Читать книгу The Lost Time Accidents - John Wray - Страница 16

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 of all. She was long-limbed and thin, almost gaunt, with the dark-lidded eyes set far back in the skull that the Wittgensteins all had in common. She had a seriousness about her that Kaspar had never encountered in a woman of twenty-four, but she grinned whenever she caught Sonja’s eye, as though they shared some confidential joke between them.

“So this is the Herr Professor’s assistant,” Gretl said solemnly. “I hear you’ve become indispensable.”

“Professor Silbermann could dispense with me at any time,” Kaspar said, feeling his face go hot. That hadn’t been what he’d meant to say at all.

Gretl patted him on the arm and turned to Sonja. “I have a surprise for you, darling. The maestro is here.”

Now it was Sonja’s turn to redden. “Where is he?”

“In the Chinese room with Hermine, making utter mincemeat of her latest portraits.”

Kaspar looked from one girl to the other. Gretl was scrutinizing him thoroughly, which made it difficult to think; Sonja was fidgeting with the hem of her gown. “I didn’t expect to see him here, Gretl. I should have, I suppose, but I didn’t.” She hesitated. “I’m not wearing that smock of his, you see.”

That smock of his? Kaspar thought.

“Hermine isn’t wearing hers, either,” Gretl said, giving Kaspar a wink. “Come along now, both of you. If we ask nicely, His Eminence may grant us an audience.”

Kaspar followed the girls sheepishly through those splendid apartments, through music rooms and reading rooms and chintz-swaddled rococo parlors, until they arrived at an octagonal chamber with paint-spattered bed-sheets thrown over chinoiserie tile. A woman with the same arched nose as Gretl was standing with her hand on the shoulder of a black-bearded bear of a man, bobbing her small dark head in rhythm with his voice. The man spoke softly, with his hands primly folded; the shapeless muslin tunic he wore would have dumbfounded Kaspar if he hadn’t seen it many times already. Catching sight of Sonja, he clapped and whistled like an organ grinder.

“Dovecote!” the man bellowed, seizing Sonja by the arms. “Such a surprise! Such a shock! I barely recognize you in that uniform.”

“It’s not a uniform, maestro,” said Sonja, more red-faced than ever. “It’s only a dress.”

“It’s an exquisite dress.” He lifted Sonja’s right hand to his lips. “And it’s also a uniform, as you know very well.” He turned to Gretl. “Thank you for delivering my dovecote to me, fräulein.”

“I’ve also delivered the dovecote’s companion, maestro, as you may have noticed.”

“So you did. Pleased to meet you, Herr—?”

“Kaspar Toula, Herr Klimt.” Kaspar didn’t feel jealous, as such—only painfully conscious of his disadvantage. “I’m to blame for Fräulein Silbermann’s uniform, I’m afraid.”

“Ah!” The maestro squinted searchingly into Kaspar’s face, as though he’d misplaced his pince-nez. “Fräulein Silbermann has told you, no doubt, about this hobbyhorse of mine.” He hooked a thumb inside the collar of his tunic. “I simply believe that contemporary fashion imprisons a woman, and disfigures her shape—which is splendid enough, in my opinion, without our interference.”

“I certainly can’t argue with—”

“Clothing,” the maestro continued, “should be worn only when necessary, and gotten out of as quickly as possible. This capuchinette I have on, for example—”

“Gustav,” warned Gretl.

The maestro laughed and let his collar loose. “Not to worry, my dear. I haven’t forgotten my place. But you’re lucky we’re not in my atelier!” He turned back to Kaspar. “I must tell you, Herr Törless—”

“Toula,” said Kaspar.

“—that Fräulein Silbermann is the most gifted of my models.”

“The most gifted of your former models, maestro,” Sonja murmured.

But the maestro was still taking Kaspar’s measure. “What’s your trade, sir, if I may presume to ask?”

“Herr Toula is a physicist,” Gretl put in graciously.

“Is that so,” said the maestro, scratching his beard. “I must confess, I took you for some sort of—”

“A physicist!” Hermine exclaimed. “In that case, Herr Toula, you must join the discussion that Papa is having with Professor Borofsky, from Göttingen. The professor is giving a lecture tomorrow, if I’m not mistaken, on the mathematics of the velocity of light.”

“I’ve studied Professor Borofsky’s work,” Kaspar stammered. “Where did you say—”

“In the smoking room,” Gretl cut in, shooing them off. “Sonja can take you. It’s a private meeting, but since you’re a student of physics . . .”

“You behaved very well, Kasparchen,” Sonja whispered to him as they retraced their steps. “Thank you for that.”

