The Lost Time Accidents (29 page)

“You’ve got a funny way of talking, Tolliver. Kind of old-timey. Anybody ever tell you that?”

“Lots of people,” I said, buttoning my coat. “Most recently R. P. Haven’s wife.”

“I’m disappointed in you, I have to say. One tiny cloud on the horizon and you’re calling it quits. What would your daddy say?”

“That’s none of your business. Who the hell is my father to you?”

“As I’ve mentioned, I used to be a member of the Church of Synchronology. A fairly high-ranking member. I had my own trailer.”

I looked at her. “This house belongs to Haven, doesn’t it?”

Menügayan shrugged.

“Why do you stay, if you hate them so much?”

“Not my decision. The Church likes to keep its jaundiced eye on me. What the Listener demandeth, He receiveth.” She leaned smoothly forward, smiled up at the ceiling, then fixed me with what whodunits like to call a “hungry” look. I knew I should run for my life, but I stayed where I was. Where did I have to go?

“Tolliver,” Menügayan said slowly. “
Waldemar
Tolliver.”

“I should probably explain about that. The truth is, I—”

“Quite a responsibility to carry that name, I should think. Quite an honor.”

“An honor?” I said, before I could stop myself. “I have a hard time seeing—”

“Waldemar is a name of no small significance to the Church. It was the name of one of our great apostles—the greatest, perhaps. The Timekeeper, we call him. He did battle with the forces of chronology and lost. Perhaps you’ve heard the tale?”

I shook my head. “Like I said, I really need to—”

“He died violently, a martyr’s death, at the hands of an international cabal of scientists and bureaucrats and Semites, in a forest on the Russo-Polish border. His blood—like that of Jesu of Nazareth—is on the hands of the children of Israel. They had too much invested in the Lie of Chronologic Time, you see, to let him live. But there’s a reason, beyond simple mechanics, that a clock’s face is shaped like a circle. Waldemar’s hour was
once
—praise be to the Prime Mover!—and it shall be again.” She threw her head back and sang, in a girlish falsetto:
“Jan Sküs is the name of a friend I met once, and Sküs Jan is a friend I’ll meet twice.”
She held her breath for a moment, then gave a tight laugh. “As you can see, Tolliver, the Scripture still moves me.”

I gaped at her, sickened and dumbstruck. She sat there serene as a panther.

“Why have you told me all this? What do you want from me?”

“That’s simple. I want you to steal R. P. Haven’s wife.”

My head felt hot and empty. The candles shuddered weakly in their sconces. The uniform glowed redly in the hall.

“Ms. Menügayan—”

“Julia.”

“You’ve just made it clear to me, Julia, that Haven has everything and I have nothing.”

“That’s true!” she said genially. “Or
practically
true. But you do have one thing—one small piece of the jigsaw—that your enemy lacks. And it’s a piece that fits right in the middle.”

“What is it?” I mumbled. “What piece do I have?”

Menügayan smacked her lips. “That should be obvious by this point, Waldy. You have me.”

XV

I’m going to work today
, my grandfather said to himself.
It’s Monday, and I’m going off to work
.

He liked how the phrase sounded in American mouths. He liked how unguarded it sounded, how brashly naïve, as if work were a brightly lit hall filled with hundreds of people, possibly thousands, every last one reserving his judgment. He’d waited more than four years for the opportunity of saying those words to himself, and now, at the age of not-quite-sixty, he was as boisterous and cocky as a schoolboy. Via God knew what series of backroom intrigues, Wilhelm had secured him a position in the offices of Kaiserwerks, a midrange timepiece manufacturer based in Niagara Falls—not coincidentally, one of Empress Sisi’s Cabinet’s suppliers—that specialized in brass-and-Bakelite travesties for coddled little girls. According to Wilhelm, Vincent Kaiser himself had okayed the appointment, impressed both by Kaspar’s credentials and the story of his travails. Kaspar privately thought it more likely that Felix “Bunny” Mastmann, Wilhelm’s occasional post-theater companion, had put the hire through without asking his boss; but he certainly wasn’t complaining. He had children to feed, and payments to make on the dilapidated stucco cottage that he’d recently begun renovating. A man who lived as a guest in another man’s house couldn’t marry, after all, regardless of his probity and intentions. And marriage was on my grandfather’s mind.

