The Lost Time Accidents (19 page)

It was Kaspar, fittingly enough, who finally brought the stalemate to an end. A Slovenian communist had brought Sonja a bouquet of alpine flowers in belated honor of the birth, and my grandfather discovered that the surest way to quiet the twins, at the height of their tantrums, was to twirl a tiny star-shaped gentian above them.
Enzian
is the name of that flower in Austria, and it struck Kaspar as perfect for the firstborn of his daughters: not too feminine, not too pretentious, and fittingly peculiar to the ear. Sonja allowed him to convince her (as much out of exhaustion as anything else) and suggested, lover of verse that she was, that their younger daughter be named Gentian, in tribute to William Cullen Bryant’s “To the Fringed Gentian,” a favorite poem of her schooling days. The resulting names managed to sound as awkward in German as they did in English, which is harder to achieve than you might think; but no one ever claimed the twins’ names didn’t suit them.

Professor Silbermann retired the following summer, to the relief of everyone who knew him, and the twins grew more tractable, if no less bizarre. Gradually existence reverted to normal—though Kaspar could never say for certain that he hadn’t simply grown accustomed to the strangeness of the times. Conditions grew grim for the city’s Jews and leftists, then very slightly better, then worse than anybody could recall. Sonja did what she could for her embattled protégés, but her protection wasn’t what it once had been. There was little she could offer them but shelter.

It grew commonplace for Kaspar to come home from the university—or, just as often, to rise in the mornings—to find a rumpled, bearded
ism
-ist sleeping on the yellow divan in the parlor. He complained to his wife regarding this exactly once. “If you want
me
to sleep in your house, Herr Toula,” Sonja replied, “then you’ll have to put up with my guests. The girls enjoy them, even if you don’t.” Disgruntled though he was, my grandfather knew there was no point in arguing, especially with regard to the twins: Enzian and Gentian, barely able to walk, delighted in standing next to the divan in pallbearer-ish silence, taking turns seeing how firmly they could tug on the whiskers of each new refugee before he sat up with a yelp of pain.

Rumors of Waldemar von Toula surfaced from time to time—he was in Germany now, allegedly, which came as no surprise at all—but the family preferred to disregard them. Kaspar was offered no promotions by the Department of Physics, but no pigs were stuffed into his pen cup, either. By the turn of the decade, he’d resigned himself to passing the remainder of his duration as an adjunct professor in a city he no longer felt at home in, shunning the papers and most of the people he knew, Jew and gentile alike.
When a body, in motion, is not acted upon by any force
, Newton famously wrote,
that body shall continue on in a straight line, at the same speed
. If the middle of Kaspar’s life was a plateau to him—a hilltop with an unobstructed view—then the future was a single smooth descent. And that temperate decline was all he wished for.

How to assess my grandfather, Mrs. Haven? How to judge him? Admittedly, he hadn’t read a newspaper since 1927, he rarely left the house except to deliver his lectures, and he’d come to have as much use for human interaction as a jellyfish; but the force that was building—and would soon overwhelm him—had announced its arrival in letters of fire. To quote Kaspar himself, on the last page of his European diary:
Only a blind man could have lived through these last years without seeing what was bearing down upon us; so I made myself as blind as I could manage. I wanted to believe that the worst was behind me, and I found an easy way to make it so. I simply turned my back on what was coming.

Monday, 09:05 EST

Where in spacetime are you, Mrs. Haven? Are you relaxing at home on a dull winter evening, as I like to imagine, leafing idly through these pages by the fire? Are you happy, Mrs. Haven? Are you tipsy? Are you bored? It’s getting harder and harder, with each chapter I finish, to bring your darkling image into focus. My reason for writing was allegedly to capture your interest, or at least to recapture your memory; instead I find your likeness warping, refracting the light I shine toward it, like a cigarette wrapper left out in the sun. How far can I go before you’re gone completely?

In one of Orson’s first published pieces, “The Un-Extended Life” (
Preposterous! Stories
, volume 21, number 3, 1957), a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk named Silas Strangeways comes across a thumbnail-sized ad on the back page of volume 21, number 3 of
Preposterous! Stories
(with a fantastically geeky attention to detail that I can’t help admiring, the ad was actually
run
in that same issue) promising escape from his humdrum existence:

ARE
YOU
LIVING THE LIFE THAT YOUR MAKER INTENDED?

