaped explosion playing coolly in reverse. I returned to you, Mrs. Haven, as I’d known that I would, and there was nothing either of us could do to stop it. Pain compressed to a spike, no differently than light or sound or thought, and vanished just as it became too much to bear.