The Lost Time Accidents (31 page)

“Look at that goddamn
toss
,” he groaned one Rose Bowl afternoon—I’d just turned ten, Mrs. Haven, if memory serves—as the Trojans (his favorites) were being steamrolled by Michigan State. “Look at that cuntsniffer chuck that pigksin. That’s what you call a Hail Mary pass, Waldy. It means you fucking lose.”

“I know what a Hail Mary is, Orson.”

“All right, smarty knickers. What you
don’t
know, however, is this.” He paused for effect. “That football is a goddamn time machine.”

I had his attention now—as much of it as I was likely to get—and I framed my next question with care. “How is a football like a time machine, exactly?”

“In
two
ways,” he growled, his watery gray eyes finding mine at last. “You won’t contest the fact, I hope, that the football—even when that shitbird McNamara throws it—is in motion. What happens to an object in motion?”

I hesitated. “It ends up somewhere else?”

“Horsecocky, son. You can do better. Do your thinking dance for me and pray for rain.”

I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the answer. “Because time passes more slowly—”

“—for an object in motion. Good. But there’s another reason. That ball’s not only moving forward, is it? It’s also moving
up
.”

I said nothing, Mrs. Haven, because I didn’t need to. There was no stopping Orson once he’d hit escape velocity.

“Have I told you about the Lipschitz Protocol? No? One of the most elegant experiments in history. I nearly named you Lipschitz on account of it.”

I thanked him for reconsidering.

“You’re welcome. Now listen up: one of the Patent Clerk’s early predictions was that time should run more slowly near something really big, like the earth, on account of gravity. Can you guess why?”

I thought hard this time. “Is it because—”

“Right you are, Waldy. As light works its way through the earth’s gravitational field, it expends energy. The less energy light has, the lower its frequency. So
that’s
why,” he said, turning back to the game.

I tried and failed to understand his point. “That’s why what?”

“The lower light’s
frequency
is, the more time elapses between the crests of its waves,” he said, keeping his eyes on the set. “It’s the distance between those crests that determines how quickly time passes. So what old Professor Lipschitz did was this: he got himself two clocks—superaccurate clocks—then put one at the top of an old water tower and one at the bottom. What do you think he found?”

“Um—”

“Exactly. The clock at the bottom—closer to the earth—was found to run more slowly, in perfect agreement with general relativity.” He puckered his lips at the screen. “
Blitz
, you chickendicks! Pull your heads out of your jocks!”

I cleared my throat. “So, um, for the football—when it goes way up high—time is actually, really moving faster?”

Orson rolled his eyes wildly, though whether at me or at the Trojans was impossible to guess. “On the
other
hand, time moves more slowly for a body in motion, so the two factors might cancel each other out. Tough to say. I’m an amateur, remember, not like your departed gramps. You know what that old gasser used to say to me? ‘Time, my boy, is the universe’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.’ I thought that was pretty deep-dish, let me tell you.”

“Huh,” I said. “That’s actually kind of—”

“Then I found out he was quoting the goddamn Patent Clerk.” He made a face at something only he could see. “I dropped out of school the next day.”

“But why would
that
make you—” I started to ask, but he’d already switched off the set, as if there were nobody else in the room, and scuttled back down to his bunker.

*   *   *

The world, as the saying goes, is full of disappointed men—but my father, Mrs. Haven, was a disappointed child. When I picture the Cheektowaga of my boyhood, I see a Kodachromatic checkerboard of buzzing summer lawns, any of which might hide the Keys to Revelation; for Orson it was more like purgatory. The conceit of the checkerboard applies to him just as well—I stole it, in fact, from his seventeenth novel,
Monkey Say, Monkey Die
—but the board in Orson’s case was something monstrous: a horizon-wide grid across which he was fated to be shunted back and forth—the hero of some dated existential pulp—by forces beyond his control. Long after they’d outgrown their feelings of divine election, Enzian and Gentian continued to think of their brother as their personal herald: they’d named him, after all, just as Adam had done for the birds and the beasts. Which meant that he belonged to them completely.

Little by little, as they entered their teens, a new idée fixe emerged for the twins. It arrived so perfectly in concert with the beginnings of puberty that it seemed, to their astonished father, as much a secondary sex characteristic as the appearance of hair in their armpits. While other girls were sneaking their mothers’ lipstick and piercing each other’s ears under the bleachers, Enzian and Gentian were struggling through the Hooke-Newton debate on gravitation and arguing about whether God existed within the timestream or outside of it. As if to illustrate Lamarck’s theory of soft inheritance, they developed an aversion to relativity before they fully understood it, and in a matter of months—just as Kaspar had feared—they began to ask about their grandfather’s research. It became appallingly clear, by their thirteenth birthdays at the very latest, that Enzian and Gentian were showing early symptoms of the Syndrome.

Long after Abraham and Isaac had begun to bore them, the twins continued their bedtime readings of the Bible, if only for the conversation between Moses and the angel about time. Time was Jehovah’s most magnificent and terrible creation, they decided: nothing else he’d come up with was half as impressive. It may well have been God’s way of keeping everything in the universe from happening at once, but the twins understood, as their uncle and grandfather had before them, that the inverse was equally true: the universe existed to give time something to play with.

Would the mystery of Ottokar’s legacy have inflamed my aunts’ brains so virulently—would it have infected them at all—if their mother had lived? A psychologist might argue that it served to fill the void created by Sonja’s death; and it’s true, I suppose, that they’d shown no great interest before. The search for the Accidents might easily have expired in a single generation, with the passing of Ottokar’s sons: Kaspar, for example, seems to have all but cured himself before he died. But I can’t see Enzie and Genny, knowing them as I did, other than in the damp, lurid light of the Syndrome.

*   *   *

Enzian and Gentian were by no means alone in their obsession: not then, in the interminable end phase of the war. If there was ever a year when the power of physics to reconfigure the planet was plain, when engineers and theoreticians seemed as fearsome and divine as Enzian’s cherished seraphim, it was 1945. The twins were preparing a suprise birthday for their father when he came home unexpectedly, his workday smile fixed loosely on his face, and sank onto the couch without a word. They fixed him his favorite drink—he’d never taken much to cocktails, that American eccentricity, but he enjoyed a cup of tea with fino sherry—and asked him whether he was feeling poorly.

“You must not have heard,” Kaspar mumbled. “We did it, just as we told them we would.” He blinked down at his tea as though surprised to find it there. “We did it.”

“Did what, Papa?”

“Hiroshima,” he said. “We dropped the bomb.”

“Of course we’ve heard
that
,” said Enzian. “We heard about it at school. Mrs. Kieffer played the broadcast on the radio.”

“The war is over,” Gentian added.

“Not yet,” said Enzian.

Gentian rolled her eyes. “The war is
over
, Enzie. Everybody says.”

No one spoke for a moment. The twins stood close together, watching their father. They’d grown used to condescending to him, but not when the talk turned to physics. They both remembered Oppenheimer’s letter.

“I could have gone down there, to New Mexico,” Kaspar said, almost too quietly to hear. “I could have worked on that project.”

Gentian sat beside him now and took his hand in hers, a thing she hadn’t done since she was eight. “You
could
have, Papa. We know that, don’t we, Enzie? You could have helped them to build it. And we’d have been so proud.”

“Proud?” said Kaspar, lurching to his feet. He looked older than the twins had ever seen him, but there was color in his face now and his voice was harsh with rage. “Proud?” he yelled, looking from one of their startled faces to the other. “For heaven’s sake, what kind of children are you?”

*   *   *

Kaspar refused to answer any questions about physics from that day forward, let alone about the Accidents. The twins had no choice, therefore, but to invent their own creation myth, like the primitive society they were. They did their mythmaking privately, individually, taking two shots in the dark instead of one. Enzian wrote her version—in the pidgin she still used in notes to herself—on the back of a Hanukkah card, then used it as a bookmark in her journal:

THE “LOST TIME ACCIDENTS” BY ENZIAN OLIVIA TOLLIVER.

IN THE BEGINNING was two Accidents on the same Day in the middle of the Summer. This was happening in Europe. My grandfather was a Goyim Verruckter who only ate Taffees. He didn’t care what People thought except his Science was a Secret. It was Secret from the Neighbors and the Customers and even from the Family. My Father sometimes helped him then but he was in short Pants.

