John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“I can’t hear you, Nefflein. Come closer.”

I leaned forward. “Tell me what your reasons were.”

“For what?”

“For the Gottfriedens Protocols. For Äschenwald. For all of it.”

He replied without the slightest hesitation.

* * *

“In Budapest during the year of the famine I found myself, for a time, without a roof over my head, so I made my home in Népliget Park, in the company of some three hundred other starving wretches. People were eating the bark off the trees, digging holes in the frozen ground to pass the night in, slitting each other’s throats for a spoonful of cream. I did as the worst did — the ones who survived. But I was farther from myself than the others, at a greater remove from the man I’d once been, so I did more of it, Nefflein . And I did it better.

“My victims were Gypsies and Jews, for the most part — the reason was simply that they were nearby — and eventually my talents came to the attention of a certain order. The members of this order clothed me and fed me, and I accepted their patronage. I rose in their ranks, as a man of initiative will, and in time I was called to Berlin. I judged myself fortunate in this, as my patrons’ influence was waxing by the hour. I saw the future in them, Nefflein , and I was not disappointed.

“Gestures were required to consolidate my position: a measure of violence, as one might expect, but also a great deal of clerical work, for the most part pertaining to the propagation and diffusion of fear. The interests I represented during that time have come to have a reputation for viciousness, but the vast majority of them were timid men, conventional and unimaginative, and as such — given the tenor of the times — frightened within an inch of their lives. In such a field I found it easy to get on.

“I was under no illusion, when offered the directorship of the Äschenwald facility, that my scientific work was of importance to Berlin — but I realized the post would serve my needs. I’d been privileged with certain insights into the nature of time during my period of near-starvation in Népliget Park, and I’d waited almost twenty years to put them to the test. I saw the camp as a place of work: a research station, no more than that, but the only one I was likely to be granted. Compared with what I knew — what I’d known for two decades, more surely even than I knew my name — nothing else had weight or definition.

“Should a present-day scientist, for example here in America, when hot on the heels of a discovery — the discovery, say, of a cure for mental illness — refuse funding from his government, on account of its collusion with homicidal Third World regimes, or the bombing of Hiroshima, or its many costly, bloody foreign wars? Think carefully, Nefflein , before you reply. The subjects of my protocols suffered the same privations I myself had suffered — extremes of cold and hunger, prolonged exposure to darkness — and were granted the same insight I’d received. The dreams they dreamed in their captivity approximated death, and the state they existed in by the end of their trials — at the attenuated margin of existence, only vestigially conscious, suspended between oblivion and life — was a kind of perpetual dream.

“Dreams are one key to the Accidents — the surest key, perhaps — but I hadn’t discovered this. Not at that point in consensus time.

“I had no concern for my personal welfare when the Soviets came, but I knew that my research was at an end. With the Red Army less than six hours distant, I ordered all outbuildings razed, regardless of whether or not the trials they housed had reached completion. I did this at the cost of adequate defense of the camp, which resulted in the death of most of my subordinates, and of course a great number of prisoners. Just one potential test subject remained; fortunately, one was all I needed. An absolute breach this time. A full excision from the timestream. My only fear was that the camp would fall before I’d accomplished the breach — but they were in no rush, the Soviets. They razed Äschenwald to the ground, methodically and slowly, beginning with the buildings where we’d run our final trials. They were good enough, Nefflein , to cover the last of my tracks. I’m beholden to them for that service.”

* * *

That was the end of it, Mrs. Haven: all the reason my namesake possessed. He shut his mouth and turned back to his satchel. I watched him for a time, fussing over his trinkets, muttering under his breath like some aged recluse. And he was aged, of course: unnaturally, wretchedly old. His fearsomeness had long since passed away. I thought of the turning of the tide, of the collapse of the Eastern Front, of the Red Army’s march on bomb-shattered Berlin. I thought of how very long ago that was.

“Do you still think back on that time?”

“What time?” he said without turning.

“Your tenure at Czas. At the Äschenwald camp.”

He glanced up at me with an expression that bordered on pity. “ Ach , Waldy!” he said. “I’ve only just arrived from there.”

AT THE TIME I was born, total radio silence had prevailed between my father and his sisters for more than a year, to the private misery of all concerned. Orson had been too proud to take the critical first step, though he likely suffered more than anyone; Enzian had been too absorbed in her research (or so she later claimed); Gentian had fallen back into her pre-Manhattan deference; and the Kraut had decided she couldn’t be bothered. While my birth was an ambiguous event from certain points of view — my own, for example — it was a godsend for family relations. Coaxed by his wife and his own heavy conscience, Orson sent a postcard to Harlem announcing my arrival. It was a plain-enough postcard, ugly and cheaply printed, embossed with that now-inescapable icon of my native city: a buffalo wearing a scarf. But in a number of other ways, Mrs. Haven, my father’s postcard was a wonder for the ages.

It was wondrous, first of all, in that it was written by Orson, who’d never sent a postcard in his life; and it was even more wondrous — miraculous, in fact — in the olive branch it extended to his sisters. The card informed Enzian and Gentian, in a matter-of-fact, unsentimental tone, that a child had been born. It gave the child’s weight, gender, eye color, and date of birth. As to the name —wrote my father, in his pinched, clerkish script— Ursula and I are open to suggestions.

As a gesture, Mrs. Haven, it was not without a certain grandeur, and his sisters duly rose to the occasion. Less than seventy-two hours after the postcard was sent, its counterpart arrived at Pine Ridge Road, this one depicting Nutter’s Battery in Central Park. Every available inch of the card’s reverse side was covered in Gentian’s hand, and much of what was written there was indecipherable; the gist, however, was that the child should be brought to them without delay. Orson wasn’t mentioned on the postcard, and neither was Ursula, but the implication was that they’d be welcome. This itself was no minor concession, as my aunts’ door had been closed to the entire human species for the preceding seven months.

It was my mother who told me the story of that first trip to Spanish Harlem, not my father, so I’m confident the details can be trusted. It was an eight-hour drive to New York in those days, and I bawled from Rochester to Painted Post; Orson’s nerves were in tatters by the time we crossed the Hudson, and the Kraut could feel a fever coming on. We pulled up at the General Lee at dusk. The neighborhood looked even more abject than my father remembered, purged of any phantom traces of romance. He pressed the buzzer of his former place of residence three times, counted silently to thirty, then pressed it again. When no response came, he dug out a key from the glove compartment — huge and ancient and tarnished, like the key to a fairy-tale dungeon — and unlocked the front door himself. Ursula followed him feebly, already running a temperature, humming to keep the restless baby quiet.