“No need to thank me,” said Kaspar, though he was secretly pleased with his show of restraint. “What’s a dovecote, exactly?”

“A birdhouse for pigeons,” she said, drawing him closer. “Please don’t ask me why he calls me that.”

Kaspar considered this a moment, then kissed her lightly just behind the ear. Somehow the nickname seemed appropriate.

∞

They found Borofsky on a chaise longue in the smoking room, with Karl Wittgenstein on one side and Sonja’s father on the other, each of them clutching an unlit cigar. “The very boy we want!” Professor Silbermann bellowed, with a heartiness that took Kaspar aback. “Fire, Herr Toula, if you’d be so kind! A touch of the primordial spark!”

Kaspar obliged them with trembling fingers, thanking chance—and fate, and even Providence, for the sake of comprehensiveness—that he’d brought his matches along. His encounter with the maestro hadn’t shaken him unduly, but Karl Wittgenstein intimidated even his own children, and Hermann Borofsky was known far and wide as a wunderkind. He’d won the Paris Prize for mathematics at the age of eighteen, and now, in his thirties, was rumored to be testing the spatial implications of the Michelson-Morley experiment in a specially light- and soundproofed chamber beneath the Physikhalle in Göttingen. After lighting the cigars, Kaspar hovered a half step behind Silbermann’s armchair, making clear, as politely as possible, that he had no intention of leaving.

They were discussing a young man from the provinces—a difficult and eccentric physics prodigy—who’d developed a preposterous new theory. Kaspar’s legs began to buckle as he listened. A curious certainty took hold of him: a sensation akin to clairvoyance. He had no need to hear the young man’s name.

“Explain to me, Hermann, if you would,” Wittgenstein growled, “how the universe can take on shapes we can’t perceive.”

“I’m speaking purely mathematically, you understand,” Borofsky replied in his pebbly Russian accent. “But this young man—this boy, really—seems to have arrived at his ideas without using mathematics at all.”

“All the more reason to be skeptical,” Silbermann interrupted. “Not only does the theory—if you must call it that—countermand Newton, it flies in the face of basic common sense.”

Borofsky puffed at his cigar. “Unfortunately, Professor, the mathematics of his theory work out beautifully.”

Silbermann replied with a figure of speech that Kaspar was amazed to hear him use. “If neither time nor space is absolute, Herr Borofsky, you’re knocking physics back to Ptolemy, if not to Aristotle himself. We might as well be Hindus, living on an earth supported by six white elephants. We might as well be floating, all of us, inside a soap bubble!”

“That’s entirely possible.”

“I’m waiting, Hermann, for your explanation,” Wittgenstein said tersely.

“My apologies, Herr Wittgenstein. I’ll try to frame the idea as free of mathematics as possible, if you’ll indulge me.”

“By all means.”

“Let’s consider time in geometric terms. If x equals the longitude, y equals the latitude, and z equals the altitude of a given event’s location in space, then an additional coordinate—let’s call it t—could be said to describe its position in time. Each of these coordinates, needless to say, could easily be moved about, simply by addition or subtraction.” He stopped for an instant, as if at a sudden memory, then turned without warning to Kaspar. “The fourth dimension, in other words, is as mutable as any of the others.”

“Four dimensions now, is it?” Silbermann cut in.

Wittgenstein cleared his throat. “You must realize, my dear Hermann, that what you’re saying sounds absurd.”

“Think of this evening’s party,” Borofsky went on, unfazed. “Your house stands at the intersection of Alleegasse and Schwindgasse; the intersection of those two streets provides us with our x and y coordinates. Furthermore, since we are gathered on the second floor above the ground, ‘second floor’ shall serve us as coordinate z. We have now fixed this event in space, in three dimensions.”

“Well said!” Silbermann muttered. “Here we sit, dead on target, with no earthly need for a fourth.”

“That’s where my distinguished colleague is mistaken, I’m afraid. The invitation for tonight’s festivities read ‘Palais Wittgenstein, Alleegasse and Schwindgasse, second-floor apartments, at seven o’clock in the evening.’ ” He shot Kaspar a wink. “Seven o’clock, gentlemen, was this party’s coordinate in the fourth dimension. And it was every bit as necessary—as I’m sure our host will agree—as the preceding three.”

Karl Wittgenstein was not a man given to laughter, but he was laughing now. “I agree wholeheartedly, Professor Borofsky. It was highly agreeable to have our guests arrive tonight, and not tomorrow morning.”

