The Lost Time Accidents (12 page)

His brother was a different matter. The thought of Waldemar getting word of the new theory from anyone else’s lips made Kaspar go dizzy with panic. He couldn’t predict what would happen, couldn’t picture Waldemar’s reaction even dimly, and that blankness was more dreadful than any image could have been. He simply couldn’t form the least idea.

He’d expected to find the villa’s gates locked when he arrived, or at least locked to him; but the hussar let him enter without comment. He found the widow in the unlit parlor, barely visible in the gloom, sitting straight-backed and dour with her hands in her lap. She was waiting for someone, or in attendance on someone, and for a moment Kaspar wondered who it was.

“Good evening, Frau Bemmelmans. Pardon my—”

“He’s upstairs.”

“Where exactly, madame?”

“Upstairs,” the widow said, already looking away.

*   *   *

Kaspar heard Waldemar before he saw him—heard him holding forth in reasoned, deliberate tones, as if explaining something subtle to a child. He followed the sound up three flights of stairs to an unpainted door, turned the handle and let himself in, as if he were at home in that godforsaken place.

He found himself in a high-ceilinged study whose fleur-de-lis wallpaper hung in great tattered folds over the tops of three wardrobes. Through a second door he saw the foot of an unmade cot with a pair of freshly blackened boots beside it. He heard no voice now. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples. It was best to rehearse what he would say before he said it: his comportment could go some way toward lessening the shock. It remained unclear, after all, what this upstart in Bern had achieved. The proper choice of words, a certain lightness of delivery, a considered rhetorical approach—

“You look funny down there,” came a voice from behind him. “You look like a cicada in a jar.”

Kaspar turned his head slowly. He knew where the voice was coming from, though a part of him refused to credit it.

“There’s a rumor going around,” said the voice. “I imagine you’ve heard.”

Kaspar raised his eyes unwillingly to the gap between the ceiling and the top of the nearest wardrobe, where the paper was slackest. His brother sat clutching his knees to his chest beneath a dangling fold, nearly hidden behind it, as though sheltering there from the rain. His head was bent to one side, as if his neck were broken; the toes of his bare feet held tightly to the wardrobe’s beveled lip. He looked down at Kaspar without apparent interest.

Kaspar chose his words carefully. “I did hear something. It seems that some Swiss bureaucrat—in Bern, of all places—has developed a theory—”

“Ach!”
said Waldemar, coughing into his fist. “I know all about
that.
I was referring to the rumor that I’ve gone insane.”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Kaspar managed to answer.

“You will.”

“I promise you, Waldemar, I’ll do whatever I can—”

“That’s kind of you, Kaspar, but you needn’t bother.” Waldemar smiled. “I started the rumor myself.”

“Did you?” stammered Kaspar, though he knew better than to expect an intelligible answer. Waldemar shrugged his shoulders, rustling the paper behind him and raising a thin cloud of dust.

“Come down from there, Waldemar. Will you do that for me?”

“It perturbs you to see me at this altitude, of course,” Waldemar said blithely. “It’s not too comfortable for me, either, as you can imagine. But there’s a protocol I’m following.” He gave a slight shudder. “Time passes more slowly up here, first of all. The farther from the surface of the earth, the lower the frequency of light waves; and the lower the frequency of light waves, the longer it takes time to pass.”

Kaspar shook his head. “You’re mistaken about that. Altitude should have the opposite—”

“
Tssk!
You’d know as much yourself, if you’d been keeping up with your schoolwork.” Waldemar’s lips gave a twitch. “But we both know you’ve been otherwise engaged.”

Kaspar stared up at his brother and said nothing.

“I’ll tell you something else, since you’ve come all this way. Would you like me to tell it?”

“I’m listening.”

“That Swiss clerk of yours is a shit-eating Jew.”

Kaspar had forced himself, on the way to the villa, to imagine every possible reaction Waldemar might have to the news, no matter how unnerving—his brother’s outburst, therefore, came as no surprise. It came as a relief, in fact, being appropriate to the spirit of the times. Anti-Semitism hung in the air like smoke in those years, like the musk of the horse-drawn
fiakers
, and the Viennese inhaled it with each breath; not even the Jews themselves were free of it. Kaspar had been aware of
die Judenfrage
even before leaving Znojmo, but since the start of his affair with Sonja he’d begun to see it everywhere he looked. Waldemar’s racial paranoia didn’t set him apart: just the opposite. It was the best available argument for his sanity.

