The Lost Time Accidents (38 page)

“What?” said Orson. “No, no! I wasn’t thinking—”

“And I’m just the first guard. There’s others inside, and they’re not as sweet-natured as I am.”

“I had no intention—”

“This here is Hudson Gate. The next gate is Compound; the third one’s Facility. I may not look like much, but you should see the guy at Compound.” The guard shook his head. “The guy at Facility even scares me.”

Orson sat down on the little stool.

“
Now
you’re using your bean,” said the guard.

*   *   *

Over the next several hours, watching the sun decline behind the station’s soot-streaked ramparts, Orson came nearer to grasping the concept of infinity than he ever had before. To increase time’s velocity, he told the guard what little he knew of his family’s past, from his grandfather’s discovery in Znojmo to his father’s escape from Vienna. He hoped to get the guard to reciprocate, perhaps even to divulge the secrets of the Hudson/Gold Power Generating Station, or at least of its cryptic marquee; but his hope was in vain. The guard listened to his stories willingly—appreciatively, even—but he met each question about the station with a noncommital smile.

My father began to imagine himself sitting propped against that chain-link fence for the remainder of his extension into the fourth dimension, fashioning a life for himself with only the guard and the river for company. He saw himself growing progressively slacker and more hunched as his body conformed to the stool, waiting for word from the station that never arrived. After fifty-odd years he’d simply wither away to nothing; before he expired, however, he’d beckon to the guard, who would kneel down to receive his dying words.
How can it be
, he would gasp,
that in the half century I’ve spent sitting next to this gate, no one else has ever tried to enter?

He was in the middle of deciding what the answer might be when the guard stepped to the gate and waved him in. To his disappointment, the interview took place in a Quonset hut a few yards inside the fence, not within the facility proper. It consisted of exactly six questions, the last of which was whether he’d ever done time. Before he’d even gotten his bearings, he was back at the guardhouse with a brown paper bundle in his hands. He hadn’t been told what the bundle contained, but he was guessing a uniform, a flashlight, and a cap that would make him look more like a school-bus driver than an agent of the law.

“Welcome to the Hudson/Gold Power Generating Station,” the guard told him gravely, packing his personal effects into a Chiquita banana crate that he’d been using as a footstool. “I trust you’ll take your work here seriously.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the next guardhouse in. Can’t have two bugs in one jar.”

“But you’re here in the daytime,” said Orson. “I’ll be working nights.”

“Can’t have two bugs in one jar,” the guard repeated, as though Orson were forgetting his manners.

“Two bugs,” Orson mumbled. “Okay.”

“Did you find out about the lost time accidents?”

To his shock Orson realized he’d forgotten to ask. “I thought I might hold off for a while,” he replied. “Until I get my bearings.”

“Fair enough. When you figure it out, be sure to let me know.”

Orson squinted at him. “You mean
you
don’t know, either?”

“It doesn’t seem to mean much,” said the guard. “Just a fancy way of saying the system’s conked out. The house of cards falls down on them every once in a while, and the management needs a term for that—a technical term—to make it sound more like an act of God. It’s nothing more than an excuse, if you ask me.”

Orson went quiet for a moment. “An excuse?”

Monday, 09:05 EST

I searched the tunnels all day, Mrs. Haven, with nothing to show for it by sundown but a cramp. It’s never occurred to me how easy it would be to hide an object—
any
object, even a human being—in the coils and convolutions of the Archive. Who’s to say the chambers I’ve discovered are the only ones here? I have only the blurriest sense of where one room ends and the next one begins, after all. I’m using decades-old memories to navigate by.

Sensing the next sleep cycle approaching, I began yanking objects out of the walls at random, hoping to uncover hidden chutes and galleries; instead I had to dig myself out from under landslides of VHS cassettes and take-out trays and Sharper Image catalogs. As exhaustion set in, I found myself asking a question I’d never thought to ask before: What if these grottoes and trenches came about not by accident, as a by-product of my aunts’ dementia, but as part of some larger design?

