John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“What do you think of them?”

She considered his question. “They’re verdreht , I think, but they mean well. Why do you ask?”

“I’m worried about them, to tell you the truth. They’ve always been— verdreht , like you say, but over the past few years — since I went away, I mean, to New York City—”

“Yes?”

“They’ve become more than that.” He let out a breath. “Insanity runs in my family.”

“Mine, too.”

“No babies for us, then!” said Orson, attempting a joke.

Ursula didn’t laugh.

“About my sisters—”

“Yes?”

He frowned into the fire. “I don’t know how to put this.”

“Just say it.”

“They think that they can see into the future.”

Ursula turned to face him then, resting one of her small, thick-nippled breasts against his arm. “They can see into the future,” she said matter-of-factly. “Haven’t you noticed that yet?”

* * *

There’s no way of knowing how my aunts spent their first months in Harlem, Mrs. Haven, since no one — with the possible exception of the gas man — crossed their threshold during that time; but I can make a few guesses. For the whole of their durations to date — more than eighty years, reckoned together — Enzie and Genny had taken their clothes out of the same wardrobe, worn their hair in identical untidy buns, and slept in the same four-poster bed, and I see no reason to assume they changed their ways. Genny continued in her various roles as homemaker, administrator, nurse, cook and research assistant, slipping out of the house each morning with a shopping list in one hand and a stack of scholarly correspondence in the other; Enzie devoted every waking hour to her work. She’d told Orson the truth about her motives for staying — the new surroundings had drawn her conception of the chronoverse in a subtly new direction, although the details of her experiments in those months remain obscure. Genny’s letters to Orson mention Laplace’s theory of determinism, the “torque” of the Milky Way galaxy (whatever that means), the symbolic freight of counterclockwise motion, Oppenheimer’s nautilus-shaped fallout shelter blueprint, the layout of certain pharaonic tombs, Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence,” weather vanes, pinwheels, and — over and over again, though always in the most blasé of tones — the arrangement of windows, rooms and doors in the apartment.

In the weeks after Orson’s departure, three sets of ping-pong-ball-sized holes were drilled through each interior wall, exactly five feet and three inches off the floor. My father mentions these holes in his journal — Genny must have written to him about them — and I’ve been able to confirm that they exist. I thought I’d have to move half the Archive to uncover them, but each hole, no matter how hidden or hemmed in by trash, turns out to have a clear and unobstructed through-line to its counterpart across the room. In a curious way, the resulting network of linked apertures is reminiscent of a camera obscura, or an apartment-sized simulacrum of the human eye — optic nerve and ganglia included — with the bathroom, of all places, embodying the juncture with the brain. (It also calls to mind the machine, the interferometer, that Michelson and Morley used to measure the velocity of light.) I can’t see the point of it all, Mrs. Haven, and apparently neither could Genny; but Genny’s understanding, let alone her approval, had never been of much concern to Enzie. It would take more than a change of address to change that.

Certain things did change, however, once the sisters had become acclimatized to their exotic new environment: certain things, in fact, were revolutionized. Enzie’s interest in Manhattan may not have extended farther than the walls of the General Lee, but her sister was a different animal. In the course of Genny’s errands, which sometimes took her clear across the city, she came into contact with Manhattanites of every conceivable stripe, from physicists to pacificists to sodomites to junkies, and discovered that she found them all delightful. She’d never known a place to be so viciously, remorselessly alive: even when people told her to mind her own business, or to watch where the fuck she was going (which happened often), the shock of it came as a welcome infusion of feeling. Street life thrilled her to tears, as did life in the shops and the parks and the barrooms, though she never touched a drop of hooch herself. The woman who stared boldly back at her from the windows of department stores and soda shops and taxis had a face she only dimly recognized. At the beginning of her forties, entirely by accident, Genny found herself a woman of the world.

She began to spend more time away from the General Lee than was strictly necessary, taking the scenic route whenever possible, and it was not beneath her dignity to loiter. She became something of a fixture of the scenic route herself, the latest touch of quasi-local color: the middle-aged hippie, the saucer-eyed Jewess, the credulous Kraut. The bon vivant, in other words, that her brother had never managed to become. She dispensed money freely— she was in charge of the purse strings, not Enzie — and prided herself on being an equal-opportunity enabler. For every high tea she attended with the brittle-haired wives of venture capitalists in the tearoom at Saks, she’d have a café con leche and a sandwich at the corner bodeguita , or a joint at a rally in Tompkins Square Park. In no time at all she’d become known about town as what grifters used to call “an easy touch,” and she’d developed quite a fan club, from panhandlers to Abstract Expressionists to pimps. Some exploited her shamelessly, rewarding her patronage with whatever line of bullshit came to mind, and laughing at her when she took the bait; some dragged her to meetings of the John Birch Society or the Republican Party or the League of Women Voters, only to discover that politics put her to sleep; but no one, regardless of stratagem, managed to keep her out past 19:30 EST, when she went home to cook for her sister. Being Genny, however — in other words, being craftier than she looked — she eventually hit on a way both of keeping Enzie from starving and of bypassing her curfew. The solution couldn’t have been simpler: she invited everybody home for dinner.

Enzie, needless to say, was bitterly opposed to Genny’s “dog-and-pony evenings,” as she called them; but the balance of power had shifted. Genny dug in her heels and refused to back down. Hadn’t she always done every last thing Enzie wanted? Hadn’t she cooked and cleaned and generally been an exemplary homemaker since before puberty? Hadn’t she abandoned her home from one day to the next, all for the sake of Enzie’s work? Now it was her turn, and long overdue. They were living in the middle of the most fascinating city in the world, and she was damned if she was going to pretend that they lived in a bunker.

“All right, then,” Enzie grunted at last, scrambling to reach stable ground. “You can have your little dinners, if they mean so much to you. But no more than once a month. And no questions about my work, you understand?” She clenched her eyes shut. “This is important, Genny. This is wichtig. No talk about the future whatsoever.”

“There’s a war on, dear, in case you haven’t noticed,” Genny said, taking a drag of her Virginia Slim. “The whole world might get atomized tomorrow. The last thing anyone wants to talk about is the future.”

* * *

If it strikes you as bizarre, Mrs. Haven, that my aunts should have thrown open their apartment, once a month, to both the dregs and the elite of late-sixties Manhattan, you’d be no more confounded than Enzie herself. And it was arguably the surprise of her duration (barring her later discoveries re: the chronoverse and the subjective mind) that she came to enjoy Genny’s soon-to-be-notorious Wednesday nights at least as much as her wayward sister did. The first dozen or so were harmless enough — assorted Bowery hopheads, a neighbor or two, the token physics grad student for Enzie to browbeat into a corner — but the mélange of Genny’s extravagant cooking, Enzie’s nutty-professor routine, and the sheer incongruity of the two of them there, in that apartment, in that neighborhood, at that particular juncture in the fourth dimension, proved an irresistible cocktail to Aquarian-era New York. Much was made of the sisters’ obvious lack of social cunning, and of the fact that they were never seen at anybody else’s parties — or in Enzie’s case, anywhere else at all. Scores of rumors entered circulation, none of them flattering, each of them heightening the Tolliver sisters’ mystique. Freaks were en vogue in those years, after all, and Enzie and Genny fit the bill superbly. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, either, that they took a half-conscious pleasure in baffling all attempts to comprehend them. There can be safety, of a kind, in being misperceived.