Does your life lack the flavor, the crackle, the
intensity
you’ve hoped for?

Daily, we find ourselves bombarded by a thousand recommendations for extending the
duration
of our lives—exercise three times weekly! smoke in moderation! exchange sugar for saccharine!—but the truth is that time does not gain value by accruing. Time acquires value by being “spent,” and spent freely. The longest life is not always the best one; in the majority of cases, just the opposite.

If you
are
, in fact, living the life that your maker intended—it may be time to seek another maker.

Prompted, perhaps, by his genre-appropriate surname, Strangeways answers the ad, and soon finds himself in a bunker with titanium walls—located, for some reason, sixty feet beneath the Statue of Liberty—as a test subject in a top-secret, Pentagon-funded experiment in something known as “rotary chrono-feedback.” The basic idea (explains the ascot-sporting, sherry-sipping scientist in charge, Dr. Hugo von Karst) is to harness the power of certain especially nasty cosmic rays to collapse spacetime into a kind of nugget—“a diamond, if you will, of pure, unadulterated NOW”—in which every instant of a man’s life will occur simultaneously. Karst’s pitch is as follows: “Your life, Mr. Strangeways, is sadly diluted. It holds precious few pleasures, a handful at best, with far too much of nothing in between. Imagine, however, the bliss and the terror, the intensity and the passion, if it all were compressed—if you lived your
whole life
in a nanosecond!”

After some rote hemming and hawing from Strangeways—and some heavily italicized gibberish from Karst about time as mankind’s comeuppance for original sin, and mankind itself as a race of undeserving monkeys, and heaven as a kind of perpetual-motion machine—Strangeways agrees to have his life compacted, and in no time at all he’s deloused and depilated and basted in radioactive Vaseline and inserted, buck naked, into a “thrumming titanium cervix” (Orson’s words, Mrs. Haven, not mine), at which point everyone puts on goggles and the space rays are harnessed and something goes horribly wrong. The experiment has the opposite of the expected result: instead of living his entire life in a single fervent moment, Strangeways’s existence is stretched out so infinitely thin that he might as well not be existing at all. He’s traded his brief, Judeo-Christian lifespan for a diaphanous kind of immortality: he’s sidestepped the life God intended for him and become an accidental god himself.

Uncharacteristically for my father—a believer in tidy endings, like most of his peers in the trade—it’s left open whether Strangeways’s default godhood is a blessing or a curse.

The editors of
Preposterous! Stories
weren’t too taken with “The Un-Extended Life,” much to Orson’s consternation. They accepted it grudgingly—as a kind of stopgap between “Titans’ Battle,” by Heinrich Hauser, and “Warlord of Peace,” by Leroy P. Yerxa—and paid him half the normal rate per word. Orson sent them an indignant letter, seven pages long, demanding an explanation for the slight. Their answer took the form of a nine-word postcard, all in caps:

MORE TITS TOLLIVER. MORE POINTER SISTERS. MORE JUJU FRUITS.

My father scrupulously avoided repeating this error in the 136 stories that followed. From that day onward, his extraterrestrials were nearly always female, dressed inadequately or not at all, and possessed of proud, heaving, pendulous breasts, whenever possible in multiples of three.

*   *   *

I’m rambling again, Mrs. Haven. Something odd seems to have happened to the air. Could the pilot light have gone out in the kitchen?

XI

ENZIAN AND GENTIAN
had just celebrated their birthday—an orgy of Bavarian cream and marzipan at which no expense was spared—when Hitler’s Wehrmacht arrived at the gates to the city, politely requested the key, and received it with an ingratiating flourish. Vienna in ’38 was no longer the glistening pudding, studded with exotic candied fruits, that it had been in the years of its prime—but the Führer discovered, to his profound satisfaction, that it practically melted on his tongue.

