The Lost Time Accidents (48 page)

From that point forward, it was as though two movies were being projected onto the interior of my skull—both the climactic conclusion of the
Timestrider
trilogy and a spectral companion piece, flickering in and out of focus, made for a purpose I’d grasped only one thing about: my family was both its audience and its subject. In that final hour, surrounded by Coke-slurping strangers in that oversold, sticky-floored theater, I felt what paranoid schizophrenics report experiencing during pyschotic episodes: the suspicion that the actors were speaking directly to me.

Psychiatrists refer to this phenomenon as “delusions of reference,” Mrs. Haven, but there were no delusions in play in the Mohawk 6 that afternoon. I’d heard my own father reciting the actor’s lines, after all, less than twenty-four hours before. There was a riddle in that, a mystery I was still too young to solve; but I had no doubt that I’d crack the code in time. As a twelve-year-old boy, I saw the world of adults in precisely those terms—as a series of time-coded, self-solving riddles—and in this particular instance I was right. I didn’t have to wait longer than the closing credits.

*   *   *

I rushed from the Mohawk 6 back to Buffalo General as fast as the NFTA bus would carry me, bursting at the seams with self-importance. Orson was having something done to him involving gauze and electrodes when I got there, so I was forced to cool my heels out in the hall. I kept my back to the wall and my eyes on the floor, struggling to choke back my excitement. For whatever reason—urgency? fear? an adrenaline spike?—my senses were as sharp as a raccoon’s. I heard the nurse’s crepe-soled shoes against the crackling ancient vinyl and saw and smelled things that I’d rather not remember. Finally Orson’s door opened and the nurses filed out. I found him wide awake and restless.

“Well, Waldy?” he gasped. It seemed to me now, in my paranoid state, that he was gasping on purpose, on the off chance that the premises were bugged.

“I did it,” I whispered.

“Good boy. What have you got?”

“The Insurgency won, Orson. Just like you said.”

He gave a sigh and let his eyes fall closed. “That’s wonderful, Waldy. Huzzah for the cosmos. Is that all?”

I held back for a moment, aware that I was toying with my father. I was savoring his attention—his desperation, really—knowing all too well that it was temporary. His chest rose and fell under the papery hospital sheets; a vein in his neck twitched in time to his heartbeat. I had the sudden conviction, feeling my own pulse quicken, that if I stared long enough at that vein it would explode.

“I’ve also got this.” I laid my notebook on the bed beside him.

“Show me.”

I flipped to the relevant page and held it up. Printed there, all in caps, was the very last line of the credits:

SPONSORED BY THE U.S. CHURCH OF SYNCHRONOLOGY

Orson glanced at it quickly, then pushed it away. It was obviously what he’d been expecting. I remember feeling vaguely disappointed.

“As soon as I get out of this organ-harvesting center,” he muttered, “we’re going to pay a visit to your aunties.”

Monday, 09:05 EST

This entry may turn your stomach, Mrs. Haven, but the possibility no longer worries me. I’m still writing for an audience of one, still bearing witness, as I’ve done since the beginning; but sometimes I wonder. Someone will read this, I’m certain of that. But my audience might not be you—or “you”—at all. It could even be the Timekeeper himself.

My relief at his disappearance didn’t last longer than a single sleep cycle. Once it registered that I was alone again—more alone, if possible, than I’d been before I found him—the old heaviness dropped down on me at once. The singularity was tightening its hold, taking advantage of my discouragement; but I knew the heaviness was just a symptom.

The cause of it was clear to me. I missed him.

This isn’t as perverse as it sounds, Mrs. Haven. I feel no sympathy for my great-uncle, let alone love. He’s a sociopath, a criminal, a monster—I have no doubt of that. But I was possessed of two ambitions before being banished to this place: (1) to arrive at a reckoning of my family’s crimes, by finishing this history; and (2) to reckon
with
them, perhaps even atone for them, by whatever sad, belated methods I could find. And I can no longer deny, Mrs. Haven—not now, having met him at last—that Waldemar holds the key to them both.

My strength gradually returned as I reviewed chapter XXI, and I began venturing, slowly and tentatively, back into the Archive. But not once in a half-dozen forays—two of them as far as my aunts’ bedroom—did I find the slightest trace of Waldemar. It was as though all evidence of him had been deliberately erased: no imprint on the bed, no bantering notes, no mnemonic triggers left out in the tunnels. I never would have thought a place so packed with junk could seem so empty. I had nothing but my history to keep me company, and my history wasn’t enough: not when the Timekeeper himself might be in the next room.

Finally, on what I’d resolved would be my very last pilgrimage to that claustrophobic chamber, I found him waiting for me on the bed.

He was sitting with his back against the headboard and his legs splayed in a V across the sheets, unpacking a grimy olive-colored satchel. Its contents seemed as random as anything out in the Archive: a bicycle pump, a length of wire, a tarnished old key, a handful of cherry pits in a cracked glass beaker. He took no notice of me until I cleared my throat.

“There you are, Waldy,” he said absently, holding the satchel upside-down and shaking it. “You have some questions for me, I imagine.”

I hadn’t been aware of having any questions. Nothing came to my mind.

“What was that,
Nefflein
?”

“Are we the same person?”

Again he seemed barely to hear me. He was more corporeal than when I’d seen him last, but also tighter-skinned—somehow inflated-seeming—as though his viscera and flesh were pressurized.

“Those things you did,” I said. “At the Äschenwald camp.”

He set the satchel aside. “What about them?”

I hesitated. “Am I like you?”

“What a curious question. In what sense do you mean?”

I did my best to hold his milky gaze. “If your theory is right—if chronological time is a hoax—then why should your guilt have been passed on to me? Why should
I
care what happened at Czas, or Vienna, or anywhere else? Why can’t I forget?”

I’d expected him to react with surprise, perhaps even anger; instead he cocked his head and grinned at me.

“I’ve been wondering what brought you here,
Nefflein
. Now I understand.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“The past is a torment to you, the present is grim, and the future—from what I can see—scares you out of your wits. Is it any wonder you’ve excused yourself from time?”

I opened my mouth and closed it.

“Here’s a piece of advice, Waldy. If you’re looking for
causes
—”

“I don’t want your advice. I want you to answer my question.”

“No need to shout!” He held up both his hands in mock surrender. “It’s important to keep in mind, first of all, that Äschenwald was a means to me only. The
end
—as you well know—was otherwise.” He shifted indolently on the bed. “If you’d had my reasons … then yes. Perhaps you might have acted as I did.”

He coughed twice—loudly and hackingly—into his fist, then waited to hear what I would ask him next.

“What were your reasons?” I said, as he’d known that I would.

“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.”

XXII

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.