The Lost Time Accidents (28 page)

Which would mean that what I’m doing right now, hunched over this card table in my aunts’ ruined library, gumming over long-dead memories, is experiencing existence to the fullest.

*   *   *

It was ten days into the above-mentioned spell of pixelated nothingness, Mrs. Haven, that I made the reacquaintance of your neighbor. I’d fought the pull of your brownstone as long as I could, but my pride and willpower gave up the ghost simultaneously, in the middle of the second week of our separation—a windy, soggy Saturday—at 22:47 EST. In the course of a stroll to the bodega for toothpaste, I found myself suddenly at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street, twenty blocks from my apartment and less than a hundred steps away from yours. No sooner had this fact registered than I was lurching toward your front door like a wino, hissing insults and abuses at myself, praying for some random act of C*F*P to stop me. That holy trinity must have been otherwise engaged, however, because at 22:49 EST I rang your buzzer ten times in rapid succession, once for each of my fingers, then waited for catastrophe to strike.

Your windows stayed dark and your door remained shut. I should have gone straight home, counting my solemn blessings all the way, but I did no such thing. I pressed the buzzer with both thumbs and shouted your name. It wasn’t defiance that kept me there, or self-destructiveness, or even a basic lack of common sense: the thought of shuffling home to my joyless little sublet with the bathtub in the kitchen was simply more than I could entertain. I’d just gone to the curb in search of something to throw at your window when the door of the next brownstone over creaked open and a dour face informed me, in a weary tone of voice, that Mr. and Mrs. Haven weren’t at home. They’d left the week before for Nicaragua.

“Nicaragua?” I croaked.

I recognized the face now: it belonged to the sad-eyed voyeur of the month before, the one with the armful of comics. It hovered in the doorway, unblinking and pale.

“Nicaragua,” I repeated. I let the gravel in my hand fall to the curb. “That explains it, I guess. I was—”

“That explains what?”

“Just that I haven’t heard from Mrs. Haven—from Hildegard—in quite some time. But if she’s in South America, then that would be—what I mean is, that would probably explain—”

“She’s not in
South
America. She’s in Central America. And she went there to get away from you, Mr. Tompkins. Nicaragua’s the symptom, not the cause.”

I can only speculate as to how I looked in that instant, standing there at the curb with my jaw hanging open. My guess is I looked like a small-mouthed bass.

“Central America,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“She left something for you.”

“What is it?”

“A note.”

I pulled myself together. “I don’t think we’ve met,” I said, extending my hand, although the entirety of the stoop was still between us. “I’m Walter—”

The face pulled slowly back into the darkness. “I’ve got it up here.”

I climbed those steep, crumbling steps with a mixture of hope and foreboding, hanging back when I got to the threshold. Not a soul was in sight. Light from an electric candle in a faux-gothic sconce played over walls draped in wine-colored velvet, the kind you might encounter in a psychic’s waiting room. On the far side of the vestibule doors, its face pressed hard against the beveled glass, crouched a life-sized latex model of a hobbit. I turned the dragon-headed knob and stepped inside.

The hall past the hobbit was dim and wood-paneled and rank with patchouli and sweat. More electric candles lined the walls, and their flickering made everything I glanced at jump and shiver: framed movie posters and Batman paraphernalia; foam-rubber weaponry in Plexiglas vitrines; sagging latex masks on wooden mounts, like souvenirs of Narnian safaris; and—at the end of the hall, given pride of place in a spotlit, bloodred alcove—the uniform of a Standartenführer of the SS, armband and jodhpurs and jackboots and all.

A door somewhere creaked and I skipped quickly backward, not sure what to expect—a Luger-toting husband? a batsuited son?—but it was only my hostess, impassive as ever, holding an envelope between her thumb and middle finger.

She had on a housecoat of sorts (quilted green silk, printed in a pattern of interlocking yellow ankhs) and seemed larger and more owlish than before. She took me by the elbow and steered me into a fantastically cluttered living room, and in that instant I knew, without quite knowing how, that there was no husband, no son, no one else in the house—the objects on display were my hostess’s own, relics in a private sacristy, and she drew a dismal power from them all.

“I knew you’d show up sooner or later,” she said, gesturing toward a pair of pleated vinyl couches. “I’ve been walking on soft-boiled eggs for the past week.”

