The Lost Time Accidents (47 page)

*   *   *

I always find myself skipping the chapters of biographies that deal with the subject’s childhood—the dog bites, the rickets, the portentous aversion to breast milk—so I think I’ll spare posterity the bother. I came as a surprise to my parents, maybe even a shock, but they adjusted to my presence gracefully. I was considered “promising” in the standard sort of way, though I can’t recall why; I was loved, in the standard sort of way, at least by my doting, long-suffering mother. I liked to drink the vinegar in the pickle jar, I remember. I threw a ball like a girl. I made a landscape out of boogers on the wall beside my bed.

Orson loved me too, I believe, by his Orson-ish lights—but there wasn’t anything standard about it. Either he saw me, Mrs. Haven, or he didn’t. This seemed mostly to depend on how his writing was going, but it also had to do with something else: something grand and adult and hard to visualize, like the stock market or virgin birth or barometric pressure. On days when I was visible to him, he’d make up a story in which I was the conquering hero, or try to get me to throw a ball properly (which I hated), or drive me to the movies in his mustard-yellow Buick. On days when he didn’t, he’d walk past me—
through
me, if I wasn’t careful—as if I were a trick of the light.

Memory is a politician, Mrs. Haven, as every historian knows: a manipulative, pandering appeaser. Firsthand witness though I am, inaccuracies are creeping into this account. It’s likely, for example, that my father took me to the movies a handful of times at the most—I can’t remember more than one such trip, in fact, no matter how I try. But that solitary memory, from my last year of grade school, is vivid and well-lit and sharply in focus, as traumatic recollections tend to be.

The movie in question was
Event Horizon
, the third installment of the blockbuster
Timestrider
franchise. Orson had a knee-jerk aversion to Hollywood sci-fi, and a particular loathing for time-travel films; but my mother and I had joined forces this time, and we broke his resistance together. The “Kraut”—as Orson had taken to calling her—did it because my father had been in a nasty mood all week, and his bitching was driving her crazy; I did it because I needed a ride. It’s hard to say why Orson gave in, Mrs. Haven, but I do have a guess. He sensed an opportunity to rant.

Ranting was Orson’s preferred form of recreation for the whole of the eighties, and the Buick was his venue of choice. The satisfaction he took in watching his victim writhe in slack-jawed desperation, unable to escape without bodily harm, was the most compelling evidence I’d found (at that admittedly tender age) for the existence of natural evil. “Current events” set him off most dependably, but he could work up a respectable head of steam on virtually any topic: I once heard him hold forth, to one of the Kraut’s acquaintances from the Cheektowaga PTA, on the perils of middle-aged motherhood.

“The kids just don’t come
out
right,” he’d confided to Judy O’Shea. “If you don’t believe it, Judy, take a look at me.”

“Well, Mr. Tolliver, I must say—I mean, I don’t necessarily think—”

“The ideal time for conception, biologically speaking, is between twelve and fourteen years of age. That’s when the womb is at its most resilient. And please don’t even
ask
about the sperm.”

On this particular ride, as I might have expected, Orson had his crosshairs trained on Hollywood, and he dug in before we’d even cleared the driveway. “What’s pathetic to me, Waldy, is the
wish-fulfillment
quality of it all. Never mind the fact that navigating the timestream, hither and thither, is as easy in these flicks as passing gas; the medium has its conventions, I appreciate that. But ninety-nine percent of time-travel movies take it for granted that you can change whatever you want about the present—never mind the future—just by diddling a little with the past. It’s obvious that physics means
zilch
to these jerk-offs, and logic seems to count for even less. The past is the past, son. It’s done with. You keep that in mind.”

“I don’t know, Orson. I saw
Timestrider Two
last year, and I thought the whole Uncertainty Drive thing was pretty boss.”

“They’ve
gotten
to you, haven’t they,” Orson said, scrutinizing me closely. “They’ve injected their parasitic spores into your brain.”

“Keep your eyes on the road, Orson.”

“ROWWWGGGHHHHRRR,” said my father, rolling his eyes back and baring his teeth. By the time we pulled up at the Mohawk 6 Multiplex we were debating the pros and cons of an NCAA team spending its off-season on planets with stronger gravitational fields, like Saturn or Venus. A good rant never failed to cheer him up.

*   *   *

The first third of
Timestrider III: Event Horizon
passed without incident. Though Orson was sporting the fluorescent orange hunter’s cap he put on whenever he was trying to keep a low profile—his “helm of invisibility,” he called it—I occasionally managed to forget he was there. An anxious, goosenecked loner from the suburbs, three weeks shy of thirteen, I was in the demographic sweet spot for the franchise, and I loved every pulsing, booming, logic-flouting minute. The rows in front of us had been commandeered by the
Timestrider
faithful: sixteen-year-old fanboys in frosted jeans and Iron Maiden T-shirts, already on their seventh or eighth viewing, mouthing along with the dialogue like grandmas in church. With the notable exception of a pustule-necked orangutan who could barely squeeze himself into his seat, they looked as spindly and insecure as I was. Whenever the Timestrider pulled out his cryophoton blade—which was every fifteen seconds or so—they gave one another sweaty-palmed highfives. I was beholding my personal future, Mrs. Haven, and I’m not ashamed to say I liked the look of it.

The fanboys bugged the bejeezus out of Orson—the redheaded bruiser especially—but he made a concerted effort to keep calm. He seemed to be enjoying the spectacle: the battle for the icebound insurgent stronghold on Cxax, for instance, actually made him lean forward, and Marduk the Minuteman’s hourglass-shaped starcruiser earned a grudging grunt of approbation. “Interesting aproach to ballistics,” he muttered. “No
egregious
anomalies yet.”

From my father, Mrs. Haven, this was high praise indeed. He confined himself to scoffing during the swordfights—they
were
pretty hokey, I have to admit—and covering his eyes when the Timestrider and Countess Synkronia kissed. I did the same thing, being twelve, but I remember wondering at his prudishness. I was about to ask him about it, in fact, when he jerked his head back in a kind of spasm and shouted something filthy at the screen.

“Orson! What the hell are you—”

“Did you hear that?” he stammered. “Did you hear that, Waldy? Am I fucking dreaming?”

“Would you please sit down, Orson? You’re embarrassing—”

“Shut up and
listen
!”

Reluctantly, stiffly, he let me pull him down into his seat. The Horizoners glared back at us for as long as they could stand to, which thankfully wasn’t more than a few seconds. Orson’s eyes were open wider than I’d ever seen them, and his mouth was moving in a toothless, senile way. That reminded me of something—something I’d just recently thought of, or seen—but it wasn’t until I turned back toward the screen that it hit me.

He was moving his lips, Mrs. Haven, exactly like the fanboys in front of us. He was reciting each line of dialogue a beat before it happened.

The Timestrider’s krono-kruiser had just marooned him on Cxax in the primordial past, when the surface of the planet was still a bubbling swamp, and he was trying to raise his ship out of the muck. A Cxaxian mystic—a hairless gray koala in a rumpled-looking kilt—was trying to convince him not to bother. The kruiser, according to the koala, was entirely unnecessary.

“Have you not understood?” whispered my father.

“Have you not understood?” said the koala, twitching its animatronic ears. “You travel through time all your life: into the future at the rate at which you age, and into the past each time that you remember.”

The Timestrider expressed impatience with the koala’s plan of action. The Horizoners slurped their Mountain Dews in bliss.

“There is only the brain, after all,” said my father.

“There is only the brain,” the koala intoned. “But the brain, after all, is enough. Your consciousness is all the time machine you need.”

“ROWWW
GGGHHHHRRR
,” said Orson, propelling his stocky body toward the screen. The fanboy whose seat he was clambering over let out a shriek and pitched sideways, spilling his drink into the orangutan’s lap; the orangutan let out a roar that drowned out my father and the movie and everything else and practically ripped his seat out of the floor. Orson was a row and a half past him by then, balancing on someone’s armrest, but the giant had no trouble catching up. A saucerlike object spun lazily across the screen, and I recognized it, after a stupefied instant, as the orange hunter’s cap. By the time the lights came on, the giant had my father pinned to the floor between rows five and six—which was exactly where the EMTs found him, sixteen and a half minutes later, staring up at the ceiling like a corpse.

By that time the manager had apologized to everybody and distributed vouchers good for any later showing in that same theater, and the goon and his cohorts had disappeared. The theater was still full of people, bunched in loose clumps of intrigue, unwilling to believe the show was over. My understanding of what had happened was roughly as follows: my father had whipped the whole theater up into a homicidal rage, then settled on the only exit strategy that would save him from being disarticulated. He’d had a coronary.

Orson was conscious for most of the brief, choppy ride to the ICU, gripping my wrist and gazing up into my panic-stricken face, as though we’d traded one film genre for another. He had a message for me—a message of vital importance—as fathers in movie ambulances tend to do. He tried to lift his head to tell it, to the considerable irritation of the EMTs. In the hope of calming him, I told him I loved him; he shook his head and gave a breathless groan. The transition from blockbuster to low-budget family weepie was now complete. I told him I loved him again, taking care to enunciate clearly.

“At this point, son, you mostly seem to be annoying him,” the nearest EMT said. I looked down at my father, who blinked his eyes twice in agreement.

“Okay, Orson,” I said. “I get it.” I didn’t get it, of course. I took his trembling hand in both of mine.

*   *   *

It wasn’t until the next morning, after the bypass, that my father told me what was on his mind.

“I want you to go see the rest of that movie.”

“Excuse me?”

“I want you to watch the whole thing, Waldy, right to the end.” His voice was diminished and hoarse, which somehow made it more authoritative. “Don’t even
blink
until the houselights come back on.”

“Orson, I’m not sure I—”

“Pay special attention to the closing credits. Then come back here and tell me what you saw.”

You might think it would be easy to interrogate a cardiac patient—they can’t run off, for one thing—but they have the moral high ground, Mrs. Haven, whether they deserve it or not. It was 11:15 EST when Orson gave me my marching orders; at 12:45 I was watching the opening credits of
Event Horizon
(do you remember them, Mrs. Haven? The way they scrolled toward the audience out of the vastness of space, gilded and silent, like hearing-impaired subtitles for the voice of God?) from the same seat I’d sat in the evening before. Quite a few people in the audience looked familiar, including a man, two rows up, who appeared to be wearing the helm of invisibility; but I did my best to tune out all distractions. I was seeing the movie with different eyes now, on the lookout for hidden messages and codes.

At the one-hour mark, the notebook I’d brought contained only the following:

“ANDRO”
=
ROBOT

PHOTON BLASTER “BULLETS”
=
REALISTIC??

It happened every so often that Orson forgot and/or ignored the fact that I was still a child, so the sensation of near-total inadequacy I was experiencing was nothing new. For once, however, it seemed vitally important not to fail. This was partly because Orson was in intensive care, of course, but also because the
Timestrider
trilogy fell squarely within my microscopic zone of expertise. All I thought about between the ages of nine and fourteen was science fiction; even my filthiest onset-of-puberty fantasies featured “contact”—so to speak—with other worlds. Which is just to say, Mrs. Haven, that I was my father’s son. If I couldn’t give an accurate summary of
Timestrider III: Event Horizon
, no one could.

It turned out I needn’t have worried. No sooner had the Timestrider escaped the clutches of the Empiricist forces by punching a random set of coordinates into his krono-kruiser and hitting “jump” than a suspicion began to tug at my awareness. The first half of the movie had been devoted to combustion of various types, punctuated by swordfights and gunfights and cleavage; as soon as the time-travel sequences kicked in, however, I felt the blood rush to my head. I hadn’t yet reached the age at which I would start to pester Orson about our family history, but I’d scavenged enough over the years to recognize a correspondence between spacetime (as the Tollivers defined it) and the kronoverse our hero voyaged through. Both were based on the notion that the timestream is curved; curved in such a way, in fact, that it forms a ring, or possibly a sphere. Given this curvature of time, it ought to be possible to take shortcuts across it, geometrically speaking, by traveling along its chords; this (as I’d soon learn) was what my aunt Enzian had come to believe, and what she was experimenting with, at that very moment, in her rooms in the General Lee. It was also, coincidentally or not, how the Timestrider’s krono-kruiser (which looked like nothing so much as an enormous, globe-shaped pulpit) took him on his rumbling, flashing jaunts from Now to Then.