John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“The suburbs,” he once told an interviewer, “tend to have that effect on a person.”

Ignoring Ikthlb’s warning that the metallic blue phallus in his hand is uncontrollable, Gargarin bites into it and instantly finds himself neck-deep in the primordial muck. (Pretty good for a thirteen-year-old, Mrs. Haven, you’ve got to admit.) He makes countless transfers before finding himself somewhere useful: the meeting of two infamous “astral war criminals” at a remote mountain fortress near the planet’s southern pole. Not surprisingly, the war criminals object to Gargarin’s visit, and our hero is forced to bite the proverbial gherkin again, making good his escape without accomplishing — in the words of the author—“bugger-all for humankind.”

And so it goes, Mrs. Haven, for the next sixteen pages. Our hero is ineffectual, impotent, prevented time and time again from taking action. After untold further transfers, he finds himself back in the Midwestern town he was born in, on the precise day and hour of his birth; and the cosmic bus pass — in a classic Orson Card Tolliver ex machina — chooses this time and place, of all possible times and places, to expire.

Juicy premise aside, “Everywhen” is a hopeless hack job, pocked with flubs and misspellings and shamelessly bruise-colored prose; somebody must have said something nice about it, however, because Orson churned out nineteen more stories by the end of that year. Even after Kaspar and Wilhelm had convinced old man Opchik — Kaiserwerks’s bitterest rival — to back a venture into ladies’ wristwatches (dirt-cheap bobby-soxers’ geegaws, with imitation-silk wristbands, that actually kept decent time) and the family moved into a house of its own in Cheektowaga, on the manicured outskirts of town, Enzie and Genny decided to keep sharing a bedroom, in part so their brother would have space to work. Orson’s one-man exodus from consensus reality began in earnest at 308 Pine Ridge Road, and the twins did everything they could to encourage it, never having had much use for reality themselves.

* * *

The year 1954 was not a trivial one for the nation: the Supreme Court declared segregation illegal in May, Elvis had his radio debut two months later, and the plug was finally pulled on Senator McCarthy’s spook hunt in time for the holiday rush. But you won’t find any of this in young Orson’s notebooks or in his sisters’ diaries, although they subscribed to the Buffalo Courier-Express and The New York Times , along with twelve pop-science magazines, seven physics periodicals, and The Ladies’ Home Journal . In spite of its wraparound porch and its shutterless windows and its ample front yard graced by prairie grasses, the new house was even more funereal than the one on Voorhees Avenue had been. For the entirety of that first year on Pine Ridge Road, Wilhelm and his confidant of the moment (a freckle-faced dental technician from Fort Erie, Ontario) were the only visitors who stayed for dinner. The reason was simple: Kaspar gave no sign of caring about anything any longer — with the notable exception of ladies’ wristwatches — and Enzian and Gentian had exactly one friend between them, who had wings and six legs, and only showed up every seven years.

Orson, contrariwise, had a handful of bona fide flesh-and-blood pals during high school, and even — temporarily — a girlfriend. He now spent his Saturdays in the science fiction annex of Cosgrove’s Book & Vitamin Emporium (just down the aisle from the German/Yiddish section, where his father had glimpsed his mother in her shirt and dungarees), debating the relative merits of Philip José Farmer and Algis Burdrys with a hollow-eyed beatnik known only as Norm. Orson never once brought Norm home — in part because Norm was undeniably creepy, in part because the twins were even creepier. Besides, he had his writing to attend to.

What Kaspar thought of his son’s literary pretensions was anyone’s guess, but it didn’t much matter: his daughters called the shots at Pine Ridge Road by then. Since graduating from Bennett High School — Genny by the skin of her teeth, Enzie with A’s in everything but French — the twins had turned their mannish backsides on the world in earnest. Like the two-headed eagle of the old Habsburg Empire, Enzie and Genny presided over their decrepit realm grimly but fiercely, discouraging all but the most necessary change.

Certain changes, however, were beyond their power to suppress.

Ewa Ruszczyk was a wicker-haired nymphet with green eyes and undersized thumbs that she tucked into her fists out of embarrassment, which occasionally meant that Orson — when all his secret stars were in alignment — was permitted to carry her books. An interest in science wasn’t yet a social disease in the fifties, and even science fiction had a certain bucktoothed glamour — girls read sci-fi back then, or at least Ewa Ruszczyk did, which was more than enough for my father. She lived at 41 Sycamore, just off the creek, with six towheaded siblings and a mother who seemed airlifted straight from Nowy Sácz; she spoke English with a slight Polish accent that embarrassed her even more acutely than her misproportioned thumbs (which were lovely, of course, and no cause for embarrassment at all). Orson informed her solemnly, on his seventeenth book-schlepping outing, that his current favorite author was Stanisław Lem, who came from the same town in the Carpathians that Mama Ruszczyk did. Ewa blushed and said that Lem was her father’s favorite author, as well — she couldn’t read him herself, unfortunately, because his books were available only in Polish. Could Orson read Polish?

Orson assured her, incorrectly, that he could. Ewa Ruszczyk was appropriately amazed. And still it took him six synchronous rotations of the moon around the planet to lure her to 308 Pine Ridge Road.

The house was dark when they got there, an auspicious sign, but Orson proceeded with caution. He’d been casing his own home for weeks, taking note of all comings and goings, and had settled on Thursday between 16:15 and 17:00 EST. Forty-five minutes wasn’t much, admittedly, but it was the length of gym period, not counting showers. He’d timed himself, using a Kaiserwerks Mary Queen of Scots model wristwatch, taking each of his favorite books— Childhood’s End, More Than Human, Pebble in the Sky, A Voyage to Arcturus —down from the shelf above his bed, and giving a bare-bones synopsis of each. It took him exactly fourteen minutes, which (allowing no more than eight minutes for getting Cokes out of the icebox, opening them, ascending the staircase, polite conversation, etc.) still left twenty-three minutes for doing things he didn’t dare to name.

“It’s nifty in here,” Ewa said, once they’d locked his bedroom door behind them. “But it’s also kind of hard to see.”

“Sorry,” Orson murmured, fumbling noisily with his bedside lamp. He’d been prepared for anything but her absolute aplomb.

“Was there maybe a book ,” Ewa said, “that you wanted to show me?”

“ The Softest Gun ,” Orson heard himself stammer; but she was already reaching for the shelf above his bed. She was dressed in a fuzzy white cardigan and high-waisted slacks, like thousands of other girls across America — but by that point he’d forgotten any other girls existed. If he’d ever seen any paintings of babushka-wearing maidens sowing wheat, he might have been able to put Ewa’s thick-limbed beauty into context: she looked perfectly capable of eating him in two or three quick bites, like a blini. She held the paperback in question a few inches from her face — she was severely myopic, which gave her what Orson considered a dreamy look — and sucked demurely on her lower lip. He took the book from her hands impatiently, peevishly almost, and began declaiming from a random page: