John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Your duty is to make your findings public,” Geraldo insists. “Don’t let the scientific mainstream seal your lips. Tesla didn’t. Ouspensky didn’t.”

“Tesla died in a Fifty-Fourth Street flophouse,” the negro observes. “Ouspensky died in a basement in Surrey, neglected and anemic and alone.”

Enzian shakes her head. “If the world wants me, gentlemen, it knows where to find me. I’ll be happy to receive it here, in my home, on the second Wednesday evening of the month.”

LaMont rolls his eyes at this, and Jessup shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

No one else says a word. It seems a pathetic statement, textbook megalomania, the ravings of a bush-league Caligari.

In a certain sense, of course, it was all of these things; but in another, truer sense, it was not. Twenty-five years have passed since that statement was made. It was the humid late summer of 1969, and a great many things that seemed febrile that August now strike us as perfectly sane. The world has finally come, two and a half decades later, to see the Tolliver Sisters in their home. We stare, all of us, at the blurred photographs in the Times and the Post, and consider the evidence closely, from every available angle. And still we refuse to understand what we are seeing.

In his windowless cubby in Cheektowaga, meanwhile, Orson was tucking his magnum opus into bed. The novel had taken him longer than he’d expected — much longer — but he wasn’t complaining. Lopsided and inelegant though it was, it pleased him in a way no writing of his had ever done before. It was a book , for one thing — not just grist for the pulps. It might even make him some money.

More and more clearly, as he whittled and buffed, Orson came to see his novel as a paean to Reason. How he’d managed to be born into a family that approached science the way a witch doctor approaches medicine he had no idea, but he was resolved, more than ever, to go his own way. His plan was twofold. He would serve as an example, by living according to Reason’s dictates, as an Ayatollah lives by the Koran; and he would spell out his beliefs, in his novel, for the whole world to see — if it was willing to put in just a little effort.

As you can see, Mrs. Haven, he was thinking like a cult leader already.

He’d gotten into the habit of taking books down at random from the parlor bookcase at Pine Ridge Road, and in a clothbound edition of the poems of Sir Richard Francis Burton (which had almost certainly been Sonja’s) he found a couplet that would soon become his personal motto, and be printed on the frontispiece of The Excuse :

Do what thy manhood bids thee do,

from none but self expect applause;

He noblest lives and noblest dies

who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

Below this, in Greek (it was that kind of novel), was a distinctly more appropriate epigraph:

ώρα κάνει ανόητοι όλων μας

Which, loosely translated into English, means

Time makes fools of us all.

“I’m finished,” Orson told Ursula one evening. “At least I think I am. Christ, I hope so.”

They were lying together in the second room on the right at the top of the stairs. Although it was drafty — it was drafty everywhere in that house — they were both sweating lightly. Ursula lay flat on her back, still a bit short of breath, smiling one of her classic equivocal smiles. She took hold of his ear and pinched it.

“You’ve been finished before,” she said.

“This time is different.”

“You’ve said that before, too.”

“I’m sending it off tomorrow. The whole manuscript.”

That got her attention. “Tomorrow? You’re sure?”

“Genny’s found me an agent, if you can believe it. Apparently he’s a bona fide piranha.”

“Is this a good thing, a piranha?”

“Depends on who gets bit.”

She was quiet a moment.

“Does Genny know what the book is about? Does Enzie know?”

He made a face at the ceiling.

“They’ll be furious, Orson.”

“They can see it when it’s published.”

“Orson—”

“I don’t want to talk about this, Ursula. Not now.”

Conversation lagged for a time.

“I found your deck of tarock cards yesterday,” Ursula said. “My mother used to play it with my father, you know. Actually, they met over a game.”

“Then thank Jehovah for tarock,” he said, pulling her closer.

“Let’s have a game tonight. Will you play it with me?”

“I don’t really know how.”

“Come now, Mr. Tolliver. You just wrote a novel about it!”

“I’ve written about telekenesis, too, and about astral projection and fencing. You see me doing any of that stuff?”

“You could learn, Mr. Tolliver. I could teach you.”

“Fräulein Kimmelmann! Do you know how to fence?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” he said, planting a kiss on her shoulder. “When this book is done — really and finally done, flushed out of my duration forever — I’m going to put those cards back in the cabinet, pull the sliding door shut, and spend whatever’s left of my duration sipping Gennesee Cream Ale.”

But as you and I both know, Mrs. Haven, that isn’t how the cards fell for my father.

* * *

Orson swore up down and crosswise, to the day of his death, that he’d had no idea of the significance of the Sküs to our family when he wrote The Excuse —and unlikely as it might sound, I believe him. The Gottfriedens Protocols wouldn’t be released to the public until the midseventies, and Kaspar had never talked much to his son about the past; it’s possible that not even Enzie and Genny knew about the Sküs before Waldemar’s writings finally came to light. But all mention of tarock aside, the comparison of the study of physics with the study of the black arts was more than enough to horrify his sisters. The book’s final section, with the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, reads like nothing so much as a veiled declaration of war.

Ozymandias Urquhart’s vision in book III ends abruptly after eighty-four pages, as though somebody’s pulled the plug on the projector. He gets to his feet, more than a little woozy, and sets out for the desert. His psychotropic peregrinations through the timestream are behind him, and he feels no nostalgia for either the future or the past — the present is now the only tense that matters. He has come (to lift a phrase from a UCS prospectus) “to live in the moment.” He has a message to deliver to his brothers, after which he hopes to breed sheep at last, if possible on the family estate.

Word reaches Ozymandias, as he makes his way westward, that his brothers have “gone queer” during his absence. They’ve stopped shaving and bathing, he learns, and have boarded up the windows of Ouspensky Hall; they’re rumored to have constructed a device for traveling vast distances without the appearance of motion, by making infinitesimal alterations to the angle of the earth’s rotation. They’re said to have stopped speaking altogether, communicating exclusively by playing games of whist.

After a month of hard travel, most of it on foot, Ozymandias arrives at his birthplace. The once-proud estate now lies weed-choked and fallow, its front doors are missing, and the Greek-revival façade — Cassandra Urquhart’s pride — has vanished behind a shroud of Tasmanian ivy. A muffled droning draws him to the cellar, where he discovers Ralph and Gawain, barely recognizable under “Talmudic” beards, tampering with the pitch of the planet’s axis, exactly as rumored, by means of a network of magnets and tubes. It becomes clear to Ozymandias that the true purpose of this infernal machine is to travel through time; having given up on the future — to say nothing of the present — his brothers plan to subjugate the past.