The Lost Time Accidents (53 page)

Once this point was cleared up—by Haven himself, in the late spring of ’77—the path lay clear for global domination.

*   *   *

The first Theater of Simultaneity was consecrated in Tempe, Arizona, on September 17 of the following year. The entire UCS membership to date—all thirty-seven dues-paying members, not counting dependents—turned out for the groundbreaking ceremony, which was presided over by Archchronoclast Johnson, who dressed for the occasion in a tuxedo T-shirt and frayed dungarees. (The faithful, in those early days, looked more or less indistinguishable from graduate students in the humanities.) The appendix to
The Excuse
—dubbed “The
Ω
” by the UCS, and elevated to a sacred text in its own right—was read from aloud, after which the congregation traveled 6.5 seconds into the future. The “chronologic boom” this occasioned went unnoticed by the neighborhood’s residents, just as the First Listener had predicted it would.
For those with ears to hear, let them hear
, as a noted proto-chronoclast had put it.

The scene of this first—and admittedly modest—mass chrononavigation was a narrow dirt lot in a residential development on Tempe’s southwestern perimeter, occupied for the most part by lower- to middle-income retirees. Haven gave a brief speech, in which he cautioned the faithful that it might well take a decade, given scarcity of funds, for the Theater of Simultaneity to be completed. “Which span may have meaning for
them
,” he said, waving a hand to indicate the neighboring condos. “Not so much for the chrono-enlightened. For
us
,” he said genially, opening an imaginary door, “the temple is already finished. Won’t you come in?”

History teaches us, Mrs. Haven, that every great movement—however corrupt its eventual result—is launched in a fireball of idealism and brotherly feeling, which lasts exactly as long as the movement in question has nothing to lose. Even the Methodists were revolutionaries once, much as they’d like to deny it: they preached against slavery and patriarchy and private property, and had nearly as many women as men in the ranks of their preachers. So it only stands to reason that there must have been an era (or a moment, let’s say) when Synchronology was a genuine philosophy: fruit of the idea that
The Excuse
’s description of “timespin”—which itself was just a mongrelized version of Waldemar’s “rotary time”—might be taken as the model for a different way of life. I have a hard time picturing this age of innocence, Mrs. Haven, but I’m willing to accept that it existed. If nothing else, it helps to explain the UCS’s meteoric rise.

Within a few years of that seminal afternoon on the outskirts of Tempe, the United Church of Synchronology had become the largest nonaccredited religious organization in America, with Theaters of Simultaneity in forty-seven cities nationwide. The IRS—which had long since revealed its Hidden Agenda by refusing to grant the UCS tax-exempt status as a recognized spiritual entity (code 501(c)(3))—had finally buckled the tax year before, in the face of a wave of lawsuits (and a tsunami of threatened lawsuits) by the faithful. This spot of legal reshuffling had the result of making Haven’s little movement—which had been doing perfectly well already, thank you very much—wealthier than many midsized corporations.

Like any booming enterprise, the Church was faced with the problem of how to reinvest its profits, and—like any sober, well-counseled investor—it opted to diversify. Investments were made in everything from pharmaceuticals to coffee beans to LCD technology to Hollywood. Archchronoclast Menügayan, who’d overseen media and public relations for the UCS since the autumn of ’73, had been developing a film concept for quite some time, loosely based on book III of the Codex; she was a fervent devotee of
The Excuse
—perhaps the most fervent—so it’s no wonder that much of the text found its way into the shooting script verbatim. Church dogma has it that Haven himself came up with the title, though a competing account attributes it to Don Harvey Mueck, the goateed man-child director who hogged most of the credit for the movie’s success. And
Timestrider: Clash of the Aeons
was very successful indeed.

*   *   *

It was more than free-floating suspicion that brought us to Harlem that third time. I’d seen something else in the
Timestrider
credits: in considerably more modest type than BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE UNITED CHURCH OF SYNCHRONOLOGY, midway through a column of miscellaneous titles (cicada wrangler, acupuncturist, defribrillator) I’d spied the names of my aunts listed under “technical advisement.” Orson scoffed when he heard that, but I could tell that the news shook him; it had shaken me almost as badly. The adult world may never have made much sense to me, Mrs. Haven, but the filament connecting the General Lee to the Paramount backlot was beyond my capability to trace.

This time my father’s knuckles had barely brushed the doorframe before a strident voice—Gentian’s, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure—announced there was no need to raise a ruckus. The door was in even worse shape than I remembered (it was as battered as a road sign on an Indian reservation, with three disquietingly rat-sized holes along the bottom) and open just enough for me to see inside. It was Enzian who received us, not her sister. I could tell by the way she scrutinized Orson—nervously and defiantly at once—that she’d guessed the reason for our sudden visit. Her expression wasn’t lost on Orson, either.

“Let me in, Enzie. You know why I’m here.”

“Hello, Waldemar,” Enzian said to me, ignoring him completely. I’d never seen her smile before, and I can’t honestly say I liked the look of it. I did my best to smile politely back.

“Hello, Aunt Enzie. Nice to, um, see you again.”

“Marvelous boy!
Enchanting
boy!” came a voice from inside. I squinted past Enzian into the shadows of the Archive, but couldn’t make anything out but a stack of microwaves and fax machines.

“Lass mich sehen!”
the voice protested. “Let me see!”

“This is ridiculous,” said Orson. “Let us in.”

“There’s no room.”

“Lass mich sehen,”
the voice repeated. “Waldemar?”

“There’s no room.”

“For crying out loud, Enzie—”

Before Orson could finish there came a skittering sound—like a puppy’s toenails clattering over tile—and Enzian stepped out quickly onto the landing. “Go in, Waldemar. There’s room for you now. Go in and say hello to your aunt Genny.”

I hesitated, unsure how to behave; then I caught my father’s eye and saw that he was no better off than I was, and that Enzian was worse off than either of us. Her hair had gone gray since I’d last seen her, and her dress—the same one as last time, it seemed, though I couldn’t be sure—hung mournfully from her diminished body. Orson looked like a trained bear beside her. I left the two of them out on the landing, making a big show of not looking at each other, and slipped tentatively inside.

Although it was the same twilit entryway I remembered—the same chipped parquet, the same tang of mildew—I barely recognized the place. The sky-blue ceiling I’d admired at age seven was visible only in patches now, like breaks in a fog in the mountains; which isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds, Mrs. Haven, because what I’d stepped into looked more like a Himalayan col than a New York apartment. Great sloping drifts of every conceivable type of object—from telephone directories to Persian rugs to lengths of oxidizing copper pipe—rose steeply to either side, leaving barely enough space for a body to wriggle between; Enzian hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d warned us that there was no room. The trompe l’oeil effect that had once made the hallway seem endless had been superseded, at some long-ago juncture, by a crevasse that had no quality of height or depth at all. As I worked my way deeper, however, the chaos gradually resolved itself into a kind of order.
Classes
of object were grouped together, I realized, according to function: telephone books might not look much like eight-track cassettes, but they were both reference materials, of a kind, and they both transmitted information, as did the coils of fiber-optic wire they sat on. I have no idea how I intuited this, Mrs. Haven, but it came to me all in a rush. Nothing had changed since my last visit, at least not in principle. The Archive had expanded, that was all. Just as Genny had predicted that it would.

I heard my aunt’s voice before I saw her. She was whistling—some half-remembered Tin Pan Alley air she’d probably learned from Buffalo Bill—and I followed the sound back to its source. I found Genny on a cowhide settee in what I guessed to be the parlor’s southeast corner, one bandaged foot propped on a stack of board games (Battleship was topmost, I remember, followed by Mastermind and Stratego and Risk), and holding a tray of powdered doughnuts in her lap.

“There you are, dear,” she said. “I’d have come to the door, but I’m a
gottverdammter
cripple, as you see.”

It took me a moment to answer—a long, fretful moment—because of how greatly she’d changed. Enzie had also struck me as aged, of course, but Genny seemed a different person altogether. She was gray-faced and frail, half the size that she’d been, with the papery look that people in their dotage tend to get. Her bandaged foot was preposterously large, like the leg of a mummy, and its swaddling looked less than clean. I had a vision of gangrene and suppressed it at once.

“First things first!” said Genny. “Have a doughnut.”

I took one, then another, eager to hide my discomfort. “These are delicious, Aunt Genny,” I said, and I meant it. They had a peppery flavor I’d never encountered before.

“I’m glad you like them, Waldy. Have another.”

“Thanks, Aunt Genny.” I chewed for a while. “The Archive sure has, um, expanded.”

“
Hasn’t
it?” she said. “I’m so pleased you noticed.”

I stood awkwardly beside the settee as I ate, looking everywhere but at that leg of hers. I was standing, Mrs. Haven, because there seemed to be nowhere to sit. I’d been tempted by a milk crate near the newsprint-covered window, but I wasn’t sure whether it was furniture or an exhibit of some kind. I still had a lot to learn about the Archive.

“Bring that crate over here,” my aunt said abruptly. “Let’s have a nice long look at you.” She waited for me to sit, then added, more quietly: “I have a confession to make, Waldemar. Your aunt Enzie and I think about you every day.”

We sat in total silence while I thought of a reply. I wondered—not for the first time—what importance I could possibly have for two elderly shut-ins who’d seen me only twice since I was born. It seemed more than a strictly auntly sort of interest.

“Did you make these doughnuts yourself?” I said finally.

“What! Those things?” Genny said, chuckling. “I found them in a paper bag at Park and Ninety-Seventh.”

Even all these years later, Mrs. Haven, I feel proud of my reaction. I gave a businesslike nod, forced myself to keep chewing, then slid the uneaten portion of the doughnut into the pocket of my parka. If Genny noticed this maneuver, she didn’t let on.

“What happened to your foot, Aunt Genny?”

“You’re sweet to be concerned, dear. An occupational hazard. A minor landslide in the beaux arts section.”

“Who does the shopping now?”

“
Why,
I
do, of course. Enzie could never manage by herself.”

“But how do you make it outside?”

She settled back comfortably on the settee. “If you don’t like the place where you find yourself, Waldemar, it pays to remember that you’ll be somewhere else in just a moment. The place itself will
be
a different place.” She gave a catlike grin. “There’s always more than one way out. Remember that.”

I was about to ask what she meant when Enzie appeared with my father trailing after, looking as though he’d spent the intervening minutes sucking on a lime.

“Enzie tells me it was your idea,” he snarled.

“They came to
us
, Peanut,” Genny replied equably. “They came here, to One Hundred and Ninth Street, and they asked us nicely. That’s more than you ever did.”

“Fuck you,” said my father. “Fuck you both.”

I’d expected a showdown of some kind, of course, but not this kind of showdown. I tried to blend in with the wall behind me.

“You’re upset, Orson,” Enzie said, making no attempt to hide her satisfaction. “It sits poorly with you that we persist in our work, after you’ve so bravely washed your hands of it in public. It sits poorly with you, after you’ve repeatedly refused to advocate for the Accidents—the vocation you were born to, and trained in, and which brought you your fame—that we should accept assistance from another quarter. We can understand your feelings very well.”

“You’ve been used,” wheezed my father. “They couldn’t get my endorsement, so they settled for yours.”

“That’s true, Peanut!” said Genny. “They used us—and we used them in return. Isn’t that quite the best way?”

“They’re a
cult
, for fuck’s sake!”

“That’s right, Orson,” said Enzie. “And an effective one, as far as we can gather.”

He closed his eyes. “That movie is a steaming pile of—”

“We’ll have to disagree on that point, I’m afraid. Genny and I went through the screenplay very carefully. The plot may be a little
kindisch
, but the words are all in order.”

My father’s answer was so extravagantly filthy that it made my eyes water.

“It was that woman who wrote the screenplay, Peanut. We just made sure that the science was correct.”

“Science?” he bellowed. “You call that
drivel
science?”

A hush fell instantly. Even Orson seemed to know he’d said too much. For all his contempt for my aunts’ theories, for all the fierceness of his opposition, I noticed again that he was wary of upsetting them too deeply. What’s he afraid of? I wondered. What have they got on him?

It was fascinating to sit quietly in that devastated room, looking from face to face, waiting for hostilities to resume. These three people grew up in the same house, I found myself thinking. These three people were once dear to one another.