The Lost Time Accidents (66 page)

He seemed to view the question as hypothetical, so I let my attention drift—nodding amiably all the while—to take in the self-importantly stoned teens at the counter, the rain against the scratched and oily window, and a Möbius-strip-shaped dab of mayonnaise on the tabletop between us. I’d almost managed to forget where I was when my cousin dropped a name that ruined everything.

“What did you just say?”

He let out a titter. “Funny how things loop together, isn’t it? Who’d have thought the Iterants would want to horn in on the sensuality-enhancement industry?” He sighed happily. “But they’ve got to invest their cash the same as anybody else, I reckon.”

“How did they—” I took in a breath and counted slowly down from ten. “Who from the UCS contacted you?”

“What makes you think it wasn’t me doing the contacting?”

“They think you’re one of
us
, Van,” I said, fighting the urge to slap his smirking face. “That’s the reason they’re backing you—not that tarted-up horse piss you’re selling. There’s not a branch of this family they haven’t gotten their hooks into. First Enzie and Genny, then Orson, now you.” I clung white-knuckled to the edge of the table. “They haven’t hooked me, though—not yet. That’s why I need your help. I’ve got to—”

I cut my rant short when I noticed his expression. “You don’t believe me,” I muttered. “You’re not even listening.”

“I’m worried about you, Waldy.” He cleared his throat primly. “You can stay in my place for as long as you want—we’ll figure the payments out later. Get some rest. Watch some cable. Thirty-six is the vanilla porn channel, if memory serves. Thirty-seven is predominantly anal.”

I blinked at him, then at the keys he’d set down on the table. “You’re just like the others,” I said. “You think I’ve gone crazy.”

“Not at all,” Van assured me—but the look in his twitchy, bloodshot eyes said otherwise. “I’m leaving now, Waldy. Promise me you’ll get some fucking sleep.”

I watched him dart in his couture trench coat across the rain-slick pavement, relieved to have our rendezvous behind him, already intent on the next item of business. I envied him in that moment, Mrs. Haven, I have to admit. He nodded to his doorman, ducked briefly inside, then came back out with a package in his hands. His aviator glasses—mirrored, of course—matched his trench coat and expression perfectly.
Only my cousin
, I said to myself,
would wear aviator glasses in a downpour
. Then I looked at the package more closely.

It was a padded mailing envelope, crisp and marzipan-colored, identical to those I’d seen at the Villa Ouspensky. Van was cradling it as if it held a bomb.

*   *   *

Those next seven days passed like a dream, Mrs. Haven—or like a short, bumpy ride in the back of a van with packing tape covering its windows, driven by strangers wearing hazmat suits and Albert Einstein masks. I spent the week with the blinds drawn and the door double-locked and the telephone disconnected from the wall, living on stale ramen noodles and lukewarm tap water and cheese. I needed time with the package that Enzie had slipped me: time to ravel the threads and wires and light rays back into some kind of fabric, to reverse-engineer my family’s cataclysmic century. Things went on happening out in the world—horrendous things, mostly—and I was the last to find out. It was Heisenberg’s principle in all its dark glory: the observer affects the events he’s observing, no matter how many deadbolts he has on his door. I was changing, Mrs. Haven, and the chronosphere was changing with me.

I spread the contents of the package out in fan-shaped symmetry across the floor—like Ozymandias with his cards in
The Excuse
—and spent the first day sitting Indian-style on a cushion pulled down from the mildewy, beer-smelling couch, waiting for the universal Answer to arrive. It was inevitable, I suppose—or at the very least par for the course—that questions started pelting me instead.

They came slowly at first, almost bashfully; then faster and harder with each passing minute, until the floor and the sofa and the countertop were littered with scribblings on torn scraps of paper, feverish demands on one part of my brain by another. Enzie and Genny had clearly been trying to protect me at the General Lee, to keep my identity a secret from the Iterants; but what had the Iterants been doing there in the first place? What sort of a deal had been struck, and to whose benefit?

I was reading the entry in Kaspar’s diary—rereading it, to be accurate, for the seventeenth time—describing that horrific afternoon on which he’d discovered his brother in the Brown Widow’s attic, when a line suddenly stood out from the text surrounding it, like the wing of a butterfly caught in a stray beam of light:

You look funny down there, he called to me from the top of the wardrobe. You look like a cicada in a jar.

