The Lost Time Accidents (13 page)

The Xanthia T. Lasdun Memorial Ocean-View Manor & Garden was a thirty-six-chambered assisted-living facility in Bensonhurst, with that bleary, nicotine-stained shabbiness every neo-Tudor building in the world seems to exude. Its garden, as far as I could determine, was the condom-festooned median of lower Bay Parkway, and its ocean was the droning, alluvial parkway itself. I loved it there, Mrs. Haven, a fact I’ve never managed to explain. I worked at the Xanthia four days out of seven—more often than that, if I picked up some shifts—making beds and boiling catheters and playing endless games of Mastermind and Risk. My most frequent opponent was Abel Palladian, of the Bushwick Palladians: interregnum-period history buff, chocolate milk addict, and bona fide duration fetishist—the first outside of my family that I’d met.

Abel most likely had some mild neurological disorder—something like Asperger’s syndrome, but with a lower media profile—and the years had not been kind. What he suffered from most, however, was garden-variety loneliness: what some long-forgotten joker on the staff had christened Lasdun’s xanthoma. I’d no sooner introduced myself during salad hour in the Montmartre Lounge than he launched himself full-bore into his passion. My first thought was that he could smell it coming off me: the obsession my aunts had devoted their lives to, that my father had spent half a century resisting, and that I’d come to New York to extinguish at last. Later I found out that everyone got the same spiel.

He started with the life spans of the fishes.

“Haddock are found in deeper Atlantic waters than their relatives the cod, but they share the same life span: roughly fourteen years.”

“All right, Mr. Palladian. That’s a good thing to know.”

“What about the goby, Mr. Tolliver? Are you familiar?”

“I’m not, actually. Is that like a guppy?”

Palladian waved this aside. “The goby ranks among the shortest-lived animals of the vertebrate class. A goby is born, reproduces, and dies all within a single calendar year.”

“That’s fascinating. I’ve always wondered—”

“Sturgeons, now,” Palladian announced.

“I’m afraid I don’t—”

“The record for sturgeon longevity belongs to a thirteen-foot beluga that weighed one metric ton and was judged to be eighty-two years of age. A freshwater sturgeon caught in Lake Baikal in 1953, however, was believed by some ichthyologists to have attained a duration of one hundred and fifty years.”

The line was forming for the salad bar, but Palladian ignored it. He appeared to be in a fugue state of some kind.

“Trout?” I said.

“The life expectancy for a rainbow trout falls between seven and eleven years, depending on locality and species. Brook trout, the finest at table, thrive best in cold waters. In some Canadian lakes they live up to ten years, while elsewhere six years is considered senescent.”

“Good thing we’re not trout.”

Palladian’s eyes drifted back into focus. “One brook trout in captivity,” he said with a smile, as though I’d somehow played into his hands, “lived to seventeen years and twenty-seven days.”

We progressed, over time, from animate to inanimate forms: from earthworms (ten years max) to shallots (sixty to ninety days in a well-maintained fridge) to casino playing cards (two to five hours of regulation play) to the Milky Way galaxy (forty billion years, give or take). Once Stratego season started in earnest (each board game had its season at the Xanthia—Stratego in the summer, Scrabble in the fall, Monopoly through the winter, Risk sometime around Lent), the tenor of our talks shifted. We’d lost quite a few Xanthians during the recent heat wave, and I had more leisure time for a while. Incrementally, centripetally, our conversation drifted toward the personal.

“Who are your people, Mr. Tolliver?” Palladian asked me one evening, glowering down at the board. We’d been playing for an hour in absolute silence. I was winning for once.

“Excuse me, Mr. Palladian?”

“Your
people
,” Palladian barked. He had the wonky affect of somebody on the “spectrum,” often making him seem angry when he wasn’t; but this looked to be the genuine article. I’d just invaded the Sudetenland.

I shut my eyes and tried to dredge up a reply. I’d been asked this question more than once at the Xanthia, on account of what my father had liked to refer to as my “
Hitlerjugend
physiognomy,” and I’d been asked it no end of times growing up, because of my mother’s kraut-and-bratwurst accent. It never failed to make me ill at ease.

“My father’s half sisters, who raised him, sometimes took him to Orthodox temple—”

Palladian’s eyebrows twitched subtly. “Yes?”

