John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Well!” echoed Waldemar, apparently as tongue-tied as he was. But that wasn’t right, either — there was nothing tongue-tied about Waldemar. He was simply waiting, serene and all-powerful, for Kaspar to try his first gambit.

“You look different,” said Kaspar, regretting it instantly.

“Fatter, you mean.”

“Not at all!” But of course he was fatter. “I suppose so, yes. But I meant — I meant the rest of it.”

“The rest of it?”

“Your monocle, for example.”

Waldemar nodded. “I’m not wearing my monocle.”

“My wife must have mentioned it,” Kaspar said, then began coughing fiercely. He hadn’t meant to bring her up so soon.

“Ah,” said Waldemar, in a different tone of voice. “Your wife.”

“That’s right,” Kaspar answered. “Sonja Toula. Your sister-in-law.” Then — suddenly, too soon — he was pleading his case, setting prudence and decorum aside, appealing to Waldemar’s sense of conscience and of charity and to various other senses he very much doubted his brother possessed, letting his voice crack like an adolescent’s and the tears run freely down his cheeks in the hope that they might gratify his enemy. It was the longest speech he’d ever made outside a lecture hall, and the most eloquent he’d made in any setting. When he was done his brother nodded amiably, as if in acknowledgment of a well-turned somersault, and made a cryptic gesture to the Serb.

“I can’t extend my protection to Fräulein Silbermann at this time.”

“She’s my wife , Waldemar,” Kaspar hissed. “And I’m not asking you to extend her your protection. I’m asking you to refrain from hauling her off to your chamber of horrors, like you did to poor Felix Ungarsky.”

“That’s true, I suppose,” said Waldemar. “But when all is said and done, Bruderchen —and it will be very soon — it amounts to much the same thing, does it not?”

A silence fell, leisurely and fatal, during which my grandfather gaped at his brother in an excess of astonishment and loathing and his brother sipped the dregs of his mélange.

“What are you saying to me?” Kaspar got out finally. “Are you telling me that we should disappear?”

“That’s for you to decide. I’ve done all that I can.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Waldemar heaved a good-natured sigh. “I got you those exit visas, didn’t I?”

FROM THE MOMENT I left your brownstone, Mrs. Haven, I was a puzzle to my family, a frustration to my coworkers, and an irritant to every passing stranger. I stepped on commuters’ shoe heels and got in the way of tourists’ snapshots and jaywalked as though cars were made of butter. I seated myself in elegant restaurants, studied the menu intently and left without ordering a thing. My boss at the Xanthia — a red-nosed depressive named Susan B. Anthony — encouraged me to confide in her about my substance dependency; Palladian beat me at Risk thirteen times in a row; Van called repeatedly, apparently in the hope of talking business, and each time was forced to hang up in despair. In a word, Mrs. Haven, I’d become insufferable.

The ancient Pythagoreans, poets that they were, claimed that each instant of each day has a life of its own — an independent existence from the mind that perceives it — and by the end of that week I believed them. You and I saw each other when your schedule permitted, which was practically never; in the dead time between — often days at a stretch — I found myself at each successive second’s mercy.

It was the middle of November, cold and grayscale and dismal, but New York had never looked so beautiful. I wandered the city with my hands in my pockets, muttering to myself like a drunk or an adman rehearsing a pitch, both of which — in one sense or another — I was. I made plans for the future on those rambles of mine that can only, in retrospect, be characterized as insane. I was going to finish my history, win some well-endowed prize, then sell the film rights for a modest fortune; I was going to elope with you to some sultry Central American republic — Nicaragua, maybe — and open a backpacker’s hostel; I was going to run for public office (a comptroller of some kind — nothing fancy) with you in a navy pantsuit by my side. I thought of the Husband, on the rare occasions when he came to mind, with a kind of charitable contempt. I’d progressed from coward to megalomaniac in a single afternoon.

My aunt Enzian had once given my father — for reasons long since lost to time — a piece of advice that he’d passed on to me: “Fall for a single girl, Waldy, and you’re competing with every other man on earth. Fall for a married woman, on the other hand, and you’re only competing with one.” Though Enzian had always frightened me — she was the kind of person, to put it generously, whose patience with children was moderate — I admired her insight into the economics of sex, especially since (as she’d once told me proudly) she’d never once had her “chastity impugned” in the whole of her duration. She was less capable of lying than a pocket calculator, so she must have believed the advice she gave Orson. And as we both know, Mrs. Haven, she was right.

I’d tried to impugn your chastity, God knows, on that first death-defying afternoon. You’d let me drape you across my lap on that sad little beanbag of yours, even fondle you a little, but your sweater stayed on and your buttons stayed buttoned. Your shoes came off after a while, but only grudgingly: it was against your better judgment, you informed me. (I couldn’t help wondering, as I held your bare feet in my trembling hands, which aspect of our situation could possibly not be against your better judgment — but I kept my mouth shut.) Incredible as it seems to me now, I was in no particular hurry. I was prepared to stand by for as long as it took the last spark of your common sense to die.

Not to say I wasn’t horny, Mrs. Haven. Since dropping out of college I’d been practically septic with lust. By my twenty-first birthday, a few weeks before Van’s party, I was running through a Decameron ’s worth of obscenity for every respectable thought. You’d made your entrance, in other words, when my defenses were at their weakest, and your own powers — whether or not you cared or understood, or even noticed — were at their indefatigable peak.

You rarely wore makeup, because it struck you as gratuitous, and no one who saw you would have disagreed. Your body looked immaculate by daylight, as though you’d just been created, and at night you glowed like interstellar dust. It overwhelmed me at times, I confess — it fried me like an overloaded circuit. I envied Haven in those moments, it’s true, but also every other sentient being who’d ever known you, down to your most trivial acquaintances; just as I’m jealous, as I write this, of the self-regarding fool that I was then.

To distract myself when these paroxysms hit, I’d steer my thoughts back to plans from the pre-Haven era, half-forgotten now and very long delayed. I hadn’t come to New York on a whim: I’d come for information — even guidance, of a kind — and I’d gotten what I needed only days before we met. I was on a covert mission, one I needed time and money to complete: money for travel, first to Vienna, then to the Czech Republic, then to places still unknown. In my most presumptuous fantasies, I asked you for your help, and you said yes.

In those hours — usually late at night — when even this vision lost its mesmeric power, I fell back on the only source of distraction I had left: my history. I’d been blocked for a time, Mrs. Haven, as any historian would be when writing about something he still barely understood. For most of my duration the truth had been kept from me, and I was terrified of the countless blanks that needed filling in. You’ll laugh at me, and rightly so, but I feared the judgment of posterity. Since meeting you, however, I’d hit on a solution. If you’re reading this, Mrs. Haven, then the borderline-impossible has already occurred, and there’s nothing to be gained by being coy. My solution was to approach this history as a kind of novel — with dialogue and narration, the occasional sex scene, and even an attempt at atmospherics — and to write it for an audience of one.