The Lost Time Accidents (32 page)

Pickle
is an Inherently Funny Word, did you know that? I read that somewhere. And the CIA, in certain circles, is referred to as the “Pickle Factory.” I tell you this for your edification, that’s all. Nothing to do with Genny. Make of it what you will or let it be.

It’s hard to say, Mrs. Haven, whether the paranoia on display here is my father’s or Genny’s—both became famous for it in the course of their lives. And even the earliest story of Orson’s that I’ve dug up, “Everywhen,” written sometime before his fourteenth birthday (when the twins, both twenty-six, were still living at home), has Gentian’s fingerprints all over it.

“Everywhen” recounts the adventures of Gargarin V, an interplanetary do-gooder who finds a mysterious artifact on a seemingly uninhabited moon. The object, which is fashioned out of a curiously weightless blue metal and resembles a gherkin (
make of that what you will
, as Orson would say,
or let it be
), is no inert archaeological relic: it’s a kind of bus pass, a “pan-dimensional transfer voucher” that entitles its owner to switch from his current timestream to any of the countless others in the “boundless, turgid KronoMultiVerse.” Gargarin finds this out by accident when he tosses the object to Ikthlb, his hermit-crab-like housepet and personal secretary. Catching the object in its mandibles, it disappears in a small-scale thermonuclear explosion; Gargarin, miraculously unhurt, wanders around the fizzling crater for an hour or so before bumping into Ikthlb, looking a bit worse for wear, still clutching the transfer voucher in its jaws.

“Where have you been, wretch?” Gargarin demands.

“Everywhen,” answers Ikthlb.

It then informs its master, not without a certain weary pride, that it’s been traveling through spacetime for two thousand years, popping up entirely at random, and that its return was no more than an accident.

Gargarin is ecstatic as Ikthlb explains about the space pickle’s power, imagining himself interceding at countless key moments in recorded history and beyond, all for the greater good of humankind. Alas, however, this is not to be. The story is an illustration of the well-known physics conundrum about traveling back in time and accidentally killing your grandmother, which would obviously erase you from existence, which in turn would make it impossible for you to travel back in time and accidentally kill your grandmother. As so often in my father’s fiction, the looming fear in “Everywhen” is not of death, but of limbo: what terrified Orson most wasn’t the thought of something horrendous happening, but the thought of nothing happening at all.

“The suburbs,” he once told an interviewer, “tend to have that effect on a person.”

Ignoring Ikthlb’s warning that the metallic blue phallus in his hand is uncontrollable, Gargarin bites into it and instantly finds himself neck-deep in the primordial muck. (Pretty good for a thirteen-year-old, Mrs. Haven, you’ve got to admit.) He makes countless transfers before finding himself somewhere useful: the meeting of two infamous “astral war criminals” at a remote mountain fortress near the planet’s southern pole. Not surprisingly, the war criminals object to Gargarin’s visit, and our hero is forced to bite the proverbial gherkin again, making good his escape without accomplishing—in the words of the author—“bugger-all for humankind.”

And so it goes, Mrs. Haven, for the next sixteen pages. Our hero is ineffectual, impotent, prevented time and time again from taking action. After untold further transfers, he finds himself back in the Midwestern town he was born in, on the precise day and hour of his birth; and the cosmic bus pass—in a classic Orson Card Tolliver ex machina—chooses this time and place, of all possible times and places, to expire.

Juicy premise aside, “Everywhen” is a hopeless hack job, pocked with flubs and misspellings and shamelessly bruise-colored prose; somebody must have said something nice about it, however, because Orson churned out nineteen more stories by the end of that year. Even after Kaspar and Wilhelm had convinced old man Opchik—Kaiserwerks’s bitterest rival—to back a venture into ladies’ wristwatches (dirt-cheap bobby-soxers’ geegaws, with imitation-silk wristbands, that actually kept decent time) and the family moved into a house of its own in Cheektowaga, on the manicured outskirts of town, Enzie and Genny decided to keep sharing a bedroom, in part so their brother would have space to work. Orson’s one-man exodus from consensus reality began in earnest at 308 Pine Ridge Road, and the twins did everything they could to encourage it, never having had much use for reality themselves.

*   *   *

The year 1954 was not a trivial one for the nation: the Supreme Court declared segregation illegal in May, Elvis had his radio debut two months later, and the plug was finally pulled on Senator McCarthy’s spook hunt in time for the holiday rush. But you won’t find any of this in young Orson’s notebooks or in his sisters’ diaries, although they subscribed to the
Buffalo Courier-Express
and
The New York Times
, along with twelve pop-science magazines, seven physics periodicals, and
The Ladies’ Home Journal
. In spite of its wraparound porch and its shutterless windows and its ample front yard graced by prairie grasses, the new house was even more funereal than the one on Voorhees Avenue had been. For the entirety of that first year on Pine Ridge Road, Wilhelm and his confidant of the moment (a freckle-faced dental technician from Fort Erie, Ontario) were the only visitors who stayed for dinner. The reason was simple: Kaspar gave no sign of caring about anything any longer—with the notable exception of ladies’ wristwatches—and Enzian and Gentian had exactly one friend between them, who had wings and six legs, and only showed up every seven years.

Orson, contrariwise, had a handful of bona fide flesh-and-blood pals during high school, and even—temporarily—a girlfriend. He now spent his Saturdays in the science fiction annex of Cosgrove’s Book & Vitamin Emporium (just down the aisle from the German/Yiddish section, where his father had glimpsed his mother in her shirt and dungarees), debating the relative merits of Philip José Farmer and Algis Burdrys with a hollow-eyed beatnik known only as Norm. Orson never once brought Norm home—in part because Norm was undeniably creepy, in part because the twins were even creepier. Besides, he had his writing to attend to.

What Kaspar thought of his son’s literary pretensions was anyone’s guess, but it didn’t much matter: his daughters called the shots at Pine Ridge Road by then. Since graduating from Bennett High School—Genny by the skin of her teeth, Enzie with A’s in everything but French—the twins had turned their mannish backsides on the world in earnest. Like the two-headed eagle of the old Habsburg Empire, Enzie and Genny presided over their decrepit realm grimly but fiercely, discouraging all but the most necessary change.

Certain changes, however, were beyond their power to suppress.

Ewa Ruszczyk was a wicker-haired nymphet with green eyes and undersized thumbs that she tucked into her fists out of embarrassment, which occasionally meant that Orson—when all his secret stars were in alignment—was permitted to carry her books. An interest in science wasn’t yet a social disease in the fifties, and even science fiction had a certain bucktoothed glamour—girls read sci-fi back then, or at least Ewa Ruszczyk did, which was more than enough for my father. She lived at 41 Sycamore, just off the creek, with six towheaded siblings and a mother who seemed airlifted straight from Nowy Sácz; she spoke English with a slight Polish accent that embarrassed her even more acutely than her misproportioned thumbs (which were lovely, of course, and no cause for embarrassment at all). Orson informed her solemnly, on his seventeenth book-schlepping outing, that his current favorite author was Stanisław Lem, who came from the same town in the Carpathians that Mama Ruszczyk did. Ewa blushed and said that Lem was her father’s favorite author, as well—she couldn’t read him herself, unfortunately, because his books were available only in Polish. Could Orson read Polish?

Orson assured her, incorrectly, that he could. Ewa Ruszczyk was appropriately amazed. And still it took him six synchronous rotations of the moon around the planet to lure her to 308 Pine Ridge Road.

The house was dark when they got there, an auspicious sign, but Orson proceeded with caution. He’d been casing his own home for weeks, taking note of all comings and goings, and had settled on Thursday between 16:15 and 17:00 EST. Forty-five minutes wasn’t much, admittedly, but it was the length of gym period, not counting showers. He’d timed himself, using a Kaiserwerks Mary Queen of Scots model wristwatch, taking each of his favorite books—
Childhood’s End
,
More Than Human
,
Pebble in the Sky
,
A Voyage to Arcturus
—down from the shelf above his bed, and giving a bare-bones synopsis of each. It took him exactly fourteen minutes, which (allowing no more than eight minutes for getting Cokes out of the icebox, opening them, ascending the staircase, polite conversation, etc.) still left twenty-three minutes for doing things he didn’t dare to name.

“It’s nifty in here,” Ewa said, once they’d locked his bedroom door behind them. “But it’s also kind of hard to see.”

“Sorry,” Orson murmured, fumbling noisily with his bedside lamp. He’d been prepared for anything but her absolute aplomb.

“Was there maybe a
book
,” Ewa said, “that you wanted to show me?”

“
The Softest Gun
,” Orson heard himself stammer; but she was already reaching for the shelf above his bed. She was dressed in a fuzzy white cardigan and high-waisted slacks, like thousands of other girls across America—but by that point he’d forgotten any other girls existed. If he’d ever seen any paintings of babushka-wearing maidens sowing wheat, he might have been able to put Ewa’s thick-limbed beauty into context: she looked perfectly capable of eating him in two or three quick bites, like a blini. She held the paperback in question a few inches from her face—she was severely myopic, which gave her what Orson considered a dreamy look—and sucked demurely on her lower lip. He took the book from her hands impatiently, peevishly almost, and began declaiming from a random page:

Draggo tried to laugh archly, but the laughter got stuck in his pylorus. He had a sudden, spasmic urge to run out of the cryo-dome and into the otherwilds—where there weren’t any telemembranes, or taxes, or synthetic pleasure proteins. Was escape possible?

Xyxyva was out there somewhere, possibly waiting for him, possibly not: her xxanda dampened by the noonday heat, her proud, heaving
üvvübras alive to the tiniest ripple in the palpitating vacüum of—

“Where does this go?” Ewa cut in, resting her palm against the door to Orson’s cubby.

“Nowhere, really—it’s nothing. Nothing’s in there, I mean. Just a desk.”

She looked at him slyly. “Just a desk, huh?”

Orson had taken to thinking of his writing room as inhabiting its own discrete dimension, and of its door as an interdimensional portal, only selectively permeable, like the magic pools in
The Magician’s Nephew
. It was easy to think of his cubby that way, since no other member of the household ever went there; and it was important to think of it that way, since its contents were extremely classified. His journals were in there, for starters, and certain sketches he’d made of Lucille Ball and Betty Grable that were not meant for public consumption; not to mention the first eleven pages of his soon-to-be-immortal masterwork,
Expressway to the Past.
And now Ewa Ruszczyk—of all the people in the chronoverse—was tugging at the handle of its door. His hand shot forward of its own accord and closed around her wrist.

“It’s a transdimensional portal, Ewa, and it’s highly unstable. If you cross it, I can’t guarantee that you won’t be ripped into a million—”

When she pulled her hand free and jerked the door open it almost came as a relief. She was standing in the classic gunslinger stance now—feet apart, hands at the ready—and watching him to see what he’d do next. She leaned forward without warning and gave him a kiss, then pulled away to study his reaction. A pearl of drool clung brightly to her downy Polish chin.

“What’s
in
there,” she purred, “that you’re trying to hide?”

He’d already thought of a plausible answer, already taken in breath, when a sound from the cubby made them both turn their heads. The door blocked his view but not Ewa’s. The sound came again just as her mouth fell open, as though she herself were making it—but by then Orson had identified its source. It was the sound of papers being shuffled at his desk.

“You must be Ewa!” came a voice. “What a
very
nice suprise. I’m Orson’s sister.”

Ewa brought a hand up to her mouth and gave a nod. Orson mustered his courage and took a step forward, resigned to the inevitable. But the inevitable was not what he encountered.

Enzian sat at his desk with a look of calm forbearance on her face, a willingness to interrupt important work, if only for a moment. The manuscript of
Expressway to the Past
lay spread out before her, all eleven pages in a row; she was wearing the Pendleton shirt she’d bought for him at Hanukkah—an aubergine-and-yellow “shadow plaid”—with the sleeves rolled up, the way he liked to wear them. She had on his wristwatch, as well, and some boxers of his that rode up at her hips. Her feet made fan-shaped dust marks on the floor.

“Enzie,” Orson croaked.

“
There
you are, Peanut,” she said, keeping her eyes on Ewa.

“Enzie, what are you doing?”

“This is
quite
promising.” She took up the topmost page and squinted at it through her reading glasses. “Too Asimov-ish for my taste—but it’s your story, after all, not mine. The way you tweak the Dunne-Dodgson Postulate to allow for chrononavigation is original, to say the least.” Her eyes brightened. “I almost think you might be on to something.”

“Thank you,” my father said faintly. It was all he could do not to look at her feet, or at her thighs, or at all the other parts of her he’d never glimpsed before. Her pose put him in mind of a soft-focus photograph, neatly torn from a magazine, that Norm the beatnik carried in his wallet. He felt queasy again. The Pendleton shirt wasn’t even buttoned.