John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

Occasionally he sent a draft home to his sisters, accompanied by a note — half disclaimer, half challenge — instructing them to stop reading as soon as they got bored. Enzian took him at his word, rarely mentioning his writing in her matter-of-fact replies; Genny praised them to the stratosphere (“Just so promising, Peanut! A virus spread by a computer? Who on earth would have thought!!!”), which was somehow even more disheartening. He was selling regularly now to Preposterous! Stories , and to second-tier pulps with names like Dodecahedron and If ; but a sense of failure dogged him all the same. He tore open each envelope from Enzie eagerly, hoping in spite of himself for a word of encouragement, only to read yet another detailed account of Kaspar’s dementia, which by this point was advancing by the hour.

Orson had vowed to himself to remain in the Village until his twentieth birthday or until he got famous, whichever came first; but after a year and a half, from one day to the next, he packed his yellow steamer trunk (the same trunk Sonja had used, half a lifetime before, for her collection of white linen gowns) and migrated five miles north, to Spanish Harlem. The reason for this move remains obscure. It may have been that he felt like an expatriate there, surrounded by sprawling Puerto Rican and Dominican families, and that he found the feeling liberating; maybe he simply liked the lower rent. Or possibly — and this isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds — he’d caught a glimpse of his future at last, Mrs. Haven, and he knew that resistance was useless.

Kaspar died on November 5, 1964—the same month, according to legend, that Luchino Visconti began work, half a world away, on the screenplay of his masterpiece The Damned. It was also the year, appropriately enough, in which Irwin Shapiro of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology made use of astronomical radar (whatever that is) to measure the reduction in the speed of light rays traveling through the gravitational field of the sun, and found it in perfect accord with relativity’s predictions. (The deeper my research has led me into the history of my family, Mrs. Haven, the more this tripartite coincidence strikes me as the punch line to an elaborate vaudeville routine — but more on this later.) Genny informed Orson, by telegram, that their father had died in his sleep; in reality his last hours had been spent in precisely that state — at the mathematical midpoint between waking and dreaming — to which he’d devoted the final decade of his life.

Dying, Newton once wrote, is a polite undertaking, by definition the most self-effacing of acts; but even so, my grandfather’s demise was something of a pièce de résistance. He laid down his burden with so little fuss, in fact, that Enzian, who was sitting beside him on the chesterfield, noticed nothing until Genny called them to dinner. She’d been helping him to organize the photographs he’d brought from Vienna — the same parcel of blanched, water-stained images Orson had once attempted to make sense of. In all the years they’d lived at Pine Ridge Road, Enzian had never seen him look at them once; just that morning, however, he’d insisted they bring them into strict chronological order. They’d barely begun before his eyes had fallen closed.

Now she brought Genny in from the kitchen and they examined their father together. Neither had ever seen a cadaver, but they both knew they were looking at one now. A few errant snapshots lay curled in the crotch of his trousers, an improvised fig leaf in sepia and gray; moments before, they’d been rustling in time to his breath. Nothing out of the ordinary had occurred — no gasp, no thunderclap, no sudden chill — but the body had been utterly tranformed. It was evidence now, proof that something was missing, like the depression in a wheat field where a deer has spent the night.

For the first time since either could remember, the twins avoided looking at each other. Enzian had the impression — though she’d been back from the university for hours — of having come home an instant too late. Gentian felt a sudden urge to laugh.

“He’s got to the end of his term,” she said finally.

“He seems to have,” said Enzian. “Yes.”

“What do we do? Do we call the police?”

“If you care to. But first we call Orson.”

“But Enzie ,” said Genny, laughing in spite of herself. “He doesn’t even have a telephone!”

* * *

Orson missed the interment but arrived home in time for the memorial service, which was starkly lit and full of fish-faced strangers. It was held in the banquet hall of the Western New York Chapter of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, of which Kaspar turned out — to almost everyone’s amazement — to have been a member for twenty-two years. Orson kept to the back of the drop-ceilinged hall, humming to drown out the saccharine service; he tried to identify a single person in the room aside from his sisters and his uncle Wilhelm, but apparently Cheektowaga’s population had been swapped, during his absence, for a race of glassy-eyed automatons. That gave him the idea for a story, a good one, but he couldn’t get it clear — not at his father’s memorial service, no matter how emphatically he hummed. He slipped out midway through a eulogy by someone in a mud-colored toupee. Wilhelm was next, but the years hadn’t been kind to him, either — and in any case the story wouldn’t wait.

The contours of its plot were already starting to blur as Orson backed out of the hall, a sensation that never failed to rack him with anxiety. He shouldn’t have come, he realized: not to that god-awful service, not to Pine Ridge Road, not to Buffalo at all. The criminal returns to the scene of the crime, as every self-respecting genre jockey knows, at which point he gets locked up for life — if he’s lucky — or frizzled to death in the electric chair.

The fern-cluttered foyer was empty aside from Orson and a woman of about his age, with the stony, joyless look of a person who did something unappreciated for a living. She was standing with her arms tightly crossed, smoking one of those mentholated cigarettes that were all the rage in 1964, and ashing onto the potted fern behind her. Orson recognized her at once, though he counted down from ten, for precautionary reasons, before he dared to speak her name aloud.

“Hello, Ewa.”

“Welcome home, Orson. Thanks for getting in touch.”

There was a harshness to her that he couldn’t explain. “Genny told me you got married,” he said — and realized, as he said it, what the unappreciated thing must be. “You’ve got a kid, am I right? A daughter?”

“Don’t bullshit me, Orson. You don’t want to talk about my daughter. Children make your tonsils itch.”

What could she resent me for? Orson thought. Trying to talk her into leaving Cheektowaga? Not trying hard enough? What gives her the right? Indignation washed over him, quickly followed by pity — but the back of his throat began to itch regardless. At least I’m not sobbing, he thought. At least I’m not begging her to take me back. But he found, to his own astonishment, that the thought held no appeal for him. The itching in his throat was all he felt.

“I’ll never understand why—”

“Why what, Orson?”

“Why you never got away from here.”

“Is that right.”

“That you didn’t come with me — I can understand that, I guess. But that you stayed in this — in this place —”

“We can talk about it once you’ve gotten settled,” Ewa said, smiling. It wasn’t a well-intentioned smile. It seemed more like a leer of victory.

“Settled? What does that—”

“After you move back, I mean. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about it then.”