John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“There’s more to it than that,” he said, looking past her at Enzian. “I can smell it.”

“Well, now. I suppose you could say—”

“I’m not asking you, Genny. I’m asking her.”

Enzian, who’d finished her egg, wiped her lips with a napkin made from the same bright damask as the drapes. “Genny’s right — we approve of this apartment. We’ve decided to relocate to this address.”

This was too much for my father, even in his newfound state of grace. “What the hell are you talking about, Enzie? I live in this apartment, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“And in case you’ve forgotten, Orson, your rent is paid out of the Tolliver & Family Charitable Remainder Trust, established by Papa just before he passed away. Technically speaking, therefore, it’s the family’s apartment, not yours.”

By rights this answer should have sent my father through the (freshly plastered, chocolate-colored) ceiling; but he was not the man he’d been two weeks before. In place of the cyclone of self-righteous fury that both he and his sisters expected, he suddenly felt his distance from them unbearably keenly. It was a melancholy sensation, even a painful one, but there was no violence in it. These women raised me, he found himself thinking. They raised me, and I still don’t understand them.

“What is it about this apartment,” he asked Enzian, “that makes you want to use it for your work?”

She studied him a moment, as surprised as he was by his mild reply. “It possesses certain properties,” she answered. “Gewisse Eigenschaften.”

“And you’re not going to tell me what those Eigenschaften are. Am I right about that?”

Genny sat quickly forward. “From what I understand — if you’ll permit me, Enzie — the way in which the rooms are arranged — their configuration , that is, and their shape—”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re welcome to the place. I’ll be out by the first of the month.”

Orson allowed himself to imagine, in the quiet that followed, that he’d pulled the rug out from under his sisters at last: that they found him — at least momentarily — as erratic and inscrutable as he’d always found them. But his satisfaction proved to be short-lived.

“That’s good of you, Peanut,” said Enzian, nodding at Genny. “We’d never have asked you to move out, of course. But it might be for the best.”

He sat back in his chair, feeling winded and weak. “Why?” he got out. “Why would it be for the best?”

“For your safety.”

“My safety,” said Orson. “Of course.”

No one spoke for a time.

“Where will you go, Peanut?” Genny asked.

“Somewhere quiet. Upstate, maybe. I haven’t really given it much thought.”

“Perhaps you’ll allow us to make a suggestion,” said Enzian, taking his hand in hers.

It was the first time in seven years that she had touched him.

I’D BEEN HIDING in Menügayan’s attic for seventeen days, Mrs. Haven, when you finally came home. The Husband’s cobalt Lexus pulled up with a buttery screech while Julia was recaulking her parlor-floor windows; you smiled at her, apparently, and she waved coyly back.

She could have rung the old servants’ bell that ran up to the attic — we’d decided on that, if there were any developments — but she chose to break the good news to me gently. I’d been growing my beard, like any self-respecting fugitive, and I was checking its progress in a loose shard of mirror when I caught sight of Menügayan over my left shoulder, smiling at me in a predatory way. How a person of her volume and density managed to negotiate the hatch to the attic in silence, I have no idea, but I’d grown used to her inherent stealth by then. I thought of Menügayan as Batman, or as Batman’s overfed, depressive cousin — which essentially was how she saw herself.

“Looking good, Che Guevara,” she said blankly. Blankness, like cunning, was a Menügayan forte.

“I’m trying to look different, that’s all. As unlike Waldy Tolliver as I can.”

“I can’t argue with that,” she said, more tonelessly than ever.

With the benefit of hindsight, Mrs. Haven, my reflection in the mirror should have served me as a warning. I did look like Che Guevara, but the Guevara of the final, doomed Bolivian campaign, with the glazed eyes of a man prepared for death. I was in the intermediate stages of cabin fever by then, a day or two short of seeing my arms and legs as breaded chicken cutlets. I had too much time on my hands — way too much — and nothing to distract me but pamphlets from an organization called the Otherkin Resource Center (ORC), whose members believe themselves to be “otherkin” instead of human: faeries, vampires and elves are the most popular, followed, at a slight but definite remove, by lycanthropes. The enigma of Menügayan only deepened over time.

“I need to go downstairs for some fresh air, Julia. I know that it’s risky, but—”

“Not so risky,” she said, already halfway to the hatch. “I’ll meet you next to Bilbo. Bring your coat.”

* * *

We were strolling along the East River when she finally told me, with the wind at our backs and her right hand resting firmly on my shoulder. Menügayan’s right hand is gentler than a trailer hitch, Mrs. Haven, but not by much.

“Remember one thing, Tolliver, before you run off and buy Hildy a dozen roses. Just because she’s back doesn’t signify she’s back for you. The First Listener is with her.”

“I hate it when you call him that.”

“Cry me a river.”

P. G. Wodehouse (one of my father’s few idols in the “mainstream” of fiction) once described a character’s uncle as “a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow,” and suddenly I knew exactly what he meant. There was no contending with that bland, embittered face.

“You obviously have a plan, Julia. Couldn’t you just tell me what it is?”

The blandness somehow deepened. “Don’t you know anything about Hildy, Tolliver? Don’t you know anything about women, in general, per se, at all? She’ll send you a signal when the time is right.”

“It sounds as if you’re telling me to just sit around and do nothing.”

Menügayan didn’t laugh often, but when she did the effect was genuinely chilling. “Allow me to quote from a favorite author,” she said. “From every Venusian according to his abilities; to every Venusian according to his needs. ”

This was a paraphrase of Marx, of course — Marx stuffed into a space suit — and I recognized the passage right away. It was from Orson Card Tolliver’s Love on an Uninhabitable Star.

* * *

There were more than a few moments, in the course of that next agonizing week, when I suspected that Menügayan’s plan was to use the Husband to destroy me , Mrs. Haven, not the other way around. I now had a box seat for the pageant of your ongoing existence, which made it clear that you were getting on extremely well without me. You came and went on shopping trips and social calls and meditative early-evening strolls, obscenely willowy and curly-haired and bright. You looked exactly the way you’d looked that fateful day at Union Square: the same red coat, the same half smile, the same slow, indecisive way of walking. You looked as though no time had passed at all.

I’d promised Menügayan that I wouldn’t contact you, wouldn’t tap the windowpane as you walked by, let alone pound my fists against the glass and scream your name; and to our mutual surprise I kept my word. I kept it out of fear, Mrs. Haven — and not of the Husband and his flying monkeys, either. What if the smile left your face when you saw who it was? What if you turned your collar up and hurried off? What if you went straight back inside — back to mission control, back to the flying monkeys, back to whatever R. P. Haven was to you — and turned me in without a second thought?