John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

The closing pages of The Excuse are devoted to what Orson’s more kindly disposed critics refer to as a “polemical dialogue,” but which is actually no better than a rant, a salvo fired at his sisters from point-blank range:

“In summation, you both have my pity,” Ozymandias ejaculated.

“Pity?” Ralph sneered, breaking his silence at last. “We’ll see who pities whom, little brother, when Gawain and myself are Masters of the Kronoverse!”

“Have you not understood?” Ozymandias answered sadly. “We travel through time all our lives — into the future at the speed at which we age, and into the past each time that we remember. There is only the brain, after all; however we choose to employ it, we have no other device. But the brain, my dear brothers, is more than enough. Our consciousness is all the time machine we need.”

The Excuse was published on December 1, 1969, in a clothbound edition by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. In a more conservative age — in other words, at practically any other time in human history — the book would have been a hard sell; but this was the final year of the sixties, the year the grown-ups started taking what the kids had been taking, and phantasmagoria was all the rage. Orson’s novel was hailed as a bulletin from the front lines of the soft revolution, a late mid-twentieth-century Pilgrim’s Progress , a lysergic bugle call to self-expression. All of which was annoying — to put it mildly — to its author, given the message that he’d actually intended. CONSCIOUSNESS IS A TIME MACHINE began turning up on T-shirts nationwide, but they were being worn by dopers, not by astrophysicists or heads of state. More perturbingly still, the book would go on to outsell the rest of my father’s oeuvre combined, though it’s about as erotic as a dental questionnaire.

The full-page review in Life was Ursula’s favorite:

“The Excuse” is not simply an improbable bestseller; it is an improbable book, from an equally improbable man.

Orson Card Tolliver — twenty-seven years of age, veteran of Greenwich Village’s beat catacombs — was heretofore known, if he was known at all, as a writer of speculative pornography for the pulps. His new novel, however, is a horse of a rather different phenotype.

“The Excuse” is the record — in grotesque, quasi-allegorical guise — of one individual’s rejection of all received truth; of the shackles of familial precedent; even of the precepts of chronology itself. Isaac Newton counts for nothing in this brave new cosmos, and neither does Albert Einstein, or the Buddha, or even Jesus Christ. This novel demands to be interpreted as a ragged, desperate yawp of celebration: a shout from the trenches of tomorrow’s youth culture to all of us still lollygagging back in the supply tents. There is a wild, wicked music throughout these pages. America could do worse than lend an ear.

“‘A ragged, desperate yawp of celebration?’” Orson muttered after she’d read it aloud. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that we can get our gutters fixed,” Ursula answered. “The leak in the pantry has started again.”

“The leak in the pantry? Mein Gott! ” he shouted, mimicking her Oxbridge-by-way-of-the-Vaterland accent. “Whatever will become of the bratwurst?”

“You’re a celebrity now, Mr. Tolliver. A big shot. Be happy you can keep your bratwurst dry.”

“I don’t mean to complain. I realize that would be stupid.”

“Well! As long as you realize that ,” she said brightly. “I’ll have somebody look at the gutters tomorrow.”

The connubial turn in their relationship had come on so gradually, with so little fuss, that he’d barely taken note of the shift. She’s adopted me , my father would say to himself, on those rare occasions when it crossed his mind. She’s taken me in. Until the day I was born, Mrs. Haven — and for quite some time thereafter, to be honest — Orson thought of himself less as Ursula’s lover than as a prematurely aged foster child.

“Bratwursts or no bratwursts, Ursula, something needs to be done. About this review, I mean. About all the reviews.”

Ursula sighed to herself.

“I’ll add a fourth book,” said Orson. “An appendix, for the paperback edition. To make my meaning absolutely clear.”

“You can’t explain your own novel, Orson. That’s a terrible idea.”

“Why?”

She shook her curls at him. “Artists do not explain.”

“You may not have noticed, Fräulein Kimmelmann, but I’m not in the art business. I write ‘speculative pornography for the pulps.’”

“You’ll end up making a philosophy out of this, if you’re not careful.” She gave a small, involuntary shudder. “Or even a religion.”

“There’s always room for one more religion in this country, sweetheart.” He caught her by the waist. “That’s why the devil made America so big.”

* * *

The Excuse sold fifty thousand copies in its first six weeks of publication, and Orson bought a Buick hardtop with the money. He also bought a color TV in a tropical hardwood cabinet, twelve identical herringbone suits, and a dozen turtlenecks in varying shades of blue, from powder to navy to midnight. The suits became my father’s uniform, his protest against being cast as a hippie, disdain for his fanbase expressed in brushed cotton and tweed. The rest of the money went to Ursula, to spend or squirrel away or set on fire, as she saw fit.

They were married before a justice of the peace in a joyless little courthouse in Niagara Falls, with Uncle Wilhelm and one of Ursula’s former classmates as witnesses. There was no time for a honeymoon, since Orson was struggling with the postscript for the paperback edition of The Excuse —the explanation Ursula was so opposed to — which was already months overdue. His new bride pursed her lips and closed her eyes and smoothed down her dress to hide her disappointment. (I know she did all these things, Mrs. Haven, because I saw her do them at regular intervals throughout my youth.) She’d been hoping they might travel to Vienna, to visit her mother; it had been almost two years since she’d seen her. Orson promised they’d go in the spring.

Enzian and Gentian sent a box of calla lilies to the ceremony but declined to attend. They’d divined The Excuse ’s true message, unlike everyone else, and the result was exactly as their sister-in-law had predicted. For seventeen months they sent no word at all, not even a Hanukkah card. It was only a year and a half later, once perfunctory contact had been restored — due entirely to Ursula’s efforts — that the full extent of the damage became clear.

Orson had known from the start that his book would seem a willful perversion of Enzie’s ambitions for him: instead of using his talent to disseminate her ideas (however cunningly camouflaged) among the masses, he’d made a travesty of her life’s work, to say nothing of her beliefs, and encouraged the masses to laugh. He’d tried to free himself once before, by escaping to New York; this time there would be no miscalculation, no variable left unaccounted for. He’d made a deliberate decision to cut the cord between them permanently.

Nevertheless, perverse as it might seem, his sisters’ silence left him at a loss. Orson could easily imagine Enzie resolving to blacklist him, but he couldn’t see Genny agreeing — not without considerable pain. He’d somehow never asked himself what Genny’s reaction to the novel might be, only Enzie’s; and the lack of contact with her gnawed at the root of his well-being. In spite of his presence on various bestseller lists (thirty weeks in The New York Times Book Review ; top slot: #3), he felt trivial and neglected and alone. The only evidence that his sisters were still alive came via Smith Copley-Sexton, the CFO of Warranted Tolliver Timepieces. Their checks, Sexton assured him, were still being cashed.