The Lost Time Accidents (56 page)

“Right you are,
Nefflein
!” He snuffled again. “You’ll have to allow me my fun. I like to tell you what you want to hear.”

“Is anything you’ve told me true? Have you ever time-traveled at all?” I stood over him now. “Answer me, Uncle! Do you even exist?”

He grew thoughtful at that, and his eyes lost the last of their light.

“It’s painful,” he said.

“What does that mean? What’s painful?”

“It’s a
leave-taking
from things,” he went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “The pain comes beforehand, of course—but especially after. While it’s happening you feel nothing at all.”

The mischief drained out of his features as he spoke, and I saw how time-ravaged he was. He looked ready to crumble into a pile of ash, like a Hollywood vampire in the first ray of dawn.

“The pain is more than anyone deserves,” he said in a whisper. “Like the pain of ordinary loss, but compacted—accordioned together. There’s just one thing that makes it bearable.”

I kept my eyes trained on his face, searching for any hint of deceit. I couldn’t help it, Mrs. Haven. I believed him.

“What is it, Uncle? What is that one thing?”

“You forget,
Nefflein
,” he said, bowing his head. “You forget.”

XXIV

MY HIGH SCHOOL YEARS,
Mrs. Haven, are another period I’d rather skip. I was bullied no more than any other ectomorphic stammerer with a time-travel obsession would have been, I’m assuming, but the comfort this brought me was slim. My first and only pre-collegiate experience with girls—a few hours spent guzzling Schlitz and watching
The Day the Earth Stood Still
with my next-door neighbor Esther Fletcher-Suarez—was a defeat on par with the destruction of the United States Marines by Klaatu’s giant robot. When I asked if I could kiss her, Esther—whose pecan-brown face was covered in colorless down, soft and nearly invisible, like the rind of a kissable kiwi—excused herself politely, covered her entire face in lipstick (ears included), and locked herself in the bathroom until I’d left the house.

Orson was in the TV room when I got home, eating Wheat Thins and watching the NBA draft. I’d always assumed that my father possessed privileged, hard-won knowledge of the opposite sex, and I decided to ask him where I’d gone awry. He had opinions about every other aspect of “the Human Experiment,” as he liked to call it. Why not about this?

“That sounds like quite a life event, Waldy,” he said when I’d finished. “I’m happy you had a nice time.”

“You’re happy I what?”

“Want my opinion? You ought to feel honored. It’s probably not every guy she puts on lipstick for.”

“You’re right,” I said. “The other guys she probably makes out with.”

“It was a courtship display, that’s all. A little conjugal theater.” He turned the sound back up on the TV. “Try to put the experience in perspective. It’s not like she’s your first sexual partner.”

“That’s true, Orson,” I said, feeling farther from him than I’d ever felt. “She’s definitely not that.”

We watched the draft for a while. A man named Crumbs had just been drafted by the Heat. The Kraut was doing some late-evening baking in the kitchen: a strudel, to judge by the smell. This usually meant that there had been a fight.

“Mom’s making a strudel,” I said. “What’s that about?”

“No idea.” Orson sighed and hit the mute. “That reminds me. We’ve got some guests coming this weekend.”

“Guests,” I said. “Of course.” We never had guests.

“All right then, son. Glad we had this little mano a mano.”

I kept my gaze trained on the side of his head, telepathically commanding him to turn and meet my eye. He picked his nose and grimaced at the screen.

“Who are the guests, Orson?”

“Haven and some of his people.”

This was said in a casual tone, as though they came to dinner every weekend.

“Haven and some of his people,” I repeated. “The Iterants. The Fuzzy Fruits.”

“Correct.”

I stared at him in dumbstruck silence.

“Don’t give me shit, Waldy. The Kraut’s already run me through the grinder.”

I settled back into the couch, feeling the beer in my bloodstream reassert itself. The sounds from the kitchen were louder now, the aroma more sweet: cinnamon and filo dough and apples. I wanted to lay my head in the Kraut’s floury, buttery lap.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s Haven after?”

“My name,” answered Orson, puffing his chest out involuntarily. “My name and endorsement.”

“Why?”