“But he wasn’t Orthodox himself. He wasn’t anything. Both of his parents were goyim.”

Palladian shrugged and said nothing. The Stratego game seemed to have stalled.

“I am one-quarter Jewish, though. On my mother’s side.”

“Now I like you one-quarter better.” He watched me for a while, then cleared his throat. “The first incandescent bulb, tested by Thomas Edison, burned for forty hours exactly. Manufacturers today can and do make incandescent bulbs that will last, barring mishap, for a minimum of—”

“My grandfather’s brother was a war criminal, Mr. Palladian. He ran a camp in eastern Poland and experimented on human beings, the majority of them Jews. He was known as the Black Timekeeper of Czas.”

My mouth shut with a clack, like the jaw of a marionette. Palladian regarded me bleakly. Mabel Dimitrios, a Xanthia rookie, was unraveling a sweater on a nearby couch and watching me with rheumy-eyed alarm.

“Mr. Palladian?” I said. “If I’ve in any way caused you—”

Palladian made a pushing-away motion with both of his hands, as if he’d been brought a plate of food he hadn’t ordered.

“Old wash,” he said. “
Very
old wash, Mr. Tolliver.”

I nodded stupidly. “I don’t know why I said that, to be honest. The thing is—”

“Not interested.”

“Of course not. I don’t blame you.” I hesitated. “It’s just, you understand, that I’m trying to come to terms—”

“
What
terms?” Palladian rumbled. “What are you going to do, Mr. Tolliver? Go back in time and kill your father’s uncle?”

“That’s an interesting thought,” I said, with what must have seemed like an ironic smile. But nothing could have been farther from the truth, Mrs. Haven. It was an exceedingly interesting thought. I pushed my panzer division deeper into the Sudetenland.

*   *   *

There’s no other way to put this, Mrs. Haven: as the weeks passed, you receded from my thoughts. It was the law of conservation of energy, not to mention the abhorrence of a vacuum, since I’d followed every lead and come up empty. I’d just surrendered my last hope—surrendered it gladly, like a coat I’d always felt too warm inside of—when I saw you buying cheese in Union Square.

You wore a blood-colored parka trimmed with platinum fur, like some sort of Inuit heiress, and held a duck-shaped wicker basket in your fists. It was cold for October, below freezing already, and the breath left your body in tiny, immaculate puffs. You strolled from the cheese stand to a pickle stand to a stand that seemed to sell nothing but napkins. It was too much to take, hitting me like that without the slightest warning, and I had to sit down on the nearest bench. At one point you looked up abruptly, as though you’d heard some alarm, and I hid behind my mittens like a child.

Some manifestations of beauty are period-specific, expressive of the age that nurtures them; others seem to exist outside of history, warping each successive moment as they pass. Yours was the second kind of beauty, Mrs. Haven—at least in Union Square that day, at least to me. I managed to convince myself that I was waiting for an opening, a pretext of some kind; in fact I just stared, stuck to my bench like a barnacle, while you filled that ridiculous basket. It seemed cruel, as I watched you, that anyone should be privileged with such power, and it still seems unjust—though I’ve learned that the injustice cuts both ways. It sucks all moderation from the world.

From Union Square you went south, taking more deliberate steps than you had at the market, your hood pulled tightly down against the chill. As I shadowed you along University Place toward Washington Square, often close enough to catch you by the sleeve, sobriety slowly returned. What the hell was I doing tailing you across lower Manhattan, skulking from storefront to storefront, sizing you up like an aspiring sex offender? What was keeping me from calling out your name?

You continued downtown, moving more listlessly with each block, like a windup toy whose spring was losing tension. You began to stop at the slightest pretense: a fall clearance sale, a sun-bleached Calvin Klein ad, an octopus drawn on the sidewalk in chalk. A man approached you on Twelfth Street, breaking into a halfhearted routine about the loss of his asthma inhaler, and you heard him out in silence, asked a few polite questions, then handed him a fifty-dollar bill. Wherever you were going, Mrs. Haven, you weren’t in any hurry to get there.

