John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

It looked nothing like the machine that I’d envisioned — nothing at all — which was precisely what convinced me it was real. I’d have been skeptical of flashing lights and pulsing panels, but I didn’t question this. There was nothing to question. My aunt undid a hidden catch and its top swung creakingly upward, like the hood of a go-kart. There was nothing — or next to nothing — inside: just a graphite-colored layer of some spongy material that might have been Nerf, enclosing what looked to be (and in fact, on closer inspection, actually turned out to be) a reclinable Naugahyde seat. There was no denying what I was looking at any longer. Enzie’s “exclusion bin” was a white plywood crate, roughly three feet by seven, with a secondhand car seat inside it.

“I’m going to ask you to do me a kindness,” Enzie said into my ear. “I’m going to ask you to get inside this apparatus. Will you do that for me?”

I should have countered her question, Mrs. Haven, with a few of my own. I should have asked why she wanted me to climb inside the “apparatus,” and what might happen to me if I did. Instead I nodded gravely, like a prizefighter about to be pushed out of his corner, and did as she asked.

The interior smelled of Windex and vinyl and — faintly — of something like cloves. It smelled, in other words, like a used car. The seat was too big for me, squeaky and cool, and the blood rushed to my head as I lay back.

“No cause for alarm,” Enzie said, resting her palm on the crown of my head. “It’s likely that nothing will happen.”

“Where am I going?” I heard myself croak.

“Nowhere at all. This isn’t a rocket ship, as you can see. The first task of the scientist, Waldemar, is to ask the appropriate question.”

I sank into the seat — it was cracked at the corners, I noticed, and oddly deflated — and watched as she lowered the lid. The appropriate question arrived half a second too late.

“When?” I said, just as the light disappeared.

I remember a sharp rush of panic, then a sudden, inexplicable calm; I remember how absolute the blackness was, and how remarkably little this scared me. Incredibly, the silence was as total as the darkness. Touch remained, but without hearing or sight it seemed stripped of its context, a vestigial trait, an x coordinate without a y or z . I’d been cautioned to expect “nothing”—and I should have been prepared for it, science fiction addict that I was — but the nothing I’d imagined was a vastly different animal than the nothing I was being swallowed by.

I say “animal,” Mrs. Haven, because it soon became a living thing to me. I felt its weight against my open eyes; I inhaled its musk; with time I even came to hear it breathing. The silence was so consummate that my brain began to manufacture sounds. They came on mildly enough, as a hubbub of faraway squeaks; soon, however, they built — gently but irresistibly — to a thundering wall of antic background hiss. From time to time it was possible to make out voices, though what they said was gibberish, like the voices one hears before falling asleep.

That was all, Mrs. Haven, for the first long, lightless stretch of nothingness. Then the images came.

Like the noises, they started as liminal blips, imagined as much as perceived, then gradually took on form and definition. Those first abstract shapes and color fields bore little or no relation to my state of mind, as far as I could tell — my sense of self, in fact, seemed to have been expunged. But if I was as blank as the darkness around me, as empty of thought or intention, I was also just as charged with possibility.

When the first of these vague shapes was brought into focus, I felt a cold jolt of excitement; my excitement, however, was brief. The image before my mind’s eye was of a pair of pocket nail clippers, the kind designed to double as a key chain, missing its nail-file attachment. As visions go, this was about as thrilling as a balled-up Kleenex — which turned out to be the next thing that I saw. The Kleenex was followed by a pellet of crumpled silver foil, which was followed, after a brief delay, by a capless ballpoint pen. I could have seen as much in Orson’s glove compartment.

My sight went black after that, then violet, then green, then bluish white; then dim and flat and colorless again. Awareness returned to me slowly, and a sense of confinement that seemed independent of sight or touch or any sense at all. My scalp and feet and tongue began to tingle. I could feel claustrophobia sweeping toward me through the dark, and had just taken in air to yell when the catches were thrown and the lid was pulled up and Enzie’s shining eyes peered into mine.

“What was it, Waldemar? What did you see?”

“I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t really have—”

“Describe it to me.”

I blinked at her. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Of course you saw nothing,” she said impatiently. “It’s an exclusion bin. But what did you see after that?”

I took a long time to answer. I was groggy and anxious and deeply confused, and what I’d seen seemed far too trivial to mention. “Not much,” I mumbled.

She stared hard at me. “You are Waldemar Tolliver, son of Orson, son of Kaspar, son of Ottokar Gottfriedens Toula?”

I looked away from her and shrugged.

“I fail to understand,” she said, apparently to herself. Then, in a kindlier voice: “Perhaps it’s too soon yet. You’re still a child.”

“Okay,” I said, still dodging her questioning look. “Sorry.” Now that the whole thing was over I felt the same embarrassment I’d felt before. What had she been expecting — flying saucers and mushroom clouds and backward-running clocks? What had she needed me for anyhow? I climbed out of the bin and looked around me with a sinking heart. The room was better lit than I recalled: brighter and smaller and more full of junk. It looked less like a mad scientist’s laboratory, suddenly, than the basement workshop of a pensioner.

“Genny will fix you breakfast,” said my aunt. “You’ve lost some sleep, of course, but you’ll catch up. You can sleep in the back of the car on your way home.”

I was about to point out that Orson and I weren’t likely to be leaving right then, not at two in the morning, when I realized why everything seemed changed. There was a skylight above us — a peaked gray rabbit hutch of wood and chicken wire and frosted glass — and the first pale light of day was seeping through it.

“What time is it, Aunt Enzie?”

She gave me no answer. A sense of unreality broke over me: I held my hands up to my eyes, half expecting to be able to see through them. I’d have estimated my time in the exclusion bin at less than twenty minutes, half an hour at the most. It should have been the middle of the night.

“What time is it?” I said again. “How long was I in there?”

For the space of a breath my aunt stayed as she was, smiling an odd little unamused smile. Then she took up a ledger and ran her finger down a row of scribbled entries. It was only then, seeing the obvious pleasure my bewilderment gave her, that I remembered Orson’s jokes about her lack of human feeling. But there was nothing flat or robotic in my aunt’s expression now. If anything there was too much feeling in it.

“Three hours, forty-one minutes, and thirty-seven seconds,” she announced. “That’s an awful lot of not much , Waldemar.”

* * *

We found Orson awake in the parlor, sitting on a corner of our little makeshift bed, the packing blanket draped across his shoulders. I could see right away that he’d guessed what had happened. He looked at me as though we’d never met.

“There you are, Waldy,” he said. “I’d been wondering.”