“As you no doubt recall, my writings form the template—”

“That’s not what I meant. Why would you
give
it to him?”

“You know that, too,” he said, though with slightly less bluster. “Because of my sisters.” He avoided my look. “He’s promised to leave them alone.”

*   *   *

In the handful of years since we’d last seen my aunts, my father and I had discussed that momentous night exactly once, and then only because the Kraut had forced us to. Orson steered clear of the topic for classically Orson-ish reasons, ranging from denial to peevishness to injured pride; I avoided it because it creeped me out. Each time I tried to make sense of what had happened, both in Enzie’s “exclusion bin” and after, I felt an abyss open under my feet. I was too young to be asked to do the things my aunt had asked of me. Odd as my childhood had been—and eccentric, God knows, as my family remained—I’d been raised in a rational household, one in which the laws of science ruled. But my childhood had ended with that trip to Harlem. There are more things in heaven and on earth than reason accedes to, Mrs. Haven, and there was no forgetting what I’d experienced at the General Lee.

I’d heard the story of the Fuzzy Fruits’ first visit a hundred times by then, and I’d seen the First Listener’s tense, athletic face in magazines; even once—extremely briefly—on the news. It was a face better suited to torch-lit trials in some hidden star chamber than to the exigencies of modern-day PR, and no amount of styling gel or cosmetic dentistry could change that. Regardless of what he was doing, no matter how candid or innocuous the photo, Haven always looked as though he’d just stopped screaming. But it wasn’t his inquisitor’s face that disturbed me most deeply, or his army of ghoulish true believers, either. It was the fact that I didn’t have a clue what he wanted—what he wanted from
us
, from my family—and the further fact that Orson seemed to know, but wouldn’t say.

He changed the subject whenever I asked, or turned up the volume on the TV, or glowered at something just over my shoulder, as though a cicada-sized Haven were hovering there. I didn’t buy any of his jabber about the Iterants needing his “endorsement”: Synchronology was the fastest-growing religion in the United States, bar none, and it wasn’t shy about it. Orson was more useful shut away in Cheektowaga than he would have been in any kind of spotlight. The most profitable prophet is a dead one, Mrs. Haven, ecclesiastically speaking. Those who overstay their welcome start to stink.

*   *   *

It was the Kraut who answered the door that fateful Saturday—not out of any sense of wifely decorum, but because Orson refused to come up from the basement. I was mature enough, at fifteen, to be disgusted by his prima donna act: I pictured him skulking down there in his “Myth Creation Station” (as he insisted on calling his office) with a glass of lukewarm rosé in his fist, listening to every move we made upstairs. What I wasn’t old enough to consider, I now realize, was that he might have been as terrified as I was.

The only one who wasn’t terrified—not even remotely—was the Kraut. The bell had barely rung before she’d thrown the door open and advised our callers that Mr. Tolliver would be up presently; in the meantime there was coffee in the den. I took all this in from my post at the top of the stairs.

“Come down here, Waldy,” the Kraut said without turning. “Kindly show our visitors where they can put themselves.”

I’d never heard her use that tone of voice before: it was flat and metallic and brooked no objection. I came downstairs at once. She turned on her toes and marched off to the kitchen, leaving me alone with our guests, none of whom had so far said a word.

There were three of them in the foyer, just as there had been in the Econoline, just as there had been almost sixteen years earlier, the first time they’d come to the house. Two were wearing white leather sneakers with baby-blue treads; one of them—the one in the center—had on a pair of yellow calfskin loafers. All three wore matching wide-wale corduroys, and I realized to my horror—in the precise instant, as C*F*P would have it, that my eyes and
his
eyes met—that I was wearing wide-wale corduroys myself.

“Hello, pal,” the First Listener said. “I like your cords.”

He said it softly, I remember, as though we were alone. His crimped hair was subtly frosted, making him look like a preacher in some California church—the kind with acoustic guitars and headset microphones and not much use for the actual Bible. He looked exactly the way he would look eight years later, standing over me in a sunlit Moravian alley, grinning and wiping the blood from his lips.

“My dad’s in the basement,” I heard myself say.

“We have a ‘thing’ for corduroy, too, as you can see. Can you guess why that is?”

