The Lost Time Accidents (60 page)

“I don’t know, Mr. Walter,” Artur said quietly. A look of something like compassion crossed his face.

“You have to realize, Artur, that my family has been trying to make sense of this ‘comedy,’ as you call it, for the last hundred years. The last
hundred
years, do you understand me? People have wasted entire life spans trying to extract meaning from it. Crimes have been committed, Artur. All to answer this one riddle.”

Artur scratched his nose, considering what I’d told him.

“But why?”

In place of a reply, my tongue found the hollow where my molar had been. I thought of you, Mrs. Haven, and of your husband, and of his airplane, and of the whole belief system that had sprung, however crookedly, from a few words scribbled on a sheet of paper.

“What about the mathematics?” I said, sinking down onto the tiles. “What about the algebra—the third page, that proof? Are you going to tell me that was nonsense, too?”

“No,” Artur said, looking suddenly frightened. “No. That proof was not a portion of the
vtip
.”

“Then even if you’re telling me the truth—even if the letter is gibberish, a meaningless joke—that still leaves the math. And don’t tell me Ottokar wrote
that
for his mistress.”

Artur bowed his head. “That’s the second thing I have to tell. That leaves the math, as you say. But I made certain changes.”

I’ll confess to you, Mrs. Haven, that I could have killed him then. I sat on my hands to keep them from closing around his dumpling-colored neck.

“Certain changes?” I said.

He bobbed his head quickly. “Before I brought the box—when I was listening to you through the wall. I stood the ∞s up straight—all of them. I turned them into eights.”

“Why did you do that, Artur?”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. “I told you,” he said. “I did not care for that woman.”

Monday, 09:05 EST

It’s been seven sleep cycles since I saw the Timekeeper. I’ve been making regular expeditions to the bedroom and the kitchen, his usual haunts—but the contents of the fridge remain constant, and there’s been no change in his imprint on the bed.

Chances are good, Mrs. Haven, that he’ll never come back. With every iteration he’s looked more spent, less recognizable, like a joke that grows more garbled with each telling. His travels through the chronosphere seem to be distorting his body, buckling and inflating it grotesquely; or maybe it’s my perception that’s distorting. There seems to be no way for me to tell.

By now, I’m guessing, you’ve decided that I’ve imagined Waldemar, called him into being as a tonic for my loneliness and lust for resolution: that the distortions I’m seeing are caused by my imperfect memory, forced to recall his features time and time again, like the dubbing and redubbing of some overplayed cassette. It’s the likeliest explanation, I can’t deny that—but its likelihood no longer troubles me. After all, Mrs. Haven, I called you into being the same way.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about my family by setting down this history, it’s that the zone of so-called objectivity—whatever, and wherever, and whenever that may be—has always been a foreign country to us. But the great compensation of madness, as every madman knows, is that it keeps its victim company. If my own brain gave birth to the Timekeeper, in other words, why should I scorn him for it? Who’s to say that it makes him less true?

XXV

AT LONG LAST, MRS. HAVEN
, college happened.

Back in Orson’s day—as he never tired of reminding me—a towheaded American youth of no particular ambition could sidestep higher education altogether and still be regarded as sentient; by the time I left for college, even aspiring pheromone dealers were expected to earn their BAs. This was less for educational purposes, according to my father, than as a means of establishing credit: in late twentieth-century America, he argued, you existed in proportion to your debt.

My freshman-year roommate, Karl Hornbanger, carried Orson’s argument to its logical extreme, proposing to the registrar that he assume debt directly in exchange for his diploma, dispensing with his coursework altogether. “They call them ‘credits’ for a reason, Tolliver,” he used to say, as we were falling asleep on our rubberized sanitarium-surplus mattresses. “The truth is right there in the open, beating the air with its giant batwings, for anyone with the soup-and-nuts to look.” Hornbanger dropped out of school eighteen months later (which didn’t surprise anyone) to work in foreclosures in Miami-Dade. By all accounts he leads a happy life.

*   *   *

Ogilvy College (“The Sorbonne of Butternut Country”) played its own modest role in the aforementioned grift, gamely parting its gates to those spurned by the Ivy League for their lack of ambition or pedigree. It had once been the Lake Erie terminus of a branch of the underground railroad, and thus had a time-honored tradition of comforting the wretched, which I’m not ashamed to say included me. I was foaming at the mouth when I arrived, in a fever to get my puberty behind me, to relinquish all rights and privileges pertaining to my Cheektowaga self. By my third semester I had clavicle-length hair and a “math rock” band that I played “tape loops” in (The Educated Consumers) and an elementary grasp of the principles of cause and effect—which came in handy, Mrs. Haven, because I’d also found a girl.

Every male of the species, I’m fairly sure, is flabbergasted by the first woman who doesn’t run from him in bug-eyed horror, and goes on to suffer a kind of blissful PTSD for months thereafter—but even after adjusting for my near-total lack of sexual intelligence (not to mention my overall state of shock), Tabitha Guy was inexplicable. She was ferally at ease in her own body, as if she’d never heard of either Testament; she was pale and plump and up for almost anything. She had hair in her armpits the color of honey. She was a black studies major. And out of some occult motive—some faux-political agenda, some inscrutable kink—she was willing to lower her overalls for me (her
corduroy
overalls!) in the lockable single-stall bathroom on the fourth floor of the Clay Undergraduate Library, less than an hour before I caught the bus home for Thanksgiving.

“You can give thanks for
that
, Tolliver,” she announced when it was over. “Waldy? Look at me, Waldy. How soon are you going to be sick?”

The loss of my virginity enlightened me on a number of points that everyone else seemed to know already, such as the fact that it’s possible, for short periods of time, to go agreeably insane. Thanksgiving break that year was an extended hallucinogenic odyssey for which all the necessary psychoactive compounds were produced by my own stunned metabolism. I remember only three things about it with any clarity: Orson’s forced-seeming cheer, the Kraut’s puzzling remoteness, and a letter to me from my aunts—the first one in years—that I used as a bookmark instead of opening. I might as well have spent that week inside of Enzie’s plywood crate.

Tabitha’s surrender stood as the defining singularity of my duration—at least until spring term started, when it practically became an hourly event. She surrendered to me on the futon of her “divided double” in the all-girls wing of Jodorowsky Hall; she surrendered in the coed showers of my dorm, cool and arch-backed and sudsy, like a hooker in a made-for-cable movie; she surrendered pretty much anywhere, in private and in public, without even considering it surrender. For my part, I partook ravenously, hysterically, certain that my luck was temporary. I was availing myself of some providential oversight, some dimple in the cosmic status quo, and I knew that a correction would be made before too long.

What I didn’t suspect, Mrs. Haven—not even in my wildest fits of adolescent mania—was that I would make the correction myself.

I can’t say when I first got wind of the Ogilvy Synchronology Society, known unofficially around campus—for appropriately cryptic reasons—as the Stuttering Few. No one took the SFs seriously except the SFs themselves, who took their society so excruciatingly seriously that they never spoke its name aloud or publicized their meetings. This was rote cult behavior, of course, but it also made practical sense: self-promotion was risky at Ogilvy, especially if you were into something geeky. The Ogilvy Middle-Earth Collective (the “Elfdiddlers,” in Ogilvy-speak) had learned this the hard way the previous spring. In the hope of attracting fresh blood to their weekly Helm’s Deep reenactments in the college arboretum, they’d plastered the campus in Celtic-lettered flyers:

HEAR YE! HEAR YE!

ALL YE STEADFAST OF BROADSWORD

AND NIMBLE OF BOW!

ALL YE
YEOMEN
OF VIRTUE!

THE HOUR IS AT HAND.

COME DO BATTLE WITH
ORKS
IN THE ARB.

All it had taken to undo their good work was one unbeliever with a Sharpie, a few idle hours, and the idea of prefacing
ORKS
with an uppercase
D.
The Elfdiddlers never recovered.

I’d have managed to ignore the Ogilvy Synchronology Society altogether, I think, if it hadn’t been for Tabitha Guy. It happened by the ruthless whim of C*F*P: as Tabitha and I reclined on her mattress one midwinter evening, both of us smug and sweat-soaked and (temporarily) immortal, I noticed a dog-eared pamphlet on the floor. Its bottom half was wedged under the bedframe, and the author’s name—in a Celtic-looking font, if I remember correctly—was badly smudged, but its title was plain, even in the lava lamp’s slithering light:

THE HOUR IS AT HAND.

THE HOUR ***ALWAYS*** IS AT HAND.

& SO CAN YOU!

The jumbled-clock symbol of the UCS was stamped underneath, not quite centered on the page, but I didn’t need to see it. I could smell an Iterant a mile away by then, Mrs. Haven, if the wind was blowing right. Or so I’d always let myself believe.

“What’s this?” I said to Tabitha, as nonchalantly as I could. She scratched one honey-colored armpit and emitted a coo.

“Tabitha. Hey.”

“I’m trying to sleep, bunny. What do you want?”

I jerked the pamphlet free of the mattress, biting back my paranoia, and laid it across the humid sheet between us. “I asked you about this—” I hesitated, not sure what to call the thing. “This
literature.”

“Oh! That,” she said, yawning. Her yawn struck me as false: it seemed too athletic, too studied. “I’ve been meaning to show that to you, actually. There’s some trippy shit in there.”

I’d told Tabitha nothing about my history with the Iterants. This wasn’t because I distrusted her, necessarily, but because of the vow I’d sworn to bury the teenaged iteration of Waldy Tolliver alive, along with his retainer and his collection of
Timestrider
memorabilia and the green knickerbockers his parents had dressed him up in before he was old enough to reason for himself. I was less a “new man” at college, psychosocially speaking, than a man who’d demolished his identity and reassembled the rubble along wildly incongruous lines, thereby becoming both his own executioner and his own parent. (Unlikely as this sounds, the Church of Synchronology preaches that just such a wonder is possible, once the time-consuming—and costly—Seventeenth Level of Iteration has been reached.) But we tamper with the weft of the universe at our peril, Mrs. Haven, as I was about to discover. I was beginning to suspect that the Tolliver/Toulas had had things backward from the very beginning: we’d brought our combined wills to bear on escaping our past, when the future was the thing we should have run from.

*   *   *

I didn’t tell Tabitha about the Iterants the night I found that pamphlet, either, though it would have been the perfect occasion. I didn’t tell her over the course of that next week, during which period I grew steadily more guarded and suspicious; and I didn’t tell her that following Saturday—exactly seven days from our first and only conversation about the UCS—when I suggested that we “spend some time apart.”

I felt sick to my stomach as I watched the meaning of that hateful phrase register on her lovely face; but I also felt jaded and cosmopolitan, master of my emotions—the tragic, stiff-lipped, self-denying hero. This is what adults do, I assured myself coolly. In reality I was terrified, hopelessly out of my depth, gnawed to ribbons by a frantic, all-purpose jealousy that had no fixed target and therefore applied to everything I saw. Tabitha Guy had been an Iterant all along: I saw that clearly now. Why else would someone so exquisite have allowed my piggish fingers to besmirch her?

*   *   *

Right or wrong, Mrs. Haven, the rest of sophomore year confirmed this theory nicely. Girls recoiled from me as if I still had green knickerbockers on, or my entire face were covered in lipstick, or I’d invited them to fight dorks in the Arb. Friends ran out of patience with my customized blend of paranoia and self-pity almost instantly—with the exception of Hornbanger, who never listened to me very closely—and before long I was spending my nights in the periodicals reading room on the third floor of Clay, combing back issues of
Galaxy Science Fiction
for mentions of my father and trying not to think about the lockable single-stall bathroom one flight up.
Galaxy
loathed the works of Orson Card Tolliver—it hated all of his books, soft- and hard-core alike—with a dedication I found oddly soothing. (Sample quote: “Mr. Tolliver writes his novels for the ages. The ages between five and eleven.”) After a couple of weeks, however, even the periodicals reading room began to lose its charm.

TV helped for a while, until it suddenly didn’t; and the same with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and pornography and pot. Within a month I was gripped by the life-or-death need, well known to junkies and AA members (and regular garden-variety obsessives), for something louder than the whinging of my brain. Which is how I came to be sitting cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room one Saturday night—moderately high and bored out of my skull, but too afraid of my own thoughts to fall asleep—staring down at the unopened letter from Enzie and Genny that I’d been using as a bookmark. I opened it, Mrs. Haven, and it worked right away. By the second time through I wasn’t even stoned.