Ilse Veronika Card, my paternal grandmother, is fated to pass in and out of this history with a minimum of fuss, as she probably would have preferred. Of all the women drawn into the Toula/Tolliver orbit, she was perhaps the least brazen—which by no means signifies that she was tame. My grandfather met her in the most prosaic place in town: the German/Yiddish section of Cosgrove’s Book & Vitamin Emporium, across the street from the state university. She had on dungarees—a noteworthy sight on a woman in forties Buffalo—and a man’s flannel shirt with its sleeves rolled up high, something downright unheard-of. A list of books had been scrawled across her forearms in blue ballpoint ink. Kaspar had always had a weakness for tomboys—I suppose, Mrs. Haven, that it runs in the family—but what sealed his fate was her incongruousness: the quality she had of seeming both furtive and entirely at her ease, as though she slept in some back alcove of the store. The parallels to his meeting with Sonja were striking, but my grandfather paid them no mind. He was eager by then for an event with no precedent, no through-line to the past, and he knew that he’d found one at last. The slight, brown-skinned woman before him could never be Sonja—would never have
wanted
to be her—and Kaspar thanked C*F*P for it. The years of seeing his dead wife in every well-intentioned face were over, and Ilse was the captivating proof.

She was older than he’d first supposed, newly turned thirty-four, and considered unmarriageable by everyone who knew her, on account of what was generally referred to as her “willfulness.” Willfulness wouldn’t have bothered my grandfather much—he was used to that from Sonja, and even more so from the twins—but he found Ilse eager to prove the town wrong. She accepted his attentions gratefully, slumped and sad-bodied though he’d become, and bore the twins’ blank-eyed indifference—and Wilhelm’s suspicions—with consummate patience and grace.

Which is not to say, Mrs. Haven, that there weren’t a few surprises hidden down her dungarees.

Unless you were planning on being dropped behind enemy lines, German was an unpopular interest to have in those days—even a dangerous one—but Ilse was studying it for no other reason, she informed Kaspar shyly, than its beauty. She was learning the language by means of an Air Force–issued set of flash cards entitled “Military German Lingo,” packed with phrases designed to help paratroopers subjugate the Hun. On their first evening out—at Parkside Candies Soda Fountain & Sweet Shoppe, on Main Street—Ilse fanned out the cards on the sticky glass-topped table as though she planned to read his fortune from them. Kaspar’s English was serviceable by then, more or less, but Ilse insisted on German. That was what she’d brought the cards for, after all.

“Halt! Wer da?”
Ilse read from the uppermost card.

This translates, roughly, as “Halt! Who goes there?” and Kaspar decided, after a brief fit of perplexity, that she was asking him the story of his life.

“I was born in Moravia, Miss Card. My father was a gherkin manufacturer, fairly well off, with a passion for theoretical physics. The circumstances of his death—”

“Es gibt keinen Ersatz für Verstand beim Oberkommando,”
Ilse intoned. In German, this means “There can be no substitute for brainpower in the High Command.”

“Excuse me?” said my grandfather.

She frowned at him for an instant, then consulted the card.
“Entschuldigung!”
She said finally. “Wrong line.”

“That’s quite all right, miss. If you’d care to switch to English, we might—”

“Erzählen Sie mir nicht die ganze Geschichte; geben Sie mir eine Zusammenfassung.”

“A summary of my life?” Kaspar let out a sigh. “That’s a rather tall order. Perhaps I should leave that to my grandchildren.”

“You have
grandchildren
?” Ilse asked sharply, in English.

“Not yet, no. But children, I have.”

“I see,” she said, recovering her composure.
“Aus wieviel Leuten besteht die Besatzung jenes Bombers?”
(“How many people comprise the crew of that bomber?”)

“I have two daughters—Enzian and Gentian. I had a wife, Sonja, who died in the course of our passage from Vienna. Her parents stayed behind, as did my brother.”

“Die Flotte hat schwere Verluste gehabt.”
(“The fleet has sustained heavy losses.”)

He nodded. “Yes indeed, fräulein. We have.”

Ilse blushed when he addressed her as “fräulein,” although there was nothing inappropriate about it, and Kaspar began to feel cautiously optimistic.

