The Lost Time Accidents (41 page)

Orson allowed himself to imagine, in the quiet that followed, that he’d pulled the rug out from under his sisters at last: that they found him—at least momentarily—as erratic and inscrutable as he’d always found them. But his satisfaction proved to be short-lived.

“That’s good of you, Peanut,” said Enzian, nodding at Genny. “We’d never have
asked
you to move out, of course. But it might be for the best.”

He sat back in his chair, feeling winded and weak. “Why?” he got out. “Why would it be for the best?”

“For your safety.”

“My safety,” said Orson. “Of course.”

No one spoke for a time.

“Where will you go, Peanut?” Genny asked.

“Somewhere quiet. Upstate, maybe. I haven’t really given it much thought.”

“Perhaps you’ll allow us to make a suggestion,” said Enzian, taking his hand in hers.

It was the first time in seven years that she had touched him.

I
’D BEEN HIDING
in Menügayan’s attic for seventeen days, Mrs. Haven, when you finally came home. The Husband’s cobalt Lexus pulled up with a buttery screech while Julia was recaulking her parlor-floor windows; you smiled at her, apparently, and she waved coyly back.

She could have rung the old servants’ bell that ran up to the attic—we’d decided on that, if there were any developments—but she chose to break the good news to me gently. I’d been growing my beard, like any self-respecting fugitive, and I was checking its progress in a loose shard of mirror when I caught sight of Menügayan over my left shoulder, smiling at me in a predatory way. How a person of her volume and density managed to negotiate the hatch to the attic in silence, I have no idea, but I’d grown used to her inherent stealth by then. I thought of Menügayan as Batman, or as Batman’s overfed, depressive cousin—which essentially was how she saw herself.

“Looking good, Che Guevara,” she said blankly. Blankness, like cunning, was a Menügayan forte.

“I’m trying to look different, that’s all. As unlike Waldy Tolliver as I can.”

“I can’t argue with that,” she said, more tonelessly than ever.

With the benefit of hindsight, Mrs. Haven, my reflection in the mirror should have served me as a warning. I
did
look like Che Guevara, but the Guevara of the final, doomed Bolivian campaign, with the glazed eyes of a man prepared for death. I was in the intermediate stages of cabin fever by then, a day or two short of seeing my arms and legs as breaded chicken cutlets. I had too much time on my hands—way too much—and nothing to distract me but pamphlets from an organization called the Otherkin Resource Center (ORC), whose members believe themselves to be “otherkin” instead of human: faeries, vampires and elves are the most popular, followed, at a slight but definite remove, by lycanthropes. The enigma of Menügayan only deepened over time.

“I need to go downstairs for some fresh air, Julia. I know that it’s risky, but—”

“Not so risky,” she said, already halfway to the hatch. “I’ll meet you next to Bilbo. Bring your coat.”

*   *   *

We were strolling along the East River when she finally told me, with the wind at our backs and her right hand resting firmly on my shoulder. Menügayan’s right hand is gentler than a trailer hitch, Mrs. Haven, but not by much.

“Remember one thing, Tolliver, before you run off and buy Hildy a dozen roses. Just because she’s
back
doesn’t signify she’s back for you. The First Listener is with her.”

“I hate it when you call him that.”

“Cry me a river.”

P. G. Wodehouse (one of my father’s few idols in the “mainstream” of fiction) once described a character’s uncle as “a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow,” and suddenly I knew exactly what he meant. There was no contending with that bland, embittered face.

“You obviously have a plan, Julia. Couldn’t you just tell me what it is?”

The blandness somehow deepened. “Don’t you know anything about Hildy, Tolliver? Don’t you know anything about women, in general, per se, at all? She’ll send you a signal when the time is right.”

“It sounds as if you’re telling me to just sit around and do nothing.”

Menügayan didn’t laugh often, but when she did the effect was genuinely chilling. “Allow me to quote from a favorite author,” she said.
“From every Venusian according to his abilities; to every Venusian according to his needs.
”

This was a paraphrase of Marx, of course—Marx stuffed into a space suit—and I recognized the passage right away. It was from Orson Card Tolliver’s
Love on an Uninhabitable Star.

