The Lost Time Accidents (52 page)

“That would take some telling. After all, ten years have passed since then.”

I saw now that he looked a decade older, perhaps even more: his straw-colored hair had gone gray at the temples, his hands were liver-spotted, and his face was blotched and scored with tiny rifts. The cause seemed to be more than mere aging—his body looked distorted in ways that the passage of time alone could not account for. My head began to spin.

“Are you saying I’ve been trapped here for a decade?”

“Time doesn’t pass for you!” he crowed, laughing openly now. “That was my understanding.”

I covered my ears and shut my eyes and wished him gone with all my strength of will. When I looked again he was right there on the counter.

“Enough of this childishness! We have work to do together, you and I. The future is knocking,
Nefflein
, whether you choose to notice it or not.”

“
We
don’t have any future,” I gasped. “You’re diseased, Waldemar, and I’m well. Do you hear me? We’re not the same person.”

The smile left his face. “You’re repeating yourself.”

“Does that bother you, Uncle? I’ll say it again. We’re not the same.” To my own surprise I broke into a grin. “God, that feels good to say. Four simple little words. We’re not the same.”

He studied me a moment. “May I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“Who on earth suggested that we were?”

I brought my face close to his, unafraid and triumphant. Then I felt my mind go hot and blank.

“But it’s obvious,” I stammered. “Anyone could see—I mean, our family—your name—”

“I’m
curious
, that’s all,” he said, lowering his feet to the floor. “
I’ve
certainly never implied that we were fellow travelers—far from it!—and you’ve gone to great pains to assure me our kinship means nothing. Your father and mother, to judge by your memoirs, kept my existence a secret; and those matzo-chewing aunts of yours—may Jehovah preserve them!—seem to have viewed you as a guinea pig for their sad little experiments, which most assuredly is not how they saw
me.
All of which raises the question”—here he smiled and draped an arm around me—“who was it, Waldy Junior, who planted the half-baked notion of our spiritual and moral equivalence in your antsy little brain?” He brought his body weightlessly against my own. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think it came from no one but yourself. You sense our connection with the sureness of instinct. You feel it in your muscles and your bones.”

“You’re here to drive me insane,” I said, hiding my face in my hands. “I understand that now.”

“There’s something else you’d like to ask. Why don’t you ask it?”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

“I disagree,
Nefflein
. I think that you do.”

I steeled myself, expecting some new jeer—but his expression was solemn.

“Can you get me out of here?” I heard myself whisper.

“I thought you’d never ask!” he said. “I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because I’m not the person who
did
this to you, Waldy.” He regarded me sadly. “I’m not the reason you’re here.”

“You’re lying. Who else could possibly have done this?”

He shook his head. “It’s no use. You’re not listening.”

“Go away,” I said, starting to weep.

I sank to the floor and pressed my forehead to my knees. I should have felt shame for breaking down in front of him—for allowing him to see me at my weakest—but I felt none at all. Why was that?

I heard him curse under his breath as he arranged himself beside me.

“I want to get out of this place,” I said.

“I don’t believe you.”

I looked up at him. “What do you mean by that?”

He shook his head a second time, regretfully and slowly.

That jarred something loose inside me, Mrs. Haven. I spun around and caught him by the shoulder. There was no electric charge now, no tingling, no phantom chill. He felt almost as real to me as my own body.

“You come and go,” I said. “Tell me how.”

“I got here the same way you did, Waldy. There’s no difference between us.”

I wanted to strangle him by his antiquated collar, to shake him until the truth came tumbling out; instead I asked him again, as calmly as I could, to explain how I’d been exiled to this place.

“Waldy!” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Can it be you really don’t recall?”

My mind gave a twitch as I tried to reply. It was
there
, Mrs. Haven, at the edge of the light: the memory of my final instants in the timestream. It was there but it refused to show itself. I shut my eyes and held my breath and waited.

“It’s no use,” I said finally. “I can’t remember.”

“Let me ask you this,” he said softly. “Have you tried simply getting up and walking out the door?”