The Toula-Silbermanns watched the victory procession from the mezzanine balcony of their apartment—close enough, as Kaspar’s father-in-law put it, “to trim your whiskers on the bayonets.” The phalanxes of uniformed torsos, extending up the Ringstrasse as far as the eye could see, were impressive enough; but the fervor of the crowd was grander still. Teenagers flung confetti; couples kissed in the street; men sang ardently along with songs they didn’t know the words to yet; and everywhere that stiff-armed, armpit-exposing, supremely unsavory salute. In terms of pure spectacle, that tremendous parade was unsurpassed in the city’s three-thousand-year history: a whirling
laterna magica
of jet black and scarlet, submission and patriotism, sweating men and fawning women, eros and repression, brotherly feeling and hate. And at the navel of it all, at its heroic center, Waldemar von Toula—all two hundred kilos’ worth—sat artfully arranged in the back of a Daimler convertible.

He was mountainous now, more massive even than Reichsmarschall Goering, and his spectacles had been replaced by a cobalt-tinted monocle on a length of silver cord. He was squinting blandly out into the crowd, searching for familiar faces, but his gaze never rose to the level of his brother’s balcony. The family looked on in silence as the Daimler rolled past; even the twins seemed momentarily abashed. Sonja stood at the railing, ashen-faced and white-knuckled; Kaspar huddled behind her, staring out through his fingers, contending with actuality at last. But it was one Felix Ungarsky—Trotskyist agitator, occasional pimp and current tenant of the yellow divan—who put the collective feeling into words.

“I couldn’t possibly eat as much dinner,” Ungarsky growled into his beard, “as I’d like to be able to puke.”

*   *   *

On the nineteenth of March—an unseasonably balmy Saturday—the same Daimler convertible eased to a stop in front of 37 Ringstrasse, its brakes chuffing softly, and a monocled man in a cherry-red suit stepped out into the piping noonday sun. As chance or fate or Providence would have it, it was Felix Ungarsky who answered the door, and none too cordially either: he’d done almost nothing but sleep since the transfer of government, and the doorbell had roused him from a wonderfully Wermacht-free dream. Blinking out at the caller through nearsighted eyes, his face piggish with sleep, Ungarsky did his best to get his jumbled thoughts in order. The man regarded him warmly, in no apparent hurry, beaming like Saint Nicholas himself. In his fuddled condition, Ungarsky failed to recognize the caller; he decided—not altogether wrongly—that he was a peddler of religious literature.

“You’ve chosen the wrong house, I’m afraid. Our souls are brimming with fulfillment as it is. We’re part of the German Reich now, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“I
did
hear something to that effect,” the man replied.

“There you have it, then. This family has no time for you today.”

“No time for me?” the caller answered brightly, stepping past him. “Run upstairs and announce me, there’s a good fellow. I rather think you’ll find that I’m expected.”

This was by no means the first time Ungarsky had been mistaken for the butler, but in his grogginess he made a rash decision: he decided, just this once, to let it get under his skin.

“One moment now, Father Christmas,” he said, catching hold of the visitor’s sleeve. “My name is Felix Ungarsky, and I happen to
reside
in these apartments. You seem to be under the mistaken impression—”

“You’re neglecting your other caller, Felix.”

The hallway seemed to darken, and Ungarsky, gripped by a sudden premonition, let the man’s sleeve go and turned to look behind him. A second man stood backlit in the doorway. He wore a gray loden cape over a jet-black uniform with gleaming silver buttons, and he smiled at Ungarsky as if he knew him well.

“Felix Ungarsky—Hauptsturmführer Kalk,” said the man in the suit, halfway up the stairs already. “The two of you have an interest in common.”

“An interest in common?” Ungarsky echoed. He was clearheaded now, as sober and awake as he had ever been, and he’d recognized the caller at last.

“Exactly so,” said the man in black, pulling the door of the house shut behind him. “Can you guess what it is?”

“I don’t—” Ungarsky stammered. “That’s to say, I couldn’t—”

“It’s you, Felix Ungarsky! You yourself.”

*   *   *

Sonja had just come out of the kitchen to see who’d rung the bell—and to ask whoever it was to keep quiet, so as not to rouse her father from his nap—when she saw Waldemar at the head of the stairs, draping his suit jacket over the banister. Her first impulse was to raise a finger to her lips; her next was to slip into her father’s room and hide under the bed. Waldemar crossed the landing almost soundlessly, moving with surprising grace for so immense a man. His monocle—ridiculous! who wore a monocle any longer?—caught the lamplight as he came forward, giving him an oddly startled look. He smelled strongly of almonds—or was it marzipan?—and Macassar oil and smoke.