At Tenth and University you hung a grudging right—you were dragging your feet comically now, like a cat on a leash—then stopped before a brownstone the same color as your coat. A siren sounded somewhere in the distance. The city had never seemed so ominous to me, or so strangely becalmed. The only other person in sight—a heavyset, gender-nonspecific individual with an armful of comics in bright Mylar baggies—had stopped walking as well, as though the siren were some citywide alarm. I looked from the back of your head toward the comics collector, who stared brazenly back. It was a woman, I decided, though I couldn’t have said how I knew. I was beginning to think she’d been tailing you—or possibly even me—when she crossed the street toward you, mumbled a perfunctory greeting, and climbed the stoop of the brownstone next door.

I began to move again now, convinced retreat was impossible, though it was clear you were lost to the world. The blinds gave a jerk in your neighbor’s front window: for better or for worse, we had an audience. You set the basket down between your boots—you were slightly pigeon-toed, I noticed—then bent over and took out a fat winter pear. It was impossibly green against your scarlet sleeves, illuminated as if from within, a Technicolor piece of Martian fruit.

You buffed it in your palms and took a bite.

All at once the light started flickering, making everything tremble, as though the sun had turned into a film projector. I let out a strangled gasp that seemed to make no sound. We were on camera, the two of us: we were trapped in some forgotten silent picture. In the next shot you’d look back at me and scream.

Months later, I would finally come up with an explanation for this on-camera feeling, and for the faintness and paralysis it brought. It was the sensation—the
physical
sensation—of time passing: a kind of chronologic wind. Certain people—my grandfather, for example, or my aunts, or the members of your husband’s cult—might have had this feeling on a daily basis; as for me, Mrs. Haven, I’ve felt it exactly three times. And each time I’ve felt that wind, no matter how desperately I fought, it’s knocked me down.

A truck pulled up across the street—
VAN GOGH MOVERS
:
A “CUT” ABOVE THE REST
—and the spell was finally broken. Another day, I told myself, would almost certainly be better. I needed time to prepare, to review what I’d learned, to make sure that you would see me at my best. I turned back toward University.

“Walter?”

Your voice was so serene, so devoid of surprise, that I could only conclude that men followed you home all the time.

“Is that you, Mrs. Haven? I didn’t recognize you in that—in that hoodie you’re wearing.”

“I’ve caught you red-handed, haven’t I?”

“Mrs. Haven, if you’ll just—”

“You were going to walk by without saying hello!”

I squinted at you for a moment, my mouth still half-open, attempting to parse your expression. “I wasn’t sure you’d want me to say hello,” I said carefully. “I behaved like a perfect ass the night we met.”

“Like a
perfect ass
,” you repeated. You glanced over your shoulder. “I’ll confess something to you, Mr. Tompkins. Do you mind?”

I shook my head.

“I’d had a sidecar or six at that godawful party, and I’ve been trying to figure out which of my memories of that night I could trust. Sidecars tend to make me see little green men.” You nodded to yourself. “But I guess
that
part of it was true enough.”

“Which part?”

“That you look like you’re twenty and talk like you’re sixty.”

“I’ve been told that before, Mrs. Haven. Apparently I’m prematurely aged.”

You smiled at that. “If you say so, Mr. Tompkins.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“Well! It’s been a pleasure running into you, Mrs. Haven. If you’ll kindly—”

“Don’t run away like a
girl
,” you said, catching me by the sleeve. “There’s something I want you to see.”

I struggled to assemble an appropriate response as you steered me roughly down a flight of steps. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why we were entering your brownstone through the basement until I knocked my head against the lintel.

“Are you all right out there, Walter?”

“Extremely all right! Never better.” I thought of Van and his sailor friend butting foreheads and felt what I can only describe as a rush of nausea and nostalgia combined.
Naustalgea
, I thought, pleased with myself in a far-off sort of way. Red-and-purple globules danced before my eyes.

“Come on in, Mr. Tompkins! Don’t dawdle!”

Apart from a defeated-looking beanbag and a tidy pile of junk mail by the window, the room I stepped into held nothing at all. There were clues, if one looked closely, that the apartment had once been inhabited: shadows on the parquet where carpets had lain, ghosts of vanished pictures on the walls, scattered stacks of vintage 45s. You sat on the floor and began flipping through them.

“Have you ever listened to the One-Way Streets, Walter? I’m betting you haven’t. I’ll play them for you if I can find the single. There should still be a turntable somewhere. Would you look?”