A cicada in a jar, I thought, turning the phrase over in my mind. It was then that I recalled a further point in the series, not in the diary but in my own experience, in the immediate past, so recent that the memory was still damp. The mural in Haven’s sanctum in the Villa Ouspensky: the one Miss Greer had allegedly painted. Those insects had been
cicadas
, not grasshoppers or cockroaches or ants. I hadn’t made the connection at the time—I hadn’t been sure—but I was sure of it now. And with that first modest link, that initial line drawn between a casual turn of phrase and its most extravagant, fantastic expression, I was suddenly attuned to other points in the sequence, other appearances, both in the documents littering the floor of Van’s apartment and in my own memory. It was a cicada that my great-uncle had been mesmerized by as a boy; it was a cicada I’d seen trapped under a glass at age ten, when Genny had shown me the Archive; and what else could the “little flying thing” have been that the twins had communed with as children? It had visited them every seven years, after all—in between, it had been “no-where and no-when,” as Enzie had put it in her diary. No wonder they’d given it Ottokar’s name.

I lowered my throbbing head onto the couch. Was the cicada somehow significant to Waldemar’s argument for rotary time—as a symbol of the overlooked, perhaps, or of the meandering, or of the cyclical? Or was it simply the Timekeeper’s totem, a fetish he left behind him at every point of the chronosphere he visited, like a dirty drawing on a bathroom stall?

I’d taken the critical step, Mrs. Haven: the leap from the rational to the occult. But none of the above, beguiling though it was, brought me nearer to cracking the fundamental conundrum, the one from which all the others arose, and without which they subsided into nothing. Physical time travel, especially into the past, has long been regarded as an impossibility. How had Waldemar—indigent, paranoid Waldemar, embittered and embattled and patently mad—succeeded where so many better men had failed? What sliver of his grotesque, rabid, mystical pseudotheory had ultimately turned out to be true?

Dreams had something to do with it, according to my aunts: dreams and subjectivity, and the inexorable influence of the observer. The secret of Enzie’s homemade time machine, in other words. What was an “exclusion bin,” in effect, but an objectivity filter? I’d seen into the future myself, after all, using nothing but a whitewashed plywood box. Was it possible that Waldemar’s madness, far from being a hindrance, had brought him some sort of advantage? Could the breach of consensus reality be a preliminary step—perhaps even a
precondition
—to escaping from consensus time?

I reached this inductive toehold again and again in the course of that week, in relative psychological comfort; but whenever I tried to move past it, to find the next step, my brain would begin to feel greasy and hot and penned in by my skull, like a tin of pâté left out in the sun. Orson had tried to shield me from this punishing, frightening, hazardous mental state for the bulk of my childhood—he’d told me as much at the Villa Ouspensky. But it was too late, Mrs. Haven. It had been too late forever.

*   *   *

Time is a nightmare
, wrote Theodore Sturgeon—hero of West Village coffee-shop Orson—
that madmen have always felt themselves at home in.
The problem with time, Sturgeon argues, is that it’s too boundless a concept—too fever-dream nightmarish, too all-pervasive, too sublime—for us to wrap our feeble primate brains around. Saint Augustine struggled with time all his life; Newton, in his arrogance, reduced it to a constant; Nietzsche tied it into pretzel knots to make it submit to his mania, then ultimately scrapped it altogether. And the harder I tried, in the course of that week, to distill the contents of my aunts’ package into a single explicable truth, the more inclined I was to follow his example.

What then, is time?
writes Augustine.
If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.

What confounded me most about the Accidents was the lack of unanimity about them. Everyone who’d tried to crack the rebus of Ottokar’s discovery had come up with his or her own inimitable answer, often contradicting all the rest. My namesake had discovered impunity there: a sovereign solution, accountable only to itself, that could be warped to accommodate every possible question, to rationalize every crime. My grandfather, understandably enough, had come to view them as a conduit to madness. And to Enzie and Genny, after their mother’s death, the puzzle of the Accidents became nothing less than the window frame—the only one they didn’t fill in, or brick up, or shutter over—through which they watched and understood the world. For my part, Mrs. Haven, I was tempted to view my great-grandfather’s legacy as a window, as well: a blank pane of glass—sometimes letting light through, sometimes throwing it back—in which we’d discovered nothing but our own monkey-like reflections.