This idea had just hit—I was lying on the kitchen floor at the time, massaging a crick in my neck—when a sound carried in from the Archive. It was the real thing, Mrs. Haven, not a subsonic hum or a liminal whir or the grannyish complaining of my bowels: a series of knocks, as if someone were testing a wall or a door—or possibly even the floor—for points of entry. It seemed whole rooms away, but these walls swallow sound, as I’ve mentioned before. It might almost have been close enough to touch.

I dropped onto my belly like the cockroach I’m becoming and scrabbled slowly forward, pausing every few feet to make sure the sound hadn’t stopped. It was coming from somewhere to my right, I was certain of that, but pinpointing it was maddeningly tricky. When at last I reached the spot where the knocking was sharpest, I attacked the wall in such a frenzy that the ceiling should have fallen on my head. The detritus was packed more haphazardly there, like a spot of slightly mealier decay in an already badly rotten set of teeth, and in no time I’d exposed a narrow door. Its knob made a crack when I turned it, as though it had been painted shut from the inside, and the knocking grew brighter. It was coming from a radiator pipe—that was obvious now. The door gave a pop, like the report of an air gun, and I toppled in.

I found myself in a dust-choked recess, barely wider than my spread arms, the bulk of which was taken up by an enormous bed. There was no space to spare between the bed and the walls, not even the width of a finger: it must have been brought into the room in sections and assembled inside, like a ship in a bottle. An entire family—grandparents, parents, grandchildren and all—could have passed the night in it without discomfort. The knocking was coming from a heating pipe beside it, just as I’d guessed.

How to explain what happened next, Mrs. Haven? The urge overtook me, filthy though that great bed was, to climb over the footboard and hide under its covers. I’d never encountered so totemic an object, Tolliver-wise: I imagined my elders sleeping between those varnished bedboards—all the heroes and the villians of this history of mine, from Enzie to Kaspar to Ottokar himself—and felt a genealogical ache to join them there. However this monstrous object had come to be shoehorned into that cramped and airless chamber, it had traveled across a vast expanse of time and space to do so. It was possible that generations of my forefathers had been born in that bed, and even likelier that some of them had died in it. But in spite of this thought—or because of it, maybe—I wanted to wrap myself up in those sheets.

“You don’t have to be quiet,” came a voice. “I’m already awake.”

A bunched, loglike mass near the headboard started twitching at this, like a sackful of mice. You’d think I’d be innoculated against surprise by this point, Mrs. Haven, but what I was seeing nearly dropped me to the floor. I clutched at the pipe to keep from falling over: it was scalding, and I snatched my hand back with a cry. But the pain passed at once, was flushed clear of my brain, because the thing under the covers had sat up.

“It’s you, of course,” I murmured. “Who else could it possibly be?”

I can’t explain how I knew that the thing on the bed was the man I’d been named for—Waldemar Toula, the Black Timekeeper of Äschenwald-Czas—but I was sure even before I’d seen its face. It had to be him, Mrs. Haven. And therefore it was.

“I had an eyeglass somewhere,” he said, shivering slightly. He spoke in a damp, droning hiss, like steam issuing out of a pipe.

“A what?”

“Not an eyeglass—what’s the word—what’s the blessed
word
for it in English?”

“A monocle,” I said, as though it were the most ordinary question in the world.

Already my mind was recovering its equilibrium, finding a place for this latest impossibility in the same walk-in freezer where the others were kept. I’ve had practice integrating the unintegratable by now, after all. I felt no need to question the reality of what I was seeing.

“You can’t do anything about this radiator, can you?” he said, letting the coverlet slip from his shoulders. “It’s banging loud enough to wake the dead.”

Deliberately, quietly, my great-uncle came into focus. His face composed itself out of a field of charged mnemonic particles: I’m aware how this must sound, Mrs. Haven, but I don’t know how else to describe it. His body caught the light and held it strangely, as if he’d been assembled out of dust. He was dressed in a chalk-stripe suit of banker’s blue, but his jacket and his tie were badly creased, and his hair had the chopped, formless look of a military buzz cut gone to seed. He was smaller than he looked in photographs. I hadn’t expected his wheat-paste complexion, either, or the Parkinson’s-like trembling of his hands. He looked less like a fugitive from justice, all things considered, than a drunk who’d spent the night under a bush. This wasn’t the dapper Goering look-alike of 1938, or the headstrong physics prodigy of the first years of the century—it was the ailing, ragged indigent of Budapest during the famine, superimposed over faded snapshots of my father in his youth, and perhaps some spectral iteration of myself.

