John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

The 1st Accident was: he found out what Time is and what it isn’t. It dropped down on his Head like the Law dropped on Moses. The 2nd was he got tötet by a Car.

Time is a misbehaving Thing because it moves and you can’t see it. If you can’t see it how do you know it’s moving? You don’t know. But it’s gone and now you’re in a different Place. It’s going and moving and taking Things with it. Always in the one Direction, never the others, but Nobody can find out where it’s going. My Grandfather found out. He called it the Accidents because nobody could guess the Direction. Not on Purpose they couldn’t. Because it’s going Everywhere at once.

Another Brother’s name was Freiherr Von who had no Timepiece so he kept Time using People. A Jew in Switzerland killed him by becoming famous. He’s dead and doesn’t matter in this story.

Both more prudent and more retiring than her sister, Gentian was careful not to set her version down in writing — but my father remembered it forty years later, in the ICU at Buffalo General, in the wake of his first coronary. I asked him about it in the milk-of-magnesia-colored room where he lay between bypasses, staring up at the TV he’d insisted on personally unplugging before they slid his clammy body into bed. He’d have answered any question I asked him, most likely — he was bored out of his skull — but nothing better came to me. He was too weak to write, so I recorded him on a Dictaphone I found in his attaché case.

BUFFALO GENERAL MEDICAL CENTER 16:50 EST

It was a gherkin that first set the old asspicker onto the idea that time was coiled and pinched up like a blocked intestine. He might have had the idea anyway, I suppose, but gherkins were his livelihood so that was how it took him.

People think cucumbers are flavorless, just warty green dongs full of water and pulp; but the best of them taste slightly sweet. As soon as it’s plunked in the brine — which in Ottokar’s day was mostly acetic acid and salt — your cucumber begins to turn sour, and in a few weeks you’ve got your classic gherkin. However, Waldy.

However .

What’s that? No, no — Genny didn’t know thing one about the brining process, and neither did Enzie. I’m filling in the blanks for your benefit. Genny’s theory had plenty of holes in it, believe you me. She wasn’t the brains of the unit.

All right then. As every pickler knows, if you leave your gherkin in the brine too long — a full year, let’s say — the process begins to reverse. It goes backwards, you savvy? Your sourness leaches away like old sap, and sooner or later you’re left with a flavorless mush, a grayish lump of proto-pickle that’s no use to anybody. Except in your great-granddad’s case. It was useful to him. That’s a genius for you. It got him cogitating, ruminating, chewing the proverbial cud. He started thinking about the chronosphere as a kind of cosmic brine.

Why — your great-granddad asked himself — do we think of time as running straight ahead, from past to future? Because we perceive it that way, you might answer — but that doesn’t cut the Poupon. To a Yanomamo on the banks of the Amazon, every river runs due east, toward the rising sun; and a Bedouin thinks the world is made of sand. Are the rest of us any better, really, physicists included? We’ve lost faith in our senses — and we were right to lose faith, because our senses are fucking pathetic. Why should we have faith in what they tell us about time?

That was when the Chronologists had to put the kibosh on the deal. Word got out that Ottokar was on the brink of a major discovery — one that could knock some heavy hitters out of business. His aversion to automobiles was well known, so it was decided, as a kind of crowning insult, to use a Daimler as the murder weapon. The “watch salesman,” Bachling, had just learned how to drive a car that morning. He was an underground Chronologist from Prague.

No clue where Genny scraped this stuff up, by the way. She used to say a talking cricket told her. No idea who the “Chronologists” were supposed to be, either. I doubt that Genny even knew herself.

Funny how well I remember all this antediluvian pucky.

Enzie didn’t believe all that hokum about the assassination and the Chronologists and whatnot, but old Genny sure as shit did. They didn’t agree about the Accidents either. To Enzie they were a phenomenon to be taken advantage of and harnessed, for chrononavigation and the like; to Genny they were something to be feared. How was human Progress with a capital P possible, was her thinking, when you might easily end up before you’d begun? It was the “grandmother paradox” all over again, but this time as an explanation for our failure as a species. Spiritually, morally — according to Genny, even scientifically — we’ve been killing our own grandmothers since we wriggled up out of the soup. That’s the reason she started the Archive. She wanted proof — in things you could actually pick up and hold — that mankind was learning from its mistakes.

Pickle is an Inherently Funny Word, did you know that? I read that somewhere. And the CIA, in certain circles, is referred to as the “Pickle Factory.” I tell you this for your edification, that’s all. Nothing to do with Genny. Make of it what you will or let it be.

It’s hard to say, Mrs. Haven, whether the paranoia on display here is my father’s or Genny’s — both became famous for it in the course of their lives. And even the earliest story of Orson’s that I’ve dug up, “Everywhen,” written sometime before his fourteenth birthday (when the twins, both twenty-six, were still living at home), has Gentian’s fingerprints all over it.

“Everywhen” recounts the adventures of Gargarin V, an interplanetary do-gooder who finds a mysterious artifact on a seemingly uninhabited moon. The object, which is fashioned out of a curiously weightless blue metal and resembles a gherkin ( make of that what you will , as Orson would say, or let it be ), is no inert archaeological relic: it’s a kind of bus pass, a “pan-dimensional transfer voucher” that entitles its owner to switch from his current timestream to any of the countless others in the “boundless, turgid KronoMultiVerse.” Gargarin finds this out by accident when he tosses the object to Ikthlb, his hermit-crab-like housepet and personal secretary. Catching the object in its mandibles, it disappears in a small-scale thermonuclear explosion; Gargarin, miraculously unhurt, wanders around the fizzling crater for an hour or so before bumping into Ikthlb, looking a bit worse for wear, still clutching the transfer voucher in its jaws.

“Where have you been, wretch?” Gargarin demands.

“Everywhen,” answers Ikthlb.

It then informs its master, not without a certain weary pride, that it’s been traveling through spacetime for two thousand years, popping up entirely at random, and that its return was no more than an accident.

Gargarin is ecstatic as Ikthlb explains about the space pickle’s power, imagining himself interceding at countless key moments in recorded history and beyond, all for the greater good of humankind. Alas, however, this is not to be. The story is an illustration of the well-known physics conundrum about traveling back in time and accidentally killing your grandmother, which would obviously erase you from existence, which in turn would make it impossible for you to travel back in time and accidentally kill your grandmother. As so often in my father’s fiction, the looming fear in “Everywhen” is not of death, but of limbo: what terrified Orson most wasn’t the thought of something horrendous happening, but the thought of nothing happening at all.