John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

It was a tiny place really, less than twelve blocks all told, but each visit yielded up some new discovery. In spite of their grandiose names — Plymouth, Hudson, Gold, Pearl — the streets were narrow and dark, making unforeseen turns, often stopping short without the slightest warning. In the courtyard of an egg-yolk-colored building at the corner of Water and Gold, Buddhist monks played basketball on sunny afternoons, holding the hems of their vestments in one hand and dribbling with the other; from the roof of a rimless Buick at the foot of Jay Street, a Korean War veteran who answered to the name of “Mr. Bread” delivered lectures on Marxist ethics to indifferent passersby. Mr. Bread recognized Orson as a brother in literary arms, and paid him the compliment of sending him on the occasional errand to Brooklyn Heights, usually to pick up ointment for his perpetually bandaged shins. Adrift as he was, Orson happily obliged.

On the afternoon in question, in exchange for a bottle of aspirin, Mr. Bread gave my father a piece of advice. “Get a job,” he said, chewing the aspirin like candy. “Get a job, Tolliver, and get your hair cut. Not necessarily in that order.”

“I have a job,” said Orson. “I’m a writer.”

“A job ,” Mr. Bread repeated.

“I’m surprised to hear that from you,” replied Orson. “Whatever happened to the great class struggle?”

“The time for revolution is not yet ripe.”

There was no arguing with that, Mrs. Haven, so he didn’t try.

“I’ve never had a job. A real one, I mean.”

Mr. Bread made a gesture — a comfortable twitch of the shoulders — to indicate the self-evidence of this statement.

“I might as well do something with my time, I guess, since I can’t seem to write. But I wouldn’t know where—”

“Power plant’s hiring. Security work. Nothing to do all day but sit on your culo and dream about Jackie Kennedy’s unmentionables.”

Orson narrowed his eyes. “Why don’t you take the job, if it’s such a hayride?”

“I have a job,” Mr. Bread said proudly. “I’m a writer.”

* * *

The Hudson/Gold Power Generating Station was a stone’s toss from Mr. Bread’s roadster. My father set out without much hope or ambition, straightening a borrowed paisley tie; he didn’t expect much, for various reasons, and by the time he knew better — as is often the case, Mrs. Haven, with blows to the head by the hammer of fate — there was nothing left to do but cry to heaven.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Orson heard himself shout.

He’d just rounded the corner of Plymouth and Gold — a quaint little cluster of houses, worlds removed from the warehouses and garment factories behind him — and had caught his first glimpse of the station. It was colossal, fortresslike, far more forbidding than he’d imagined; but he barely took in such mundane details. What knocked him sideways was the flickering sign, gaudy as a Times Square marquee, that hung suspended from its massive gate:

WELCOME TO THE HUDSON * GOLD POWER

GENERATING * STATION. 0062 HOURS

WITHOUT A LOST * TIME ACCIDENT.

The world went unnaturally quiet: he heard nothing but the humming of high-tension wires and the rush of blood to his bewildered brain. A man in his thirties, in security grays, took his measure from the window of a hut.

“Sign needs changing,” the man said. “We’re way past sixty-two.”

“What exactly—” said Orson, then ran out of breath. “What exactly is a lost time accident?”

“Sixty-two hours isn’t even three whole days. Today’s what — Tuesday? Tuesday the seventeenth?”

Orson managed to nod.

“There you go,” said the guard. “It’s been three weeks at least.”

“I still don’t understand—”

“What are you here for, son? You one of them power freaks?”

“Not at all,” Orson answered, holding up both his hands. “I’m not sure what that means, to be honest. I’m here about the job.”

The guard pursed his lips. “And what job would that be?”

“Well—” He hesitated. “Your job, I guess.”

The guard scrutinized him for a full minute, which is a long time to look someone dead in the eye without saying a word. His cap, which was peaked and black and seemed slightly too tight, put Orson more in mind of a school-bus driver than an agent of the law.

“The night shift, I’m thinking,” the guard said finally.

“The night shift,” Orson said. “Sure.”

“I work days.”

“Okay.” Orson nodded. “Do you think—”

“They’re not seeing people at present. Later on, maybe.”

“How much later?”

The guard stared at him blankly.

“I’m sorry, but I was given to understand—”

“I can’t let you in at this time,” the guard said, not unkindly. “You can wait on that chair over there.”

Orson followed his gaze to a low wooden stool, the kind shoeshine boys sat on, propped against the chain-link fence. “Okay, then,” he said.

“Okay, then,” said the guard.

“What’s a lost time accident?”

The guard nodded shrewdly. “Best to ask them inside.”

“Fair enough,” said Orson. He stood still for a moment, then leaned sideways and peered through the gate.

“Go ahead and try it, if you’re tempted. Keep one thing in mind, though — I take my work seriously.”

“What?” said Orson. “No, no! I wasn’t thinking—”

“And I’m just the first guard. There’s others inside, and they’re not as sweet-natured as I am.”

“I had no intention—”

“This here is Hudson Gate. The next gate is Compound; the third one’s Facility. I may not look like much, but you should see the guy at Compound.” The guard shook his head. “The guy at Facility even scares me.”

Orson sat down on the little stool.

“ Now you’re using your bean,” said the guard.

* * *

Over the next several hours, watching the sun decline behind the station’s soot-streaked ramparts, Orson came nearer to grasping the concept of infinity than he ever had before. To increase time’s velocity, he told the guard what little he knew of his family’s past, from his grandfather’s discovery in Znojmo to his father’s escape from Vienna. He hoped to get the guard to reciprocate, perhaps even to divulge the secrets of the Hudson/Gold Power Generating Station, or at least of its cryptic marquee; but his hope was in vain. The guard listened to his stories willingly — appreciatively, even — but he met each question about the station with a noncommital smile.

My father began to imagine himself sitting propped against that chain-link fence for the remainder of his extension into the fourth dimension, fashioning a life for himself with only the guard and the river for company. He saw himself growing progressively slacker and more hunched as his body conformed to the stool, waiting for word from the station that never arrived. After fifty-odd years he’d simply wither away to nothing; before he expired, however, he’d beckon to the guard, who would kneel down to receive his dying words. How can it be , he would gasp, that in the half century I’ve spent sitting next to this gate, no one else has ever tried to enter?

He was in the middle of deciding what the answer might be when the guard stepped to the gate and waved him in. To his disappointment, the interview took place in a Quonset hut a few yards inside the fence, not within the facility proper. It consisted of exactly six questions, the last of which was whether he’d ever done time. Before he’d even gotten his bearings, he was back at the guardhouse with a brown paper bundle in his hands. He hadn’t been told what the bundle contained, but he was guessing a uniform, a flashlight, and a cap that would make him look more like a school-bus driver than an agent of the law.