John Wray: The Lost Time Accidents

What happened next was attested to by everybody on the square that day. Bachling took sudden notice of the man in his path—“He popped up out of nowhere,” he said at his deposition—“out of the air itself”—and clawed frantically at the Daimler’s manual brake; Ottokar paid no mind to his impending end until its grille made gentle contact with his paunch. His coat seemed to drape itself over the hood of the Daimler, as if no human body were inside it, and by the time he hit the cobbles he was in his shirtsleeves. Bachling opened his mouth in a coquettish O of disbelief, extending his right arm over the windshield in an absurd attempt to shunt aside his victim; a stack of loose papers pirouetted skyward with no more urgency or fuss than the Daimler took to pass over the obstruction. The papers came to rest in the middle of the street — in perfect order, as I picture it — but no one present took the slightest notice.

No one except a single passerby.

Monday, 08:47 EST

Of the many mysteries of my situation, Mrs. Haven, the most brain-curdling isn’t the question of time, but — for want of a better expression — the question of space. My recollection of events since our parting is patchy at best, a shadowy pudding of fuddled impressions, and the days and hours leading up to this limbo seem to have been erased altogether. I regained consciousness sweatily, fuzzily, as if surfacing from an afternoon nap beside some muddy semitropical lagoon, and I still haven’t snapped out of it completely. What force and/or agency deposited me here? Why this place, of all places? Who excavated this cramped little burrow for me, set up this table and armchair, laid out this pen and ream of acid-free paper, and drank half of this bottle of nearly undrinkable beer?

As if to smooth my way further, a dozen or so books jut out of the mess within reach of this armchair, each one of them related to my work: Saint Augustine’s Confessions , Kubler’s The Shape of Time , a pocket biography of Einstein, and The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS by a lurid little German named Heinz Höhne, to name just a few. This room was once my aunts’ library, as I’ve said, but the coincidence is a little hard to credit. I can’t help but suspect — like the stiff, defensive Protestants who raised you — that some Intelligence contrived to place me here.

I took my first stab at writing the history of my family when I was still in college, and that manuscript—“Toula-Silbermann-Tolliver: A Narrative Genealogy”—lies close by as well, in the crumpled manila envelope, packed with Tolliver lore, that was the last thing my aunts ever gave me. It’s a ponderous slog, a painstaking patchwork of “primary” texts — I was a history major at the time — and reading it now, I find its fusty, deliberate tone grotesquely out of keeping with a family for whom “objectivity” has always been an alien (if not downright extraterrestrial) concept. In other words, Mrs. Haven, it’s an undercooked, flavorless porridge of facts, the opposite of what I’m after here. You’ve never read a work of history in your life. To bring the past alive for you, I’m going to have to approach it as a sort of waking dream, or as one of those checkout counter whodunits you keep stacked beside your bed. I’ll have to treat my duration as a mystery and a sci-fi potboiler combined — which shouldn’t be too hard to do at all.

Not to say these books won’t come in handy, Mrs. Haven. The Kubler, for instance — an elegant art history tract, with a pretty two-tone cover that I think you would have liked — practically reads like an abstract of my family’s travails. Here’s a passage from page 17:

Our signals from the past are very weak, and our means for recovering their meaning are still most imperfect. The beginnings are much hazier than the endings, where at least the catastrophic action of external events can be determined. Yet at every moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures.

Ottokar’s death, both as an ending and as a beginning, might have been dreamed up expressly to prove Kubler’s point. His ending was hazy enough, witnessed though it was by half the town of Znojmo; but the questions raised by his death led into a swamp in which first his children, then his grandchildren, and finally even his great-grandchildren lost themselves beyond hope of recovery. In spite of embracing science — and pseudoscience, and science fiction (and even, in one case, out-and-out humbuggery) — as our family religion, we Tollivers have always been a backward-looking bunch, and we’ve paid a fearsome price for our nostalgia. Like an unconfirmed rumor, or a libelous book, or a golem, or a flesh-eating zombie — never fully alive and therefore unkillable — Ottokar’s discovery shadowed each of us from the cradle to the tomb.

I was once informed by a tour guide, on a high school trip to Scotland, that any self-respecting clan should have at least one ancient curse; and even then, at the age of not-quite-fifteen, the Lost Time Accidents sprang to mind at once. I’ve asked myself countless times how we might have turned out if my great-grandfather had stepped in front of that Daimler even one day earlier, only to realize, time and again, that I might as well ask what would have happened if he’d never been conceived. Time may be as subject to spin as everything else in the universe, Mrs. Haven, but the lines of cause and effect are no less evident for being curved. If the Tollivers had a crest, it would be the colors of pickling brine and tattered notebook paper, twisted together into a Möbius strip, rampant against a background of jet-black, ruthless, interstellar space.

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER DIED without recovering consciousness, Mrs. Haven, and the notes he’d let fall in the street were forgotten in the drama of his passing. In any event, only one person might have been able to appreciate the full significance of those pages, and she was prevented by propriety from coming forward. Marta Svoboda’s “testimony” was given in no court of law: even if Bachling had been in violation of the primitive traffic regulations of the age, his negligible speed would have been enough to put him in the clear. Frau Svoboda’s questioning, such as it was, was carried out by Ottokar’s sons, Kaspar and Waldemar, heirs to both their father’s business and his love of Fenchelwurst.

The liaison between Ottokar and Marta had by no means been a secret, and all eyes (except, perhaps, my great-grandmother’s) were on her in the days and weeks that followed; but she proved a disappointment to her neighbors. When the butcher shop opened the next day, she was behind the counter as always — slightly tighter-lipped than usual, perhaps, but otherwise composed. None of her customers made so bold as to invite her to unburden herself, and she did absolutely nothing to encourage them.

She showed less reticence, however, when Waldemar and Kaspar came to call.

* * *

My grandfather and his brother were in their teens at the time of the accident, a year or so shy of manhood, and were often mistaken for twins. Waldemar was slightly taller than his older brother, with an elegant, straight-backed way of propelling himself through the world; Kaspar — my grandfather — was a dark, quiet boy, businesslike for his age, with the set jaw and good-natured suspiciousness of the emigrant he would one day become. Waldemar was his mother’s favorite, Kaspar his father’s. Though less fetching than his younger brother, and decidedly less brash, it was on Kaspar’s broad back that the hopes of the family rested. There was a reasonableness about him that was missing in Waldemar: his lack of imagination, it was felt, was precisely the corrective to his father’s excesses that Toula & Sons was in need of. On the morning of June 26, however, the pickle trade couldn’t have been farther from either boy’s thoughts. They walked the six blocks to Frau Svoboda’s shop shoulder to shoulder, talking in grave and self-important whispers, and rapped in tandem on its yellow door.