John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

Nefflein!

First you will pardon my English. I’ve had Leisure, in my Ramblings, to have practice with my Spelling, but it remains the Language of my Schooling-days. You didn’t know we had English, your opa and I? Our father decided. Those were Schools in those times, let me tell you! Remarkable schools. Then Kaspar for some reason switched to Czech.

It strikes me as desirable that you regard me as Human—“als ein Mensch”—so that you may regard Yourself likewise. A Human, Nefflein, with all the customary human Frailties. Perhaps this is a Thing that I can teach you.

It’s an Accident that brought us here, both of us, to these x/y/z/T coordinates — you won’t believe this, I think. But this simply proves how Much you have to learn. There are only Accidents, after all, or Happenstances: only *C*, in other words — no *F* or *P*. But it’s just as true to say that no such thing as Happenstance exists, since it can never exist by itself. The Word only has a meaning when opposed to Something else. Don’t you agree? Not unlike that playing Card of yours — the “Sküs.”

I’ve been leafing through your History, of course. How could I resist? The tone, I think, is a Success — not too frumpy, not too certain of itself — but I have a few minor corrections. I’ve written up a List, Nefflein, and trust you will have no objections. I find it helps to make the Time go by.

ERRATA

pg 29—The Apartment house on Mondscheingasse may currently be painted a “brilliant yellow,” but in 1905, if Memory serves, its color was a ghastly jaundiced Mauve.

pg 29—I was not in the Habit of cleaning between the slats in the floor of our Apartment with “a fork expressly altered for that purpose.” I made use of a sharpened graphite Pencil.

pg 32—I should like to state, for the Historical Record, that I was never a Patron of the Café Jandek. Bilch, the Source of my Brother’s information, was well known as a Gossip and a Thief.

pg 68—I’ve left this Erratum for last, both in deference to Chronological Order (ho! ho!) and to give it the Pride of Place that it deserves. In the second Paragraph, you write (very fetchingly):

“She (Sonja Silbermann) rose from the bench and walked straight to her front door without looking back. It was slightly ajar, just as she’d left it, and she slipped inside and pushed it shut behind her. Waldemar made no move to follow.”

I quite enjoyed your treatment of this Scene — the detail of the Chestnut Trees and the oilcloth-draped Bugatti in particular! — and have only two Objections worth recording. Silbermann’s sedan was a Citroën, not a Bugatti. And Sonja did, in fact, accompany me home on the Evening in question. I could never have left the Chronosphere without her.

MY FATHER DISCUSSED his second homecoming with me exactly once, after a relentless campaign of emotional blackmail on my part, and even then — more than thirty years post-factum — he gave me no more than a few stale crumbs. He got his jollies playing the grand old man of letters in his later years, and there were certain episodes of his personal history that he trundled out for anyone who’d listen, gumming them over like the stem of his god-awful pipe; but his return to Buffalo was not among them.

The reason for his reticence, Mrs. Haven, most likely isn’t what you think. He felt no regret at putting Manhattan behind him, and even less at breaking his self-important teenage oath to turn his back on his hometown forever; he was the first to acknowledge, in later years, that the move had brought him luck and happiness. The source of his silence was simpler than that. For the first time since he’d struck out on his own — the first time in what he thought of as the years of his maturity — he’d made a decision without understanding why.

Enzie and Genny had manipulated him — he knew that, of course. But he went along willingly, even eagerly, as though his sisters’ scheme had been his own idea. His desire for self-determination seemed to have abandoned him since his illness: where he’d once been defiant, he now felt conciliatory, at times even meek. In logistical terms the switch happened cleanly, with decorous precision, like castling in a friendly game of chess. Warranted Tolliver Timepieces, Inc., still required the occasional presence of a warranted Tolliver, if only for the sake of appearances; and 308 Pine Ridge Road was vacant and at his disposal. He could finish his book there, in the cubby that had incubated his earliest stories, and the uneasiness he’d no doubt feel at finding himself back where he’d started — just as Ewa Ruszczyk had predicted in the Odd Fellows Hall — would make him work faster and better. He’d be lonely, of course, but no more so than he’d been in Spanish Harlem. His solitude would help to keep him focused. He was regressing, he knew, but regression has one great advantage: the advantage of precedent. Whatever else it might bring, he reasoned, life in Buffalo wouldn’t hold much in the way of surprises.

On this last point, however, Orson’s sisters had a few trumps left to throw.

* * *

Two weeks later, my father climbed the steps of 308 Pine Ridge Road in an advanced state of dishevelment, dragging his battered yellow steamer trunk behind him. His shirt was misbuttoned and his face was unshaven and his hair stood out straight in the back, where his headrest on the train had ionized it. He’d returned home for one reason only, after all — to get his book finished — and his seediness was both a reminder and a caution: a message to neighbors and friends (if he had any left) to leave him in peace. Like untold writers before him — science fiction writers, especially — he’d begun to fancy himself a lone mystic, a hermit of sorts, and Pine Ridge Road was now his hermitage. It was just as possible to be a mystic in the suburbs, after all, as on some mountain in the wilderness. Retreat was the main thing: withdrawal from the struggle. What mattered was that you were left alone.

Orson unlocked the door in a rush, buzzing with anticipation, and pushed it gently open with his foot. Dust revolved in the air — the lazy, protozoan dust of wooden houses — and the afternoon sun turned the foyer the color of beer. It had been more than a decade, to the best of his reckoning, since he’d had that house completely to himself. He estimated the hour at four o’clock — half past at the most — and went to check the mantel clock, but found it stopped at 08:27 EST. An omen of some kind, no question about it, but for the moment its meaning escaped him.

He set his trunk down at the foot of the stairs and stood, beguiled and delighted, listening to the house shift and settle around him. If a single object had been added or removed since he’d left for New York, the change was too minute for him to see. Nine years had come and gone without a trace. There was something deliciously morbid in that: something unnatural, even perverse. I could never have predicted this, he thought. Not this changelessness.

“Nine years,” Orson said to the stillness. “Nine years and no time at all.”

He took off his peacoat and hung it on the mahogany head of the banister, whose burnished roundness made him think — as it had when he was small — of an old man’s bald crown. He slipped out of his loafers, then out of his socks. His feet stank agreeably. He crossed the frayed Persian carpet, feeling its coarseness against his instep, and laid his palm against the kitchen door. He felt the urge to strip completely — a thing he’d never once done in those rooms — and saw no earthly reason to resist it. Starting tomorrow I’ll write naked , he said to himself. That ought to keep the brush salesmen away .