The Lost Time Accidents (30 page)

What if?

I picture my grandfather standing next to the All-Powerful Opp, his fists stuffed into his lab coat’s starched white pockets, observing the first H-bomb test at Trinity. Everyone is wearing cardboard 3-D glasses, for some reason, and nervously checking their Kaiserwerks watches. The priapic observation tower and the tiny men inside it are suddenly flooded by the flat gray light of nightmare, and for a nanosecond the landscape is completely stripped of shadow. In this version, it’s Kaspar, not Oppenheimer, who murmurs the notorious line from the Bhagavad Gita:
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
The symmetry with his brother would then have been perfect: both would have contributed, however modestly, to the signature horrors of mankind’s most apocalyptic age.

My grandfather was kind enough to spare our family that particular trauma, which would probably have mentally buggered his descendants until the (alleged) end of time; but the man who deserves the lion’s share of my gratitude is the same man whose letter to FDR kick-started the Manhattan Project, and whose outlandish solution to the Michelson-Morley paradox sent Waldemar down the rabbit hole to Timekeeperhood in the first place. That’s right, Mrs. Haven. The name invoked by Oppenheimer at the close of his letter to Kaspar was none other than that of our family nemesis, the gorgon of Zurich, the destroyer of worlds: none other than the Patent Clerk himself.

My grandfather respectfully declined.

XVI

THE CLOSEST MY FATHER
ever came to writing about his childhood, Mrs. Haven, was the opening chapter of his second-to-last novel,
Salivation Is Yours!
, in which the origin of O
2
the Perambulator is told in all its pornographic splendor. Orson was a seasoned purveyor of “starporn” by then, and could work almost anything into his plots, even genuine human emotion; working it into conversation, on the other hand—on birthdays, let’s say, or during family dinners—was something he preferred to leave to experts.

O
2
, firstborn son of
StoKasTa,
a sentient cloud of dark matter in the Centauri System, has the most monotonous childhood imaginable: he’s born, matures, and dies, time and time again, without ever escaping the womb.
StoKasTa
’s privates resemble those of any well-built woman, with three important distinctions: they’re made out of interstellar gas, they exist in eighteen dimensions (including D16, the dimension of smell) and they look like suburban Buffalo in the 1950s.

StoKasTa
’s birth canal, we are told, is a bona fide black hole, one whose “event horizon”—the gravitational boundary across which even light cannot escape—is always just beyond our hero’s reach. O
2
himself is a pimply, awkward ectomorph with more than a passing likeness to my father; he’s fated to be torn to bits—“spaghettified,” in the unapologetically wacky parlance of black hole research—whenever he tries to make a break for it. Luckily for O
2
, he finds himself reincarnated after each annihilation; unluckily, he’s always reincarnated as himself.

“I can’t really complain,” O
2
says, which in his case is literally true—he’s a querelophobe, physically unable to express disatisfaction. “I can’t complain, really. But sometimes I’d like to.”

In the course of his eighteen-year journey to the limits of his personal singularity, our hero encounters a series of equally wretched life-forms, all of whom have made the mistake of flying their spaceships too close to
StoKasTa
’s unmentionables: a dandified pleasure robot, a koala-faced mystic, and a two-headed hydra with “antifreeze eyes” against whom O
2
has to battle in order to make his escape. Orson opted for blunt, C. S. Lewis–style allegory this time (instead of his default Tolkienish vison-questing) and the result makes for an uncomfortable read: a queasy one-to-one correspondence between fiction and fact. It’s easy to recognize Kaspar in the gibberish-spouting mystic (he
was
a little koala-shaped, in his later years), Wilhelm fits the robot to a T, and I have no doubt at all, given the shadow Orson’s sisters cast over his life, whom the hydra is supposed to represent.

Considering the frustrations of his existence, Mrs. Haven, O
2
is remarkably well adjusted. He has nothing against his mother (or
Agawotkeech
, as her vulva is locally known); he’d just like to see what the rest of the universe looks like. “This isn’t a bad place to grow up,” O
2
tells the koala. “But by your one million, five hundred seventy-six thousand, seven hundred and seventy-eighth iteration, there’s not much in the way of novelty.”

