The Lost Time Accidents (33 page)

“I appreciated your description of the Nameless Planet, too. Weak gravitation might well have that effect on vegetation.” She gave Ewa a wink. “Best of all, there’s not a trace of Patent Clerk–ism anywhere.”

“Enzie—”

“How are you going to work the Accidents in?”

“I’m not going to work the Accidents in.”

Her smile drifted subtly out of alignment. It hadn’t been the most convincing of smiles to begin with.

“Not work them in? What do you mean by that?”

“I mean what I said.”

Orson had known for some time that his sisters’ enthusiasm for his stories was directly proportional to the prominence of time travel in them—and he’d been willing to oblige, at least up to a point, since the twins were all the audience he had. That confrontation in his cubby, however, was the true zero-hour of my father’s career, and not just because he’d decided, for the first time in his life, to stand his ground. As he watched Enzian’s angular features reconfigure themselves, he was struck by an unprecedented feeling: the conviction that he was right and she was wrong. Everything about her was wrong, he realized, from her superior air to her goose-pimpled thighs to her uninvited presence in his room. His surprise gave way to anger as he watched her, then to something akin to contempt. Ewa played a role in this, of course, but by that point she was almost incidental. Orson’s and his sisters’ agendas had parted ways, quite possibly forever. In a heartbeat he’d become a different person.

“You’ve been using me, Enzie.”

“
Using
you? What on earth—”

“You’ve been making guesses about the Accidents—guesses, hypotheses, whatever you want to call them—and getting me to turn them into stories. Don’t try to deny it.”

“I haven’t the slightest intention of—”

“But I don’t want to do that anymore, you understand? I want to use my
own
ideas, Enzie, not yours. I’m not like you and Genny—not in that way, at least.” He took in a breath. “To start off with, I haven’t got the Syndrome.”

“Of course you do, Peanut,” Enzian said softly.

Orson flinched as if she’d slapped him. “I’m not a goddamn
peanut
,” he hissed. “I’ve got better things to do than help you with your guesses about time.”

She was quiet a moment. “What could possibly be better?”

“None of your business.”

“Orson, please—”

“Come on, Ewa. Let’s get out of here.”

But Ewa, not surprisingly, was nowhere to be found.

*   *   *

Kaspar noticed that a change had occurred in his house, but he had only the murkiest idea of what it was: he’d been a noncombatant for too long. Enzian evaded his questions, Gentian seemed to know less than he did, and Orson had locked himself away and spoke to no one. My grandfather had long since reconciled himself to the irrelevance of age—he’d practically rushed forward to meet it—so this latest failure came as no surprise. One night after dinner, however, two weeks into this brittle new epoch, Enzian astonished him by coming into the parlor and perching close beside him on the sofa, as she’d done on rainy afternoons when she was small.

“Papa,” she said in German, “I have something to discuss.”

Kaspar nodded at her mildly, excruciatingly aware of how doddering and hapless he must seem. Enzian was a little girl again, decades younger than her twenty-seven years, and the sensation this triggered was one of staring down from a high balcony onto a street he’d lived on a lifetime before, in a city whose name he’d encouraged himself to forget. Chronology is a lie, someone had said to him once.

“What is it,
Schätzchen
?” he heard himself ask. He hadn’t called anyone
Schätzchen
since getting off that dreadful ship in New York Harbor. But that wasn’t quite true—he’d called his second wife
Schätzchen
, he recalled that distinctly. His second wife: Ilse. He did his best to bring her face to mind.

“Papa,” said Enzian, in English this time. “Are you listening to me?”

“I am, Enzie. Of course.” He sat up and nodded. “But it might be best if you began again.”

“Orson doesn’t want to study physics. He doesn’t even want to go to school.”

Her anger was palpable, even to Kaspar. He took care in framing his answer. “Orson’s fifteen years old, Enzie. I doubt that he knows what he wants.”

“He turned sixteen last March. And he knows what he wants perfectly. He’s not like you.” The child had vanished, and the familiar sharp-edged face stared into his. “You’ve never understood him, Papa. That’s the truth.”

“He’s a teenager now,” Kaspar said equably. “Not a tot anymore. There are more important things, for a boy of his age, than the study of the nature of time.”

For a moment it seemed that Enzian wouldn’t answer. “That’s what
he
said. But what on earth could be more important?”

Gentian came in just then, a dish towel in one hand and a cup of Ostfriesen BOP in the other. Kaspar whispered his answer into Enzian’s ear.

“Papa!”
she said, bringing a hand to her mouth. “I’m astonished that you even know that word!”

“I know it in three languages,” he said matter-of-factly. “English, German, and Czech. If I didn’t, sweetheart, you might well not exist.” He looked from one of his daughters to the other. “You girls need to get out of the house more often.”

“That’s just what I want to talk about,” said Enzian.

*   *   *

The following autumn, on September 5, 1956, Enzian attended her first lecture in the Physics Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo. She was older, at twenty-seven, than a number of her instructors, and she was the only woman in the whole department; but such trivialities were no concern of hers. She kept her time on campus to a minimum, but even so, the hours away from her sister were bitter. Harder still was the pretense her studies demanded: the need to dissemble, to parrot her professors’ orthodoxies, to feign interest in theories that were of no use to her. My aunt had developed her own ideas about the physical world by that time, some of which would have made even Waldemar blush. She was rattled and drained when she came home at night, as though on furlough from some grim but crucial conflict—which was exactly what she considered her coursework to be.

Hostilities commenced in the second month of Principles of Physics. Things had gone smoothly till then: she’d familiarized herself with those areas, like Laplace’s theory of determinism and Newton’s early work in optics, that she’d missed in her self-education. (She particularly liked the idea, which she’d never once thought of, that physics often seems to violate common sense because our common sense evolved to explain things on a
human
scale—the scale of things that we can touch and see and hear—whereas physics deals with everything in the universe, from the subatomic to the infinite.) By the time the class had arrived at Michelson and Morley, however, my aunt had begun to get antsy. The lecturer, an archetypically tweedy Scotsman with a tendency to stammer when excited, had barely rounded the headland of the twentieth century when he found himself in shark-infested seas.

The topic was Philip Lenard’s work on photoelectrics, which had never posed a problem for the Scotsman before. Lenard had been an opponent of relativity from the start, in part because it rendered his pet theory—that everything in the universe is suspended in an invisible substance, the “luminiferous ether”—not only obsolete but silly. Using the technique known as Occam’s razor, which cuts away all the elements of a theory that aren’t essential—the fat and the gristle, conceptually speaking—Einstein and his cohorts had dispensed with the ether, and found that the universe ran perfectly well without it. Little wonder, then (the Scotsman continued) that Lenard had ended up a rabid Jew-baiter. As Max Planck once wrote to his colleague, Sir James Jeans—

“Excuse me, Mr. Urquhart,” said Enzian, raising her hand.

Urquhart glanced up in alarm. “What is it, Miss Tolliver? Are you unwell?”

“Not me,” she replied. “Mr. Occam.”

“Mr. Occam?” echoed the Scotsman, struggling to master his stammer.

“His razor.” Ignoring the tittering around her, Enzian pressed on. “Occam’s principle is to cut away everything that’s unnecessary, isn’t that so? To strip each theory back down to its bones?”

“That is correct, Miss Tolliver. Now, if you’ll permit me—”

“Seems to me you’d lose a lot of meat that way.”

Urquhart opened his mouth and closed it. “A lot of
meat
, Miss Tolliver?”

“That’s right.” Enzian was smiling her private smile now, the one she used only with her father and Genny. “Where do all those theories go, that Occam shaves away? How many tasty tidbits are we missing?”

Monday, 09:05 EST

I’ve been nursing a suspicion for at least three sleep cycles, Mrs. Haven, without the confidence to set it down. There have been too many coincidences, especially lately—too many barely perceptible changes to my surroundings, too many relevant books poking up from the trash, too many mnemonic prompts left out where I was sure to find them. I may be cut off from the timestream in this junk-filled mausoleum, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m alone.

The idea of someone else in these catacombs, laying out a bread-crumb trail for me while I’m asleep, gives me the fantods, for obvious reasons; but I can’t deny it also gives me hope. As I wrote in my ledger of credits and debits:

But someone must have put me here, and provided me with these books and writing materials—ergo, someone wants me to complete my history. And that person may also have the means to set me free.

I’ve held back till now, Mrs. Haven, out of uncertainty and lack of evidence. But something has just happened—a few minutes ago, before I started this entry—that’s convinced me I’m right.

*   *   *

I awoke from my most recent spell of semiconsciousness to the knowledge that something had changed. It was dark in the room—smoothly, blankly, two-dimensionally dark—and as usual I heard almost nothing. I felt my adrenaline surge as I groped for the lamp, terrified that I’d been blinded in my sleep: I yanked on its chain, then again, then
again
, but the dark only thickened. Sliding to the floor, I followed the cord of the lamp with my fingers, crawling through the blackness on all fours, praying that I’d somehow pulled it from the wall. I seemed to be crossing a wide, pitching space, like a seasick passenger on the deck of some great cruiser. I had to burrow through a loose drift of magazines and milk cartons and shoe boxes to uncover the socket; when I did, I found the cord firmly plugged in. This may seem like a minor point, Mrs. Haven, but it struck me like a swell of icy water. The only explanation left was that the bulb had blown, and I had no replacement. The thought of passing each coming night with nothing but my claustrophobia for company was more than I could bear. I sank back against a stack of ceiling tiles and sobbed.

As I was making my way back, however, I had a stroke of improbable luck. Just as my hand reached the base of the lamp, my fingers brushed against something cool and round and light, and set it spinning. A lightbulb! I was too overjoyed to ask how it had gotten there, or why I hadn’t noticed it before. I brought it to my ear and shook it gently.

Unbelievably, miraculously, the bulb was intact. I let out a groan of thanksgiving and got to my feet, guiding myself upward by the stem of the lamp. I hesitated briefly at the top, held back by a sudden misgiving: that the power to the apartment had been cut.

The implications of this made me slightly woozy. Is it possible that my temporal isolation operates in one direction only—that the timestream can still affect me, even though I’ve been excised from time? With this troubling thought I roused myself from my reverie and reached up, under the lampshade, to unscrew the dead bulb and replace it.

But there was no bulb to replace, Mrs. Haven. There was no bulb in the socket of the lamp.

As I stood motionless with the lamp stem in my right hand and the lightbulb in my left, hearing nothing but my own dumbfounded wheezing, something gradually impinged on my awareness. I’d been conscious of it for some time, in the way that I was conscious of the clothing I wore, or of the floor beneath my feet: I’d sensed it without giving it a thought.

Someone else was in the room, close beside me in the darkness, breathing in time with my breath.

I let out a squeal, choked and childlike, that died almost before it left my throat. There was someone else
there.
Someone was trying to match me breath for breath, to hide in my biorhythm, and was almost succeeding. I turned around slowly, keeping my hand on the lamp stem, and guided the bulb into the empty socket. I was facing him now. I seemed to feel his scentless breath against my skin.

“I want to know who you are,” I said into the blackness.

I gave the bulb one full turn. The ghostly breathing seemed to have stopped, or to have conformed to my own more precisely. I turned it again.

“I want to know who you
are
,” I repeated. “I want to know why you’re doing this to me.”

A great distance away, at the margin of hearing, a board seemed to creak.

“Show yourself!” I shouted, giving the bulb a third and final twist.

My mistake, I see now, was to keep my eyes open as the light came on. I recoiled backward into the card table, knocking half the pile of books onto the floor, then doubled over and dug my palms into my eyes. A stream of burning afterimages roiled across my sight, in one of which I saw—or thought I saw—a human figure. But by the time my sight had cleared the room was empty.

On the floor behind my armchair, within arm’s reach of the Archive, a fractured snow globe glittered in the light. It had held water once; now it held only soot. I looked closer and discovered a postapocalyptic Forty-Second Street, the block just east of Grand Central, as desolate and caked with grime as this apartment. The Chrysler Building jutted like a starship from the dust.

XVII