John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

As its name implied, the deck was derived from the tarot, which had infiltrated Europe from Egypt in the late Rennaissance. The origin of the Sküs , however — the joker-like card that had first caught my father’s attention — was a mystery. No such card existed in the Arab tradition, or in any other deck of the ancient world. The game of tarock predated the use of the cards for occult purposes by three centuries, though certain cards — the Sküs among them — were rumored to have been made use of by alchemists (no one quite knew how) to gain access to the wisdom of past ages. The fool on the Sküs had taken many forms over the centuries, from bearskin-sporting hobo to lute-strumming courtier to urchin to dwarf; the illustration on Orson’s deck, however, was the only one to display that curious, Escher-like circularity.

He brought the book nearer to the light and kept reading, concentrating on the fool card now. In tarock, the Sküs ( L’excuse in French) is the deck’s highest trump, but it has no rank or value of its own. Alone among the trumps, L’excuse has no number: its power emerges only in challenge to another card. Orson began to understand its appeal for him now, since he often felt that way about himself.

He took the card from the floor and regarded it fondly. Like the Sküs , he was a born contrarian, and — like the fool on the card, like madmen and jesters and clowns throughout the ages — the nonsense he spouted could serve, if used artfully, as a vessel for ideas that couldn’t otherwise be spoken. He thought of Enzian at the university, and of Waldemar before her, and of what little he understood about his “mad” grandfather’s work. “The fool,” he muttered to himself, staring down at the card, “ought to be on our family crest.”

What Orson didn’t realize — not on that first evening; not yet — was that he would be the one to put it there.

* * *

The telephone rang at Pine Ridge Road a few days later, and Genny went to answer it, thinking it must be someone from Warranted Tolliver Timepieces. It was the first time that the phone had rung all week.

“I’m working on something,” said the caller before she could speak.

“Peanut! Is that you? Enzie and I were just saying — both of us — how nice it would be to hear from you. It’s not as though we can call you up, you know.”

“I know that, Genny. I’ll get a telephone soon. Then you can call me whenever you want.”

“Well! We’d certainly appreciate that. ” She hummed to herself for a moment in the odd, nervous way she had when she was pleased. “You’re working on a story, did you say?”

“I’m working on a novel.”

“A novel ! My goodness, Peanut! What about?”

“It’s about time, believe it or not. A variation on what Ouspensky calls ‘Möbius time’ in The Hydra-Headed Hourglass. The basic idea is that time, which seems to be running straight ahead from any given point — just as the earth seems flat, from any one perspective — might in fact be ‘feeding back’ into itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail. If that snake were long enough — it would have to be really gigantic, of course — it might appear straight, because the curve wouldn’t be visible, you see? Like a Möbius strip, that has either one side or two, depending on how you choose to think about it. It’s chronologic time considered as a kind of sleight-of-hand trick, really. I got the idea from a deck—”

“Where are you calling from, Peanut? You sound fuzzy.”

Orson cleared his throat. “From a pay phone.”

“You really must get a line of your own. Is it cold where you are?”

“Not as cold as in Buffalo.”

“It’s important to eat, you know, when it gets cold. You need calories to help you keep warm. Have you been taking the vitamin caplets I sent?”

An awkward pause ensued.

“Genny, can I talk to Enzie now?”

“Of course you can, Peanut! How silly of me! I’ll go get her.”

But Enzian, as usual, turned out to be indisposed.

* * *

To the end of his days, my father viewed The Excuse as his proudest achievement, and it was a milestone for him without question: both his first published novel and his last attempt to keep within the bounds of decency. He wrote the first eleven chapters in a trance, narcotized by the story he was spinning, by the radical idea that lay hidden behind it, and by his fervent belief that the fruits of his labor would free him of the family curse forever. The Excuse was no antiseptic exercise, no half-baked scientific treatise smeared with narrative frosting, as the bulk of his fiction had been. It was no more and no less, Mrs. Haven, than a reckoning — in extravagant, ham-fisted, desperate terms — with the Syndrome itself.

Ozymandias Hume, the book’s protagonist, is the scion of an haute-bourgeoisie family whose fortune was made in the licorice trade, but whose clandestine passion — passed from generation to generation, like a weakness for drink — is the use of the tarock deck to tell the future. Virtually any game can be used to foretell events, he believes, if it’s played in reverse, or counterchronologically; but the game of tarock is especially well suited, on account of being intended to run counterclockwise, and of displaying the follies of mankind so bluntly on its picture cards. (Ozymandias’s grandfather made this discovery a half century earlier, we’re told in a flashback, during a postcoital game with his clandestine lover, the chief of police of Merthyr Tydfil, in Wales. As he threw down his trump— L’excuse over La lune —a vista of living, dancing symbols rose before him, and he saw himself lying dead in the street, with the chief of police standing over his body, smoking pistol in hand. Horrified, he ended their affair on the spot and rushed home to his wife. His lover shot him the next time he left the house.)

Before this nameless grandfather’s violent end, the secret of the cards was passed down to his daughters, Cassandra and Yrsyla Hume. The sisters, both of whom went on to master what they simply called “the Game,” used their father’s discovery to opposite ends. Yrsyla, the elder, became embroiled in Welsh separatist politics, while Cassandra, the more practical of the two, made a nice little pile as a gambler, using each hand she played to predict its own outcome. Cassandra eventually bought herself a ranch in Australia, and bore her illiterate, Adonis-like foreman a series of sons; after the disaster of the Great War and the collapse of the Cymru Fydd movement, Yrsyla disappeared without a trace.

The Excuse opens grandiosely, in Australia’s Gibson Desert. Ozymandias, Cassandra’s youngest son, is coming into his maturity, surrounded by half-witted prospectors and drunken Aborigines and missionaries who regard all forms of recreation — even waltzing — as abominations in the sight of God. His parents are dead, but Ozymandias is carefully looked after by two elder brothers, Ralph and Gawain, neither of whom have inherited their mother’s gift. It’s assumed, given his talent, that he’ll take up the family mantle; Ozymandias, however, has ideas of his own. As he grows toward adulthood, he develops a passion for the ranching life: he dreams of moving deeper into sheep country, where the range is still free, and of making his name as a breeder. But the gift of clairvoyance, he soon discovers, has one potentially lethal catch. Once given, it has to be used.

Ozymandias remains at home as long as he can stand to, dutifully reading the cards every evening for his brothers, though his disenchantment waxes by the day. The allure of the deck for them, he discovers, has nothing to do with the future at all, and still less with the world of the present: at some unknown point the Game has been perverted, turned inward, become less an exploration of things to come than a means of embalming the past. It has become, very literally, an excuse: a way of retreating from life, of taking shelter — in Ozymandias’s own words—“in some eldritch, sepia-tinted other-when .”