Silbermann’s mien, meanwhile, had grown steadily darker. “The simple fact, gentlemen, that time can be viewed in such terms doesn’t mean that it must. The idea that the speed of light should be the same for every observer, no matter how fast that observer himself may be traveling, is simply—”

“It’s simply the only explanation for the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment,” Borofsky broke in impatiently. “Time and space will have to bend a little, I’m afraid.” He turned to their host. “This young man is a genius, Herr Wittgenstein—mark my words. He’ll be hailed by the world as the greatest scientific mind of the century.”

No one spoke for a moment.

“And what about the young man himself?” Wittgenstein said finally. “Does he agree with your lofty opinion?”

“I couldn’t say, Herr Wittgenstein. Thus far he’s worked in obscurity. He hasn’t even taken his degree.”

“Excuse me, please,” Kaspar heard himself stammer. “Pardon the interruption, but I believe I know the man you’re speaking of.”

He stepped forward stiffly, automatically, like a mechanical toy, and drew in a whistling breath. It was the greatest moment of his duration to date, and the most terrifying. An eccentric young prodigy from the provinces, heretofore unknown, who’d developed a preposterous new theory. The ceiling seemed to bow toward him, its gilded fretwork low enough to touch; the rushing in his ears might have been the music of chronology itself. Wittgenstein and Borofsky sat as if trapped in amber, their mouths slightly open, their eyes round as coins. The floor was now Kaspar’s and he took it boldly. What he had to say was perfectly straightforward.

“I know the man of whom you’re speaking,” he repeated. “I’m privileged to inform you, gentlemen, that he is my brother.”

His words fell on the men like a blow. The look on their faces was hard to interpret, but it might very well have been awe. Their cigars hung slackly from their gaping mouths.

At last Silbermann spoke. “A small misunderstanding, I’m afraid.”

“What in blazes?” Wittgenstein got out at last. “Who is this person, Ludwig? Is he out of his wits?”

“My name is Kaspar Toula, sir. Waldemar Toula, as I’ve already mentioned—”

“Boy,” Borofsky said calmly, “the man we are discussing is a former student of mine at the Technical University in Zürich. Not your brother, unless I’m very much mistaken.”

“But the theory you describe,” Kaspar said, fighting for breath. “It must surely derive from the Accidents—I mean to say, the Lost—”

“It does nothing of the sort,” said Silbermann. “It’s a theory, not yet published, which Professor Borofsky refers to as ‘special relativity.’ ”

“I see,” answered Kaspar, though his voice made no sound. “I see that now. Yes, of course. Thank you kindly.” He bowed to all three men, who continued to goggle in astonishment, then promptly made his excuses to the sisters Wittgenstein, and to Sonja, and to everyone else he met on his way to the landing, then left as quickly as his shaking legs would take him. Before his feet had touched the pavement he was running.

∞

Kaspar ran across Karlsplatz—as good as empty at that hour—then down past the Graben, with its grandly priapic monument to the plague, and out Rotenthurmstrasse to the bile-colored canal without pausing for breath. Time moved lethargically, thickening into a soup, the way it often did when he was frightened. At Ferdinandstrasse he spun clownishly on his heels, skidding slightly, and made for Valeriestrasse with all possible speed. He thought passingly of Sonja, and of the embarrassment he’d caused her. Sonja will be just fine, he said to himself, and of course it was true.

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 wall-paper 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.

The Xanthia T. Lasdun Memorial Ocean-View Manor & Garden was a thirty-six-chambered assisted-living facility in Bensonhurst, with that bleary, nicotine-stained shabbiness every neo-Tudor building in the world seems to exude. Its garden, as far as I could determine, was the condom-festooned median of lower Bay Parkway, and its ocean was the droning, alluvial parkway itself. I loved it there, Mrs. Haven, a fact I’ve never managed to explain. I worked at the Xanthia four days out of seven—more often than that, if I picked up some shifts—making beds and boiling catheters and playing endless games of Mastermind and Risk. My most frequent opponent was Abel Palladian, of the Bushwick Palladians: interregnum-period history buff, chocolate milk addict, and bona fide duration fetishist—the first outside of my family that I’d met.

Abel most likely had some mild neurological disorder—something like Asperger’s syndrome, but with a lower media profile—and the years had not been kind. What he suffered from most, however, was garden-variety loneliness: what some long-forgotten joker on the staff had christened Lasdun’s xanthoma. I’d no sooner introduced myself during salad hour in the Montmartre Lounge than he launched himself full-bore into his passion. My first thought was that he could smell it coming off me: the obsession my aunts had devoted their lives to, that my father had spent half a century resisting, and that I’d come to New York to extinguish at last. Later I found out that everyone got the same spiel.

He started with the life spans of the fishes.

“Haddock are found in deeper Atlantic waters than their relatives the cod, but they share the same life span: roughly fourteen years.”