I shook my head woodenly.

“Corduroy, being a material composed of a grouping of parallel lines, performs two services for its wearer simultaneously.” He held up two fingers. “The first is the practical service of keeping him (or her) warm, and shielding him (or her) from the elements, if inclement. The second is an ideological service, if you’ll pardon the expression. It reminds him (or her) of the multiplicity of timestreams running parallel to our own, and of the possibility of congruence between them.”

I blinked at him. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Of course you hadn’t.” He patted my shoulder and slipped gracefully past me. “There are many things you haven’t thought of, Waldemar—not yet. You’re still early in your cycle, after all. But you’ll find yourself considering them soon.”

“What do you mean?”

“The den is just through here, as I recall.”

My instinct was to stop him—to catch him by the scruff of his neck or the collar of his Eddie Bauer blazer (corduroy, of course)—but he was only doing as my mother had suggested. I followed him sullenly into the den.

Haven draped himself across my father’s leopard-print armchair as though he dropped in all the time, while his escort (after a kind of ritual pause, during which I could actually see them counting under their breath) dropped synchronously onto the couch. I knew with absolute certainty, without being able to say
how
I knew, that the configuration was exactly the same as it had been in 1970, when the Fuzzy Fruits had made their shy debut. The only available seat was between the two mouth-breathers on the sofa, so I decided to stay on my feet. Haven wasn’t the least put out by this, as far as I could tell. It’s possible he took it as a gesture of respect.

“Are you a
Timestrider
fan, pal? I’m guessing you are.”

“I couldn’t care less about it.”

“Is that right.”

Silence fell. Haven let out a contented sigh every so often, smiling blandly at the walls and at the ceiling and at me. It was a victory lap for him, this visit; that much was clear.

“Where’s your father, Waldy?”

“My family calls me Waldy.”

“I know that, pal. Where’s your—”

“You’re not my family.”

This was unquestionably the boldest thing I’d said in my duration thus far, but it didn’t have the effect that I’d intended. Haven grinned at the mouth-breathers, showing his teeth; they tittered and nodded, as if I’d just stood up on my hind legs and barked.

“Right you are, pal,” said Haven. “Nicely put.”

He closed his eyes and gave a happy shiver. When he looked at me again I had the sense that something about his face had changed—that his jaw was slightly heavier, or that his eyes had taken on a different tint. I wondered where the hell my father was.

“It doesn’t really matter where the Prime Mover is,” said Haven, as if I’d been speaking aloud. “We didn’t come to see him, after all.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, cursing the quaver in my voice. “Of course you came to see the Prime—of
course
you came to see Orson. My father, I mean.”

Haven shook his head. “That’s the funny thing, Waldy—we didn’t. We came to see you.”

The Kraut rematerialized at that instant, for some reason holding a Warranted Tolliver egg timer, and announced that my father would be receiving his callers downstairs. Haven thanked her politely and got to his feet. I kept perfectly still, staring fixedly down at the sphincterish spots on the leopard-print armchair, watching the imprint of the First Listener’s backside gradually disappear. By the time I’d recovered my composure he was gone.

L
ESS THAN AN HOUR
after the Kraut’s whispered warning, I was sitting in an open second-class car of the Václav Divis Regional from Vienna to Brno, looking past your freckled shoulder at the men across the aisle. Both of them were wearing trench coats, I noticed, and expensive-looking leather driving gloves. The Kraut was right: everyone in this part of Europe looked like a member of the Gestapo.

But no sooner had I had this thought, Mrs. Haven, than the various doubts I’d been suppressing wriggled up into the light. Could that really have been what the Kraut had said? It wasn’t true, of course—the only people who looked like members of the Gestapo were the trench-coat-wearing men across the aisle. My mother was a rational woman, as far as I knew: the single levelheaded member of our family. Why on earth would she have told me that you, of all people, “wished me ill”? Either her brain chemistry had shifted radically or I’d made a grievous error—the most grievous one, by far, of my duration. I could think of no other hypothesis.

To calm myself, I brought out the postcard of Znojmo and studied it, imagining the two of us already there. I recited its doggerel under my breath like a charm: