The Lost Time Accidents (63 page)

I said nothing to this, either. I never should have come. I realized that now.

Orson squinted at me. “Why’d you come here, Jack? Is there something you want?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Don’t shit a shitter.”

“I’m not—” I stopped myself. “To be honest, I need your advice.”

“I suspected as much.” He grabbed a lever on his armrest and winched himself upright. He seemed like Orson to me now, or close enough. “What’s the nature of the problem? Is it money? Is it girls?”

“Neither, actually. I wanted—”

“It
isn’t
girls? Why the hell not?”

“What I really—”

“You’re not an
enculeur
, are you? A French pastry baker? A swish?”

“Orson, I’m not even sure what that means.”

“Never mind.” He tugged at his beard. “How’s this for a potential course of action. Why don’t you tell me what the fuck you want.”

“I want to talk about the Timekeeper.”

“The which?”

“Waldemar Gottfriedens von Toula, the Black Timekeeper of Czas.” I waited until his bleary eyes met mine. “I’ve got a feeling that he might still be alive.”

“A
feeling
, eh?”

Something in his sidelong glance encouraged me. I told him, as quickly as I could, about my revelation in the media lounge at Ogilvy. Hearing the words as I spoke them, I realized they sounded absurd, even childish; but Orson, for once, gave me his full attention. When I’d finished, he wiped his nose and turned back to the window.

“Well, Orson?” I said. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s ridiculous.”

He was right, of course—it
was
ridiculous. I practically laughed with relief. “You really do?”

“Of course I do.” He shook his head. “I said the same thing to the First Listener yesterday.”

I bit down on my thumb to keep from shouting. Orson stared imperturbably out through the glass.

“Come on over here, Jack. I’ll show you where I get
my
feelings from.”

I joined him at the window. On the lawn behind the villa, in diaphanous dresses that managed to look ethereal and uncomfortable at once, two stoned-looking redheads with sixties-style beehives were pulling up weeds. Their trim, sweating haunches made twin egg-shaped prints through the cloth.

“Orson,” I said, taking hold of his arm. “Look at me for a second. I know you have no reason to help me with this, other than the fact that I’m your son—”

“My
alleged
son.”

“—but I need to know what Haven said to you about the Timekeeper. If the Iterants have hit on the same idea, then there has to be a reason, don’t you see? Waldemar had carte blanche in that camp of his, and all the room and resources he needed. If it’s true that he escaped, when the Soviets came, by slipping out through a hole in the fabric of—”

“Haven’s a cult leader, Waldy. A
cult leader
. Don’t you get what that means?”

“I know what he is. But if—let’s say
if
—we track Waldemar down, we could finally put an end to all of this. To everything that’s gone wrong with us—as a family, I mean—for the last hundred years. We’d be doing humanity—”

“Ah!” my father said. “Of course.
Humanity
.”

I took hold of his arm. “I’ll tell you what I think, Orson. I think our curse doesn’t have anything to do with the Lost Time Accidents at all. Our troubles began with Waldemar—not with his father or the Patent Clerk or anybody else. We’ve been ashamed for generations now, ashamed and paranoid and isolated, and
not
because we can’t figure out some nonsense scribbled in a notebook. All your grandfather did, really, was get hit by a car. But his son—your own uncle, Orson—killed hundreds of people, possibly even thousands. Our curse is that we’ve looked the other way.”

Orson shifted in his armchair and said nothing.

“But if we can catch him—are you listening?—we could finally start over.” I let go of his arm. “I need your help, Orson. I think he’s somewhere in the present, in the
now
. Maybe somewhere close by.”

He was looking at me again, not at the jailbait out on the lawn. His eyes were wider than I’d ever seen them.

“It’s in you,” he murmured. “It skipped a generation—thank God!—but now you’re infected.” He gripped the peeling arms of his recliner. “I can see it on you, Waldy, and I can hear it in your voice. I can practically
smell
it coming off you.”

“What are you talking about?” I murmured, though of course I knew perfectly well.

My father covered his eyes. “In spite of everything—everything I did, since you were small, to keep you safe—the Accidents have got you.” A muffled sob escaped him. “Enzie told me, the first time I brought you to see her. She
knew.
‘There’s nothing to be done,’ she said to me. ‘It’s in the genes.’”

“The Kraut told me the same thing,” I said. “She thinks our whole family is mentally ill.”

“Smart lady, your mother. She’s right—I’m the only exception.”

“She doesn’t quite see it that way.”

For an instant he looked genuinely pained. “I can’t help what she thinks. Not anymore.”

Looking down at my father then, swaddled in his seedy recliner like the ailing, aging pervert that he was, it struck me that I finally understood him. He’d been abused in his time, disparaged and manipulated and underpaid, and even—once the Fuzzy Fruits had gotten to him—hounded; but until recently he’d never been ignored. His heart attack had been a sign to him, a harbinger, a marker of the passing of his prime. Each new novel had sold slightly worse than the last;
starporn
was a dated term now, rarely made use of even as a slight; the Kraut’s attention had migrated back to her work, and his son seemed to have checked out altogether. Greater men than Orson Card Tolliver have converted late in life—most, I’m guessing, for similar reasons. At least my father was converting to a religion he’d invented.

“What did you think of the mural?” he said, cheerful again. “I’m assuming you’ve seen it. They show everybody.”

“I meant to ask about that, actually. The faces are human, but the bodies look like—”

“You’ll have to ask Miss Greer. She painted it.”

“Miss Greer?” This took me a few seconds to process. “Do you mean that lady downstairs?”

Orson nodded.

“What is Miss Greer, exactly? Is she some kind of church administrator, or—”

“Miss Greer is a synthetic human being.”

“What?”

He eased his La-Z-Boy backward and puffed out his chest. “Miss Greer is an android—
Auto sapiens
, to use the industry term—created for my pleasure and relief.”

As I recall it, Mrs. Haven, right here was where my tolerance reached its limit. If my father was playing a game of some kind, I wanted no part of it; and the other possibility—that he was demented, or high, or insane, as the Kraut seemed to think—was more than I was willing to accept. I’d come to the Villa Ouspensky with some underbaked notion of bringing him home—even freeing him by force, if necessary—but now I saw this for the pipe dream that it was. There was nothing more that I could do for him.

“I’m going to ask you one last thing, if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead, Jack! Fire away.” He made six-shooter gestures at me with both hands.

“What made you leave the Kraut like that?”

He frowned. “Like what, exactly?”

“Like a coward.”

The Orson I’d known would have blown his stack at this, rightly or wrongly; the current Orson heaved a wistful sigh. “She’s a tough one, your mother—you know that yourself. She’d have demanded to know
why
I was going away, and I’d have had no answer for her.” He took my shoulder and squeezed it. “None that wouldn’t have caused her distress.”

Something snapped in me then, Mrs. Haven. Strung out and/or senile though my father may have been, I wanted to kick his nicotine-stained teeth down the back of his throat.

“You know something, Orson? That’s not a good enough reason. Not even close. As a matter of fact, it’s a goddamn—”

“Also, there were extenuating circumstances,” he cut in, as though the notion had only just occurred to him. “I’d learned, on the previous morning, that my current iteration has come due.”

“Spare me the cult-speak. What I want from you is a straightforward—”

“Cancer of the small intestine. Stage three, whatever that means.” He beamed up at me. “That straightforward enough?”

A particle of dust turned in the sunlit air between us. The wallpaper, which was coming loose around the soot-grimed window, was patterned with tiny, shabby-looking fleurs-de-lis. Everything in that awful room was shabby, my father included, and everything outside was clear and bright.

“So that’s it?” I croaked, my throat thick, my voice breaking. “So that’s it, Dad? You’re going to die?”

“That appears to be the general consensus.” He shifted in his chair and closed his eyes. “I’ve never been all that troubled by dying, to tell you the truth. Must be my natural aversion to cliché.”

*   *   *

I’d expected the Iterants to hold me prisoner in the villa, or at least to detain me until Haven arrived, but they did no such thing. The house seemed deserted when I left Orson’s room, the way it had seemed when I’d first been let in, and I sat on the second-floor landing with my head in my hands for what felt like a very long time. Our talk had left me hollow and weak, as if my organs had been harvested—discreetly and painlessly—while my father rambled and evaded my questions.

When my nausea had passed I continued downstairs without caring who saw me. I was reaching for the front door when an elegant white hand closed around my wrist.

“One moment, Mr. Tolliver.”

I turned to face her, prepared for the worst, and saw to my surprise that she looked frightened. She smelled—faintly but unmistakably—of hairspray and coffee and sweat. So much for the “synthetic human” theory.

“Let go of me, Miss Greer. I’m not my father.”

“Let’s suppose, Mr. Tolliver, that there’s a tiny grain of truth to your idea. Not an
enormous
grain, mind you, but just enough. There would likely be people—individuals, or even entire groups—who’d have an interest in keeping that truth to themselves.” Her voice dropped so low that I could barely hear her. “Don’t go to the General Lee. It’s being watched.”

“What do you mean?” I said, feeling queasy again. “Who’s watching it?”

“You don’t need to go to Harlem, Waldy. Use your head a little. You’re a history major. You ought to
know
where to go next.”

“I’m trying to come up with a reason to trust you, Miss Greer.”

“Do you think you’re the only one—you and the rest of your family—with an interest in turning back time?”

She glanced quickly over her shoulder, then unlocked the door and pulled it smoothly open. I stepped out onto the stoop, feeling as though anything in the world might happen next. It ought to have been a good feeling, Mrs. Haven, but it wasn’t.

“Can I ask you why you’re telling me all this?”

She gave a clipped laugh. “I’m in love with your father. Is that so hard to imagine?”

“It is, actually. What’s in it for you?”

“I had no choice in the matter—I thought you’d been informed. I’m an autobot, created for his pleasure and relief.”

She gave another, harsher laugh and shut the door.

Monday, 09:05 EST

I was on my way back from the bathroom, Mrs. Haven, when I saw him. He lay spread-eagled in the Archive, around a slight crook in the tunnel, and only the heels of his wingtips were visible. His eyes came open when I reached him, identified me, then fell closed again. His face was not a face I recognized. If not for his shoes and his tattered green satchel I might not have known him at all.

“There you are,
Nefflein
,” he managed to rasp. “I’ve been eavesdropping again, as you can see.”

He gestured at his lap, wincing from even that small effort, and I saw my latest pages scattered there. The top few were coated with a fine, slate-gray dust, as though they’d traveled with him a great distance. Some of them were dog-eared at the corners: passages, presumably, that he took issue with. He asked if he might have a drink of water.

When I returned with the water he was sitting upright, or as near as he could manage, and my manuscript lay neatly stacked beside him. He took the glass from me and drained it, then let out a sigh—long and damp and contented—and sucked in enough air to speak.

“Judging by the look on your face,
Nefflein
, you’re asking yourself why I make these visits.”

“You come because of me. I understand that now.”

He nodded. “And because of the book.”

I took the manuscript and leafed through it, fingering the occasional dog-eared corner. “It looks as though you’ve found some more errata.”

“Not at all,” he said, smiling a little. “Those are places where you’ve gotten something right.”

It was the first joke we’d shared, and it seemed to ease his pain, or at least to distract him a little. I refilled his glass and let him drink, in no hurry to ask my next question. I had very few left.

“Tell me what happened at Äschenwald.”

His smile was gone before I’d finished speaking. “No use talking about
that
. I set everything down, clear as day, in my protocols.” His voice cracked. “If you care to consult—”

“Your protocols describe how you did what you did. That doesn’t interest me, Uncle. I want to know why.”

“I’ve told you already.”

“Tell me again.”

He seemed to pull back into the wall of trash behind him. “Why do you persist in the delusion that my crimes are your concern? If our positions were reversed,
Nefflein
, I’d feel no such responsibility—I can assure you of that.”

“That’s the difference between us,” I heard myself say, and I felt the Archive tremble as I spoke. “That’s the difference between us,” I told him again. “That’s why you and I are not the same.”

I had my answer at last, Mrs. Haven, and the Timekeeper knew it.