The koala nods sadly and wishes poor, doomed O
2
all the best. The hydra, on the other hand, insists that the universe outside
StoKasTa
is simply more of the same, then tries to turn our hero’s skeleton to jelly by shooting psionic nerve blasts from the sockets of its eyes. Regretfully, O
2
decapitates the hydra and continues his journey, knowing perfectly well that it’s pointless, but hoping—as he’s done 1,576,777 times before—that everything will turn out for the best. The “pleasurebot” catches up with him at
Agawotkeech
’s second-to-last bend and gives him a fist-sized ruby from a dainty zirconium purse. “My best days are behind me, or I’d come with you,” it sighs. “Precedents notwithstanding, you might actually have a shot this time. This ruby is a piece of geniune space stuff—not like this nebulaic stageset all around us. Put it in your mouth, just before you try to force a breach. It might give you a kick in the pants.”

“Thank you, sir,” O
2
answers, trying his best to sound enthusiastic. “I think I should point out, however, that you’ve told me this one million, five hundred—”

“Don’t talk smart,” says the robot. “Look how far that got the koala.”

By the time O
2
finally draws near to the event horizon, he’s well into his adolescence, and his surrender to gravity, on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, has the desperate romance of teenage suicide. This time, however, as the robot has promised, things actually do turn out differently. The ruby catapults O
2
to safety (for reasons that remain unclear, at least to me) and a passing starcruiser picks him up just as he runs out of breath.

O
2
has had plenty of practice being a teenager, but none being an adult, which makes it hard for him to hold down a respectable job; on the other hand, millennia spent inside a cosmic vagina have furnished him with a finely tuned understanding of a woman’s wants and needs—which expertise he makes use of, regular as a timing cog, for the next hundred pages. In trademark Orson Card Tolliver style, no detail of the Perambulator’s amorous adventures is spared us, no matter how cringeworthy. My father sinned in all sorts of ways as an author, Mrs. Haven, but the sin of omission wasn’t one of them.

*   *   *

Salivation Is Yours!
ends with the death of the protagonist’s mother, which is an interesting inversion, since Orson’s duration began with the death of his own. As a girl of eighteen, Ilse had been advised by an East Tonawanda gynecologist—himself a refugee from Vienna—that childbirth would place her in mortal danger. This may have been one reason for her reluctance to accept a suitor, or it may have had nothing to do with it; in any case, she seems to have concealed the fact from Kaspar. She died in great pain, three doors down from the nursery, recovering consciousness just long enough to scrutinize her son. Kaspar laid the newborn beside her—a scowling, beet-colored organism, obscenely robust—and she focused her bloodshot eyes on him and nodded.

“What should we call this little singularity of ours?” Ilse rasped to the twins, who stood silently together at the foot of her bed, appraising the baby.

“Let’s call him Orson,” said Enzie. “After the picture director.”

“Because he has a fat face,” Genny added.

“Orson,” said Ilse, smiling faintly at Kaspar. “Orson Card Tolliver. That has a nice ring.”

Three days later she was buried in a small but sunny plot at Forest Lawn, and the baby—a contrarian from the start—was keeping Buffalo Bill’s household awake through the night. The stucco cottage, with all of its furnishings, was sold at a moderate loss. Kaspar’s last wisp of adventurousness had left him.

*   *   *

The fact that the motherless child Kaspar received in exchange for his bride would grow up to become an accomplished peddler of smut—and smut is what it is, Mrs. Haven, no question about it—is peculiar, given how the boy was raised. Kaspar had grown so committed to feeling
old
since meeting Ilse, had spent so many hours fretting over the future well-being of his young wife, that the possibility of outliving her had never crossed his mind. Had there been a self-pitying or vindictive bone in my grandfather’s body, he might easily have come to resent his new son; as it was, he simply kept him at a distance.

Certain neighbors and acquaintances were shocked, after Ilse’s funeral, by Kaspar’s near-immediate resumption of work; but no one who knew him well questioned the depth of his grief. My grandfather may have been a reasonable man, blessed with mental fortitude and common sense, but he harbored a talent for guilt that went beyond all reason. He’d brought about his first wife’s death, he was sure, by failing to recognize the danger that his brother’s madness posed, and then by hauling her across the ocean; and his complicity in Ilse’s death was even clearer.