“I want to know what’s happened to me,” I said. “I want to know who brought me here. And I want to know why.”

Waldemar gazed past me at a soot mark on the ceiling. His pupils had an oily, milky cast.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” he said finally. “My eyesight is poor and my memory’s worse. I don’t recall that we’ve been introduced.”

If not for his delivery, Mrs. Haven, I might have believed him. But he spoke smoothly and mechanically—glibly, even—like a ventriloquist’s marionette.

“I asked you a question,” I said, giving the footboard a kick.

He nodded placidly. “Can I trouble you for a glass of water?”

“How long have you been lying in this bed?”

A look of relief crossed his face. “
That
I can tell you exactly. I’ve been counting the knocks, you see, to make the time go by.” He arched his back and heaved a drawn-out sigh. “I’d just made it to three hundred and eight when you arrived. Now I’ll have to start again from the beginning.”

I thought for a moment. “So you’ve just gotten here.”

“That’s true, I suppose.”

“Where were you hiding before?”

“Before—?”

“That’s right, Uncle. Back when you were creeping around in the Archive, leaving clever little clues for me to find. Or can’t you remember that, either?”

He smiled up at me now: a perfect idiot’s smile, almost flirtatious. “As the soul grows toward eternal life,
Nefflein
, it remembers less and less.”

“Don’t you dare quote my great-grandfather’s notes to me.”

He let out a bright, soggy snuffle at that—midway between a laugh and a snort of contempt. “Who has more right to quote a father than his son?”

“You have no rights at all. Not with me.”

“Don’t go putting on airs. We’re
Familie
, my boy. You ought to treat your flesh and blood with more respect.”

A wave of sickness hit me when I heard those words, Mrs. Haven: a decade’s worth of shame and indignation, breaking free of the containing walls I’d built. I thought back to the day I’d first learned of my namesake’s existence, at an age when I still thought of my name—and of my family—as a thing to take pride in. I remembered the thrill that I’d felt, as a child, on those rare occasions when the Timekeeper was mentioned. I remembered the moment I’d finally grasped what he’d done.

“What is it,
Nefflein
? You look a bit green at the gills.”

I stood at the foot of the bed, fighting to maintain my balance, opening and closing my fists. “Ridiculous as it might sound,” I said, “I’ve imagined what would happen if we met.”

“That’s not ridiculous in the slightest. Take a look—here the two of us are!”

“That’s right, Uncle. Here we are, just as I pictured it.” I took in a breath. “And I told myself—I made a vow to myself—that if this day ever came, I’d carry out your sentence.”

“What sentence would that be?”

“The sentence of death.”

His milky eyes widened. “
Death
, little Waldemar! Whatever for?”

“For the crimes—” The blood roared in my ears. “For the crimes you committed at the Äschenwald camp.”

“
Ach!
—for that. I thought perhaps for figuring out about the Accidents.” He snuffled again. “No one else could, you know.” He shook his head. “Certainly not your grandfather, that Yid-loving ass.”

A surge of electricity shot through me as my fist met his jaw—the kind of prickling chill ghost hunters describe in their memoirs—and he fell backward with a satisfying thump. I felt grateful to him then, as I watched him scrambling to right himself: he was playing his part obligingly and well. But then something shifted, Mrs. Haven. Things fell out of proportion. The hissing built to a shriek as he drew himself upward: the bedsheets rose behind him like a jellyfish, billowing up until they darkened half the room. I saw him now as Marta Svoboda had seen him, as Sonja had seen him, as the prisoners at Äschenwald had seen him, and I felt the same unreasoning dread they must have felt. He took hold of me and bent me back until my shoulders touched the floor. His blank gray features overwhelmed my sight.

“You should
thank
me,” he said. “Not everybody has your opportunities.”

“Thank you? What do you mean?”

“Who wouldn’t want to take his forefathers to task for their sins?” He wrapped himself around me like a shroud. “Who wouldn’t like a chance at playing judge and jury?”