*   *   *

There were more than a few moments, in the course of that next agonizing week, when I suspected that Menügayan’s plan was to use the Husband to destroy
me
, Mrs. Haven, not the other way around. I now had a box seat for the pageant of your ongoing existence, which made it clear that you were getting on extremely well without me. You came and went on shopping trips and social calls and meditative early-evening strolls, obscenely willowy and curly-haired and bright. You looked exactly the way you’d looked that fateful day at Union Square: the same red coat, the same half smile, the same slow, indecisive way of walking. You looked as though no time had passed at all.

I’d promised Menügayan that I wouldn’t contact you, wouldn’t tap the windowpane as you walked by, let alone pound my fists against the glass and scream your name; and to our mutual surprise I kept my word. I kept it out of fear, Mrs. Haven—and not of the Husband and his flying monkeys, either. What if the smile left your face when you saw who it was? What if you turned your collar up and hurried off? What if you went straight back inside—back to mission control, back to the flying monkeys, back to whatever R. P. Haven was to you—and turned me in without a second thought?

But you shouldn’t suppose that I’d given up hope. I assembled a kind of throne out of back issues of
Otherkin
and
Omni
and
The Official World of Warcraft Game Guide
—which Menügayan had whole crates of, for some reason—so that I could work on my history and keep lookout for you simultaneously. I’d settled in for what card players call “the long con”: I was prepared to do whatever it took to tip the scales in my favor, even if that meant, for the moment, doing nothing. I’m fairly sure that I’m the only person on earth who’s read
The Official World of Warcraft Game Guide
three times, in its entirety, appendices and all, without ever having played World of Warcraft.

As the days passed, I began to take note of passages in that venerable text, many of them in the “Guidelines for Ethical Play” (GEP), that seemed to relate, directly or indirectly, to the text I was writing myself. (What were the Accidents, from a certain point of view, but a jewel-encrusted chalice tucked away inside some sleeping monster’s bowels?) I found one guideline, in particular, that ought to be inscribed across the Toula coat of arms:

6 (B)—

If you notice a person is about to attack a dragon, let them have it.

Find another dragon elsewhere to attack.

Such was my life in hiding, Mrs. Haven. Menügayan would stick her head through the hatch every so often—to pass along that morning’s
Daily News
, for example, or a lukewarm-at-best TV dinner—but she rarely spoke to me or met my eye. Her silence had taken on a spiritual quality: something beyond words, possibly beyond all human understanding.

This was a clear indication, looking back on it now, that I’d been in the attic too long. It took me most of the next week to figure that out, but as soon as it hit me I packed up my clothes and my notes and my manuscript and decided to rejoin the human race. I couldn’t wait any longer for the message she insisted you’d send; not in that haunted castle of hers. Things were going to take a dark turn if I stayed.

I’d just finished explaining this to Menügayan—whose only response was a grunt—when the sign we’d both been waiting for arrived.

It presented itself in the form of a personal ad in the Sublets Wanted section of the
Post
. I have an explanation for this coincidence now—two or three explanations, in fact—but at the time it seemed the wildest quirk of C*F*P. Running my finger down the leftmost column while Menügayan made me a sandwich (“Don’t look at me that way, Tolliver—I’d do the same thing for a dog”), I encountered the following entry, which had no business in the Sublets Wanted listings:

WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. Experience necessary. Box 334, New York, NY 10001. Length of voyage: 33 minutes and a half. Euphasia a distinct possibility. No lying, no biting. I have only done this once before.

“Find anything?” Menügayan asked, plunking the sandwich down in front of me. It was tidily wrapped and smelled faintly of curry.

“Probably not,” I said, closing the paper. “More than I can afford. But it can’t hurt to look.”

“That depends,” said Menügayan.

I nodded. “On what?”

“On what you’re looking at.”

“Which zip code is one-zero-zero-zero-one?” I asked nonchalantly. “Which P.O. would that be?”

“One-zero-zero-zero-one,” Menügayan echoed. “I guess that would be Penn Station. The main post office up there.”

“The one with the columns, across from the Garden?”

“That’s right.” She flashed me one of her most unfathomable smiles. “The only one that’s open all night long.”

*   *   *

Sunset found me in the Italianate lobby of the James A. Farley Post Office, gazing up at the ceiling with my hands in my pockets and my back against the buzzing stamp dispenser. Philatelically minded citizens elbowed me aside now and then, shooting me dirty looks, but I stared through them as if they were ghosts. The James A. Farley is to the grimy, crowded pressure cookers that pass for P.O.s in the rest of the city as an aircraft carrier is to an inflatable duck. Its monumentality would have tilted toward fascism, at least for me, if not for the potty-mouthed irreverence of the clerks. The J.A.F. may be a secular temple, a twenty-four-hour shrine to the power of discourse, but to the middle-aged ladies behind the art deco grilles in its lobby, it’s just another badly lit P.O.

I’m still not sure why I chose to keep Menügayan in the dark about the message you’d sent, but at the time I felt relieved to have escaped. She might have claimed that it was too risky, or that the timing was wrong, or that I was walking into a trap—none of which I wanted to be told. I cased the J.A.F.’s lobby as discreetly as I could, struggling to keep a lid on my excitement. Box 334 turned out to be a modest fourteen-dollar-a-month unit along the south wall; as far as I could make out, it was empty. I returned to my position at the aforementioned postage dispenser—an optimal location, from a surveillance point of view—and stayed there, with four brief but necessary interruptions, for the next sixteen hours.

You swept through the revolving doors the following afternoon. I should have guessed you’d come then, at the most nondescript time of day: 14:00 EST, the adulterer’s hour. You had on a blue tartan cape and a silver beret, like a prep school kid playing at being a spy, but also vaguely like an otherkin. A pair of Hasids were emptying a jumbo-sized unit a few columns down, shouting into each other’s ears as if communicating by transatlantic cable; you waited until they’d walked away, then snuck a furtive glance into the box.

“Nothing’s in there, Mrs. Haven. I’ve checked.”

“He’s keeping his eye on me,” you said without turning. “For my own protection. You shouldn’t be here.”

“I’m going to guess you shouldn’t be here, either.”

You kept your face toward the box, one hand against its tarock-card-sized window. “You’re right about that.”

“But you came anyway.” I took a half step closer. “And so did I.”

You straightened your shoulders and took in a breath: you were steeling yourself. In a moment you’d explain to me, in a cordial, room-temperature voice, that you saw no way for us to continue our friendship. I’d turned out to be a liar, and far worse than that, a coward: my fear of the Husband—your husband—had compelled me to lie. You could not excuse that. It embarrassed you to admit it, but you’d made a mistake. If I’d been honest from the start, perhaps, there might have been—

“Come to Vienna with me,” I said, laying my hands on your shoulders. “There’s a mystery there that I’m trying to solve. It involves the Gestapo, and the war, and the speed of light, and a card game no one plays anymore. It involves the Husband—
your
husband—and the whole United Church of Synchronology. I’ll tell you everything, the whole sleazy story, if you’ll only say yes. Come to Vienna with me, Mrs. Haven. Without you I don’t stand a chance in hell.”

I said more than that—much more—and you kept still and listened. I stood closer to you than anyone but a lover had the right to stand, and you made no move, either toward me or away. Your hair smelled of smoke, I remember—of clove cigarettes, or possibly pot. The down on your nape stirred in time to my breath. As long as I kept talking, things would remain as they were, in a state of suspension; but I couldn’t keep talking. When it was clear that I’d finally run out of breath, you nodded to yourself and turned to me.

“I can’t come to Vienna with you, Walter. You know that.”

It was happening now, just as I had foreseen. The floor started to tilt.

“Give me one hour, then. You can spare me that much. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

*   *   *

The Xanthia’s citizenry generally disappeared into their rooms after TV hour like mollusks pulling back into their shells, but Palladian was the exception. I knew we’d find him in a Naugahyde recliner in the Montmartre Lounge, reading the business section of
The Wall Street Journal
from back to front and scribbling compound fractions in its margins. He looked up with a smile when he heard me come in, and his smile got so wide when he saw who I’d brought that it nearly put a crack in his pomade. Palladian was a ladies’ man, as a legion of scandalized Xanthettes could attest—allegedly he was a pincher. I could see right away, however, from the look on his face, that today he’d be on his best behavior. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, Mrs. Haven, but you made Abel Palladian shy.