The Lost Time Accidents (61 page)

Dearest Waldemar!

Nearly six years have passed since your visit to Harlem: enough time to do a bit of growing up. How much you’ve grown since that time? this is what we’ve been wondering. Your father has sent us
pictures
one small picture of you, unfortunately something out of focus. You look, as far as we can tell, like an American adult—meaning rather too “fleischig.” Remember to keep fit for the little girls!

But we’re interested in other manner of changes, your aunt Enzie and I. Can you think for yourself yet, Waldemar, or are you still your father’s “schlemiel”? This is one thing we are curious about. For this reason we include a little “Märchen.”

An old man goes to sleep one night and has a funny dream.

He dreams that he arrives at his workplace, ready to begin the day’s business, and finds his desktop strewn with cherry pits. There are pits in the drawers, on the floor, even under his heels.

Once the desk has been cleared, the old man’s work goes well. It goes so well, in fact, that after only a few hours he gives himself a holiday. He takes his lunch as usual, savoring every bite, then goes for a walk along a cobbled street, congratulating himself on his success.

A car surprises him in the dream, and he wakes up.

A few hours after waking, the man arrives at his workplace and finds his desktop strewn with cherry pits. One of his assistants (a teenaged boy!) has left them there.

Another man might prefer to dismiss these events—to attribute them to happenstance, or to an attack of nerves, or even to mystical sight. This old man does none of these things. He approaches the problem as a man of science would. There is meaning hidden here, and he will find it.

He has had such dreams before, he begins to recall. He has always chosen to dismiss them, as everyone else does, since such dreams are offensive to Reason. But this time the old man has a different idea. What if—he asks himself—this thing that has happened is not, in fact, odd or uncommon at all? What if it’s not a freakish occurrence, but an everyday one? What if it happens to all of us, virtually every night, while we’re asleep?

What if the Universe is, as other men of science have conjectured, spread out across
Time
as well as Space? What if the partial view we have—a view with the Future mysteriously missing, kept from the ever-expanding Past by the rolling windowpane we call the Present—is the effect of a
mentally imposed barrier
, one that functions only while we are awake?

This might explain the dream of the cherry pits, the old man thinks. He was seeing into the Future while he dreamt, as the driver of an automobile looks across a bridge that he has yet to cross.

Applying the principle of Occam’s razor, he now pares his theory down to its essentials. If, in fact, the Universe is—as some scientists claim—composed of at least
four
dimensions, why can we fully perceive only three? What if the Attention of the dreamer, obeying no rules but the rules of association and chance, travels back and forth across the Present/Past membrane at will?

The longer he considers this point, the more absurd it seems that our movement should be restricted in this so-called Fourth Dimension, when we enjoy such freedom in the others. If we travel with the prevailing wind through Time, like children adrift in the hold of a pilotless yacht, it can only be, he decides, because we haven’t learned to take our bearings yet. The sea, after all, looks the same in every direction—it’s easy to find oneself sailing in circles. Why should our voyages through the chronosphere be any different?

The old man is taking his afternoon stroll when this idea arrives, and its significance is clear to him at once. It represents the summit of his rational duration. His discovery will shake the scientific world to its foundations.

He is ambling over the cobblestones, congratulating himself on this stroke of good fortune, when a car comes rolling up the street and kills him.

If you understand this much, Waldemar, you might be old enough. Are you old enough, finally? If you are then come along and see us.

ET & GT

XXVI

IN THE FALL
of my third year at Ogilvy, Mrs. Haven, my father joined the Church of Synchronology. We didn’t find out until later, the Kraut and myself, because he didn’t stick around to clue us in. My mother had gone down to the basement one wet November afternoon, to check for flooding in the boiler room, and also to bring Orson the weird red South African tea (Redbush? Roy’s Bus?
Rouge-Bouche?
) that he always insisted on drinking, only to find the door of his office wide open and its floor and bookshelves in a shocking state. The shelves were dust-free and immaculate, the drafting table had been neatly clapped together, and the purple shag rug with the Möbius-strip pattern actually looked as if it might have been shampooed. The man she was married to would have been appalled. She stood transfixed in the doorway with her mouth hanging open, swaying lightly in place, like a scientist who’s had a sudden breakthrough. She felt sure, in that moment, that she’d never see Orson again.