His face began to blur as he said this, to lose definition—but his expression was sincere, almost beseeching. He was right, Mrs. Haven. I’d never once attempted to escape. I pictured my aunts’ massive door, long since dropped from its hinges, cobbled together out of trash-can lids and drywall studs and casement frames from gutted Harlem brownstones. What need could they have had for such a barrier? What forces had it been constructed to withstand? Was the chronoverse in suspension on the landing outside, sucking against the door like space against an air lock, waiting silently to readmit me?

I pushed past Waldemar into the Archive. Its length seemed greater than I remembered—immeasurably greater—but I was used to the apartment’s tricks by then. I noticed in passing a ream of UCS stationery, a book of Czech folktales, and a balsa-and-playing-card model of the General Lee. When I came to the door I drew myself up, pulled in a steadying breath, and reached for the first bolt.

*   *   *

“Nefflein,”
my great-uncle said gently. “Answer me,
Nefflein.
Do you hear my voice?”

I placed myself by smell before my eyes came open. I was flat on my back on my aunts’ immense bed, the one with the strangely carved headboard and discolored sheets. It was morning outside, to judge by the brightness, and I wondered—as I so often had before—how the light of chronologic day could reach me. This time, however, I remembered a joke Orson had once told me about singularities. It’s no problem at all, physics-wise, to enter a black hole: an event horizon is an easy thing to cross. Problems only arise if you should reconsider.

“What am I doing on this bed?”

“I brought you here,
Nefflein.
You had an accident.”

I watched the dust roll and coagulate above me. “It’s possible I’m going to be sick.”

“That might be for the best.”

I waited for the nausea to pass. It took a while.

“What happened to me?”

“I found you facedown at the door to the apartment. Your idea must have been to open it. Apparently you had second thoughts.”

“Second thoughts? I collapsed on the floor!”

“That’s right,” he said, snuffling. “This concludes your lesson for today.”

“What lesson, for God’s sake?”

He gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder. “I
told
you that you didn’t want to leave.”

XXIII

GIVEN WHAT YOU KNOW
about my two earlier visits to the General Lee, Mrs. Haven, you can probably guess that my feelings the third time—a month after my father’s
Timestrider
-induced coronary—were mixed. Orson had ranted less than usual on the drive down, speaking mostly in grunts, so I’d had plenty of time to sort through my memories of my aunts’ apartment, and the wonders—or
alleged
wonders—that had transpired there. The difference between ages seven and thirteen is enormous (the difference, really, between an overgrown toddler and a miniature taxpaying citizen) and I viewed my younger self with prim disdain. Five years after the episode in the dark at the bend in the hallway, it was my informed thirteen-year-old opinion that I’d dreamed the best parts of it up.

They’d found me facedown on the floor, after all, blubbering and shivering with fever. I’d barely recognized Orson, who’d fed me some aspirin and rushed me straight home. My aunts had failed to prevent our departure: there’d been no sorcery, no kidnapping, no human sacrifice. If my father displayed any emotion at all on the drive back to Buffalo—as far as I can recall—it was boredom. The status quo had reasserted itself so unconditionally that I’d found myself doubting, as the months and years passed, that we’d driven down to see my aunts at all.

But none of my considered thirteen-year-old opinions, however blasé, could stave off a spasm of anxiety as we rang the General Lee’s epileptic buzzer, or an equal and opposite thrill of excitement as the lobby lamps sputtered to life. There remained zones of magic in the world, apparently, and 109th Street was one. (It didn’t hurt that enchantments in folktales, both benign and horrific, have a habit of coming in threes.) Orson kicked the lobby door open without waiting to be buzzed in, shot me a look that I couldn’t account for, then steered me upstairs, gripping me by the shoulder, as though afraid that I might try to run away.
He’s reconsidered their offer
, I found myself thinking.
He’s going to sacrifice me after all.

*   *   *

This might be as good a place as any, Mrs. Haven, for a caplet-sized history of the United Church of Synchronology, from 1970—the year of both my own and the Church’s conception—to the moment my father rang his sisters’ bell. You know some of what follows, of course, but I’m betting you don’t know it all. You always insisted that the Husband kept you at a remove from the Church, and I still believe that, in spite of everything I’ve found out since. I refuse to indulge the suspicion (clamorous though it sometimes gets) that you were a willing party to his machinations. I could never have fallen in love with one of Haven’s automata.

If my father hadn’t learned of his wife’s pregnancy moments before the First Listener and his sidekicks had appeared on his stoop, he might have taken the “Three Fuzzy Fruits,” as he took to calling them, more seriously—but I can’t say for certain. Orson was a celebrity at the time, however priggish and conflicted, and Haven and Co. had by no means been the only pilgrims to Pine Ridge Road. Like some solitary king under a spell—one who never leaves his throne room, and eventually comes to doubt the existence of the world outside—Orson rarely engaged with anyone anymore, his wife and son included, and the more isolated he became from his so-called generation, the more he saw himself as its True Voice. In other words, he was beginning, like so many successful men before and after, to believe that his shit smelled like rosewater. He’d stopped seeing anything funny about
Life
’s portrait of him long before. And if he still ate death biscuits, Mrs. Haven, he ate them in private.

In defiance of Orson’s rejection of the world, however, the world continued to exist, and it was growing fuzzier and fruitier by the day. The sixties may be the decade we tend to associate with communes and dropouts and thousand-yard stares, but it was in the seventies that things got seriously weird. There were never more quasi-religious organizations on the FBI’s watchlist than in 1979: the number of cults in North America was estimated at 108, not counting Mormons, vegetarians, or the Daughters of the American Revolution. A house just up the street from ours had a sign on its lawn with a quotation from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon—
GOD WILL TAKE THE WORLD BY LOVE
—and though the people who lived there looked more like candidates for a mass divorce than a mass wedding, there was never a shortage of tenants. If Orson didn’t see why the Fuzzy Fruits were worth his time, Mrs. Haven, who can blame him? He’d set his sights on withdrawing from the world, after all, in the classic Toula/Tolliver tradition: not for his father’s reasons—or his mad uncle’s, either—but because it suited his vocation as a prophet.

Missives from the faithful arrived in our mailbox regardless. It was my job, once I was old enough, to bring in the mail, and I used to dread finding those letters: somehow I’d intuited that they were dangerous. The first were from the Listener himself, with the return address scrawled clumsily in cursive; then from Menügayan, typewritten; then from people we had never heard of, on corporate-looking UCS stationery. Orson passed them along, unread, to Ursula, who rolled them into tight little joints that she used to light the burners on our stove.

For a while near the close of the decade, the doorbell would ring at odd hours—most often between seven and eight in the morning—and Ursula would discover progressively more desperate “Iterants” (as UCS members had taken to calling themselves), always in groups of three, petitioning for an audience with the Prime Mover. Eventually Ursula took to calling the cops, and a court injunction was obtained, much to my parents’ and the neighborhood’s (and quite possibly the Iterants’ own) relief. All of which explains how it was possible for my father to go a full ten years without realizing that the UCS had become—both figuratively and by official church decree—the cult to end
all
cults, along with organized religion, Western philosophy, and the Internal Revenue Service. He had no one to blame for the shock but himself, needless to say—which didn’t make it any easier to stomach.

It had been a busy decade for the Church of Synchronology. They’d had a wobbly start, unsure how to market the G.S.M. (Gospel of the Scientific Method)—let alone the B.E.C.T. (Benefits of Emancipation from Chronologic Time)—to the general public, but their eyes had ultimately been opened, after a series of setbacks, to a wonderfully liberating truth: the general public was not their target demographic. The meek and the downtrodden and the underinformed were the stuff all great religions had grown fat on, and the fact that Religion with a capital
r
was the single greatest fraud ever perpetrated on humankind (aside from the persistent illusion, fostered by said Religion, that the arc of time tended from Present to Past) was no reason to reject its business model. What was an “empiricist,” after all, but someone who analyzed cause and effect, and adapted his theories accordingly?