John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

I was able to take all this in, Mrs. Haven, because the days had expanded, accordion-like, to hold more than their apportioned share of hours. The moments oozed past like slugs across a wilted lettuce leaf, no matter how I tried to hurry them along. It was tempting to believe that the film reel of experience had been slowed for me alone, so that I might divine some hidden message there — if so, however, I failed to make it out. No sooner had I won you than I’d lost you again: this was the only message I discovered, and I discovered it in everything I saw. Each day was more high-definition than the last, brighter and sharper and more precisely digitized, like an advertising jingle that grows more maddening with every repetition. Life had never been more vivid or less fun.

I’ve located a passage in Kubler, that Svengali of heartbreak, that goes some way toward explaining this phenomenon. Actuality , he writes,

is the instant between ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening.

Actuality is the void between events.

Let’s see if this makes sense to you, Mrs. Haven. If what our patron saint terms “actuality”—that slippery, perpetually corner-of-the-eye nonevent we think of as now — is the void between events, then the inverse might conceivably hold true: it’s only during periods of emptiness, when nothing of consequence is happening , that we’re fully and entirely alive.

Which would mean that what I’m doing right now, hunched over this card table in my aunts’ ruined library, gumming over long-dead memories, is experiencing existence to the fullest.

* * *

It was ten days into the above-mentioned spell of pixelated nothingness, Mrs. Haven, that I made the reacquaintance of your neighbor. I’d fought the pull of your brownstone as long as I could, but my pride and willpower gave up the ghost simultaneously, in the middle of the second week of our separation — a windy, soggy Saturday — at 22:47 EST. In the course of a stroll to the bodega for toothpaste, I found myself suddenly at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street, twenty blocks from my apartment and less than a hundred steps away from yours. No sooner had this fact registered than I was lurching toward your front door like a wino, hissing insults and abuses at myself, praying for some random act of C*F*P to stop me. That holy trinity must have been otherwise engaged, however, because at 22:49 EST I rang your buzzer ten times in rapid succession, once for each of my fingers, then waited for catastrophe to strike.

Your windows stayed dark and your door remained shut. I should have gone straight home, counting my solemn blessings all the way, but I did no such thing. I pressed the buzzer with both thumbs and shouted your name. It wasn’t defiance that kept me there, or self-destructiveness, or even a basic lack of common sense: the thought of shuffling home to my joyless little sublet with the bathtub in the kitchen was simply more than I could entertain. I’d just gone to the curb in search of something to throw at your window when the door of the next brownstone over creaked open and a dour face informed me, in a weary tone of voice, that Mr. and Mrs. Haven weren’t at home. They’d left the week before for Nicaragua.

“Nicaragua?” I croaked.

I recognized the face now: it belonged to the sad-eyed voyeur of the month before, the one with the armful of comics. It hovered in the doorway, unblinking and pale.

“Nicaragua,” I repeated. I let the gravel in my hand fall to the curb. “That explains it, I guess. I was—”

“That explains what?”

“Just that I haven’t heard from Mrs. Haven — from Hildegard — in quite some time. But if she’s in South America, then that would be — what I mean is, that would probably explain—”

“She’s not in South America. She’s in Central America. And she went there to get away from you, Mr. Tompkins. Nicaragua’s the symptom, not the cause.”

I can only speculate as to how I looked in that instant, standing there at the curb with my jaw hanging open. My guess is I looked like a small-mouthed bass.

“Central America,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“She left something for you.”

“What is it?”

“A note.”

I pulled myself together. “I don’t think we’ve met,” I said, extending my hand, although the entirety of the stoop was still between us. “I’m Walter—”

The face pulled slowly back into the darkness. “I’ve got it up here.”

I climbed those steep, crumbling steps with a mixture of hope and foreboding, hanging back when I got to the threshold. Not a soul was in sight. Light from an electric candle in a faux-gothic sconce played over walls draped in wine-colored velvet, the kind you might encounter in a psychic’s waiting room. On the far side of the vestibule doors, its face pressed hard against the beveled glass, crouched a life-sized latex model of a hobbit. I turned the dragon-headed knob and stepped inside.

The hall past the hobbit was dim and wood-paneled and rank with patchouli and sweat. More electric candles lined the walls, and their flickering made everything I glanced at jump and shiver: framed movie posters and Batman paraphernalia; foam-rubber weaponry in Plexiglas vitrines; sagging latex masks on wooden mounts, like souvenirs of Narnian safaris; and — at the end of the hall, given pride of place in a spotlit, bloodred alcove — the uniform of a Standartenführer of the SS, armband and jodhpurs and jackboots and all.

A door somewhere creaked and I skipped quickly backward, not sure what to expect — a Luger-toting husband? a batsuited son? — but it was only my hostess, impassive as ever, holding an envelope between her thumb and middle finger.

She had on a housecoat of sorts (quilted green silk, printed in a pattern of interlocking yellow ankhs) and seemed larger and more owlish than before. She took me by the elbow and steered me into a fantastically cluttered living room, and in that instant I knew, without quite knowing how, that there was no husband, no son, no one else in the house — the objects on display were my hostess’s own, relics in a private sacristy, and she drew a dismal power from them all.

“I knew you’d show up sooner or later,” she said, gesturing toward a pair of pleated vinyl couches. “I’ve been walking on soft-boiled eggs for the past week.”

I had a chance, as she arranged herself on the chirruping vinyl, to examine her more closely. She was a medium-sized woman, with fine — even delicate — features, who nonetheless exuded massiveness. Where other women might be round, or even stout, she was blufflike, almost sedimentary. I’d never realized how many countless small behaviors I associated with the opposite sex until I was confronted, in your neighbor, by their total nonexistence. Her androgyny had a calming effect, strange to say, and so did her matter-of-factness about my presence there. I couldn’t shake the impression that I’d met her before — in some other, less unnerving living room — and I wondered what this déjà vu could mean.

“I should introduce myself,” I said, though there was clearly no need. “My name is Walter Tompkins.”

She nodded slowly in acknowledgment — so slowly that the significance of the gesture fell away before she’d finished — then pointed at the couch across from hers. She waited for me to sit before she spoke.

“This note must not be for you, then. My mistake. It’s addressed to somebody named Tolliver.”

“Tolliver?” I squeaked.