The Lost Time Accidents (39 page)

“If I execute you, Uncle, it won’t be for my own sake. It will be to take you out of circulation—to take you out of contention—so you can’t ever—”

“Can’t ever what? Continue in this duration, living proof that the chronoverse can be manipulated—that time travel is possible? Who will benefit from this settling of accounts,
Nefflein
, aside from you yourself?”

Silence fell for a moment. His face buzzed and flickered.

“That won’t work on me, Uncle,” I said through clenched teeth. “No end can justify the means you used at Czas.”

He was back in bed now, frail and docile again. But there was a new light in his clouded eyes, or so it seemed to me. “You’re a Toula,” he whispered. “Don’t try to deny it.”

“That means
nothing
,” I hissed back. My voice was sounding more like his with every word I spoke. “Toula’s a name, that’s all—an empty noise, like Oppenheimer or Goering or Haven. Don’t treat it like some sort of magic spell.”

He laughed and swung his legs over the footboard. “Let me ask you this,
Nefflein
. Can you be sure—can you be absolutely certain—that you’d have turned down the chance I was offered in that godforsaken camp? If you knew you were right, that you’d cracked the great riddle, that you stood on the cusp of true and
tangible
proof that the gates of chronology—of mortality itself—were close at hand and waiting to be forced? There was no other way, I can promise you that. Extremes had to be gone to: blood sacrifice made. There was no way short of death to force a breach.”

I fell back from him dizzily, shaking my head. “That’s not science, Uncle. That’s witchcraft.”

“Synonyms,
Nefflein
.” His voice had gone rapt. “Two words for approaching the nexus of things.”

“I’d never have done what you did in that camp. I’d have found some way out. I’d have cut myself free—”

“What was that?” He took a dragging step toward me, his hand to his ear, leering sightlessly into the dark. “I can barely hear you, little Waldy. You’ll have to speak up.”

“Why are you here?” I stammered. “How in God’s name did you end up in this place?”

To my surprise this question stopped him cold. He looked confused for an instant, blinking down at the floor.

“I don’t know,” he said softly. “An accident of some sort. I can’t seem to recall.”

I watched his face for a time. I saw no cunning there.

“I can’t either,” I told him.

He said nothing to that. I propped myself against the wall between the doorway and the bed and waited for my body to recover. The horror of my situation was clear to me now: more convincing by far than the man on the bed, or the room we were in, or the labyrinth of trash to every side. The Timekeeper kept himself still, his dead eyes wide open, staring sadly past me into empty space.

XIX

LATER THAT NIGHT
, in his empty apartment at the corner of 109th and Fifth Avenue (in a tenement house with the unlikely name of the General Lee), Orson laid out the cards, all fifty-four of them, in a crescent on the floor beside his desk. The power was out, a not-uncommon state of affairs in Harlem, and the six tallow candles he’d lit and stuck into bottles of Yuengling Draft bathed the scene in an appropriately pre-Enlightenment glow. He’d taken out a book from the library that he had no intention of returning—
Tarock für Trotteln
, by Yitzak W. Yitzak—and he read the introduction and first chapter before so much as glancing at the cards. The rules were still opaque to him, as much due to Herr Yitzak’s schnapps-addled prose as to anything else; but the history of the game held him entranced.

As its name implied, the deck was derived from the tarot, which had infiltrated Europe from Egypt in the late Rennaissance. The origin of the
Sküs
, however—the joker-like card that had first caught my father’s attention—was a mystery. No such card existed in the Arab tradition, or in any other deck of the ancient world. The game of tarock predated the use of the cards for occult purposes by three centuries, though certain cards—the
Sküs
among them—were rumored to have been made use of by alchemists (no one quite knew how) to gain access to the wisdom of past ages. The fool on the
Sküs
had taken many forms over the centuries, from bearskin-sporting hobo to lute-strumming courtier to urchin to dwarf; the illustration on Orson’s deck, however, was the only one to display that curious, Escher-like circularity.

He brought the book nearer to the light and kept reading, concentrating on the fool card now. In tarock, the
Sküs
(
L’excuse
in French) is the deck’s highest trump, but it has no rank or value of its own. Alone among the trumps,
L’excuse
has no number: its power emerges only in challenge to another card. Orson began to understand its appeal for him now, since he often felt that way about himself.

