The Lost Time Accidents (43 page)

The rumbling of his stomach brought him back into the present. There was bound to be food of some kind in the kitchen: canned corn or beets or string beans, maybe even a jar of preserved eggs. They were a family of picklers, after all. He pulled up his shirtfront and patted his belly and opened the door with his knee. A girl in a snow-white dashiki was eating a sandwich at the kitchen counter.

“Shalom,” said the girl.

“Jesus Christ!” said my father.

“As you prefer,” she replied.

He stood frozen in en garde position, half upright, half crouching, his right hand braced against the door behind him. The girl had the palest face he’d ever seen—a genteel, almost medieval shade of ivory—framed by distinctly Continental-looking glasses. Everything about her was so wildly implausible that the unlikelihood of her presence in his childhood kitchen slipped his mind completely.

“This is my house,” he said finally.

“You must be Orson, then! Such a
relief
.” She spoke with an accent, a thick one, but he could take in only one thing at a time. Her hair was black and thick and spherical, a topiary cropped into the shape of a planet. He’d never seen curls that curly outside of a Little Orphan Annie comic strip.

“I wasn’t expecting anybody,” said Orson. “To be here, I mean.”

“I can see that,” she said, glancing down at his feet. From anyone else this might have seemed teasing, even flirtatious, but not from this girl. She was tracking him as closely as a sniper.

He tucked his shirttails back into his jeans. “What’s your name? I wasn’t informed—”

“Ursula.” Her accent softened slightly. “I’m in the second bedroom past the stairs.”

“Do you mind if I sit down, Ursula? I feel a bit woozy.”

“Please.”

“My sisters didn’t tell me you were here, you understand. In this house. I wasn’t expecting anybody.”

“You’ve said that already.”

He hesitated. “Were
you
expecting anybody?”

“Oh, yes. They told me at the start.”

Orson rested his elbows on the counter and attempted to think. “When was this, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“When was what?”

“When—when
exactly
—did my sisters let you know that I’d be coming?”

She pulled one of her geometrically precise curls into her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. “The morning I got here,” she said. “Six weeks ago today.”

*   *   *

Ursula was not a projection of my father’s libido, or a comic-strip character, or a pleasure android from the distant future. She was an exchange student from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (which, as C*F*P would have it, had been cofounded by the Patent Clerk a few decades earlier) working on her Ph.D. in chemistry—and on her English—at the State University of New York at Buffalo. It was a mystery to Orson how she’d come to Cheektowaga, of all places, and the idea of Enzie and Genny taking in boarders, Israeli or otherwise, was so contrary to his conception of his sisters that his conscious mind refused to entertain it. But it didn’t much matter, Mrs. Haven, by what back alley of circumstance she’d arrived at his house. As long as Ursula continued to occupy the second bedroom past the stairs, he had no further questions for the court.

She turned out to be older than she looked, to his considerable relief; and she seemed to accept his attentions as a matter of course, which he wasn’t quite sure how to feel about. Her girlish gravitas at their first meeting had not been a form of politeness—she was to remain, for the entirety of their shared duration, the most poker-faced woman he knew. In spite of Orson’s twenty-six years, moreover, it was clear that any awkwardness would be coming from
his
side of the counter, not hers. Within a week he knew the details of her doomed love affair with a young Mossad operative, and of its sequel with a middle-aged Tel Aviv dentist; he knew what she would and wouldn’t do in bed well in advance of their first kiss (which was unexpectedly helpful, like taking a sample test before the true exam). Science fiction interested her—even, in a sense, excited her—which surprised him most of all: he’d resigned himself to the idea that Ewa Ruszczyk was the only girl this side of Alpha Centauri who’d ever read his work.

True to Tolliver tradition, it was Ursula, not Orson, who finally brought the beaker to a boil. The year was 1969, after all, not 1904, and my father’s shyness bordered on effrontery. Although he wrote compulsively and virtuosically about fornication, Mrs. Haven—or perhaps for precisely that reason—he’d done precious little himself. Ursula seized him by the scruff of the neck, as if he were a kitten; there was something feral about her in that moment, and Orson’s first thought was that she meant to tear his throat out with her teeth. The body that had appeared so childlike seemed another body altogether when he held it in his hands, and by the time she was naked (which was not too long after) the last traces of girlishness had vanished. She left her clothes on the floor of the kitchen—he himself, laughably, was still fully dressed—and led him through the swinging door into the parlor. The goose bumps on her forearms and on her meaty blue-white haunches made him feel oddly top-heavy, and he followed her with his arms outstretched, to catch himself if he should start to fall.

A fire was burning in the parlor grate. When had that happened? He stared into the flames for what seemed a great while, struggling to recapture his calm. She undressed him as he stood there, taking her time about it, efficient and completely at her ease. He cursed himself for a coward and a fool. When she’d finished he took stock of himself, prepared for the worst, and found himself heroically aroused.

“
There
now,” Ursula purred. She was squatting in front of him, appraising him frankly, her left hand resting lightly on his hip. “There now, Mr. Tolliver. Let’s see if you can guess what happens next.”

“I’ve got a general idea,” said Orson. “I write smut for a living, remember.”

“This isn’t
DarkEncounters
, Mr. Tolliver. I want to
do
the thing, not fantasize about it.”

“For your information, I take pride in the fact that my stories are accurate, from a technical standpoint, down to the slightest—”

“Shh,”
she told him, bending slightly forward. “No excuses.”

*   *   *

It was only afterward, when they were lying together in front of the inexplicable sui generis fire—Ursula denied having started it, and why on earth should she do that?—that he realized how much of her history she’d been keeping to herself. She’d been born in Barkai, on a bona fide kibbutz; her mother had taken her to Vienna at age three to meet her
goyishe
father, and they’d lived there for the next eleven years. Her father had left Austria long before, they discovered, and no one could say where he was. At first they’d stayed on in hope of word from him, then because they couldn’t afford the passage back; then because her mother, still a beauty, had remarried. Ursula was happy in Vienna, and too young to mind so much about her father, but her mother grew pinched and silent and peculiar. The second husband was a drinker, and the marriage ended badly. Soon after that, they moved to Tel Aviv.

“What happened next?” said Orson.

“America happened,” she said, smiling strangely. “You happened.”

They lay with their legs entangled, staring dumbly at the fire.

“Sometimes I think it might be better to have less family,” said Orson, “than to have too much.”

“You’re thinking of your sisters, I suppose.”

“What do
you
think of them?”

She considered his question. “They’re
verdreht
, I think, but they mean well. Why do you ask?”

“I’m worried about them, to tell you the truth. They’ve always been—
verdreht
, like you say, but over the past few years—since I went away, I mean, to New York City—”

“Yes?”

“They’ve become more than that.” He let out a breath. “Insanity runs in my family.”

“Mine, too.”

“No babies for us, then!” said Orson, attempting a joke.

Ursula didn’t laugh.

“About my sisters—”

“Yes?”

He frowned into the fire. “I don’t know how to put this.”

“Just say it.”

“They think that they can see into the future.”

Ursula turned to face him then, resting one of her small, thick-nippled breasts against his arm. “They
can
see into the future,” she said matter-of-factly. “Haven’t you noticed that yet?”

*   *   *

There’s no way of knowing how my aunts spent their first months in Harlem, Mrs. Haven, since no one—with the possible exception of the gas man—crossed their threshold during that time; but I can make a few guesses. For the whole of their durations to date—more than eighty years, reckoned together—Enzie and Genny had taken their clothes out of the same wardrobe, worn their hair in identical untidy buns, and slept in the same four-poster bed, and I see no reason to assume they changed their ways. Genny continued in her various roles as homemaker, administrator, nurse, cook and research assistant, slipping out of the house each morning with a shopping list in one hand and a stack of scholarly correspondence in the other; Enzie devoted every waking hour to her work. She’d told Orson the truth about her motives for staying—the new surroundings had drawn her conception of the chronoverse in a subtly new direction, although the details of her experiments in those months remain obscure. Genny’s letters to Orson mention Laplace’s theory of determinism, the “torque” of the Milky Way galaxy (whatever that means), the symbolic freight of counterclockwise motion, Oppenheimer’s nautilus-shaped fallout shelter blueprint, the layout of certain pharaonic tombs, Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence,” weather vanes, pinwheels, and—over and over again, though always in the most blasé of tones—the arrangement of windows, rooms and doors in the apartment.

In the weeks after Orson’s departure, three sets of ping-pong-ball-sized holes were drilled through each interior wall, exactly five feet and three inches off the floor. My father mentions these holes in his journal—Genny must have written to him about them—and I’ve been able to confirm that they exist. I thought I’d have to move half the Archive to uncover them, but each hole, no matter how hidden or hemmed in by trash, turns out to have a clear and unobstructed through-line to its counterpart across the room. In a curious way, the resulting network of linked apertures is reminiscent of a camera obscura, or an apartment-sized simulacrum of the human eye—optic nerve and ganglia included—with the bathroom, of all places, embodying the juncture with the brain. (It also calls to mind the machine, the interferometer, that Michelson and Morley used to measure the velocity of light.) I can’t see the point of it all, Mrs. Haven, and apparently neither could Genny; but Genny’s understanding, let alone her approval, had never been of much concern to Enzie. It would take more than a change of address to change that.

Certain things
did
change, however, once the sisters had become acclimatized to their exotic new environment: certain things, in fact, were revolutionized. Enzie’s interest in Manhattan may not have extended farther than the walls of the General Lee, but her sister was a different animal. In the course of Genny’s errands, which sometimes took her clear across the city, she came into contact with Manhattanites of every conceivable stripe, from physicists to pacificists to sodomites to junkies, and discovered that she found them all delightful. She’d never known a place to be so viciously, remorselessly alive: even when people told her to mind her own business, or to watch where the fuck she was going (which happened often), the shock of it came as a welcome infusion of feeling. Street life thrilled her to tears, as did life in the shops and the parks and the barrooms, though she never touched a drop of hooch herself. The woman who stared boldly back at her from the windows of department stores and soda shops and taxis had a face she only dimly recognized. At the beginning of her forties, entirely by accident, Genny found herself a woman of the world.

She began to spend more time away from the General Lee than was strictly necessary, taking the scenic route whenever possible, and it was not beneath her dignity to loiter. She became something of a fixture of the scenic route herself, the latest touch of quasi-local color: the middle-aged hippie, the saucer-eyed Jewess, the credulous Kraut. The bon vivant, in other words, that her brother had never managed to become. She dispensed money freely—
she
was in charge of the purse strings, not Enzie—and prided herself on being an equal-opportunity enabler. For every high tea she attended with the brittle-haired wives of venture capitalists in the tearoom at Saks, she’d have a
café
con leche
and a sandwich at the corner
bodeguita
, or a joint at a rally in Tompkins Square Park. In no time at all she’d become known about town as what grifters used to call “an easy touch,” and she’d developed quite a fan club, from panhandlers to Abstract Expressionists to pimps. Some exploited her shamelessly, rewarding her patronage with whatever line of bullshit came to mind, and laughing at her when she took the bait; some dragged her to meetings of the John Birch Society or the Republican Party or the League of Women Voters, only to discover that politics put her to sleep; but no one, regardless of stratagem, managed to keep her out past 19:30 EST, when she went home to cook for her sister. Being Genny, however—in other words, being craftier than she looked—she eventually hit on a way both of keeping Enzie from starving and of bypassing her curfew. The solution couldn’t have been simpler: she invited everybody home for dinner.

Enzie, needless to say, was bitterly opposed to Genny’s “dog-and-pony evenings,” as she called them; but the balance of power had shifted. Genny dug in her heels and refused to back down. Hadn’t she always done every last thing Enzie wanted? Hadn’t she cooked and cleaned and generally been an exemplary homemaker since before puberty? Hadn’t she abandoned her home from one day to the next, all for the sake of Enzie’s work? Now it was
her
turn, and long overdue. They were living in the middle of the most fascinating city in the world, and she was damned if she was going to pretend that they lived in a bunker.