In later years, the Kraut would come to wonder how her husband could have vanished so utterly, with a roomful of books and papers and typewriters, in the course of a day she’d spent almost entirely at home; but at the time the question barely crossed her mind. She called the police but hung up as soon as the dispatcher answered, feeling ashamed without quite knowing why. She called me at Ogilvy and left a rambling message, full of cleaning tips and Cheektowaga gossip, that made no mention of my father’s disappearance. What surprised her most, she told me afterward, was her relative composure. Being a woman of science, she put this down to denial, and braced herself for the inevitable hair-tearing, teeth-gnashing hysterics.

She was still waiting, two and a half weeks later, when I arrived home for Thanksgiving.

I found her at the kitchen counter, the picture of bland domesticity, peeling a heap of fingerling potatoes. “
There
you are, Waldy,” she said. “Orson’s gone.”

Somehow I understood her instantly. “To Znojmo?” (A visit to his father’s birthplace—followed, if all went well, by application for political asylum in the Czech Republic—had been a hobbyhorse of Orson’s recently.)

She smiled to herself and kept peeling. “I doubt it.”

“Where to, then? To Harlem?”

“I’ve spoken to your aunts—both of them. They haven’t heard from him in months.” Her smile stiffened slightly. “They suggested I might try the Fuzzy Fruits.”

“That can’t be true,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

The Kraut didn’t answer. She was still, at just past forty, a singularly beautiful woman, at least to me. It was painful to see her so chastened.

“Why the hell would he want to go
there
? Why to the Iterants, in the name of all that’s holy?”

“In the name of all that’s holy,” the Kraut repeated. She gave an airless little laugh. “What a funny choice of words. That must be it.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve been calling your father a prophet for years. What middle-aged man wouldn’t like the sound of that?”

Neither of us spoke for a time.

“Is there gas in your car?” she said, setting her knife down abruptly. When the Kraut decided a subject was finished, Mrs. Haven, she wrung its neck without remorse and tossed it in the river. There was no going back for her, only ahead. She was like the nineteenth-century chronoverse that way.

I nodded. “Half a tank.”

“Excellent! We need to buy a turkey.”

*   *   *

For reasons I can’t entirely describe, Mrs. Haven, those four days with the Kraut were as pleasant as any I’d passed in that house. For the first time since I’d been a toddler, the two of us had the place entirely to ourselves, an extended weekend’s worth of idle hours, and an almost mystical ability to see each other as we were. The quirks that had driven me bonkers for years—her way of looking past you when she spoke, her sitcom-Nazi accent, her earsplitting, glass-cutting laugh—now somehow had the opposite effect. I’d taken her for granted as a child, the way spoiled children will—she was so constant, so effective, so
elemental
that she was often hard to see. Orson had always been sharply in focus, never anywhere but front and center, the cardinal or potentate or dragon in the foreground of the painting; my mother, by contrast, was the fortress in the distance, or the range of sky-blue mountains, or the gauzy blue dome of the sky itself.

The chicken-sized turkey we ended up buying was our single concession to the holiday spirit. We ate it from sheets of tinfoil spread out on the counter, along with Triscuits and cans of Genessee Cream Ale.

“So what happens now?” I asked her, feeling worldly and urbane. “Will you guys get divorced?”

She laughed. “He hasn’t left me for a woman, Waldy. He’s left me for himself.”

“Does he really believe all that UCS horseshit?”

“I hope so, for his sake. Otherwise it won’t be very fun.”

“Maybe he’s trying to infiltrate the Iterants, to figure them out—to study them from the inside.” My voice had gone childish. “Maybe this is about the Accidents.”

“The Accidents?” She looked at me sharply. “Who’s been talking to you about that?”