*   *   *

She brought him home two nights later—she rented a studio of her own, on the east side of town, another black mark on her record—and the game was taken up where they’d left off. They’d had a perfectly conventional date, slurping
linguine con vongole
at one of Buffalo’s countless Sicilian pasta parlors and making trite small talk in English; but as soon as the door closed behind them, Ilse gave a dark laugh, a different person entirely, and drew forth the cards with a flourish. From that moment on—until they were laid out, naked and exhausted, across the folding army cot she slept on—their spoken communication, according to my grandfather’s (wonderfully unexpurgated) diary, consisted exclusively of these strategic phrases:

“Still halten!”
(“Keep still!”)

“Keinen Laut!”
(“Don’t make a sound!”)

“Hinlegen!”
(“Lie down!”)

“Schnell, hier herum!”
(“Quick, this way!”)

“Hände auf den Rücken!”
(“Hands behind your back!”)

Then, some minutes later:

“Verstehen Sie diesen Apparat?”
(“Do you understand this apparatus?”)

And finally:

“Die Vorkehrungen, Sie nach hinten zu schicken, sind getroffen.”
(“The arrangements have been finalized to send you to the rear.”)

Worldly though he ought to have been by this point in his duration, Kaspar reeled at Ilse’s easy lewdness, which made even Sonja (he
would
not think of her—not now) seem as genteel as a governess.
It’s the middle of the century, grandpa
, he told himself when it was over, not without a certain melancholy.
Women are wearing men’s work shirts now, and telling us what they want in plain language, at least behind closed doors. They’re even fucking like men. I suppose it’s because of the war.

For the first time in his experience, staring into the Victorian standing mirror at the foot of Ilse’s cot, Kaspar felt the involuntary defensiveness of the old. Meeting her, splendid and implausible though it was, had aged him overnight. But this was a small price to pay for such a stroke of preposterous fortune—he’d been on the cusp of his dotage already, after all—and he paid without the slightest hesitation.

*   *   *

Within the year, to his enduring amazement, Ilse had taken Kaspar’s name and all the worry that came with it, and on February 2, 1943—the same day, auspiciously enough, as the German surrender at Stalingrad—she bore him a plump-cheeked, walleyed baby boy. But the past wasn’t willing to set Kaspar free yet.

In the late fall of 1942, a few months before his wedding to Ilse, a brown paper parcel arrived in Buffalo Bill’s mailbox, addressed to Konrad B. Toula, Professor of Physics, with a New Mexico return address. My grandfather, who had only the vaguest idea where New Mexico was, opened the parcel with caution—and for once his intuition was correct. The author of the letter was a man named Oppenheimer, who purported to be a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Even more surprisingly, he claimed to have read—in the original German—the only scholarly paper that Kaspar had ever published: a study of radioactive decay.

Professor Oppenheimer had recently been appointed by the United States government to direct a project of considerable import to the national defense—or so he claimed—about which he could say nothing further by mail. Would Professor Toula (the use of his original surname irked my grandfather, for some reason) consider a visit to Los Alamos, where a state-of-the-art facility (the exact nature of which could, regrettably, not be gone into in writing) was in the final stages of completion? All expenses paid by Uncle Sam, of course.

My grandfather was anything but impervious to flattery, especially from a colleague; he hadn’t thought of himself as a physicist since well before the Flight into Egypt, and it felt unexpectedly good. There was his betrothed to consider, of course, and his cousin Wilhelm, and his bosses at Kaiser’s, and the twins, who’d just begun attending a new school; on the other hand, Kaspar thought—admiring the Army Corps of Engineers letterhead and the pistachio-colored card stock it was printed on—it looked as though there might be money in it. Before he sat down to reply to the letter, Kaspar got out his AAA
Atlas of America
(a present from Ilse, who dreamed of a honeymoon road trip) and opened it to a map of the Southwest.

*   *   *

Imagining this moment—which has the distinction, unique in this history, of being significant because of what it
didn’t
lead to—I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if my grandfather had taken Oppenheimer up on his offer. It plays out in my mind in glaring Technicolor, a set of train tracks diverging with all the dizzying smoothness of those
What if?
stories my father used to churn out for the pulps. Ilse might have gone with him to New Mexico, might have agreed to postpone their wedding and support him in the long incubation of Fat Man and his plucky sidekick, Little Boy—then again, she might have angrily refused. There might have been no sparsely attended Cheektowaga wedding—no Orson, no me. The quest to decipher my great-grandfather’s notes might have ended with Kaspar, subsumed in the even more glorious quest to reduce our planet to a lump of frozen ashes. I’d never have materialized at my cousin’s party, Mrs. Haven, never have met you underneath that kitchen counter.