Monday, 08:47 EST
A remarkable thing has happened, Mrs. Haven, and I’ve got to write it down. Waldemar’s breakthrough can wait.
I was sitting at the card table just now, struggling with the contradictions and minutiae of my great-uncle’s theory, when I became aware of a discomfort in my lower body—a sort of roiling muscular impatience—with its focus at the buckle of my belt. I shifted and the sensation ebbed briefly; but it came back soon after, and this time there was no mistaking it. I needed the bathroom, Mrs. Haven, and I needed it quick.
My first reaction was disbelief, then astonishment, then a wild rush of hope: if my guts are resuming their God-given functions, then my banishment from the timestream might not be as total as I’ve thought. I wasn’t able to think this proposition through, however—not fully—because by that point I was in a state of panic. I tried to move my feet inside their slippers—to wiggle my toes, at the very least—but the roar of my bowels drowned out all competition. I won’t say more than this: the only thing that frightened me worse, at that moment, than the idea of getting out of my chair was the idea of not getting out of it. I bit down on my lip, steeled myself for the worst, then shut my eyes and pushed back from the table.
When I opened my eyes, I was exactly where I ought to have been: an arm’s length from the table with my legs slightly splayed, as though a medium-sized textbook had been dropped into my lap. I hadn’t dematerialized, or inverted the timestream, or exploded in a shower of gore. I kept still for a moment to let this sink in. Then I leaned forward in my chair, dropped to my hands and knees, and hauled myself into the tunnel.
Have I described the tunnel to you, Mrs. Haven? It’s a kind of dismal wonder in itself. At one time it was nearer to a trench, a shoulders-width gorge cut through what my aunts always referred to as “the Archive”; but that era is past. Aside from the occasional cone-shaped hollow—the one I’m sitting in as I write this, for example—the tunnel is never more than five feet high, and usually less than three. A kind of clear-eyed dementia took hold of Enzie and Genny in their twilight years, but they never lost their commitment to their work—Enzie’s so-called research—in which this tunnel played some unfathomable role. Its purpose had to do with time, they admitted that much: with time’s shape, and its color, and the sound that it makes as it moves. It was a proof of some sort, or so my aunts implied. But what was being proven, exactly—what the Archive is, or does, or represents—was left for future ages to discover. My father and I used to joke about it.
Crawling through the Archive is torturous and asthma-inducing at the best of times, Mrs. Haven, and its sloping, strutless walls are none too stable. To make matters worse, it’s well known that my aunts passed their days, toward the end, constructing snares and booby traps for prowlers. The material of the walls is mostly newsprint—whole decades of The New York Times and the Observer and the Daily News and the Post and the Sun, bundled together with duct tape and wire—but countless other artifacts impinge, in an order that never seems completely random. On my way to the bathroom, for example, a framed postcard of an eighteenth-century Haarlem farmhouse led to a broken African mask, which led to an aluminum baseball bat, which led to a hardcover copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A few feet farther on, at the door to the bathroom, a stereoscopic postcard of Vienna’s famous Ferris wheel sat cradled in the wax jaws of a shark. Past that bend in the tunnel lies the door to kitchen, which I don’t have the nerve to investigate yet. God knows what bugaboos await me there.
The bathroom, to my surprise and relief, turned out to be fairly clean and free of clutter. I lingered after the completion of my mission, in no great rush to slink back to my desk. I let my sight drift from the tiles under my feet to the pressed tin above, then glanced at the bookshelf behind me. A Bulova digital clock radio on the second-to-lowest shelf read
09:05 AM
Eighteen minutes had passed since I’d left the card table: exactly the amount of time that ought to have passed, if time were moving normally again.
This may not strike you as much, Mrs. Haven, but it hit me with the force of amnesty. I began to make plans right away, sitting there with my pants around my ankles, and every scheme I hatched began with you. My next step was clear: I needed to wash my hands in the sink, find some presentable clothes, get out of this hellhole and tell you the rest of this history in person. I yanked the pull chain and got to my feet.
It was then that I noticed, as I hiked up my briefs, that the clock radio behind me still read
09:05 AM
By the time I’d grasped the import of this terrible discovery I’d fallen sideways into the bookshelf and brought it down with me across the floor. A vast sucking sound filled my ears, a noise like the wind at the mouth of a whirlpool; and it seemed to me, as I fell, that I’d heard that monstrous sucking all my life. The water in the bowl was still flushing, still revolving like our galaxy in miniature, and I knew its bright cascade was never-ending. My exile was anything but over: the little Bulova had stopped functioning as soon as I’d come near. I’d brought timelessness with me, in other words, as surely as a carrier of the plague.
Looking up from the floor—where I lay crumpled under a landslide of pop-physics paperbacks and rolls of quilted lilac toilet paper—I found the things closest to me in a state of suspension, hanging perfectly still. Farther out, this motionlessness gradually gave way to an elliptical drift, like the course of planetoids around a sun. For the very first time, I was able to witness the phenomenon of which I form the epicenter: to perceive it for myself in all its geometric glory.
This is beginning to read like a passage out of one of my father’s novels, I realize—but you’ve got to admit that what’s happening to me could have fit tidily into the old gasser’s oeuvre. I can see the pocket-paperback version clearly, with the sort of airbrushed starscape on its cover that never seems to go out of style: The Accidental Chrononaut or Timecode: Omega or Little Lost Lamb, Who Made Thee?, filed away among the works of Orson Card Tolliver’s later period, after he’d become morbid and self-pitying and unable to keep up his end of the conversation; after the Syndrome had come to tyrannize his thoughts, just as it had his father’s and his grandfather’s before him. Orson’s last books were barely a hundred pages long, nostalgic wish-fulfillment dreams posing as interdimensional quests for vanished lovers, meditations on aging that no amount of gamma gunplay could disguise. His heroes and heroines were rarely human, and often not even carbon-based life-forms; but they were all, without exception, solitary. My fate would have lent itself perfectly to one of my father’s plotlines, even before the chronosphere expelled me, if for no other reason than its loneliness.
VII
ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1905—three days after Waldemar’s midnight proposition—Sonja celebrated Kaspar’s return by taking him to a musical evening at the Alleegasse salon of Karl Wittgenstein, a schoolmate of her father’s and one of the wealthiest men in the empire. Professor Silbermann had only the vaguest of notions that his assistant and his daughter were acquainted, and was amused by the coincidence of their arriving simultaneously; he never relinquished the belief, in later years, that their romance had begun at the Wittgensteins’, and no one took the trouble to correct him.
When the two of them entered, the professor was sitting on a cowhide divan, smoking a pungent cheroot; he looked back and forth between them in bewilderment, then ushered Gretl Stonborough—née Wittgenstein—over to make introductions. “I think I ought to know your daughter, Herr Professor,” she laughed, extending a gloved hand to Kaspar, then kissing Sonja warmly on both cheeks.
All eight of the Wittgenstein children were brilliant—they were famous for it even then, when most of them were barely out of school—but Gretl was judged the most brilliant
