John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Good evening, Frau Bemmelmans. Pardon my—”

“He’s upstairs.”

“Where exactly, madame?”

“Upstairs,” the widow said, already looking away.

* * *

Kaspar heard Waldemar before he saw him — heard him holding forth in reasoned, deliberate tones, as if explaining something subtle to a child. He followed the sound up three flights of stairs to an unpainted door, turned the handle and let himself in, as if he were at home in that godforsaken place.

He found himself in a high-ceilinged study whose fleur-de-lis wallpaper hung in great tattered folds over the tops of three wardrobes. Through a second door he saw the foot of an unmade cot with a pair of freshly blackened boots beside it. He heard no voice now. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples. It was best to rehearse what he would say before he said it: his comportment could go some way toward lessening the shock. It remained unclear, after all, what this upstart in Bern had achieved. The proper choice of words, a certain lightness of delivery, a considered rhetorical approach—

“You look funny down there,” came a voice from behind him. “You look like a cicada in a jar.”

Kaspar turned his head slowly. He knew where the voice was coming from, though a part of him refused to credit it.

“There’s a rumor going around,” said the voice. “I imagine you’ve heard.”

Kaspar raised his eyes unwillingly to the gap between the ceiling and the top of the nearest wardrobe, where the paper was slackest. His brother sat clutching his knees to his chest beneath a dangling fold, nearly hidden behind it, as though sheltering there from the rain. His head was bent to one side, as if his neck were broken; the toes of his bare feet held tightly to the wardrobe’s beveled lip. He looked down at Kaspar without apparent interest.

Kaspar chose his words carefully. “I did hear something. It seems that some Swiss bureaucrat — in Bern, of all places — has developed a theory—”

“Ach!” said Waldemar, coughing into his fist. “I know all about that. I was referring to the rumor that I’ve gone insane.”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Kaspar managed to answer.

“You will.”

“I promise you, Waldemar, I’ll do whatever I can—”

“That’s kind of you, Kaspar, but you needn’t bother.” Waldemar smiled. “I started the rumor myself.”

“Did you?” stammered Kaspar, though he knew better than to expect an intelligible answer. Waldemar shrugged his shoulders, rustling the paper behind him and raising a thin cloud of dust.

“Come down from there, Waldemar. Will you do that for me?”

“It perturbs you to see me at this altitude, of course,” Waldemar said blithely. “It’s not too comfortable for me, either, as you can imagine. But there’s a protocol I’m following.” He gave a slight shudder. “Time passes more slowly up here, first of all. The farther from the surface of the earth, the lower the frequency of light waves; and the lower the frequency of light waves, the longer it takes time to pass.”

Kaspar shook his head. “You’re mistaken about that. Altitude should have the opposite—”

“ Tssk! You’d know as much yourself, if you’d been keeping up with your schoolwork.” Waldemar’s lips gave a twitch. “But we both know you’ve been otherwise engaged.”

Kaspar stared up at his brother and said nothing.

“I’ll tell you something else, since you’ve come all this way. Would you like me to tell it?”

“I’m listening.”

“That Swiss clerk of yours is a shit-eating Jew.”

Kaspar had forced himself, on the way to the villa, to imagine every possible reaction Waldemar might have to the news, no matter how unnerving — his brother’s outburst, therefore, came as no surprise. It came as a relief, in fact, being appropriate to the spirit of the times. Anti-Semitism hung in the air like smoke in those years, like the musk of the horse-drawn fiakers , and the Viennese inhaled it with each breath; not even the Jews themselves were free of it. Kaspar had been aware of die Judenfrage even before leaving Znojmo, but since the start of his affair with Sonja he’d begun to see it everywhere he looked. Waldemar’s racial paranoia didn’t set him apart: just the opposite. It was the best available argument for his sanity.

“I didn’t know the man was Jewish,” Kaspar said. “I suppose that’s interesting.”

“It’s about as interesting as potato blight,” Waldemar answered. “To what other race could he possibly belong?”

“Please come down, little brother. Come down here and sit with me.” Kaspar took a step toward the wardrobe and extended a hand. “Sonja tells me you’ve made progress with your work.”

Waldemar blinked at him for a moment, then swung his legs over the edge of the wardrobe and took hold of his arm. “Sonja said that?” he murmured. His hand felt oddly dry and insubstantial.

“She did indeed!” Kaspar assured him. (Sonja had, in fact, done her best to pass along what Waldemar had told her — though she’d omitted the proposition he’d made.)

“I have made progress,” said Waldemar, hopping down and steering Kaspar to his cot. “What else has Sonja told you? Has she reconsidered my request?”

“What request would that be, little brother?”

Waldemar let his arm fall. The boyish enthusiasm of an instant before was gone without a trace, and an elderly man’s suspicion had been lowered across it like a metal shutter.

“What exactly did she tell you, Bruderchen ?”

“Only that your work has been going well, and that you seemed — well, that you seemed in the highest of spirits—”

Waldemar made a queer rasping noise in the back of his throat. “In other words, Kaspar, she told you nothing. She made meaningless noises, and you lapped them up gratefully, ass that you are. You probably considered them music.” He nodded to himself. “She told you nothing at all about the Accidents.”

Even from the mouth of a lunatic, that term compelled my grandfather’s attention. “No,” he said, gripping the bed’s coverlet. “That is to say, she told me certain things, but not being a physicist herself—”

“Then I’ll tell you now, you starry-eyed buffoon, though heaven knows you don’t deserve to hear it.” He brought his mouth alongside Kaspar’s ear. “Chronology, dear brother, is a lie.”

Kaspar raised his hands at that, as if to arrest a speeding motorcar; but there was no halting his brother any longer.

“Sequential time is a convenient fiction, an item of propaganda — a fable propagated from the birth of Jesus outward by a collective of interests that has spread in all directions since that instant, growing in power in direct proportion to the advance of so-called chronologic time.” He held up a finger. “Civilization was founded on numbers , Herr Toula, and its downfall can be read in them as well. Today, for example, the interests to which I refer are approximately one thousand, nine hundred and five times more powerful than they were at the beginning of the so-called Christian era. The very calendar we use, in other words, is not only the totem of the progress of this aforementioned ‘collective,’ but the actual numerical index of that progress. What do you say to that?”

Kaspar shook his head and said nothing. Waldemar touched his fingers to his temples, as if he were about to attempt telekinesis, which wouldn’t have surprised his brother in the slightest.

“You’re a clever boy, Kaspar — nearly as clever as I am. I don’t intend to condescend to you.” Waldemar withdrew his fingers from his brow. “I’m confident, for example, that you can identify the secret society to which I refer.”