John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

At Tenth and University you hung a grudging right — you were dragging your feet comically now, like a cat on a leash — then stopped before a brownstone the same color as your coat. A siren sounded somewhere in the distance. The city had never seemed so ominous to me, or so strangely becalmed. The only other person in sight — a heavyset, gender-nonspecific individual with an armful of comics in bright Mylar baggies — had stopped walking as well, as though the siren were some citywide alarm. I looked from the back of your head toward the comics collector, who stared brazenly back. It was a woman, I decided, though I couldn’t have said how I knew. I was beginning to think she’d been tailing you — or possibly even me — when she crossed the street toward you, mumbled a perfunctory greeting, and climbed the stoop of the brownstone next door.

I began to move again now, convinced retreat was impossible, though it was clear you were lost to the world. The blinds gave a jerk in your neighbor’s front window: for better or for worse, we had an audience. You set the basket down between your boots — you were slightly pigeon-toed, I noticed — then bent over and took out a fat winter pear. It was impossibly green against your scarlet sleeves, illuminated as if from within, a Technicolor piece of Martian fruit.

You buffed it in your palms and took a bite.

All at once the light started flickering, making everything tremble, as though the sun had turned into a film projector. I let out a strangled gasp that seemed to make no sound. We were on camera, the two of us: we were trapped in some forgotten silent picture. In the next shot you’d look back at me and scream.

Months later, I would finally come up with an explanation for this on-camera feeling, and for the faintness and paralysis it brought. It was the sensation — the physical sensation — of time passing: a kind of chronologic wind. Certain people — my grandfather, for example, or my aunts, or the members of your husband’s cult — might have had this feeling on a daily basis; as for me, Mrs. Haven, I’ve felt it exactly three times. And each time I’ve felt that wind, no matter how desperately I fought, it’s knocked me down.

A truck pulled up across the street — VAN GOGH MOVERS: A “CUT” ABOVE THE REST — and the spell was finally broken. Another day, I told myself, would almost certainly be better. I needed time to prepare, to review what I’d learned, to make sure that you would see me at my best. I turned back toward University.

“Walter?”

Your voice was so serene, so devoid of surprise, that I could only conclude that men followed you home all the time.

“Is that you, Mrs. Haven? I didn’t recognize you in that — in that hoodie you’re wearing.”

“I’ve caught you red-handed, haven’t I?”

“Mrs. Haven, if you’ll just—”

“You were going to walk by without saying hello!”

I squinted at you for a moment, my mouth still half-open, attempting to parse your expression. “I wasn’t sure you’d want me to say hello,” I said carefully. “I behaved like a perfect ass the night we met.”

“Like a perfect ass ,” you repeated. You glanced over your shoulder. “I’ll confess something to you, Mr. Tompkins. Do you mind?”

I shook my head.

“I’d had a sidecar or six at that godawful party, and I’ve been trying to figure out which of my memories of that night I could trust. Sidecars tend to make me see little green men.” You nodded to yourself. “But I guess that part of it was true enough.”

“Which part?”

“That you look like you’re twenty and talk like you’re sixty.”

“I’ve been told that before, Mrs. Haven. Apparently I’m prematurely aged.”

You smiled at that. “If you say so, Mr. Tompkins.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“Well! It’s been a pleasure running into you, Mrs. Haven. If you’ll kindly—”

“Don’t run away like a girl ,” you said, catching me by the sleeve. “There’s something I want you to see.”

I struggled to assemble an appropriate response as you steered me roughly down a flight of steps. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why we were entering your brownstone through the basement until I knocked my head against the lintel.

“Are you all right out there, Walter?”

“Extremely all right! Never better.” I thought of Van and his sailor friend butting foreheads and felt what I can only describe as a rush of nausea and nostalgia combined. Naustalgea , I thought, pleased with myself in a far-off sort of way. Red-and-purple globules danced before my eyes.

“Come on in, Mr. Tompkins! Don’t dawdle!”

Apart from a defeated-looking beanbag and a tidy pile of junk mail by the window, the room I stepped into held nothing at all. There were clues, if one looked closely, that the apartment had once been inhabited: shadows on the parquet where carpets had lain, ghosts of vanished pictures on the walls, scattered stacks of vintage 45s. You sat on the floor and began flipping through them.

“Have you ever listened to the One-Way Streets, Walter? I’m betting you haven’t. I’ll play them for you if I can find the single. There should still be a turntable somewhere. Would you look?”

The bedroom at the back was the barest of all. I crossed its freshly waxed floor to a window that faced a high wall of bamboo. Its sill was as sterile as everything else, but I found a cocktail napkin ( Bemmelmans Bar at The Carlyle ) wedged between the window and the frame, with a scribbled note along its inner fold. It took me a moment to decipher the scrawl:

NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

1 NO lying

2 NO biting

3 NO travel thru time

“What have you found back there, Walter?”

“Nothing,” I said, pocketing the napkin. “Any more stops on the tour?”

“Only the grand finale.”

The bathroom, with its overflowing medicine cabinets and terry-cloth toilet-seat cover and heap of scaly-looking couture in the bathtub, was the only room that seemed lived-in. The clothes in the bathtub looked oddly compressed, and I felt a dark thrill, a tingle in regions unmentionable, when I realized you’d used them for a bed.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Three years this Thanksgiving. What do you think of the decor?”

“I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Haven. I don’t know how to answer that.”

“I had a fight with the Husband,” you said matter-of-factly. “The Husband took my furniture away.”

“Is that what that truck’s for, outside? Van Gogh Movers?”

You shrugged. “He hardly needed them, really. They just took everything upstairs.”

“This whole brownstone is Haven’s, then.” I felt my stomach twist. “Of course it is.”

Your expression went cold. “The Husband feels that way, too. You ought to get to know each other, Walter. You might turn out to have a lot in common.”

My plan had been to avoid the subject altogether, to keep Haven small and indeterminate and vague, but I should have known there’d be no way around him. He was a feature of the landscape through which you and I moved — as vast and undeniable as a mesa. But he was also as lifeless as one, and as flat, at least on that first magic afternoon. He was static on a TV set in a corner of the room in which I loved you. I couldn’t even bring his face to mind.

“As far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Haven, your husband—”

“Why were you following me, Walter?”

I wobbled in place for a moment, then stepped stiffly toward you, clutching an imaginary hat. “My intentions are honorable, Mrs. Haven.”

“Your what?”

I took your hand in both of mine, not caring how Victorian I seemed. “I saw you, just by chance, in Union Square—” What on earth was I trying to say? A humming sprang up somewhere behind my left ear, in what may or may not have been my temporal lobe. The chronologic wind was picking up again.