John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

It grew commonplace for Kaspar to come home from the university — or, just as often, to rise in the mornings — to find a rumpled, bearded ism -ist sleeping on the yellow divan in the parlor. He complained to his wife regarding this exactly once. “If you want me to sleep in your house, Herr Toula,” Sonja replied, “then you’ll have to put up with my guests. The girls enjoy them, even if you don’t.” Disgruntled though he was, my grandfather knew there was no point in arguing, especially with regard to the twins: Enzian and Gentian, barely able to walk, delighted in standing next to the divan in pallbearer-ish silence, taking turns seeing how firmly they could tug on the whiskers of each new refugee before he sat up with a yelp of pain.

Rumors of Waldemar von Toula surfaced from time to time — he was in Germany now, allegedly, which came as no surprise at all — but the family preferred to disregard them. Kaspar was offered no promotions by the Department of Physics, but no pigs were stuffed into his pen cup, either. By the turn of the decade, he’d resigned himself to passing the remainder of his duration as an adjunct professor in a city he no longer felt at home in, shunning the papers and most of the people he knew, Jew and gentile alike. When a body, in motion, is not acted upon by any force , Newton famously wrote, that body shall continue on in a straight line, at the same speed . If the middle of Kaspar’s life was a plateau to him — a hilltop with an unobstructed view — then the future was a single smooth descent. And that temperate decline was all he wished for.

How to assess my grandfather, Mrs. Haven? How to judge him? Admittedly, he hadn’t read a newspaper since 1927, he rarely left the house except to deliver his lectures, and he’d come to have as much use for human interaction as a jellyfish; but the force that was building — and would soon overwhelm him — had announced its arrival in letters of fire. To quote Kaspar himself, on the last page of his European diary: Only a blind man could have lived through these last years without seeing what was bearing down upon us; so I made myself as blind as I could manage. I wanted to believe that the worst was behind me, and I found an easy way to make it so. I simply turned my back on what was coming.

Monday, 09:05 EST

Where in spacetime are you, Mrs. Haven? Are you relaxing at home on a dull winter evening, as I like to imagine, leafing idly through these pages by the fire? Are you happy, Mrs. Haven? Are you tipsy? Are you bored? It’s getting harder and harder, with each chapter I finish, to bring your darkling image into focus. My reason for writing was allegedly to capture your interest, or at least to recapture your memory; instead I find your likeness warping, refracting the light I shine toward it, like a cigarette wrapper left out in the sun. How far can I go before you’re gone completely?

In one of Orson’s first published pieces, “The Un-Extended Life” ( Preposterous! Stories , volume 21, number 3, 1957), a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk named Silas Strangeways comes across a thumbnail-sized ad on the back page of volume 21, number 3 of Preposterous! Stories (with a fantastically geeky attention to detail that I can’t help admiring, the ad was actually run in that same issue) promising escape from his humdrum existence:

ARE YOU LIVING THE LIFE THAT YOUR MAKER INTENDED?

Does your life lack the flavor, the crackle, the intensity you’ve hoped for?

Daily, we find ourselves bombarded by a thousand recommendations for extending the duration of our lives — exercise three times weekly! smoke in moderation! exchange sugar for saccharine! — but the truth is that time does not gain value by accruing. Time acquires value by being “spent,” and spent freely. The longest life is not always the best one; in the majority of cases, just the opposite.

If you are, in fact, living the life that your maker intended — it may be time to seek another maker.

Prompted, perhaps, by his genre-appropriate surname, Strangeways answers the ad, and soon finds himself in a bunker with titanium walls — located, for some reason, sixty feet beneath the Statue of Liberty — as a test subject in a top-secret, Pentagon-funded experiment in something known as “rotary chrono-feedback.” The basic idea (explains the ascot-sporting, sherry-sipping scientist in charge, Dr. Hugo von Karst) is to harness the power of certain especially nasty cosmic rays to collapse spacetime into a kind of nugget—“a diamond, if you will, of pure, unadulterated NOW”—in which every instant of a man’s life will occur simultaneously. Karst’s pitch is as follows: “Your life, Mr. Strangeways, is sadly diluted. It holds precious few pleasures, a handful at best, with far too much of nothing in between. Imagine, however, the bliss and the terror, the intensity and the passion, if it all were compressed — if you lived your whole life in a nanosecond!”

After some rote hemming and hawing from Strangeways — and some heavily italicized gibberish from Karst about time as mankind’s comeuppance for original sin, and mankind itself as a race of undeserving monkeys, and heaven as a kind of perpetual-motion machine — Strangeways agrees to have his life compacted, and in no time at all he’s deloused and depilated and basted in radioactive Vaseline and inserted, buck naked, into a “thrumming titanium cervix” (Orson’s words, Mrs. Haven, not mine), at which point everyone puts on goggles and the space rays are harnessed and something goes horribly wrong. The experiment has the opposite of the expected result: instead of living his entire life in a single fervent moment, Strangeways’s existence is stretched out so infinitely thin that he might as well not be existing at all. He’s traded his brief, Judeo-Christian lifespan for a diaphanous kind of immortality: he’s sidestepped the life God intended for him and become an accidental god himself.

Uncharacteristically for my father — a believer in tidy endings, like most of his peers in the trade — it’s left open whether Strangeways’s default godhood is a blessing or a curse.

The editors of Preposterous! Stories weren’t too taken with “The Un-Extended Life,” much to Orson’s consternation. They accepted it grudgingly — as a kind of stopgap between “Titans’ Battle,” by Heinrich Hauser, and “Warlord of Peace,” by Leroy P. Yerxa — and paid him half the normal rate per word. Orson sent them an indignant letter, seven pages long, demanding an explanation for the slight. Their answer took the form of a nine-word postcard, all in caps:

MORE TITS TOLLIVER. MORE POINTER SISTERS. MORE JUJU FRUITS.

My father scrupulously avoided repeating this error in the 136 stories that followed. From that day onward, his extraterrestrials were nearly always female, dressed inadequately or not at all, and possessed of proud, heaving, pendulous breasts, whenever possible in multiples of three.

* * *

I’m rambling again, Mrs. Haven. Something odd seems to have happened to the air. Could the pilot light have gone out in the kitchen?

ENZIAN AND GENTIAN had just celebrated their birthday — an orgy of Bavarian cream and marzipan at which no expense was spared — when Hitler’s Wehrmacht arrived at the gates to the city, politely requested the key, and received it with an ingratiating flourish. Vienna in ’38 was no longer the glistening pudding, studded with exotic candied fruits, that it had been in the years of its prime — but the Führer discovered, to his profound satisfaction, that it practically melted on his tongue.