The glass-pane notion was a seductive one, for obvious reasons: it would have allowed me to dismiss the whole mess and head back to Ogilvy, or to Cheektowaga, or to some cottage in the country, as Nietzsche had done, and spend the rest of my duration shaving horses. There was only one catch, Mrs. Haven. My projection theory might have explained Enzie and Genny and Kaspar, and even, with a bit of fiddling, Ottokar himself; but Waldemar had actually succeeded. Waldemar, the worst of all of us, had broken free.

If no one asks of me
, said Augustine,
I know.

*   *   *

By the end of the sixth day I was out of ramen noodles, and the only cheese I had left—“Processed Manchego,” according to the packaging; exactly the sort of thing Van would eat—was making the roof of my mouth itch. I was sick to death of sifting through the ashes of my paternal lineage in search of the keys to the chronoverse. What I needed had been clear to me since I’d woken up that morning, bug-eyed and antsy, at 07:45 EST.

I needed a bucket of Popeyes.

I made it through the building’s faux-Soviet lobby and across Forty-Fourth Street without incident, unless you count one near-collision with a taxi, one actual collision with a UPS dolly, and some dubious looks from the doorman, a red-bearded Sikh. I ducked into Popeyes, placed my order politely, then hit the ATM next door to liquidate the next installment of my college fund. I’d come to a decision the previous night: I’d figured out my next move, and it was a doozy. The plane ticket alone, according to my calculations, would cost all I had left in the bank.

I was still standing at the ATM ten minutes later, my arms outstretched as if in supplication. Its screen had just informed me, in no uncertain terms, that not a dime of Orson’s cash would be forthcoming. It had informed me of this sixteen times in a row, and the people behind me—eight of them, the last time I’d checked—were starting to run low on Christian feeling. When the machine finally opted to swallow my card, leaving me with nothing but my driver’s license and my Ogilvy ID, the woman behind me nudged me with her purse. “Here’s a dollar,” she whispered. “Go buy yourself a Snickers. Then get yourself a motherfucking job.”

For want of any other option, Mrs. Haven, I took her advice. I went back into Popeyes and canceled my order and brought her dollar to a bodega at the corner of Forty-Fourth and Sixth. I spent it on a Mars bar, not a Snickers, and ate it while I browsed morosely through the
Times
. Which is how, within fifteen minutes of reconnecting with the outside world, I found out that Enzie was gone.

ENZIAN TOLLIVER, HARLEM RECLUSE, FOUND DEAD AT 62

Police Require Two Hours to

Break into 5th Ave. Home,

Booby-Trapped with Junk

SISTER FAILS TO APPEAR

BY WILLIAM HALL

Enzian Tolliver was found dead yesterday in her decaying tenement apartment at 2078 Fifth Avenue, but the legend of the reclusive Tolliver twins persists.

Her sister, Gentian, devoted to the frail and aging Enzian, may still be in the seven-room apartment, her home since 1969, although it is now boarded shut. There was no sign of her yesterday, despite the police activity at her home.

The circumstances surrounding the death of 62-year-old Enzian, rarefied as the flower both she and her sister were named for, are as mysterious as the life the two eccentric sisters lived on the unfashionable upper reaches of Fifth Avenue, at the Harlem terminus of Central Park.

UNKNOWN MALE CALLER GAVE TIP

A mysterious telephone call to Police Headquarters yesterday morning reported that there was a dead woman at 2078 Fifth Avenue. The caller gave his name as Waldemar Toula, a deceased uncle of the sisters. Police believe that it may in fact have been Waldemar “Jack” Tolliver, the sisters’ nephew, who reportedly is visiting the city.

I stopped there a moment, punch-drunk with shock. The shopkeeper said something to me but I ignored him.

Police Emergency Squad 6 used crowbars and axes in trying to force their way into the apartment, but the reinforced door proved impassable. It was 12:10 P.M. before Patrolman LaMont Barker forced his way through the picture window at the fourth-story front.

He disappeared from view for several moments, then returned and called down, “There’s a D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) here.” Detective Ali Lateef climbed the ladder to inspect the body. He reported that the dead woman was in a sitting position, dressed only in a Pendleton shirt. The emaciated body was tentatively identified as Enzian by Willis James Buckram, a neighbor. At 3:45 P.M. Medical Examiner Roger C. Erfect reported that the woman had been dead for fourteen hours.