The 1st Accident was: he found out what Time is and what it isn’t. It dropped down on his Head like the Law dropped on Moses. The 2nd was he got tötet by a Car.

Time is a misbehaving Thing because it moves and you can’t see it. If you can’t see it how do you know it’s moving? You don’t know. But it’s gone and now you’re in a different Place. It’s going and moving and taking Things with it. Always in the one Direction, never the others, but Nobody can find out where it’s going. My Grandfather found out. He called it the Accidents because nobody could guess the Direction. Not on Purpose they couldn’t. Because it’s going Everywhere at once.

Another Brother’s name was Freiherr Von who had no Timepiece so he kept Time using People. A Jew in Switzerland killed him by becoming famous. He’s dead and doesn’t matter in this story.

Both more prudent and more retiring than her sister, Gentian was careful not to set her version down in writing—but my father remembered it forty years later, in the ICU at Buffalo General, in the wake of his first coronary. I asked him about it in the milk-of-magnesia-colored room where he lay between bypasses, staring up at the TV he’d insisted on personally unplugging before they slid his clammy body into bed. He’d have answered any question I asked him, most likely—he was bored out of his skull—but nothing better came to me. He was too weak to write, so I recorded him on a Dictaphone I found in his attaché case.

BUFFALO GENERAL MEDICAL CENTER 16:50 EST

It was a gherkin that first set the old asspicker onto the idea that time was coiled and pinched up like a blocked intestine. He might have had the idea anyway, I suppose, but gherkins were his livelihood so that was how it took him.

People think cucumbers are flavorless, just warty green dongs full of water and pulp; but the best of them taste slightly sweet. As soon as it’s plunked in the brine—which in Ottokar’s day was mostly acetic acid and salt—your cucumber begins to turn sour, and in a few weeks you’ve got your classic gherkin. However, Waldy.

However
.

What’s that? No, no—Genny didn’t know thing one about the brining process, and neither did Enzie. I’m filling in the blanks for your benefit. Genny’s theory had plenty of holes in it, believe you me. She wasn’t the brains of the unit.

All right then. As every pickler knows, if you leave your gherkin in the brine too long—a full year, let’s say—the process begins to reverse. It goes
backwards
, you savvy? Your sourness leaches away like old sap, and sooner or later you’re left with a flavorless mush, a grayish lump of proto-pickle that’s no use to anybody. Except in your great-granddad’s case. It was useful to
him
. That’s a genius for you. It got him cogitating, ruminating, chewing the proverbial cud. He started thinking about the chronosphere as a kind of cosmic brine.

Why—your great-granddad asked himself—do we think of time as running straight ahead, from past to future? Because we perceive it that way, you might answer—but that doesn’t cut the
Poupon
. To a Yanomamo on the banks of the Amazon, every river runs due east, toward the rising sun; and a Bedouin thinks the world is made of sand. Are the rest of us any better, really, physicists included? We’ve lost faith in our senses—and we were right to lose faith, because our senses are fucking pathetic. Why should we have faith in what they tell us about time?

That was when the Chronologists had to put the kibosh on the deal. Word got out that Ottokar was on the brink of a major discovery—one that could knock some heavy hitters out of business. His aversion to automobiles was well known, so it was decided, as a kind of crowning insult, to use a Daimler as the murder weapon. The “watch salesman,” Bachling, had just learned how to drive a car that morning. He was an underground Chronologist from Prague.

No clue where Genny scraped this stuff up, by the way. She used to say a talking cricket told her. No idea who the “Chronologists” were supposed to be, either. I doubt that Genny even knew herself.

Funny how well I remember all this antediluvian pucky.

Enzie didn’t believe all that hokum about the assassination and the Chronologists and whatnot, but old Genny sure as shit did. They didn’t agree about the Accidents either. To Enzie they were a phenomenon to be taken advantage of and harnessed, for chrononavigation and the like; to Genny they were something to be feared. How was human Progress with a capital
P
possible, was her thinking, when you might easily end up
before
you’d begun? It was the “grandmother paradox” all over again, but this time as an explanation for our failure as a species. Spiritually, morally—according to Genny, even
scientifically
—we’ve been killing our own grandmothers since we wriggled up out of the soup. That’s the reason she started the Archive. She wanted proof—in things you could actually pick up and hold—that mankind was learning from its mistakes.