John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

Orson wrote these opening chapters in a fever, drunk on the sheer impertinence of his argument, and his mania is clear both in the speed of the narrative and in the bubbling molasses of his prose. The climactic scene of book I, in which Ozymandias finally has it out with his brothers, reads less like a confrontation than like some kind of meshuggana manifesto:

“You mean to abandon us, then?” Gawain demanded, his tawny eyes flashing like vitreous coals .

“I mean to raise livestock,” said Ozymandias. “Goats at first, and then sheep.”

“It amounts to the same,” snarled his brother .

Ralph took in a breath to speak, but the expression on Gawain’s visage — and on Ozymandias’s own — made the skin of his nape start to prickle. “What would we become without the Game, Ozymandias?” he simpered. “The Game is our birthright. Without it — why, without it, we’d stop being Humes!”

“Without it,” Gawain said darkly, “the future might as well not come at all.”

“You’ve been bamboozled!!” Ozymandias ejaculated, holding the Excuse aloft. “And the tragedy of it, brothers, is that you’ve bamboozled yourselves. If you’d ever truly regarded this card — regarded it, I mean to say, and SEEN it — you’d have noted that the image is that of a Möbius coil, with no beginning and no end.”

“A Möbius which?”

“Time itself is no different,” Ozymandias proclaimed. “It ends where it begins. Why have we been able to stare into the future all these years, over all these proud, farsighted generations, but never become masters of our fate?” The orbs of his amethyst eyes, Welsh to the very core, revolved from Ralph to Gawain, then back again. “The answer is hideously simple. We’ve created a closed system, repetitive and stagnant, like the circuit represented on this card. We’ve turned the future into the past, dear brothers, simply by attempting to arrest it. There’s no escape from the Game — no solution, no respite, no hope — but to STOP PLAYING.”

After a lively debate, then a second grand speech, then a scuffle involving (I blush to report) a boomerang and a didgeridoo, Ozymandias vows never to consult the cards again, not ever, and strikes out into the night to seek his fortune. The book now metamorphoses into a survivalist bildungsroman, with the Aborigines alternately scaring the hell out of Ozymandias and treating him for dysentery. The temptations are great, as he works his way west, to make use of the cards; but he holds firm. He crosses the country, buys a farm, loses it, then somehow finds himself in Sydney, a destitute failure, languishing in a dingy furnished room. Throughout all these trials the deck has remained in his satchel, untouched and pristine. One evening, however, he takes it out of its tooled leather slipcase — a parting gift from his mother — and lays the cards out in a crescent on the floor.

Here the narrative morphs again, veering from bildungsroman toward something murkier, and it isn’t hard to figure out the reason. My father had arrived — after nearly three hundred pages — at the present instant of his own duration. Until then, his novel had been a work of history, however camouflaged; henceforth, it would be a prophecy.

The scene with the cards is cut short without warning, displaced by a sequence of drab, blurry flashbacks that serve no discernible purpose. I can feel Orson floundering at this point, Mrs. Haven, and stalling for time. We get Ozymandias as a toddler, dressed as Saint Augustine for a local pageant; we get Ozymandias’s first love affair, with Helen, an Aboriginal girl (the opposite of Ewa Ruszczyk in every detail); we get Ozymandias attacked by a dingo. When we finally return — somewhat the worse for wear — to that furnished room in Sydney, Ozymandias is still staring at the cards, which are lying facedown on the corkwood floor. He stays put for two-thirds of a page, sweating and running his tongue along his teeth, like a suicide struggling to work up his nerve. Then he takes the nearest card and flips it over.

* * *

Countless critics have tried, in the three decades since, to account for the popularity The Excuse enjoyed in Aquarian-era America, in spite of its blundering plotline, its junior high symbolism, and a style that makes Arthur C. Clarke look like Arthur Miller. None have come anywhere close to succeeding, but all agree that the novel’s last section, which is entirely taken up by Ozymandias’s psychedelic vision of the future, must somehow be to blame. Such a degree of critical consensus (as any connoisseur of book reviews will tell you) is the rarest and most delicate of flowers; but in Orson’s case the critics had their reasons. For one thing, the “Revelations” section — as it’s come to be known — has a radically different tone than the rest of the book, as if the author were taking dictation; and for another thing, Mrs. Haven, a number of its predictions have come true.

In spite of their almost incidental presence in his novels — usually as hastily sketched backdrops to scenes of cybernetic debauchery — my father’s prognostications of the not-too-distant future emerged, even during his lifetime, as the engine-in-chief of his fame. The time-travel allegation — the time travel insinuation , better said — had been leveled against my family before, to explain the Timekeeper’s disappearing act at Äschenwald; but the case against Orson Card Tolliver, especially since the invention of Global Positioning Systems and Viagra and the European Union (all of which he predicted), proved harder to sweep under the rug. The evidence, after all, is plain for anyone with a library card (or access to the World Wide Web — which Orson also saw coming) to judge for themselves. It changed my father from a figurative “cult novelist” into a literal one, an actor on the klieg-lit stage of history, no matter how furiously he lobbied to prevent it.

The orgy scene in “How to Make Machines and Influence Your Wife,” for example, is tame by today’s standards (six-dimensional dildo notwithstanding), and its prose won’t win any Nebula Awards; the wireless earpiece, however, so casually deposited on a night table as the frolicking begins, is noteworthy in a story written in 1963. Personal infrared goggles were undreamed-of in 1959, but they’re standard issue on “Planet Perinorium 13,” and used to predictably lascivious ends. Orson had a rabid fantasy life, needless to say, and a commitment to reality negation possibly unsurpassed in human history, not to mention a lifetime subscription to Technology Today ; but even I have a hard time explaining the appearance, 112 pages into Clocksuckers (1973), of a jihadist riding a Jet Ski.

Every self-respecting religion needs its miracles, Mrs. Haven, and it was from “prophecies fulfilled” such as these that the UCS distilled its theology. If they hadn’t done their work so outrageously well, hadn’t transmuted Orson’s art into propaganda with such consummate skill, the rest of the world might have taken him more seriously; and if the rest of the world had taken him more seriously, I might have an explanation for my father’s apparent clairvoyance, for the Iterants’ growing influence over him, maybe even for what’s happened to me since. By the time I tried to get the truth out of Orson, however, he was tucked away in the attic of a place called the Villa Ouspensky — the Vatican of the Church of Synchronology — surrounded by sycophants and nurses and bullnecked, hard-eyed men in khaki suits. He was far gone by then, ravaged by both cancer and time, and I had to choose my questions carefully. I didn’t kick up any fuss; there was no point in that. I had other dragons elsewhere to attack.