John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

Unbelievably, miraculously, the bulb was intact. I let out a groan of thanksgiving and got to my feet, guiding myself upward by the stem of the lamp. I hesitated briefly at the top, held back by a sudden misgiving: that the power to the apartment had been cut.

The implications of this made me slightly woozy. Is it possible that my temporal isolation operates in one direction only — that the timestream can still affect me, even though I’ve been excised from time? With this troubling thought I roused myself from my reverie and reached up, under the lampshade, to unscrew the dead bulb and replace it.

But there was no bulb to replace, Mrs. Haven. There was no bulb in the socket of the lamp.

As I stood motionless with the lamp stem in my right hand and the lightbulb in my left, hearing nothing but my own dumbfounded wheezing, something gradually impinged on my awareness. I’d been conscious of it for some time, in the way that I was conscious of the clothing I wore, or of the floor beneath my feet: I’d sensed it without giving it a thought.

Someone else was in the room, close beside me in the darkness, breathing in time with my breath.

I let out a squeal, choked and childlike, that died almost before it left my throat. There was someone else there. Someone was trying to match me breath for breath, to hide in my biorhythm, and was almost succeeding. I turned around slowly, keeping my hand on the lamp stem, and guided the bulb into the empty socket. I was facing him now. I seemed to feel his scentless breath against my skin.

“I want to know who you are,” I said into the blackness.

I gave the bulb one full turn. The ghostly breathing seemed to have stopped, or to have conformed to my own more precisely. I turned it again.

“I want to know who you are ,” I repeated. “I want to know why you’re doing this to me.”

A great distance away, at the margin of hearing, a board seemed to creak.

“Show yourself!” I shouted, giving the bulb a third and final twist.

My mistake, I see now, was to keep my eyes open as the light came on. I recoiled backward into the card table, knocking half the pile of books onto the floor, then doubled over and dug my palms into my eyes. A stream of burning afterimages roiled across my sight, in one of which I saw — or thought I saw — a human figure. But by the time my sight had cleared the room was empty.

On the floor behind my armchair, within arm’s reach of the Archive, a fractured snow globe glittered in the light. It had held water once; now it held only soot. I looked closer and discovered a postapocalyptic Forty-Second Street, the block just east of Grand Central, as desolate and caked with grime as this apartment. The Chrysler Building jutted like a starship from the dust.

AMBITIOUS AS SHE WAS in her blank, brutal way, Enzian had never pictured herself out in the world — out among the ignorant, the time-bound, the conventionally human — and least of all in the role of messiah. This wasn’t due to any doubt as to her own charisma (she’d been blessed with an almost fanatical belief in her suitability for pretty much everything) but because she herself had decided, nearly two decades earlier, that her brother would be the one to play that part. Not decided , she reminded herself. Nothing had been decided, not then or ever. Only foreseen.

Orson kept his distance from her now, whether out of anger or embarrassment she couldn’t have said; and her disappointment was still so severe, so painful to her, that it was safer for them both if he kept clear. The contract between them had been straightforward and fair — generous, really — and he had broken it. If Enzian had had her way — if Kaspar hadn’t opposed her with the last of his vitality — she’d have turned her brother out into the street.

Kaspar was fading perceptibly, growing smaller and more diffuse each time she looked, like the traveler waving from a moving train in the classic physics problem. There was a geometry to her father’s enfeeblement, a mathematical precision that suited them both, and which allowed her to observe its progression without losing her head to sentiment or panic. The heavy hair of which he’d always been so vain, and which had kept its chestnut color well into his sixties, now showed the shape of his skull when the light was behind it, and his square plowman’s shoulders had started to slump. He’d never been a handsome man — even Enzian knew that — but he’d somehow seemed more manly for his plainness. Now the sexlessness of old age had engulfed him. His hearing was failing, he’d taken to falling asleep at the dinner table, and she could hear his labored breathing through the bedroom wall at night. The end of Kaspar’s term was fast approaching.

What Gentian’s thoughts were with regard to this fact, or to her sister’s decision to take up the Tolliver mantle, or to any of the other upheavals at Pine Ridge Road that year, was far more difficult for Enzian to discern. Which is not to say there weren’t certain clues.

“By the way,” Gentian said, as she was clearing the table one evening. “Your friend came to the window last night. I let him in. We had ourselves a little heart-to-heart.”

Enzian, who’d just come down from tucking Kaspar into bed, cocked her head at her sister. “What’s that, Genny? Which friend? I have no—”

“Ottokar.”

“I don’t understand. Little Ottokar, the Ungeziefer ? From back when we were girls?”

Gentian nodded without looking up. “We thought about waking you, of course, but you’d been up so late studying for that ballistics midterm. He’ll be back soon, though. He said so.”

Gentian’s manner was as matter-of-fact as ever: her voice betrayed no urgency, no acknowledgment that what she was saying was in any way unusual. She might have been talking about one of Orson’s classmates, or about Calvin Huber, the man who read the gas meter each month — though in that case she’d have been a bit more flustered. She had a schoolgirl’s crush on Calvin Huber.

“It’s 1957, Genny,” Enzian said at last. “We’re twenty-eight years old.”

“Do you want to hear what Ottokar had to tell me?”

Enzian could count on one hand the number of times she’d been at a loss for words with her sister. “You?” she said finally. “What Ottokar had to tell you ?”

Gentian gave an absent little nod.

“What was it?”

“He’s proud of you, Enzie.” Gentian smoothed down her apron. “Just like the rest of us are.”

Enzian felt herself redden. “Well! That’s kind of you to say, Genny. I’d been hoping—”

“Yes, Enzie. Of course. But you’re making a terrible mistake.”

Everything hushed as she said this — all the manifold small workings of the house. Enzian could feel the hush against her ears, cool and flat, as if the room had been depressurized. Then slowly — one by one, it seemed — the noises returned. She heard her father cough and turn in bed.

“What mistake am I making?”

“Oh! He never said that ,” Genny singsonged, gliding off into the kitchen.

* * *

Enzian had plenty of worries in her debut year as a physicist, from her father’s poor health to her brother’s defection to her sister’s unchecked eccentricity; but material concerns were not among them. Through some dark, occult bargain she never quite grasped — and which thrilled and alarmed her in equal measure — Warranted Tolliver Timepieces, Inc., grew in inverse proportion to Kaspar’s decline. Whatever it was he’d been doing from sunrise to sunset in his drop-ceilinged office downtown, he’d been doing it preposterously well. It would stand as the crowning irony of my grandfather’s irony-bedeviled duration that the most unilateral of his withdrawals from the world was the most richly rewarded venture of his life.