John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Let me in, Enzie. You know why I’m here.”

“Hello, Waldemar,” Enzian said to me, ignoring him completely. I’d never seen her smile before, and I can’t honestly say I liked the look of it. I did my best to smile politely back.

“Hello, Aunt Enzie. Nice to, um, see you again.”

“Marvelous boy! Enchanting boy!” came a voice from inside. I squinted past Enzian into the shadows of the Archive, but couldn’t make anything out but a stack of microwaves and fax machines.

“Lass mich sehen!” the voice protested. “Let me see!”

“This is ridiculous,” said Orson. “Let us in.”

“There’s no room.”

“Lass mich sehen,” the voice repeated. “Waldemar?”

“There’s no room.”

“For crying out loud, Enzie—”

Before Orson could finish there came a skittering sound — like a puppy’s toenails clattering over tile — and Enzian stepped out quickly onto the landing. “Go in, Waldemar. There’s room for you now. Go in and say hello to your aunt Genny.”

I hesitated, unsure how to behave; then I caught my father’s eye and saw that he was no better off than I was, and that Enzian was worse off than either of us. Her hair had gone gray since I’d last seen her, and her dress — the same one as last time, it seemed, though I couldn’t be sure — hung mournfully from her diminished body. Orson looked like a trained bear beside her. I left the two of them out on the landing, making a big show of not looking at each other, and slipped tentatively inside.

Although it was the same twilit entryway I remembered — the same chipped parquet, the same tang of mildew — I barely recognized the place. The sky-blue ceiling I’d admired at age seven was visible only in patches now, like breaks in a fog in the mountains; which isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds, Mrs. Haven, because what I’d stepped into looked more like a Himalayan col than a New York apartment. Great sloping drifts of every conceivable type of object — from telephone directories to Persian rugs to lengths of oxidizing copper pipe — rose steeply to either side, leaving barely enough space for a body to wriggle between; Enzian hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d warned us that there was no room. The trompe l’oeil effect that had once made the hallway seem endless had been superseded, at some long-ago juncture, by a crevasse that had no quality of height or depth at all. As I worked my way deeper, however, the chaos gradually resolved itself into a kind of order. Classes of object were grouped together, I realized, according to function: telephone books might not look much like eight-track cassettes, but they were both reference materials, of a kind, and they both transmitted information, as did the coils of fiber-optic wire they sat on. I have no idea how I intuited this, Mrs. Haven, but it came to me all in a rush. Nothing had changed since my last visit, at least not in principle. The Archive had expanded, that was all. Just as Genny had predicted that it would.

I heard my aunt’s voice before I saw her. She was whistling — some half-remembered Tin Pan Alley air she’d probably learned from Buffalo Bill — and I followed the sound back to its source. I found Genny on a cowhide settee in what I guessed to be the parlor’s southeast corner, one bandaged foot propped on a stack of board games (Battleship was topmost, I remember, followed by Mastermind and Stratego and Risk), and holding a tray of powdered doughnuts in her lap.

“There you are, dear,” she said. “I’d have come to the door, but I’m a gottverdammter cripple, as you see.”

It took me a moment to answer — a long, fretful moment — because of how greatly she’d changed. Enzie had also struck me as aged, of course, but Genny seemed a different person altogether. She was gray-faced and frail, half the size that she’d been, with the papery look that people in their dotage tend to get. Her bandaged foot was preposterously large, like the leg of a mummy, and its swaddling looked less than clean. I had a vision of gangrene and suppressed it at once.

“First things first!” said Genny. “Have a doughnut.”

I took one, then another, eager to hide my discomfort. “These are delicious, Aunt Genny,” I said, and I meant it. They had a peppery flavor I’d never encountered before.

“I’m glad you like them, Waldy. Have another.”

“Thanks, Aunt Genny.” I chewed for a while. “The Archive sure has, um, expanded.”

“ Hasn’t it?” she said. “I’m so pleased you noticed.”

I stood awkwardly beside the settee as I ate, looking everywhere but at that leg of hers. I was standing, Mrs. Haven, because there seemed to be nowhere to sit. I’d been tempted by a milk crate near the newsprint-covered window, but I wasn’t sure whether it was furniture or an exhibit of some kind. I still had a lot to learn about the Archive.

“Bring that crate over here,” my aunt said abruptly. “Let’s have a nice long look at you.” She waited for me to sit, then added, more quietly: “I have a confession to make, Waldemar. Your aunt Enzie and I think about you every day.”

We sat in total silence while I thought of a reply. I wondered — not for the first time — what importance I could possibly have for two elderly shut-ins who’d seen me only twice since I was born. It seemed more than a strictly auntly sort of interest.

“Did you make these doughnuts yourself?” I said finally.

“What! Those things?” Genny said, chuckling. “I found them in a paper bag at Park and Ninety-Seventh.”

Even all these years later, Mrs. Haven, I feel proud of my reaction. I gave a businesslike nod, forced myself to keep chewing, then slid the uneaten portion of the doughnut into the pocket of my parka. If Genny noticed this maneuver, she didn’t let on.

“What happened to your foot, Aunt Genny?”

“You’re sweet to be concerned, dear. An occupational hazard. A minor landslide in the beaux arts section.”

“Who does the shopping now?”

“ Why, I do, of course. Enzie could never manage by herself.”

“But how do you make it outside?”

She settled back comfortably on the settee. “If you don’t like the place where you find yourself, Waldemar, it pays to remember that you’ll be somewhere else in just a moment. The place itself will be a different place.” She gave a catlike grin. “There’s always more than one way out. Remember that.”

I was about to ask what she meant when Enzie appeared with my father trailing after, looking as though he’d spent the intervening minutes sucking on a lime.

“Enzie tells me it was your idea,” he snarled.

“They came to us , Peanut,” Genny replied equably. “They came here, to One Hundred and Ninth Street, and they asked us nicely. That’s more than you ever did.”

“Fuck you,” said my father. “Fuck you both.”

I’d expected a showdown of some kind, of course, but not this kind of showdown. I tried to blend in with the wall behind me.

“You’re upset, Orson,” Enzie said, making no attempt to hide her satisfaction. “It sits poorly with you that we persist in our work, after you’ve so bravely washed your hands of it in public. It sits poorly with you, after you’ve repeatedly refused to advocate for the Accidents — the vocation you were born to, and trained in, and which brought you your fame — that we should accept assistance from another quarter. We can understand your feelings very well.”

“You’ve been used,” wheezed my father. “They couldn’t get my endorsement, so they settled for yours.”

“That’s true, Peanut!” said Genny. “They used us — and we used them in return. Isn’t that quite the best way?”