John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

He awoke to find her flat on her belly with her legs and arms splayed, as though she’d fallen from some great height onto his bed. He stood upright on the mattress, steadying himself against the flaking ceiling, and brought his right foot gently down against her rump. He’d expected her to be in a foul mood, drunk as she’d been, but she began to smile before her eyes came open. He made coffee on the burner, enough for two cups exactly, then forgot them on the countertop and crawled back into bed. She was wide awake now. She hadn’t forgotten what she’d said to him by the duck pond, to his amazement, or what his answer had been. They sat cross-legged on the bed, looking down into the shaded golden courtyard, speaking only when the need to speak arose. After an absurdly long silence — so long he’d have begun to squirm in anyone else’s company — she yawned and asked him where his brother was.

“Not here,” he said, surprised by the question. “I have no idea where he spends his nights.”

It had never crossed Kaspar’s mind to view his brother as a rival, in spite of his unquestionable elegance, simply because Waldemar had never shown the least interest in sex; but something in her manner gave him pause. Before he was entirely aware of it — and certainly before he’d weighed the pros and cons — he was describing how Waldemar had stared at her the night before.

“I’m accustomed to being stared at, Kasparchen,” Sonja said with a shrug. “That’s one of the reasons I go about town in a sack.”

Kaspar hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said finally, “when my brother stares at a woman, that it means exactly what you think it means.”

“Oh! I’m quite sure it does,” Sonja answered, with just the faintest hint of coquetry.

The only means Kaspar saw to make his meaning clear was to recount the episode of the cicada. Sonja listened intently, never once interrupting, and by the end of it her complacency was gone. He relaxed somewhat then, confident that he’d communicated whatever it was — he couldn’t have put a name to it, precisely — that had troubled him so much the night before.

“That story gives me the horrors,” said Sonja.

“Then you see what I mean? Waldemar can’t be thought of as an ordinary—”

“Imagine being trapped under glass,” Sonja murmured, her eyes strangely dim. “Imagine being swept up by some enormous, foreign power, torn free of the world, then set down in a place where nothing happens — absolutely nothing. You can see the world go by, and you can try to recollect how it once was; but you have no function in it any longer.” She shook her head. “How would you know that time was even passing?”

Her response to the anecdote struck Kaspar as childish at first; but the last question she’d posed — if you were set apart from the world, compeletely sequestered, how could you detect that time was passing? — refused to leave him in peace. Worst of all, when he was alone again in that dusty, airless garret, his brother’s face persisted in his thoughts, superimposing itself over everything he looked at or imagined, until the cicada and Sonja’s naked body and Waldemar’s dispassionate mortician’s stare combined into a hideous chimera that filled his mind to the exclusion of all else. Anything was preferable to dwelling on that grotesque composite: even scientific work, however futile. Even the invocation of the dead.

Which was how, without fully realizing it himself, my grandfather began to hunt the Accidents again.

WALDEMAR HAD EXPECTED time to move more quickly once he’d put Znojmo behind him, but to his surprise the opposite was true. Each instant was now distinct from those before and after, bite-sized and luminous, like a pearl on an invisible, indivisible wire. Vienna rattled and bustled and pirouetted around him, but he felt himself to be in no great hurry — though it wasn’t until the end of his first year at the university, reading the work of the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, that he understood why. Lorentz had discovered, to his and the whole world’s astonishment, that time moves more slowly for a body in motion. And it often seemed to Waldemar, since he’d escaped the constraints of his childhood, that his body had never fully come to rest.

Unlike his brother, no event steered my great-uncle’s attention back to the Accidents, for the simple reason that they’d never left his thoughts. His father’s cryptic discovery and sudden death had conspired to give Waldemar a sense of significance he’d never otherwise have had, and he took pains to be deserving of his fate. Occasionally the thought would make him shiver, like a pang of self-consciousness in a crowded theater: Without the Accidents, I’d be no different than any other man. The notion thrilled and frightened him in equal measure. By “Accidents,” he meant two distinct but intertwined events: both Ottokar’s discovery and the encounter with Progress, in the form of Herr Bachling’s Daimler, that had snuffed his father’s brilliance just as it was poised to set the world alight.

Waldemar saw his coming of age — his entire existence, in fact — as a series of momentous collisions; but those two were set apart from the rest, kept sacrosanct and pure. Not even Kaspar grasped how much they signified. Waldemar had made a close study of his brother after their father’s death, but Kaspar seemed to be the same person afterward that he’d been before. He was haunted by the Accidents, of course — how could he not have been? — but he showed no gratitude for their occurrence. When this realization set in, Waldemar’s disappointment was bitter; and though he kept his outward manner cordial, he was careful to keep his ideas to himself.

He was sorry to do so, desperately sorry, because his thoughts grew more electric by the day. He could feel the secret of the Accidents flutter against his brain stem as he went about his work — especially when he was busy with something trivial, such as drafting a letter for the widow Bemmelmans — and on certain evenings, as he nodded off at his desk at the university, it beat against his awareness like a moth against a paper window-shade. Waldemar copied Ottokar’s riddle into a series of notebooks, just as Kaspar had done, taking pains to match his father’s scrawl exactly. He chanted it under his breath on streetcars and benches and barstools, like a madman or an Israelite at prayer, and it never failed to pacify his nerves.

The Michelson-Morley experiment weighed on Waldemar’s mind. How in God’s name could the speed of light be absolute — a constant? Only time and space could have that magic property. Isaac Newton, the greatest intellect in human history, had unlocked the mechanics of the entire solar system based on this self-evident fact, and had solved the mysteries of gravitation; in light of the Michelson-Morley result, however, Newton’s laws had come to seem outmoded, even quaint. How was this possible? Waldemar longed to ask Kaspar — to ask his opinion, to have an ally again, to break free of the glass dome that seemed to have been lowered over him since coming to Vienna — but the truth was that he feared his brother’s answer. How could it be that nothing —no force in the universe, not even the spinning of a planet on its axis — either added to light’s velocity or reduced it?

Each time he arrived at this precipice, Waldemar compelled himself to catch his conceptual breath. He could feel his neurons pickling whenever he dwelt on its implications, as though the fat his cerebrum floated in were gradually being transmuted into brine. This nauseated him at first — it made his entire body clench — but in time he taught himself to like the feeling. And once he’d begun to relish the sensation, once it had stopped sickening him, something shifted inside his skull, like a delirious child turning in a sweat-sodden bed, and his father’s text began to offer up its secrets.