Quietly, imperceptibly, without confiding in a soul, Kaspar began to see relations between the sexes as a thing to be avoided. Though he lacked a tyrant’s nature, his pain made him a man to be deferred to: over time, visits to 153 Voorhees Avenue—even by other children—grew less and less frequent. The house became a lonely place, shrouded and somber, where conversation took place in a hush. The baby didn’t mind, of course, not knowing any better; and Enzian and Gentian didn’t mind—just the opposite, in fact—because they had the baby.

*   *   *

The baby entered their lives like a flood or a plague or the death of some biblical king: a twitch of God’s will that changed history forever. The twins had begun taking Torah instruction on Thursday afternoons and they were unafraid to think in sacred terms. Enzian suspected that she and her sister might themselves be a species of angel, seraphim put among men for a purpose both high-minded and obscure, in which case the baby was probably some sort of herald. Their stepmother had been a vague, muted thing, hard to bring into focus; the baby stood out electrically from his surroundings, beatific and bright, as if God’s fingertips rested on the crown of his head. Gentian was slightly less church-drunk than her sister, but she agreed that the baby was a creature of wonder. No one else paid attention—Kaspar seemed half-asleep most of the time, and Buffalo Bill had never had the slightest use for children—so care of the baby devolved onto them.

The twins had drawn up a list of potential names before they’d ever set eyes on their brother, as if they’d known that the choice would be left up to them. Enzian had been in favor of something Talmudic, in keeping with the child’s significance: Moses, for example, or Nebuchadnezzar. But Gentian (always the more practical of the two) argued that too messianic a name could be risky. Names were dangerous things: names singled you out from the crowd. Hadn’t their own father changed his name—and theirs, too—when they’d arrived in New York City? Oma and Opa Silbermann, on the other hand, had kept theirs the same. And Oma and Opa Silbermann were dead.

“They’re not dead,” Enzian said, brandishing a rattle at the baby. “Papa got a letter at Passover.”

“Postmarked last year, Enzie. I heard Papa tell Ilse—”

“
Ilse
’s dead,” Enzian declared, in that grown-up way of hers that ended every argument. “Oma and Opa aren’t. They just moved to Poland, that’s all. The same way that we moved to here.”

Gentian took the rattle back. “Who told you that?”

“You know who.”

“Ottokar?”

Enzian bit her lip and said nothing. Ottokar was a little flying thing with hooked legs that lived in the ginkgo tree outside their bedroom. On certain warm nights he’d come in through the window and cling to Enzian’s ear like a fat clip-on earring and tell her a story. Sometimes Enzian would pass what he told her along, but most of the time she kept it to herself. Papa said it was a thing like a locust—a pest. But everything Ottokar told them turned out to be true.

“I’ve got another idea for what to call the baby,” Enzian said. “
Peanut
. That’s what he looks like.”

Gentian wasn’t listening. “What else did Ottokar tell you?”

“That we should stop talking German. He says people don’t like it.”

“
I
don’t like it,” said Gentian. She was always quick to agree with Ottokar’s suggestions, always taking his side, in the hope that he might one day talk to her instead. She and Enzie hadn’t spoken German in a long time, anyway, not even with Uncle Willy or their father. “What else?”

“We have to take care of him.”

“Who?”

“Peanut, of course. He’s going to be famous.” Enzian shut her eyes like a cat, which was as close as she got to a smile. “But you knew that already.”

“I knew that already,” said Gentian. “He’s going to be
famous
.” Enzian was right—she was right almost always. How could the baby be anything else?

*   *   *

There’s nothing like writing a family history, Mrs. Haven, for shining a light into the fusty darkness. Take my dad, for example. Orson isn’t even out of diapers yet, narrative-wise—he’s barely been named!—and already he seems less alien to me, less inscrutable, less forbidding. He was sphinxlike for most of my childhood, a textbook case of the Sequestered Father: in quarantine for no apparent reason, existing at a small but definite remove, as his own father had done. He emerged from the basement, as far as I can remember, for one of only three reasons: to eat frozen yogurt, to fight with the Kraut (as he’d taken, more or less affectionately, to calling his wife) or to watch NCAA ball in the den. I would put in hours beside him on the couch, matching him scoop for scoop, before he’d privilege me with so much as a glance. But sometimes, if the game was going well—or catastrophically badly—he’d suddenly jerk upright, drag a hand across his face and stare at me as though I’d just dropped from the sky. I lived for those moments, at least when I was small.