John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“What’s your trouble, grandpop?” said my father, whose manners hadn’t been done any favors by the move to New York. “Don’t you care for my looks?”

“It’s not cards to read the future with. Tarock, it’s called — not tarotové karty . A game only. Try to tell the future and you’ll see.”

“See what, exactly?”

The Czech made no reply. Orson gave him his most hard-boiled squint.

“Who said anything about the future, anyhow?”

“No one plays this game anymore,” said the shopkeeper. “Not around here.” He coughed into his beard. “There used to be clubs.”

Orson flipped the topmost card over: a face card, identical to the one he’d seen through the window. Heavier than a poker card, and cut from stiffer stock. “My grandfather used to play this game,” he said. “What’s this first one — the joker?”

“No jokers in tarock,” harrumphed the shopkeeper.

“What’s the name of this card, then?”

“I don’t know in English.”

“Then tell me in German. Or in Czech. Whichever.”

The old man shrugged his shoulders. “In French it was called L’excuse. ”

Orson frowned and brought the card up to the light. A wavy-haired man in what might either have been the costume of a soldier or a harlequin held a saucer-shaped hat on which another man, dressed in the same gaudy outfit, was dancing. This dancer, who was roughly squirrel-sized, held a hat in his own hand, no bigger than an espresso cup, into which the wavy-haired man was pointing, as if there were something of significance inside. The effect was agreeably dizzying, like tracing the curve of a Möbius strip. The image itself was like a Möbius strip, come to think of it: an infinite loop with a twist in the middle. It represented something — that much was clear — though God alone knew what that thing might be.

“Where were these cards made?”

“I don’t know,” said the shopkeeper. “Vienna, maybe.”

“How do you play?”

“It goes counterclockwise.”

“Counterclockwise,” said Orson. He thought for a moment. “I was reading something about that just this morning. It’s supposed to be the direction the Milky Way spins.”

“ That ,” said the shopkeeper, “depends on who’s looking. You never heard of relativity?”

Orson held up the fool. “How much do you want for this card?”

“For the card I want nothing. For the deck, twenty bucks.”

The price was outrageous — a three-course dinner at the Old Homestead Steak House — but my father paid it. He was a young man of means, after all.

“It’s not for telling the future,” the Czech repeated, stuffing the bills into his jacket pocket. “You heard me, smarty kalhoty ? No moneys back.”

* * *

The truth was that Orson badly needed a glimpse of the future just then. He’d arrived in New York flush with the sense of clairvoyance all bright young men have, confident of the world’s submissiveness; the world, however, had seen no pressing reason to oblige. Ewa Ruszczyk’s cousin had told him to “go fry a duck” when he’d shown up at Forty-Second Street, then kicked the door shut in his face, and the next four years had been a series of variations on this theme. The city was mysteriously indifferent to his fate.

It pains me to admit it, Mrs. Haven, but la vie bohème was wasted on my father. According to his letters home, he spent his first twelve months in a cold-water studio on Christopher and Seventh, just three doors down from the Village Vanguard, without ever once looking inside. He didn’t go in for jazz (“the musical equivalent of aftershave,” he said to me once) and marijuana made him laugh at things that weren’t funny. He kept to himself for the most part, eating tepid knishes on piss-smelling benches and sulking in secondhand bookshops; his acquaintances ranged from hopheads to wallflowers to bottom-tier grifters (“ectoplasmic hookworms,” in Orson-speak), none of whom he actually liked. The Village was at its sociohistoric apogee in those years — its most self-obsessed and manic and debauched — but Orson might as well have stayed in Cheektowaga.

To be fair to my father, he logged his due share of hours in the coffee shops, notebook in hand, and he did give dissipation a go every once in a while, in a halfhearted way; but he’d chosen the only neighborhood in America, it seemed, where wealth was considered a social disease. The first girl he’d told about his inheritance — late one Saturday night, at the Kettle of Fish — had spit in his lager and lifted his wallet. What was worse, when he’d finally caught up with her a few nights later, holding court on the very same barstool, she hadn’t been a bit apologetic.

“You’re a Jew, Tolliver. You’ve got plenty of lettuce.”

“I’m actually not Jewish, technically speaking,” he’d found himself mumbling, which hadn’t been what he’d meant to say at all.

“Don’t try to flimflam me , Lord Fauntleroy. Your sisters used to read you to sleep with the Talmud.”

“Who told you that?”

“You did,” she’d said, turning back to her grog. “Last Saturday night. Right before you started bawling like a baby.”

An error had been made, Orson decided: a miscalculation, either in his estimation of the Village or in the Village’s estimation of him. He’d had only the vaguest of hopes for his life as an artist — Rothko-like puffs of color, too diffuse to call daydreams — but the city’s indifference had snuffed even those. Peers and fellow travelers were hard to find, girlfriends next to impossible. Literary pretensions were derided — excoriated, really — in the Bleecker Street cafés: not because they seemed bold, but because everybody and his mother had literary pretensions. Girls who cared about books went for Sexton and Sartre; science fiction, according to their boyfriends (novelists all, naturellement ), was for Ukrainian immigrants and nose-picking teens. Orson got his own nose bloodied more than once in defense of the genre, and inevitably staggered home in tears, which only served to prove the boyfriends’ point. Ambition and talent (and lettuce) notwithstanding, my father was still, by anyone’s yardstick, a teenager himself.

It was only to be expected, given this state of affairs, that Orson pined for big-boned, sloe-eyed Ewa Ruszczyk; but the predictability of his loneliness depressed him even more. He was a writer, and allergic — or so he flattered himself — to the marzipan-like odor of cliché. Ewa had decided, at the last possible instant, not to run away with Orson. The last he’d heard, she was “going steady” (hateful phrase!) with a thirty-year-old ROTC recruiter. He’d expected so much more of her. Who was his audience now?

On his last night in Buffalo, by way of a consolation prize, Ewa had picked him up in her father’s Montclair and driven him out to the Bird Island pier, where she’d folded down the backseat, spread out a camping blanket, and proceeded to undress herself completely — socks, barrette, sugar-free chewing gum and all. He’d been picturing her naked body at fifteen-minute intervals for the better part of a year, in every conceivable attitude; but this once, Mrs. Haven, his imagination had failed him. She was even downier than he’d imagined, and her breasts were heavier, which was glorious and frightening at once. The skin there was pale, almost bluish, which surprised him most of all — he’d expected her to be golden brown all over. Commit this to memory, Orson , he’d said to himself, as she pulled him down onto the blanket. If you retain one single hour of your duration, make it this.

* * *

My father did have one great advantage over his beret-sporting, bop-listening, café-haunting literary rivals, Mrs. Haven, which was that he actually wrote. He was churning out stories, in fact, at a clip that would have sent even Philip K. Dick fumbling for his inhaler. “Plexiglass Children,” “The Curious Splotches,” “BIEHXIXHEIB,” and “The Voyage of the Silver Esophagus,” to name just a few: some of Orson’s best-known stories date from his self-imposed exile on Christopher Street. Beatnik snobs notwithstanding, these were sci-fi’s boom years, and the hunger of the pulps was never slaked. His dirty work sold more quickly and made him more money, but even his respectable material (“your dry-pussy stories,” as his DarkEncounters editor so decorously put it) managed to see the light of day from time to time. He referred to defeat, in his diary, as “eating a death biscuit,” and saved his rejection slips with the masochistic relish of a natural-born hack.