He took the card from the floor and regarded it fondly. Like the
Sküs
, he was a born contrarian, and—like the fool on the card, like madmen and jesters and clowns throughout the ages—the nonsense he spouted could serve, if used artfully, as a vessel for ideas that couldn’t otherwise be spoken. He thought of Enzian at the university, and of Waldemar before her, and of what little he understood about his “mad” grandfather’s work. “The fool,” he muttered to himself, staring down at the card, “ought to be on our family crest.”

What Orson didn’t realize—not on that first evening; not yet—was that he would be the one to put it there.

*   *   *

The telephone rang at Pine Ridge Road a few days later, and Genny went to answer it, thinking it must be someone from Warranted Tolliver Timepieces. It was the first time that the phone had rung all week.

“I’m working on something,” said the caller before she could speak.

“Peanut! Is that you? Enzie and I were just saying—both of us—how nice it would be to hear from you. It’s not as though we can call
you
up, you know.”

“I know that, Genny. I’ll get a telephone soon. Then you can call me whenever you want.”

“Well! We’d certainly appreciate
that.
” She hummed to herself for a moment in the odd, nervous way she had when she was pleased. “You’re working on a story, did you say?”

“I’m working on a novel.”

“A
novel
! My goodness, Peanut! What about?”

“It’s about time, believe it or not. A variation on what Ouspensky calls ‘Möbius time’ in
The Hydra-Headed Hourglass.
The basic idea is that time, which seems to be running straight ahead from any given point—just as the earth seems flat, from any one perspective—might in fact be ‘feeding back’ into itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail. If that snake were long enough—it would have to be really gigantic, of course—it might appear straight, because the curve wouldn’t be visible, you see? Like a Möbius strip, that has either one side or two, depending on how you choose to think about it. It’s chronologic time considered as a kind of sleight-of-hand trick, really. I got the idea from a deck—”

“Where are you calling from, Peanut? You sound fuzzy.”

Orson cleared his throat. “From a pay phone.”

“You really
must
get a line of your own. Is it cold where you are?”

“Not as cold as in Buffalo.”

“It’s important to eat, you know, when it gets cold. You need calories to help you keep warm. Have you been taking the vitamin caplets I sent?”

An awkward pause ensued.

“Genny, can I talk to Enzie now?”

“Of course you can, Peanut! How silly of me! I’ll go get her.”

But Enzian, as usual, turned out to be indisposed.

*   *   *

To the end of his days, my father viewed
The Excuse
as his proudest achievement, and it was a milestone for him without question: both his first published novel and his last attempt to keep within the bounds of decency. He wrote the first eleven chapters in a trance, narcotized by the story he was spinning, by the radical idea that lay hidden behind it, and by his fervent belief that the fruits of his labor would free him of the family curse forever.
The Excuse
was no antiseptic exercise, no half-baked scientific treatise smeared with narrative frosting, as the bulk of his fiction had been. It was no more and no less, Mrs. Haven, than a reckoning—in extravagant, ham-fisted, desperate terms—with the Syndrome itself.

Ozymandias Hume, the book’s protagonist, is the scion of an haute-bourgeoisie family whose fortune was made in the licorice trade, but whose clandestine passion—passed from generation to generation, like a weakness for drink—is the use of the tarock deck to tell the future. Virtually any game can be used to foretell events, he believes, if it’s played in reverse, or counterchronologically; but the game of tarock is especially well suited, on account of being
intended
to run counterclockwise, and of displaying the follies of mankind so bluntly on its picture cards. (Ozymandias’s grandfather made this discovery a half century earlier, we’re told in a flashback, during a postcoital game with his clandestine lover, the chief of police of Merthyr Tydfil, in Wales. As he threw down his trump—
L’excuse
over
La lune
—a vista of living, dancing symbols rose before him, and he saw himself lying dead in the street, with the chief of police standing over his body, smoking pistol in hand. Horrified, he ended their affair on the spot and rushed home to his wife. His lover shot him the next time he left the house.)

