John Wray: The Lost Time Accidents

I must have known, even then, that the day would come when it would cause her pain.

Monday, 08:47 EST

I can’t see much in my current position, but I’m not too far from the windows, and — if I crane my neck to look past a cracked lucite bust of J. W. Dunne — I can make out a light-speckled sliver of park. For an hour a day, the view has the patina of a retouched picture postcard: the willow boughs sigh, the asphalt promenades gloam, and Nutter’s Battery and the old wooden boathouse hum with a mystery they could never aspire to at noon. Right now, for example, the evening sun is setting across Harlem Meer, glimmering up from the pond scum, giving a pair of overweight maintenance workers the look of lovers in a cheap romantic comedy. The universe is still in motion, close enough to take hold of, patiently awaiting my return; but the clock at my elbow — a Tolliver Magnetic Chronometer, model 8-Ω, accurate to.000000000000000178 of a second — remains frozen, Miss Havisham — like, at 08:47 Eastern Standard Time.

So many forces had to conspire for our paths through the chronosphere to intersect, Mrs. Haven, let alone for us to share a bed. Isn’t that a great and terrifying notion? If the past of a given event — let’s call it event X — might be considered as all things that can influence X (as mainstream physicists claim), then the whole of human history could be thought of as the past of our affair. You’ve decided, under the influence of God knows what toxic cocktail of fear and regret, to deny the events of the last seven months; but I believe — I have no choice but to believe — that if I bear witness to our history, you’ll consent to raise it back up from the grave.

I can picture you shaking your head as you read this, your magnificent corkscrew-curled head with its translucent ears. You’ve ordered me, in no uncertain terms, to obliterate all traces of our friendship: I’ve received clear instructions, in writing, to cease and desist. I don’t blame you for that. We were given three shots, after all — far more than we deserved — and we bungled each one.

Our last and bravest attempt ended on the morning of August 14, between 08:17 and 11:47 CET, in the honeymoon suite of the Hotel Zrada, in that fatal little town in Moravia whose name I choose not to recall. We’d slept with our clothes on, a full arm’s length apart, a first in all our secret life together. You informed me that you’d struggled all night to come to a decision; your coppery hair stuck straight out on one side, I remember, as though pointing the way out the door. I noticed a minor constellation of freckles under your left clavicle — a faint, Pleiades-like clustering I didn’t recognize — and wondered whether your recent safari in Mr. Haven’s company might have brought it to the surface of your skin. A vision came to me of you riding naked on a Bengal tiger, leading a winding file of porters through the khaki-colored bush; I tried to make a joke about it, but instead let out a strangled chirp, like a deaf child attempting to speak.

You took no notice, Mrs. Haven, because you were making a speech of your own. I watched your beautiful lips move, unable to follow. Something momentous was happening, that much was obvious, but my conscious mind refused to let it in. I thought of something you’d said on our first day together, coming out of the Ziegfeld after seeing some by-the-algorithm Hollywood romance:

“There ought to be a word for this feeling, Walter.”

“What feeling is that?”

“The one when you come out of a movie — in the daytime especially — and everything still feels like part of it.”

“The ancient Greeks called it euphasia ,” I’d said, inventing a word off the top of my head.

“Aren’t you the bright penny,” you’d laughed, then asked me to spell it for you, which I did. I could do no wrong that perfect afternoon.

“ Euphasia ,” you’d said thoughtfully. “I’ll make a note of that.”

My memory of our last hours has gone nova since then, grown so bloated and bright that it’s all I can see, though I sense — though I know —that glorious things are hidden just behind it. I want to make a pilgrimage back along the causal chain: to line up my mistakes in a row, for the sake of comparison, with those of all my star-crossed ancestors. From the moment we met I’ve felt like an impostor, like the single normally proportioned member of a clan of sideshow geeks, desperate to keep his pedigree obscured. That ends as of this writing, Mrs. Haven. I want to explain the Tollivers to you, to take you on a private tour of our shabby little hall of curiosities; but in order to do that properly, I’ve got to take an axe to the vitrines. I’ll have to reckon with my namesake — Waldemar, Freiherr von Toula, physicist and fanatic, the Black Timekeeper of Äschenwald-Czas — by testifying to his many crimes at last.

I’m writing to bring you back to me, Mrs. Haven. I can’t deny that. I want to reenter the continuum, if for no other reason than because it’s the place — or the field, or the condition — in which you exist. And there’s only one way to do that, appalling though the prospect is to me.

I’m writing to tell you about the Lost Time Accidents.

ON JUNE 12, 1903, two hours and forty-five minutes before being killed by a virtually stationary motorcar, my great-grandfather made a discovery that promised to shake the world to its foundations. Ottokar Gottfriedens Toula, father of two, amateur physicist, pickler by trade, had spent the morning in his laboratory — a converted brining room directly beneath the Hauptplatz of Znojmo, Moravia, the gherkin capital of the Habsburg Empire — and was about to lock up for the afternoon, when something about the arrangement of objects on a workbench caught his eye. According to his notes, he spent the better part of a quarter hour perfectly motionless, his right hand still cradling his keys, staring over his left shoulder at the “spatial dynamics” between a crucible, a brining jar, and a slowly desiccating winter pear.

A jarring, insistent noise which he eventually identified as the jangling of his key ring brought him out of his bedazzlement, and he approached the workbench with a trembling step. By the time he’d cleared a space on his perennially cluttered desk, pinched his pince-nez into place, and dug his notebook out from under a heap of cherry pits, the first crude attempt at a theory was already coalescing in his brain. He lowered himself to the bench, taking great care not to tip it over, and in less than an hour wrote the entry — seven pages of tilting courant script — that would trouble the dreams of his descendants for the next one hundred years.

I couldn’t possibly know this, Mrs. Haven — not all of it — but I hope you’ll indulge me a little. Ottokar’s notes, the sole source I have for this scene, are as dry as pencil shavings. The only means I’ve got to bring this primal scene to life, to keep you here beside me — if only in potentia —is the license I’ve given myself to speculate. Imagination is a form of time travel, after all, however bumbling and incomplete. And every history is an act of subterfuge.

The town my great-grandfather lived and died in — Znaim to the Germanic ruling class, Znojmo to the Czechs — was a pretty imperial backwater, prosperous and unpretentious, known for its views of the Dyje River, its pickling mills, and not a thing besides. A postcard from the year of Ottokar’s death combines these twin distinctions into a single tidy package: entitled “A Visit to Znaim,” the postcard depicts a portly businessman in a bowler hat, happily suspended in midair above the Dyje, with the town square glowing rosily in the background. Pickles peek out of his pockets, and he brandishes a brining brush in his right hand, like a riding crop; his flight seems to have been made possible by the gargantuan, midnight-green, unapologetically phallic gherkin that he straddles like some suicidal gaucho. A poem at the bottom left-hand corner does nothing whatsoever to explain matters, though it does strike me as pertinent to my great-grandfather’s brief, quixotic life: