The Lost Time Accidents (37 page)

“Hello, Ewa.”

“Welcome home, Orson. Thanks for getting in touch.”

There was a harshness to her that he couldn’t explain. “Genny told me you got married,” he said—and realized, as he said it, what the unappreciated thing must be. “You’ve got a kid, am I right? A daughter?”

“Don’t bullshit me, Orson. You don’t want to talk about my daughter. Children make your tonsils itch.”

What could she resent
me
for? Orson thought. Trying to talk her into leaving Cheektowaga? Not trying hard enough? What gives her the right? Indignation washed over him, quickly followed by pity—but the back of his throat began to itch regardless. At least I’m not sobbing, he thought. At least I’m not begging her to take me back. But he found, to his own astonishment, that the thought held no appeal for him. The itching in his throat was all he felt.

“I’ll never understand why—”

“Why what, Orson?”

“Why you never got away from here.”

“Is that right.”

“That you didn’t come with me—I can understand that, I guess. But that you stayed in this—in this
place
—”

“We can talk about it once you’ve gotten settled,” Ewa said, smiling. It wasn’t a well-intentioned smile. It seemed more like a leer of victory.

“Settled? What does that—”

“After you move back, I mean. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about it then.”

“Move back?” said Orson, his mind going blank. “I’m not going to move back, Ewa. Where did you hear—”

“Your sister told me.”

Orson’s scalp started to prickle. “Jesus Christ. I knew Enzie was nuts, but where she got
that
idea—”

“It wasn’t Enzie that told me.”

“What—” He closed his eyes. “It wasn’t? You mean—”

“That’s right, city boy. It was Genny.”

That yanked the rug out from under him completely. He shook his head and gave a frightened sneeze.

“I guess we’ll be seeing each other around,” said Ewa, flicking her cigarette into a corner. “I’m looking forward to it. You can tell me about your fabulous career.”

“I’m
never
,” Orson got out finally. “I’m never moving back here.” But his voice was drowned out by polite applause.

*   *   *

Orson left the next morning on the 20th Century Limited, the earliest possible train, after a night unlike any he’d passed with his sisters before. Enzie, normally so austere, had sat slumped at the dinner table, staring at her pork chop as if expecting it to speak; Genny had been giddier than ever, babbling about all and sundry, barely able to sit still long enough to eat. Orson had studied her closely, trying to puzzle out the meaning of what she’d told Ewa Ruszczyk. The only explanation Genny had offered—grudgingly, it had seemed to him—was that “a little birdy” had told her he’d be moving home.

“A little birdy, Genny? What’s that supposed to—”

“Not a
birdy
, exactly,” she’d said, smiling down at her plate.

“She told herself,” Enzie had muttered darkly. “She told herself, by God. And she believed it.”

His sisters’ unmooring hit him harder than his father’s death had done. He’d been resisting them both for the whole of his adult life, for no better reason than their irresistibility: they’d been preternatural to him, less elder sisters than de facto parents, less parents than agents of some arrogant, exacting cosmic will. But this had changed with Kaspar’s passing, changed radically and without warning, as if his dying breath had tripped some hidden wire. The twins may have been absolute rulers of the world they’d created, but their father—at least toward the end of his term—had been their sole remaining subject. They had no one left to rule now but themselves.

*   *   *

If any doubt persisted that the earth had shifted subtly on its axis—that the time, at least for Orson, was severely out of joint—his second escape from Buffalo erased it. He ought to have felt exhilaration at sidestepping Genny’s prophecy, or at least some modest measure of relief; instead he spent his first week back in Spanish Harlem in his star-spangled pajamas (a gift from Genny on his fifteenth birthday), drinking beer and feeling sorry for himself. The apartment smelled faintly of cat piss, he was sure of it, though he had no cats and neither did his neighbors.
Maybe I’ll have cats in the future
, he said to himself.
Maybe I have cats right now, in dimension X/12. I’ll have to ask my sisters about that.

He let out a groan at this thought and crawled back into bed. The vertigo he’d picked up at the Odd Fellows Hall had grown sharper with time, and his lunatic family—Genny, especially—seemed to have permanently colonized his dreams. Worst of all, that awful run-in with Ewa had shone a new light on his Great Emancipation: his monomaniacal pursuit of the artist’s life seemed less an act of heroism, suddenly, than one of adolescent self-indulgence. He could be viewed as a dilettante, he realized: a privileged snob, a hack with delusions of grandeur, no different than the turtlenecked deep-thinkers he looked down on. His hometown had endured—had refused to expire, to implode, to break down into its component particles—in spite of the fact that he’d abandoned it. Just the opposite: in his absence, it seemed to have thrived.

The upshot of this new understanding was that, for the first time since he’d moved to New York City—for the first time since he’d hit puberty, in fact—my father couldn’t write to save his life. The trip home had only reinforced his resolve to make art for
himself
, not his sisters, and he stuck to his ban on time travel, going so far as to outlaw the mention of time in his stories altogether; far from setting him free, however, this last decision crippled him completely. He’d long since discovered that time (beyond its obvious importance) was wondrously useful as a descriptive tool, sometimes even as a metaphor: it was invaluable in writing about sex and robotics and beauty and the vastness of space, to name a few favorite topics. There was a catch, however, an unforeseen con, which was that sex and robotics and beauty and the vastness of space (not to mention love, and death, and even good old-fashioned human consciousness) seemed to Orson, more often than not, to be metaphors for writing about time.

My father began no fewer than thirty-nine stories that spring, some of which (“The Pumpless Pump,” “The Marsupial Light & Power Company,” “An Experiment in Gyro-Hats”) he kept in a drawer for the next forty years, which means he must have seen potential in them. The only story he actually finished, however—a six-page cavalcade of unsavoriness whose title, “In No Particular Odor,” pretty much says it all—was such a spectacular stinker that even
DarkEncounters
wouldn’t touch it. By August he’d thrown in the towel altogether.

For a few days he tried to teach himself tarock, sliding the cards lackadaisically around on the floor with his toes; but he was in no state to learn anything by then. He ranged farther and farther on his afternoon walks, less out of curiosity or a sense of adventure than to put off the return to his apartment. The hour before sunset—which had always been the most productive of his day—now found him shuffling in circles in Morningside Park, or in the rococo lobby of the Woolworth Building, or on the wooden walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Drifting brought on a numbness, a bearable remove from the facts of his duration, at least if he roamed far enough. For the first week he brought along a pocket notebook, in case inspiration should strike; then a folded sheet of stationery; then a napkin or a page torn from the
Times
. By September he’d stopped carrying even that.

It was on one of these daily forced marches—a little longer than most, perhaps, but in no way unusual—that he was catapulted clear of his despond. Aimless as his rambles seemed, they tended to take him downtown more often than up, and to Brooklyn more often than he could explain. He’d grown fascinated, in a numb sort of way, by the spatial dynamics between the two immense bridges, which lifted off from far-flung locations near the tip of Manhattan only to touch down in Brooklyn at virtually the same coordinates in space. Their geometry made his synapses fire in the same way that the tarock deck had done: an idea was being expressed—this time on the grandest possible scale—and though its meaning kept its distance he could feel it in his body, as a buzzing in his cortex and his spine.

The pie wedge of buildings enclosed by this confluence—which had precisely the same proportions as the triangle formed by the bridges’ great twinned arcs across the river—was one of the most obscure precincts in the city, bordered on two sides by stone-and-brickwork thoroughfares and on the third by the river itself. It had no name, only a postal code. The landlords and warehouse foremen were generally Hasidic, the workers Puerto Rican or Polish. At times Orson had the feeling that he was trespassing in some private and melancholy city, one that magically mirrored his own state of mind.

It was a tiny place really, less than twelve blocks all told, but each visit yielded up some new discovery. In spite of their grandiose names—Plymouth, Hudson, Gold, Pearl—the streets were narrow and dark, making unforeseen turns, often stopping short without the slightest warning. In the courtyard of an egg-yolk-colored building at the corner of Water and Gold, Buddhist monks played basketball on sunny afternoons, holding the hems of their vestments in one hand and dribbling with the other; from the roof of a rimless Buick at the foot of Jay Street, a Korean War veteran who answered to the name of “Mr. Bread” delivered lectures on Marxist ethics to indifferent passersby. Mr. Bread recognized Orson as a brother in literary arms, and paid him the compliment of sending him on the occasional errand to Brooklyn Heights, usually to pick up ointment for his perpetually bandaged shins. Adrift as he was, Orson happily obliged.

On the afternoon in question, in exchange for a bottle of aspirin, Mr. Bread gave my father a piece of advice. “Get a job,” he said, chewing the aspirin like candy. “Get a job, Tolliver, and get your hair cut. Not necessarily in that order.”

“I have a job,” said Orson. “I’m a writer.”

“A
job
,” Mr. Bread repeated.

“I’m surprised to hear that from you,” replied Orson. “Whatever happened to the great class struggle?”

“The time for revolution is not yet ripe.”

There was no arguing with that, Mrs. Haven, so he didn’t try.

“I’ve never had a job. A real one, I mean.”

Mr. Bread made a gesture—a comfortable twitch of the shoulders—to indicate the self-evidence of this statement.

“I might as well do something with my time, I guess, since I can’t seem to write. But I wouldn’t know where—”

“Power plant’s hiring. Security work. Nothing to do all day but sit on your
culo
and dream about Jackie Kennedy’s unmentionables.”

Orson narrowed his eyes. “Why don’t
you
take the job, if it’s such a hayride?”

“I have a job,” Mr. Bread said proudly. “I’m a writer.”

*   *   *

The Hudson/Gold Power Generating Station was a stone’s toss from Mr. Bread’s roadster. My father set out without much hope or ambition, straightening a borrowed paisley tie; he didn’t expect much, for various reasons, and by the time he knew better—as is often the case, Mrs. Haven, with blows to the head by the hammer of fate—there was nothing left to do but cry to heaven.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Orson heard himself shout.

He’d just rounded the corner of Plymouth and Gold—a quaint little cluster of houses, worlds removed from the warehouses and garment factories behind him—and had caught his first glimpse of the station. It was colossal, fortresslike, far more forbidding than he’d imagined; but he barely took in such mundane details. What knocked him sideways was the flickering sign, gaudy as a Times Square marquee, that hung suspended from its massive gate:

WELCOME TO THE HUDSON * GOLD POWER
GENERATING * STATION. 0062 HOURS
WITHOUT A LOST * TIME ACCIDENT.

The world went unnaturally quiet: he heard nothing but the humming of high-tension wires and the rush of blood to his bewildered brain. A man in his thirties, in security grays, took his measure from the window of a hut.

“Sign needs changing,” the man said. “We’re way past sixty-two.”

“What exactly—” said Orson, then ran out of breath. “What exactly is a lost time accident?”

“Sixty-two hours isn’t even three whole days. Today’s what—Tuesday? Tuesday the seventeenth?”

Orson managed to nod.

“There you go,” said the guard. “It’s been three weeks at least.”

“I still don’t understand—”

“What are you here for, son? You one of them power freaks?”

“Not at all,” Orson answered, holding up both his hands. “I’m not sure what that means, to be honest. I’m here about the job.”

The guard pursed his lips. “And what job would that be?”

“Well—” He hesitated. “Your job, I guess.”

The guard scrutinized him for a full minute, which is a long time to look someone dead in the eye without saying a word. His cap, which was peaked and black and seemed slightly too tight, put Orson more in mind of a school-bus driver than an agent of the law.

“The night shift, I’m thinking,” the guard said finally.

“The night shift,” Orson said. “Sure.”

“I work days.”

“Okay.” Orson nodded. “Do you think—”

“They’re not seeing people at present. Later on, maybe.”

“How much later?”

The guard stared at him blankly.

“I’m sorry, but I was given to understand—”

“I can’t let you in at this time,” the guard said, not unkindly. “You can wait on that chair over there.”

Orson followed his gaze to a low wooden stool, the kind shoeshine boys sat on, propped against the chain-link fence. “Okay, then,” he said.

“Okay, then,” said the guard.

“What’s a lost time accident?”

The guard nodded shrewdly. “Best to ask them inside.”

“Fair enough,” said Orson. He stood still for a moment, then leaned sideways and peered through the gate.

“Go ahead and try it, if you’re tempted. Keep one thing in mind, though—I take my work seriously.”