“There’s a mystery about them—Orson told me that much. I know they’re supposed to be some kind of code, but no one understands what for. I know they’re why my great-grandfather died.”

The Kraut heaved a sigh. “If they’re code for anything at all, sweetheart, it’s self-delusion. For all the good that ridiculous phrase has done this family, it might as well have been written by a chimpanzee on a banana peel.”

“But don’t you think there’s a chance—”

“I’d rather talk about something else.” She pursed her lips. “Your future, for example.”

“Groan.”

“You’ll have to declare a major soon, and—”

“I’ve already declared a major.”

That surprised her. “What is it?”

“History.”

“History?”

I gave a solemn nod.

“History!” the Kraut repeated. “I’ll be damned.”

The relief in her voice was unmistakable. I hadn’t said writing or panhandling or gunrunning or—God forbid!—physics. I’d said the first thing that had popped into my head, Mrs. Haven, to tell you the truth. But I liked the sound of it.

“You’ll have to write some kind of thesis, won’t you?” the Kraut said, once she’d recovered her bearings. “The challenge of history, I’ve always thought, is that the field is so big. You’ve got millennia of stupidity and hysteria to choose from.”

“I’ve thought about that, too,” I told her. “I’m going to stick to the hysteria I know.”

“Very good,” she said, taking a thoughtful sip of her beer. “Write what you know.”

She was wondering what the hell that meant, of course, and so was I.

Looking back, it’s clear to me that I had this chronicle in mind already, though neither of us knew it at the time—at least not consciously. This was part of what made that weekend so extraordinary: we were able to chatter on about the future happily, to treat it as a glowing white unknown, free of any fear of its petrifying blankness. We had no need of tarock cards or exclusion bins. The one thing we knew about the future was that it was likely to be—that it
had
to be—different from the past. That was all we knew, Mrs. Haven, but it was enough.

It dawned on me gradually, as the hours and days passed, that my mother had plans of her own, and that some of them were intricately plotted; which could only mean she’d seen the end approaching. She wanted—after a twenty-year hiatus—to finish her doctorate, if possible at the University of Vienna. I bluffed my way through these conversations, nodding and frowning as if deep in thought, doing my best to hide my wonderment. The Kraut would be returning to Europe, she told me, and possibly not coming back. It occurred to me at one point—I think it was late Sunday morning, eating apricot
palatschinken
in the kitchen—that I’d never before seen her so happy.

“It’s for the best that he left, then,” I said tentatively. “I can’t see Orson moving to Vienna.”

The Kraut didn’t answer.

“He was a good father, basically,” I continued. “I know he meant well. But sometimes days would go by—more than days—when I didn’t understand a single word he said. He’s like—” I hesitated. “I don’t really know what. I guess he’s like Enzie and Genny.”

“You’re right,” said the Kraut. “He’s
exactly
like them.”

“That’s what I can’t figure out. Why is it that no one’s like Orson but Enzie and Genny, and no one’s like Enzie and Genny but him?”

She said nothing to that. But she looked as though she wanted to say something.

“You must have thought about this, Ursula. It must have occurred to you, some time or other, that there was—I mean, that there was kind of an unusual—”

The Kraut took my hand in both of hers and stared at me. “You’re too close to see it,” she said. “How
could
you see it? It’s all you’ve ever known.”

I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. “What is it,” I said carefully, “that I’m too close to see?”

“Don’t you understand yet, Waldy, that your family is mentally ill?”

*   *   *

I arrived back at Ogilvy flush with high-minded purpose, having managed to convince myself on the three-hour drive back from Buffalo that I was a budding connoisseur of human history. Tabitha and pot and social paranoia, not to mention the UCS in all its forms and guises, were the stuff of my personal past. I was determined to call my own bluff, to focus my fractured attention into a photon beam of sober inquiry: to get to work on my thesis immediately, or at least to start going to class.

All of which might actually have happened, Mrs. Haven, if C*F*P had only looked the other way.