Before this nameless grandfather’s violent end, the secret of the cards was passed down to his daughters, Cassandra and Yrsyla Hume. The sisters, both of whom went on to master what they simply called “the Game,” used their father’s discovery to opposite ends. Yrsyla, the elder, became embroiled in Welsh separatist politics, while Cassandra, the more practical of the two, made a nice little pile as a gambler, using each hand she played to predict its own outcome. Cassandra eventually bought herself a ranch in Australia, and bore her illiterate, Adonis-like foreman a series of sons; after the disaster of the Great War and the collapse of the Cymru Fydd movement, Yrsyla disappeared without a trace.

The Excuse
opens grandiosely, in Australia’s Gibson Desert. Ozymandias, Cassandra’s youngest son, is coming into his maturity, surrounded by half-witted prospectors and drunken Aborigines and missionaries who regard all forms of recreation—even waltzing—as abominations in the sight of God. His parents are dead, but Ozymandias is carefully looked after by two elder brothers, Ralph and Gawain, neither of whom have inherited their mother’s gift. It’s assumed, given his talent, that he’ll take up the family mantle; Ozymandias, however, has ideas of his own. As he grows toward adulthood, he develops a passion for the ranching life: he dreams of moving deeper into sheep country, where the range is still free, and of making his name as a breeder. But the gift of clairvoyance, he soon discovers, has one potentially lethal catch. Once given, it has to be used.

Ozymandias remains at home as long as he can stand to, dutifully reading the cards every evening for his brothers, though his disenchantment waxes by the day. The allure of the deck for them, he discovers, has nothing to do with the future at all, and still less with the world of the present: at some unknown point the Game has been perverted, turned inward, become less an exploration of things to come than a means of embalming the past. It has become, very literally, an excuse: a way of retreating from life, of taking shelter—in Ozymandias’s own words—“in some eldritch, sepia-tinted
other-when
.”

Orson wrote these opening chapters in a fever, drunk on the sheer impertinence of his argument, and his mania is clear both in the speed of the narrative and in the bubbling molasses of his prose. The climactic scene of book I, in which Ozymandias finally has it out with his brothers, reads less like a confrontation than like some kind of
meshuggana
manifesto:

“You mean to abandon us, then?” Gawain demanded, his tawny eyes flashing like vitreous coals
.

“I mean to raise livestock,” said Ozymandias. “Goats at first, and then sheep.”

“It amounts to the same,” snarled his brother
.

Ralph took in a breath to speak, but the expression on Gawain’s visage—and on Ozymandias’s own—made the skin of his nape start to prickle. “What would we become without the Game, Ozymandias?” he simpered. “The Game is our birthright. Without it—why, without it, we’d stop being Humes!”

“Without it,” Gawain said darkly, “the future might as well not come at all.”

“You’ve been bamboozled!!” Ozymandias ejaculated, holding the Excuse aloft. “And the tragedy of it, brothers, is that you’ve bamboozled yourselves. If you’d ever truly regarded this card—regarded it, I mean to say, and SEEN it—you’d have noted that the image is that of a Möbius coil, with no beginning and no end.”

“A Möbius which?”

“Time itself is no different,” Ozymandias proclaimed. “It ends where it begins. Why have we been able to stare into the future all these years, over all these proud, farsighted generations, but never become masters of our fate?” The orbs of his amethyst eyes, Welsh to the very core, revolved from Ralph to Gawain, then back again. “The answer is hideously simple. We’ve created a closed system, repetitive and stagnant, like the circuit represented on this card. We’ve turned the future into the past, dear brothers, simply by attempting to arrest it. There’s no escape from the Game—no solution, no respite, no hope—but to STOP PLAYING.”

After a lively debate, then a second grand speech, then a scuffle involving (I blush to report) a boomerang and a didgeridoo, Ozymandias vows never to consult the cards again, not ever, and strikes out into the night to seek his fortune. The book now metamorphoses into a survivalist bildungsroman, with the Aborigines alternately scaring the hell out of Ozymandias and treating him for dysentery. The temptations are great, as he works his way west, to make use of the cards; but he holds firm. He crosses the country, buys a farm, loses it, then somehow finds himself in Sydney, a destitute failure, languishing in a dingy furnished room. Throughout all these trials the deck has remained in his satchel, untouched and pristine. One evening, however, he takes it out of its tooled leather slipcase—a parting gift from his mother—and lays the cards out in a crescent on the floor.