“I didn’t know the man was Jewish,” Kaspar said. “I suppose that’s interesting.”

“It’s about as interesting as potato blight,” Waldemar answered. “To what other race could he possibly belong?”

“Please come down, little brother. Come down here and sit with me.” Kaspar took a step toward the wardrobe and extended a hand. “Sonja tells me you’ve made progress with your work.”

Waldemar blinked at him for a moment, then swung his legs over the edge of the wardrobe and took hold of his arm. “Sonja said that?” he murmured. His hand felt oddly dry and insubstantial.

“She did indeed!” Kaspar assured him. (Sonja had, in fact, done her best to pass along what Waldemar had told her—though she’d omitted the proposition he’d made.)

“I
have
made progress,” said Waldemar, hopping down and steering Kaspar to his cot. “What else has Sonja told you? Has she reconsidered my request?”

“What request would that be, little brother?”

Waldemar let his arm fall. The boyish enthusiasm of an instant before was gone without a trace, and an elderly man’s suspicion had been lowered across it like a metal shutter.

“What exactly did she tell you,
Bruderchen
?”

“Only that your work has been going well, and that you seemed—well, that you seemed in the highest of spirits—”

Waldemar made a queer rasping noise in the back of his throat. “In other words, Kaspar, she told you
nothing.
She made meaningless noises, and you lapped them up gratefully, ass that you are. You probably considered them music.” He nodded to himself. “She told you nothing at all about the Accidents.”

Even from the mouth of a lunatic, that term compelled my grandfather’s attention. “No,” he said, gripping the bed’s coverlet. “That is to say, she told me certain things, but not being a physicist herself—”

“Then I’ll tell you now, you starry-eyed buffoon, though heaven knows you don’t deserve to hear it.” He brought his mouth alongside Kaspar’s ear. “Chronology, dear brother, is a lie.”

Kaspar raised his hands at that, as if to arrest a speeding motorcar; but there was no halting his brother any longer.

“Sequential time is a convenient fiction, an item of propaganda—a fable propagated from the birth of Jesus outward by a collective of interests that has spread in all directions since that instant, growing in power in direct proportion to the advance of so-called chronologic time.” He held up a finger. “Civilization was founded on
numbers
, Herr Toula, and its downfall can be read in them as well. Today, for example, the interests to which I refer are approximately one thousand, nine hundred and five times more powerful than they were at the beginning of the so-called Christian era. The very calendar we use, in other words, is not only the totem of the progress of this aforementioned ‘collective,’ but the
actual numerical index
of that progress. What do you say to that?”

Kaspar shook his head and said nothing. Waldemar touched his fingers to his temples, as if he were about to attempt telekinesis, which wouldn’t have surprised his brother in the slightest.

“You’re a clever boy, Kaspar—nearly as clever as I am. I don’t intend to condescend to you.” Waldemar withdrew his fingers from his brow. “I’m confident, for example, that you can identify the secret society to which I refer.”

Kaspar hesitated. “The Masons?”

“The Jews,” said Waldemar, without a hint of irritation. The precision of his answer seemed to please him.

“But surely—I mean to say, surely it was the Christians who began numbering the years from Christ’s birth,” Kaspar interjected, forgetting himself for a moment. “The Jews would not likely have chosen—”

“You fancy yourself an expert on Jewry, of course,” Waldemar said genially. “And no doubt you are, in your bumbling way. You’ve been taken in by the secret sharers, after all—you’ve been welcomed with open arms, because you pose no danger to them. Taking you
in
, in fact, was the surest way of rendering you harmless.”

Kaspar found himself nodding. “I don’t see why anyone would bother—”

“Because you were
closing in
on them, dear brother. You and I were closing in. The two of us together.”

“Listen to me, Waldemar. I need you to explain—”

“But they have a surprise in store for them. The truth will soon be clear for all to see. Nothing moves in a straight line: not even history. The highest and the mightiest have built their empire on a foundation of ashes, and to ashes shall their empire return.”