I had a chance, as she arranged herself on the chirruping vinyl, to examine her more closely. She was a medium-sized woman, with fine—even delicate—features, who nonetheless exuded massiveness. Where other women might be round, or even stout, she was blufflike, almost sedimentary. I’d never realized how many countless small behaviors I associated with the opposite sex until I was confronted, in your neighbor, by their total nonexistence. Her androgyny had a calming effect, strange to say, and so did her matter-of-factness about my presence there. I couldn’t shake the impression that I’d met her before—in some other, less unnerving living room—and I wondered what this déjà vu could mean.

“I should introduce myself,” I said, though there was clearly no need. “My name is Walter Tompkins.”

She nodded slowly in acknowledgment—so slowly that the significance of the gesture fell away before she’d finished—then pointed at the couch across from hers. She waited for me to sit before she spoke.

“This note must not be for you, then. My mistake. It’s addressed to somebody named Tolliver.”

“Tolliver?” I squeaked.

“That’s what it says here.
Waldemar G. Tolliver, ‘Gentleman
.
’
” She gave me another dead-eyed nod. “
Gentleman
is in quotation marks.”

At last your long silence made sense. I had no idea how you’d learned my real name, Mrs. Haven, but at the moment it didn’t much matter.

“That’s me,” I said, holding my hand out for the note.

“
Tolliver
,” she said thoughtfully. “
Waldemar G
.”

“It’s kind of an inside joke of ours, actually. I call her ‘Mrs. Haven,’ and she calls me—”

“Any relation to Orson Card Tolliver? Author of
The Excuse
? Prime Mover of the Church of Synchronology?”

“I get that a lot. No relation at all.”

She watched me for a moment. “I’m a member of that church myself—at least I used to be. That’s why I ask.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d give me that note.”

She passed it across to me without a word. My name was printed on the envelope in clumsy block letters, like a grade-school version of a ransom note.

“I still don’t know
your
name,” I said. “I don’t recall Hildy mentioning you.”

“She wouldn’t have.” As she said this I noticed—or imagined I noticed—the vestige of an accent of some kind. “My given name is Nayagünem Menügayan.”

No sooner had she uttered those extraordinary syllables than the déjà vu was gone, as if a hex had been broken, and a tiny, jewel-like memory replaced it. I remembered where I’d met her, though I did my best to keep my face composed. Not that it made the slightest difference. She could tell.

“Pleased to meet you, Ms.—”

“But you can go ahead and call me Julia. Everyone does, in the industry.”

“
Julia
. Okay.” I hesitated. “What industry might that be?”

Menügayan spread both arms wide, to indicate the jumble of phantasmagoria around us.

“Right!” I said, getting to my feet. “You certainly were very kind to let Hildy leave this note in your keeping. I won’t take up—”

“She didn’t leave it in my keeping. She left it hidden in a book inside her mailbox. I found it there, Waldemar Gottfriedens Tolliver, and I took it out. Now sit down and listen.”

I should have demanded to know what this passive-aggressive troll was doing rummaging through your mailbox, or—better yet—have fought my way out with a flaming battle axe, if necessary; instead I sat back down, avoiding her stare, feeling as if I’d been kicked in the kidney. We’d crossed paths once before, a decade earlier, in the parlor of my father’s house on Pine Ridge Road—but the woman I’d met then had been bashful and sweet. I’d never seen a person so transmogrified.

“I’m listening, Julia.”

Menügayan gave a throaty cluck and launched, without further preamble, into something very like a sermon. You were her subject—you and the Husband—and she had plenty to say. The two of you were her obsession, her fetish, her area of personal expertise; over the next half an hour she divulged the particulars of your private life with the precision of an entomologist describing the life of the bee. She spoke a pidgin of her own invention, a shambling amalgam of business clichés and expletives and acronyms hijacked from trade magazines, some of them whole decades out of date. It was the idiom of an acutely solitary creature, somewhere between the ramblings of a hermit and the coded patois of a paranoiac—but I learned more about you in those fifteen minutes, Mrs. Haven, than I could have in a year’s worth of surveillance.

*   *   *

“Here’s the drill-down, Tolliver. The first thing you need to understand is that the man you’re dealing with is the industry leader in client-specific brainfuckery. We’re talking about a man who founded a religion—a
religion
, Tolliver—before he was legally old enough to drink. He’s a tactical thinker and he’s patient as hell. Think innovation, Tolliver. Think iteration management. Think long-term convergence. Just
think
.” She sucked in a breath. “He and Hildy have been making the grand tour: Aruba to Phoenix, Phoenix to San Salvador, San Salvador to Managua, Managua to Dar es Salaam. He’s a ‘financier,’
nota bene
: a bankruptcy jockey. He buys companies and sells them at a loss. Strictly a bricks-and-clicks operation, OBVS. And the house always wins.

“Here comes the kicker, though, Tolliver: she
likes
what he does. She calls him her Galactus, her Eater of Worlds. He’s always flying somewhere in that jet-propelled dildo of his, and if it’s somewhere she’s never been—and he deigns to invite her—she always says yes. Hildy bores easy: that’s her feature set. Time moves more slowly for her than for the rest of us. It’s what makes her step out,
de vez en cuando
, and it’s what brings her back. Pack this into your pipe: she comes back every time. It’s a synergy game. You think you’re the first one she left him for, Tolliver? Don’t kiss your own ass. You need to get some transparency on this issue. He knows all about her ‘sympathetic friends.’

“Which brings us to you. You’re the retiring type, a garden-variety milquetoast—anyone can see that. That’s the profile she falls for. The
non-integrator
. She has a soft spot for wallflowers, bookworms, beatniks, self-anointed deep thinkers: for the unemployable, to call a spade a spade. She doesn’t believe in her own brainpower, at the end of the day. She doesn’t see herself as a resource, going forward. That’s her back-of-the-line, Tolliver, and Haven leverages it to the hilt. Strictly plug-and-play: that’s his game in a chestnut. Strictly transactional. She’s susceptible to Vuitton and Lambrusco, to happy cabbage, to payment in kind, no matter what pie-eyed spiel she tries to sell herself. She puts out for people with pull, like anybody else who’s got no
Schwerkraft
of their own.

“To summarize, Tolliver: she’s en route to a safari in Kenya. The ‘relationship’ you’ve had, such as it was, is not extensible. YHNTO, if you understand me. It is what it is. At the end of the day, the day’s over.”

Menügayan paused at this point, as if expecting me to ask some sort of question. I bobbed my head morosely for a while.

“What does YHNTO stand for?”

For an instant she regarded me with something approaching affection. “You have nothing to offer.”

“Okay.” I shut my eyes to keep the room from spinning. “One more question. Does Mrs. Haven—does Hildy have any idea what the Church of Synchronology actually—”

“Hold that thought, Tolliver. Excuse me a tick. I’ve got to go see a Chinaman about a music lesson.”

Before I could reply she was gone from the room. I sank back and pressed my palms against my temples. I hadn’t been able to follow half of what she’d said—more than half, to be honest—but I was a changed man by the end of her soliloquy. I felt postoperative, the beneficiary of a complex but necessary surgical procedure, one no less effective for having been performed by a gorilla.

If I’d had a higher opinion of myself—or of you, Mrs. Haven, come to think of it—I might have doubted some of what she’d told me; as it was, I believed every word. Whatever role this depressive occultist was destined to play in my life, it was clear to me that our affair—yours and mine—had passed some hidden point of no return. I tried to call your face to mind and could not do it.

“It’s hopeless, then,” I said when she came back.

“Eh?”

“I never had her. Isn’t that what you’re telling me? Not for a second.”

Menügayan shrugged. “The best-laid plans of mice and midgets, Tolliver. You don’t have the hit points to take Haven on, you don’t have the charisma points, and you
sure
as hell don’t have the gold doubloons.”

I nodded and got to my feet.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m grateful for your candor, Ms. Menügayan—”

“Julia.”

“I appreciate your telling me all this, Julia, but I’m going home now. You’ve just made it clear that there isn’t anything I can give Hildy that her husband can’t give her sixteen times over, and that her fling with me was nothing more than that: the latest in a long and trifling sequence. As you can probably imagine, I’d like to be alone.”

I felt proud of my self-control, under the circumstances, but Menügayan only laughed. Her laugh was a dull, toneless thing, oddly damp and forlorn, like the call of some creature of the lightless deep.