John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What covenant?”

“It’s just for a spell,” Genny purred. “You can visit whenever you like.”

“But I’ve been enjoying his company lately. He’s just starting to reason, to think for himself—”

“We had an understanding ,” Enzian repeated. “You knew this day would arrive.”

“What are you blathering about?” said my father, his voice going shrill. “What goddamn understanding?”

“We sent you a message,” Genny said with a sigh.

“You did no such thing.”

“Don’t play the fool,” said Enzian. “Why else do you think we named him Waldemar?”

If my father gave an answer I no longer heard it. I was halfway up the hallway already, scuttling backward like a water bug, stopping only when my sneakers hit the door. It gonged faintly, its earlier boom in miniature, but they were too busy squabbling to notice. I rose to a crouch, barely able to breathe. I’d been brought as an offering: that much was now clear. I would never see daylight again.

I was too young to have much self-control, Mrs. Haven, but I mustered what little I had. Be reasonable, I commanded myself — a thing my parents often said to each other. “Be reasonable , Waldy,” I whispered aloud. Nobody gets sacrificed anymore. Nobody gets skinned alive or atomized or eaten. Reality isn’t like your father’s books.

I lived in awe of my father, as most children do; but just then, in that dim no-man’s-land, my reverence for him failed to bring me comfort. My upbringing had been religion-free, more or less, but I knew the fable of Abraham and Isaac. Orson himself, just a few weeks before, had told it to me over breakfast.

I turned to face the door and found it locked. The sight of that column of deadbolts, thick and black and corroded, made me start to hyperventilate with panic. I hadn’t started crying — not yet — but I could feel my lungs and tear ducts mobilizing. I stepped away from the door, dropped back onto my knees, and set a course for the end of the hallway.

My luck held long enough to carry me past the parlor door, then the bathroom and the dressmaker’s mannequin, but after that the air began to shudder. The forced-perspective sensation returned with a vengeance: the turning kept its distance like a fata morgana, as though it were miles away from me instead of yards. It was easier to move, I discovered, if I kept my eyes closed. The argument was growing fainter now, less relevant, more abstract. When I rounded the corner it stopped altogether.

What happened then, Mrs. Haven, is still beyond my power to describe. It was a long time ago, back when the real and the unreal were interchangeable to me, and thinking in the colorless, odorless, soundless nonplace I suddenly found myself in was like trying to breathe on the moon. I made a left turn, then a second, then a third. The last of my panic had fallen away. I was traveling counterclockwise, in an inward-curving spiral, in accordance with the laws of C*F*P. When I finally stopped and stood upright and opened my eyes, it came as no surprise that I saw nothing.

THERE’S A PASSAGE in that silver book you gave me, Mrs. Haven, that comes to mind each time I think of our elopement. It’s from chapter two—“Modern Survivals of Ancient Customs”—and it touches on one of the author’s pet topics, namely abduction:

THE HONEYMOON. — The honeymoon is a period of seclusion for the amorous couple, and/or absence from the familiar habitat. It is a relic of the remote time of marriage by capture, when it was necessary for the groom to remain in hiding with his bride until the search was given up.

We never discussed it — we steered clear of the topic, both of us, by unspoken consensus — but I thought of those weeks on the run as our honeymoon, and I was relatively sure that you did, too. It was improbable and preposterous and most likely a violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions that I’d managed to spirit you away from New York City, and the happiness this gave me lent a lightness and warmth to everything I saw or touched: the world you and I inhabited for that brief, exalted interval was less a solid object, looking back on it now, than a vast and exquisite soufflé.

But like all soufflés, Mrs. Haven, it was ultimately destined for collapse.

You paid for our tickets — cash, for reasons of secrecy — and I never thanked you. The reason for your change of heart remained a blind spot in my understanding, a redacted line, a glowing white unknown, and I was incapable of asking you, for fear that you’d suddenly come to your senses. Absurdly, inexplicably, my last-ditch attempt to use the mystery of the Accidents to beguile you to Europe had worked, and I took a giddy sort of comfort in my triumph. At the same time, the fact that your husband was bankrolling our “period of seclusion from the familiar habitat” made me sick with resentment and shame, and lent the whole enterprise — your escape, our elopement, my ill-thought-out scheme to find Ottokar’s notes, even my pursuit of the Timekeeper himself — the triteness of a junior high school play.

As the more experienced of the two of us (in elopement especially), you let these moods pass without comment. You even indulged me so far as to inquire about my plan, though it was obvious you didn’t expect much in the way of an answer: you’d assumed (perfectly reasonably) that Vienna was only a pretext. You finally posed the question two and a half hours out of JFK — we’d just left the coast of Nova Scotia, I remember — and I answered as forthrightly as I could. By the time I’d finished we were over Belgium.

“So—” you said tentatively, after a long spell of quiet. You didn’t get further than that.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Haven. I know it’s a lot to take in.”

You blinked and cleared your throat and tried again. “Let me try to summarize what you’ve told me, Walter. To make sure I’ve got it all straight.”

“Sure thing.”

“First we’re flying to Vienna, to visit your mother. Then we’re going by train to, um, Snodge—”

“Znojmo,” I said patiently. “The letter j has a y sound in Czech. Like the oy in goyim .”

“Znojmo. Okay.” You flagged down a stewardess and ordered a bourbon-and-soda. “We’re going to Znojmo to track down some papers that your great-grandfather dropped in the street when he was hit by a car at the turn of the century—”

“He might not actually have dropped them; that’s conjecture on my part. They could have disappeared some other way — stolen by rivals, for example. Or his mistress might have them.”

You gave me a sharp look. “His mistress.”

“Her descendants, of course.” I hesitated. “His mistress is dead by now, I’m guessing.”

“I’d call that a safe guess.”

“Absolutely. Point taken.”

“Except that the whole reason, you’re telling me, that we’re looking for these papers—”

“These notes—”

“—these notes , is to track down your grandfather’s brother, a Nazi war criminal, who developed relativity in the same year that Albert Einstein—”

“We never say that name in my family, if you don’t mind. And it wasn’t relativity, exactly. He referred to it as rotary—”

“—in the same year that Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity, and who used his knowledge of the secret workings of time to somehow screw up your whole family — including, apparently, you — not to mention all sorts of other god-awful and nasty and just plain weird stuff, like sending cicadas back into the past, and tampering with people’s dreams—”

“That’s not exactly what I—”