John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

He sees each thing in Time as if in the Present, He being not in Time. St. Thomas Aquinas, describing the Eternal Jew.

Backwards Time is forbidden by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: the Universe is expanding, Children, & therefore so is Time. Time-travel, ergo, is as simple as Strudel. Open your Eyes to give birth to the Cosmos; Close your eyes to make It disappear. Stuff It into a pulpit & swallow It down: you’ll find that you still remain Hungry. Eternal Salivation is yours.

The Lost Time Accidents, a Gentleman once said. He wrote it down in his Ledger & gave me a Pain in the head. Every moment that passes is a Lost Time Accident. Close your eyes, Children, when you want to stop Time. Open them when you’re ready to expire.

Monday, 09:05 EST

I seem to have fallen asleep, Mrs. Haven. My eyes closed for a brief spell, my thinking went muddy, and when I opened them again the room was dark. This has happened before — the closed eyes, the changed light — but it’s never occurred to me to call it sleep. Is it possible to sleep outside of time, or to breathe, or to think — to live at all, in other words? Common sense would answer in the negative. Yet I exist.

I must exist, Mrs. Haven, because I continue to experience pain. Descartes would surely have accepted the shame and revulsion I felt while writing the latest chapter of this history as proof: Je regrette, donc je suis . Any hope I once had of exorcising my namesake by cataloging his crimes has been replaced by an awareness of his presence in my every thought and deed. The past has become too real to hold in check, too vivid to contain. Not even timelessness can keep its horrors quiet.

At this point, if I were a physicist, I’d calmly revise my understanding to adjust for this dilemma, designating a new sort of time, t2 (or Wt , maybe, for “Waldemar time”) that has the property of stasis with respect to the rest of the universe, but progress within the boundaries of its field. The bubble of time I inhabit has detached itself, somehow, from the bubble you and the Husband and everyone else refer to as “the present”; but inside my pint-sized chronosphere, existence — for want of any better term — persists.

A great deal of calculus and non-Euclidean geometry would come next, at which point (if I were a genius) I’d know why my movements and bodily functions are restricted in this state, why my memory of the recent past has been erased, and also why I’m able to do slightly more with each “sleep cycle” that passes. Or so I tell myself. Just thinking about it makes my forehead cramp.

Most likely you’ve noticed a contradiction by now, a series of incongruities, both in my condition and in the words that I’ve been using to describe it. Time, as we’ve established, appears to be passing: my body continues to function, my thoughts move in sequence, and this account of mine gets fatter, page by page. Not only that, but my descriptions of this place are crawling with time-dependent phrases and figures of speech: after a while, this whole time, since, soon, now , etc. I’ve been using them, Mrs. Haven, because it’s impossible not to use them. Trying to write, or talk — or think — without invoking time is like trying to make pancakes underwater. Time is everywhere and nowhere, omnipresent but invisible. Like adultery.

Is that what I’m being punished for, Mrs. Haven? Poisoning your marriage? Making a cuckold of the Sensational Gatsby? The punishment would suit the crime, I must admit. If anyone could appreciate the torture of reliving my bungled existence ad infinitum — to say nothing of the crimes of the Timekeeper, and the foibles of all my other hapless forebears — it would be Richard Pinckney Haven, First Listener of the Church of Synchronology.

Have I found my explanation, then? Is this singularity a prison sentence?

* * *

At the close of my most recent sleep cycle, during a momentary uptick in morale, I decided to mount an expedition to the kitchen. I’ve developed a new technique for getting out of this armchair, one that works pretty well: instead of struggling against the combined forces of gravity and inertia, I use them both to my advantage, as in jujitsu, by letting myself go slack — turning my body, as much as possible, into a kind of invertebrate jelly — until I simply ooze onto the floor. I’ve made progress in the lateral-motion department, as well: this time I negotiated the Archive without too much trouble. The singularity doesn’t care where I crawl to, apparently, as long I keep on all fours.

The kitchen turned out to be spotless, free of the least trace of clutter, lit by a buzzing row of angry blue fluorescents. The room seemed enormous compared with the rest of the apartment — a luminous, echoing stadium — and I crab-walked across it with my eyes nearly shut, holding course for the front of the fridge. I rested the back of my skull against its door when I reached it, like a freshman-year drunk, and let its reassuring hum course through me. For better or worse, Mrs. Haven, I’d arrived.

Before they’d gone into their decades-long seclusion, my aunts had been celebrated entertainers: they’d been known for a time, among their legion of guests, as the German Nightingales of Spanish Harlem. The fridge felt appropriately cool — my aunts remain in good standing with Con Edison, apparently — and I found myself wondering what it might still contain. Visions of sugarplums danced in my head, Mrs. Haven, followed by visions of cantaloupes and taco mix and frozen fish filets. Its door came open easily, with a sound like a sigh of relief.

The interior was packed from top to bottom with neatly labeled, Saran-wrapped containers of soybean sprouts.

You know how I feel about soybean sprouts, Mrs. Haven. They’ve always seemed unfoodlike to me, aggressively tasteless, the vegetable equivalent of Styrofoam. My aunts, in their declining years — long after they’d stopped letting anyone else in the door — developed a baffling obsession with their health: they were slowly suffocating themselves under alluvial deposits of trash, and they hadn’t cracked a window since the Ford administration, but they wouldn’t eat a thing that hadn’t been raised, grown or butchered by vegan fundamentalists in strict accordance with Talmudic law. There were forty-five containers in all, both in the fridge and in the freezer, dating from six years ago to a week before their bodies were discovered. I took a deep breath, directed certain dark thoughts at the C*F*P conglomerate, and forced myself to choke a mouthful down.

The consequences of this act were instantaneous. The taste of the sprouts — that oddly antiseptic, standing-water savor — brought other memories to mind, ones I thought I’d forgotten, and before I could hit my mnemonic air brakes I found myself remembering our mutual friend: your neighbor and rival, your not-so-secret admirer, the bitter, mannish fangirl with the palindromic moniker who played such a toxic role in our romance. Once I’d begun, Mrs. Haven, there was no turning back. Not even the Second Law of Thermodynamics could protect me.

THE WEEKS AFTER our Great Estrangement, Mrs. Haven, and before our clumsy, roundabout reunion, were the most wide-awake that I have ever known. Distraught though I was, I discovered features of the city that I might otherwise never have noticed: the fractal array of streets in the financial district, for example, or the disembodied tang of styling gel on certain Chinatown street corners, or the charged, lysergic flatness of midtown office towers in the minutes before sunrise. It struck me for the first time how rarely New Yorkers raise their eyes above street level, and I grew fascinated with what was going on above me, which nearly got me killed more often than I can count. Manhattan’s shrines to itself, I came to understand, were meant to be admired from below — from the level of the gutter, if possible — and I played my humble part without complaint. I grew exquisitely aware of the grid of cloud and sun and sky above the neighborhoods I passed through, and recognized, in spite of my malaise, that it was beautiful.