John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Move back?” said Orson, his mind going blank. “I’m not going to move back, Ewa. Where did you hear—”

“Your sister told me.”

Orson’s scalp started to prickle. “Jesus Christ. I knew Enzie was nuts, but where she got that idea—”

“It wasn’t Enzie that told me.”

“What—” He closed his eyes. “It wasn’t? You mean—”

“That’s right, city boy. It was Genny.”

That yanked the rug out from under him completely. He shook his head and gave a frightened sneeze.

“I guess we’ll be seeing each other around,” said Ewa, flicking her cigarette into a corner. “I’m looking forward to it. You can tell me about your fabulous career.”

“I’m never ,” Orson got out finally. “I’m never moving back here.” But his voice was drowned out by polite applause.

* * *

Orson left the next morning on the 20th Century Limited, the earliest possible train, after a night unlike any he’d passed with his sisters before. Enzie, normally so austere, had sat slumped at the dinner table, staring at her pork chop as if expecting it to speak; Genny had been giddier than ever, babbling about all and sundry, barely able to sit still long enough to eat. Orson had studied her closely, trying to puzzle out the meaning of what she’d told Ewa Ruszczyk. The only explanation Genny had offered — grudgingly, it had seemed to him — was that “a little birdy” had told her he’d be moving home.

“A little birdy, Genny? What’s that supposed to—”

“Not a birdy , exactly,” she’d said, smiling down at her plate.

“She told herself,” Enzie had muttered darkly. “She told herself, by God. And she believed it.”

His sisters’ unmooring hit him harder than his father’s death had done. He’d been resisting them both for the whole of his adult life, for no better reason than their irresistibility: they’d been preternatural to him, less elder sisters than de facto parents, less parents than agents of some arrogant, exacting cosmic will. But this had changed with Kaspar’s passing, changed radically and without warning, as if his dying breath had tripped some hidden wire. The twins may have been absolute rulers of the world they’d created, but their father — at least toward the end of his term — had been their sole remaining subject. They had no one left to rule now but themselves.

* * *

If any doubt persisted that the earth had shifted subtly on its axis — that the time, at least for Orson, was severely out of joint — his second escape from Buffalo erased it. He ought to have felt exhilaration at sidestepping Genny’s prophecy, or at least some modest measure of relief; instead he spent his first week back in Spanish Harlem in his star-spangled pajamas (a gift from Genny on his fifteenth birthday), drinking beer and feeling sorry for himself. The apartment smelled faintly of cat piss, he was sure of it, though he had no cats and neither did his neighbors. Maybe I’ll have cats in the future , he said to himself. Maybe I have cats right now, in dimension X/12. I’ll have to ask my sisters about that.

He let out a groan at this thought and crawled back into bed. The vertigo he’d picked up at the Odd Fellows Hall had grown sharper with time, and his lunatic family — Genny, especially — seemed to have permanently colonized his dreams. Worst of all, that awful run-in with Ewa had shone a new light on his Great Emancipation: his monomaniacal pursuit of the artist’s life seemed less an act of heroism, suddenly, than one of adolescent self-indulgence. He could be viewed as a dilettante, he realized: a privileged snob, a hack with delusions of grandeur, no different than the turtlenecked deep-thinkers he looked down on. His hometown had endured — had refused to expire, to implode, to break down into its component particles — in spite of the fact that he’d abandoned it. Just the opposite: in his absence, it seemed to have thrived.

The upshot of this new understanding was that, for the first time since he’d moved to New York City — for the first time since he’d hit puberty, in fact — my father couldn’t write to save his life. The trip home had only reinforced his resolve to make art for himself , not his sisters, and he stuck to his ban on time travel, going so far as to outlaw the mention of time in his stories altogether; far from setting him free, however, this last decision crippled him completely. He’d long since discovered that time (beyond its obvious importance) was wondrously useful as a descriptive tool, sometimes even as a metaphor: it was invaluable in writing about sex and robotics and beauty and the vastness of space, to name a few favorite topics. There was a catch, however, an unforeseen con, which was that sex and robotics and beauty and the vastness of space (not to mention love, and death, and even good old-fashioned human consciousness) seemed to Orson, more often than not, to be metaphors for writing about time.

My father began no fewer than thirty-nine stories that spring, some of which (“The Pumpless Pump,” “The Marsupial Light & Power Company,” “An Experiment in Gyro-Hats”) he kept in a drawer for the next forty years, which means he must have seen potential in them. The only story he actually finished, however — a six-page cavalcade of unsavoriness whose title, “In No Particular Odor,” pretty much says it all — was such a spectacular stinker that even DarkEncounters wouldn’t touch it. By August he’d thrown in the towel altogether.

For a few days he tried to teach himself tarock, sliding the cards lackadaisically around on the floor with his toes; but he was in no state to learn anything by then. He ranged farther and farther on his afternoon walks, less out of curiosity or a sense of adventure than to put off the return to his apartment. The hour before sunset — which had always been the most productive of his day — now found him shuffling in circles in Morningside Park, or in the rococo lobby of the Woolworth Building, or on the wooden walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Drifting brought on a numbness, a bearable remove from the facts of his duration, at least if he roamed far enough. For the first week he brought along a pocket notebook, in case inspiration should strike; then a folded sheet of stationery; then a napkin or a page torn from the Times . By September he’d stopped carrying even that.

It was on one of these daily forced marches — a little longer than most, perhaps, but in no way unusual — that he was catapulted clear of his despond. Aimless as his rambles seemed, they tended to take him downtown more often than up, and to Brooklyn more often than he could explain. He’d grown fascinated, in a numb sort of way, by the spatial dynamics between the two immense bridges, which lifted off from far-flung locations near the tip of Manhattan only to touch down in Brooklyn at virtually the same coordinates in space. Their geometry made his synapses fire in the same way that the tarock deck had done: an idea was being expressed — this time on the grandest possible scale — and though its meaning kept its distance he could feel it in his body, as a buzzing in his cortex and his spine.

The pie wedge of buildings enclosed by this confluence — which had precisely the same proportions as the triangle formed by the bridges’ great twinned arcs across the river — was one of the most obscure precincts in the city, bordered on two sides by stone-and-brickwork thoroughfares and on the third by the river itself. It had no name, only a postal code. The landlords and warehouse foremen were generally Hasidic, the workers Puerto Rican or Polish. At times Orson had the feeling that he was trespassing in some private and melancholy city, one that magically mirrored his own state of mind.