Waldemar was breathing effortfully now, his face set and pale, like the figures on the plague column on the Graben. “What has been, Kasparchen, will come again. Tell that to Fräulein Silbermann from me.”

It was at this precise instant, he would later recall, that Kaspar first began to fear his brother.

“You must realize—after what you’ve just said—that there can be no future for us,” he murmured, in the hope that he might make himself believe it. But there was no end in sight, Mrs. Haven, and my grandfather knew it. He was witnessing not an end but a beginning.

Waldemar gave a shrug. “Your time is now,” he said simply. “The
future
is mine.”

There was an inherent contradiction in this statement, given Waldemar’s beliefs about the nature of time; but Kaspar had no strength to point it out. He left the room in a daze, placing one foot gingerly before the other, and put the attic and the villa and the Accidents behind him, breathing more easily with every step he took.

More than fifteen years would pass, or seem to pass, before he saw his brother’s face again.

I
SPENT THE WEEK
after Van’s party playing detective, Mrs. Haven, with the same luck I’ve enjoyed in other fields. My cousin told me to go fuck myself when I asked for your address, and the response of the public record was the same, if worded differently. Back in college I’d been told I had a gift for research, but you seemed to have an equal and opposite talent for obscurity. Each trail I uncovered dissolved underfoot, as if my interest in you were in violation of some natural law or civil statute—which I suppose, in certain states, it might have been. Society was united against us, Mrs. Haven, and my failure to find you was proof.

It didn’t help that I had only your husband’s name to work with, though that was less of a problem than it might have been, on account of your choice of a husband. Even if he hadn’t been my cousin’s prize investor—even if our paths through spacetime hadn’t ever intersected—I’d have known Richard Pinckney Haven, Jr., both by name and reputation. He was a man of means and influence, perhaps even a famous man, though he’d taken pains to steer clear of the limelight. He came from a medium-sized New England dairy community that happened to bear the name of Pinckney Dells, and he’d attended Amherst College, home to the Haven Collection of Connecticut Oils. His biography gets murky for a while in the mid-seventies, in consummate seventies style: an unexplained expulsion from Amherst, a year spent keeping bees back at Pinckney HQ, a semester auditing physics and computer science lectures at MIT, then treatment for a prescription drug addiction, two years of apparent inactivity and—seemingly out of nowhere—formal public emergence as First Listener of the Church of Synchronology, aka the Iterants, when he was in his early twenties (and looked, from the handful of photos I’ve been able to find, like a sixteen-year-old on his first beer run).

You know most of this already, Mrs. Haven—the sanitized version, at least—but I can’t deny I found it lively reading.

By the time you and I met, R. P. Haven (the “Jr.” had been ditched somewhere in transit) was known as a capitalist first and a spiritualist second, and the cult he’d helped found had been given the government’s blessing in the form of a 501(c)(3) religious tax exemption. He’d repeatedly denied rumors of a gubernatorial bid in Wyoming, which was a curious thing, since he’d never been a resident of Wyoming. He had a stake in NASCAR and Best Western, and a controlling stake in a frozen yogurt line; he’d produced a few films; he was “warm friends” with Michael Douglas and Cher and Jeb Bush; he spoke Spanish, German, Tagalog, and “a smattering of Urdu.”

This was the man I intended to inveigle you from. I would do so, Mrs. Haven, by means of my personal charm.

*   *   *

I’ll admit that as the days passed I grew desperate. I convinced myself that I saw you in the background of a pixelated snapshot at a gala reception for
Schindler’s List
, and at a press conference at Gracie Mansion (half-hidden behind a bowl of calla lilies), and in riot footage on the evening news. I was new to New York, with no friends and less money. Van had stopped returning my calls altogether, though he hadn’t yet kicked me out of the studio I was renting from him, which was something I gave thanks for every day. There was no time to lose: I had my history to write, and a dangerous secret mission to accomplish (more on this later), both of which involved travel to faraway climes. I needed cash, Mrs. Haven, and I needed it quick. I seemed to have no option but to earn it.

I’ve never told you how I made my living that summer—not the whole sordid truth. I told you I worked in the medical field, in “administration,” which is technically correct. But the field of medicine I worked in, Mrs. Haven, was the care of the elderly, and what I typically administered was a mineral colonic, followed by a cup of Metamucil tea.