“All right, Mr. Palladian. That’s a good thing to know.”

“What about the goby, Mr. Tolliver? Are you familiar?”

“I’m not, actually. Is that like a guppy?”

Palladian waved this aside. “The goby ranks among the shortest-lived animals of the vertebrate class. A goby is born, reproduces, and dies all within a single calendar year.”

“That’s fascinating. I’ve always wondered—”

“Sturgeons, now,” Palladian announced.

“I’m afraid I don’t—”

“The record for sturgeon longevity belongs to a thirteen-foot beluga that weighed one metric ton and was judged to be eighty-two years of age. A freshwater sturgeon caught in Lake Baikal in 1953, however, was believed by some ichthyologists to have attained a duration of one hundred and fifty years.”

The line was forming for the salad bar, but Palladian ignored it. He appeared to be in a fugue state of some kind.

“Trout?” I said.

“The life expectancy for a rainbow trout falls between seven and eleven years, depending on locality and species. Brook trout, the finest at table, thrive best in cold waters. In some Canadian lakes they live up to ten years, while elsewhere six years is considered senescent.”

“Good thing we’re not trout.”

Palladian’s eyes drifted back into focus. “One brook trout in captivity,” he said with a smile, as though I’d somehow played into his hands, “lived to seventeen years and twenty-seven days.”

We progressed, over time, from animate to inanimate forms: from earthworms (ten years max) to shallots (sixty to ninety days in a well-maintained fridge) to casino playing cards (two to five hours of regulation play) to the Milky Way galaxy (forty billion years, give or take). Once Stratego season started in earnest (each board game had its season at the Xanthia—Stratego in the summer, Scrabble in the fall, Monopoly through the winter, Risk sometime around Lent), the tenor of our talks shifted. We’d lost quite a few Xanthians during the recent heat wave, and I had more leisure time for a while. Incrementally, centripetally, our conversation drifted toward the personal.

“Who are your people, Mr. Tolliver?” Palladian asked me one evening, glowering down at the board. We’d been playing for an hour in absolute silence. I was winning for once.

“Excuse me, Mr. Palladian?”

“Your people,” Palladian barked. He had the wonky affect of somebody on the “spectrum,” often making him seem angry when he wasn’t; but this looked to be the genuine article. I’d just invaded the Sudetenland.

I shut my eyes and tried to dredge up a reply. I’d been asked this question more than once at the Xanthia, on account of what my father had liked to refer to as my “Hitlerjugend physiognomy,” and I’d been asked it no end of times growing up, because of my mother’s kraut-and-bratwurst accent. It never failed to make me ill at ease.

“My father’s half sisters, who raised him, sometimes took him to Orthodox temple—”

Palladian’s eyebrows twitched subtly. “Yes?”

“But he wasn’t Orthodox himself. He wasn’t anything. Both of his parents were goyim.”

Palladian shrugged and said nothing. The Stratego game seemed to have stalled.

“I am one-quarter Jewish, though. On my mother’s side.”

“Now I like you one-quarter better.” He watched me for a while, then cleared his throat. “The first incandescent bulb, tested by Thomas Edison, burned for forty hours exactly. Manufacturers today can and do make incandescent bulbs that will last, barring mishap, for a minimum of—”

“My grandfather’s brother was a war criminal, Mr. Palladian. He ran a camp in eastern Poland and experimented on human beings, the majority of them Jews. He was known as the Black Timekeeper of Czas.”

My mouth shut with a clack, like the jaw of a marionette. Palladian regarded me bleakly. Mabel Dimitrios, a Xanthia rookie, was unraveling a sweater on a nearby couch and watching me with rheumy-eyed alarm.

“Mr. Palladian?” I said. “If I’ve in any way caused you—”

Palladian made a pushing-away motion with both of his hands, as if he’d been brought a plate of food he hadn’t ordered.

“Old wash,” he said. “Very old wash, Mr. Tolliver.”

I nodded stupidly. “I don’t know why I said that, to be honest. The thing is—”

“Not interested.”

“Of course not. I don’t blame you.” I hesitated. “It’s just, you understand, that I’m trying to come to terms—”

“What terms?” Palladian rumbled. “What are you going to do, Mr. Tolliver? Go back in time and kill your father’s uncle?”

“That’s an interesting thought,” I said, with what must have seemed like an ironic smile. But nothing could have been farther from the truth, Mrs. Haven. It was an exceedingly interesting thought. I pushed my panzer division deeper into the Sudetenland.

∞

There’s no other way to put this, Mrs. Haven: as the weeks passed, you receded from my thoughts. It was the law of conservation of energy, not to mention the abhorrence of a vacuum, since I’d followed every lead and come up empty. I’d just surrendered my last hope—surrendered it gladly, like a coat I’d always felt too warm inside of—when I saw you buying cheese in Union Square.

You wore a blood-colored parka trimmed with platinum fur, like some sort of Inuit heiress, and held a duck-shaped wicker basket in your fists. It was cold for October, below freezing already, and the breath left your body in tiny, immaculate puffs. You strolled from the cheese stand to a pickle stand to a stand that seemed to sell nothing but napkins. It was too much to take, hitting me like that without the slightest warning, and I had to sit down on the nearest bench. At one point you looked up abruptly, as though you’d heard some alarm, and I hid behind my mittens like a child.

Some manifestations of beauty are period-specific, expressive of the age that nurtures them; others seem to exist outside of history, warping each successive moment as they pass. Yours was the second kind of beauty, Mrs. Haven—at least in Union Square that day, at least to me. I managed to convince myself that I was waiting for an opening, a pretext of some kind; in fact I just stared, stuck to my bench like a barnacle, while you filled that ridiculous basket. It seemed cruel, as I watched you, that anyone should be privileged with such power, and it still seems unjust—though I’ve learned that the injustice cuts both ways. It sucks all moderation from the world.

From Union Square you went south, taking more deliberate steps than you had at the market, your hood pulled tightly down against the chill. As I shadowed you along University Place toward Washington Square, often close enough to catch you by the sleeve, sobriety slowly returned. What the hell was I doing tailing you across lower Manhattan, skulking from store-front to storefront, sizing you up like an aspiring sex offender? What was keeping me from calling out your name?

You continued downtown, moving more listlessly with each block, like a windup toy whose spring was losing tension. You began to stop at the slightest pretense: a fall clearance sale, a sun-bleached Calvin Klein ad, an octopus drawn on the sidewalk in chalk. A man approached you on Twelfth Street, breaking into a halfhearted routine about the loss of his asthma inhaler, and you heard him out in silence, asked a few polite questions, then handed him a fifty-dollar bill. Wherever you were going, Mrs. Haven, you weren’t in any hurry to get there.

At Tenth and University you hung a grudging right—you were dragging your feet comically now, like a cat on a leash—then stopped before a brownstone the same color as your coat. A siren sounded somewhere in the distance. The city had never seemed so ominous to me, or so strangely becalmed. The only other person in sight—a heavyset, gender-nonspecific individual with an armful of comics in bright Mylar baggies—had stopped walking as well, as though the siren were some citywide alarm. I looked from the back of your head toward the comics collector, who stared brazenly back. It was a woman, I decided, though I couldn’t have said how I knew. I was beginning to think she’d been tailing you—or possibly even me—when she crossed the street toward you, mumbled a perfunctory greeting, and climbed the stoop of the brownstone next door.

I began to move again now, convinced retreat was impossible, though it was clear you were lost to the world. The blinds gave a jerk in your neighbor’s front window: for better or for worse, we had an audience. You set the basket down between your boots—you were slightly pigeon-toed, I noticed—then bent over and took out a fat winter pear. It was impossibly green against your scarlet sleeves, illuminated as if from within, a Technicolor piece of Martian fruit.

You buffed it in your palms and took a bite.

All at once the light started flickering, making everything tremble, as though the sun had turned into a film projector. I let out a strangled gasp that seemed to make no sound. We were on camera, the two of us: we were trapped in some forgotten silent picture. In the next shot you’d look back at me and scream.

Months later, I would finally come up with an explanation for this on-camera feeling, and for the faintness and paralysis it brought. It was the sensation—the physical sensation—of time passing: a kind of chronologic wind. Certain people—my grandfather, for example, or my aunts, or the members of your husband’s cult—might have had this feeling on a daily basis; as for me, Mrs. Haven, I’ve felt it exactly three times. And each time I’ve felt that wind, no matter how desperately I fought, it’s knocked me down.

A truck pulled up across the street—VAN GOGH MOVERS : A “CUT” ABOVE THE REST—and the spell was finally broken. Another day, I told myself, would almost certainly be better. I needed time to prepare, to review what I’d learned, to make sure that you would see me at my best. I turned back toward University.

“Walter?”

Your voice was so serene, so devoid of surprise, that I could only conclude that men followed you home all the time.

“Is that you, Mrs. Haven? I didn’t recognize you in that—in that hoodie you’re wearing.”

“I’ve caught you red-handed, haven’t I?”

“Mrs. Haven, if you’ll just—”

“You were going to walk by without saying hello!”

I squinted at you for a moment, my mouth still half-open, attempting to parse your expression. “I wasn’t sure you’d want me to say hello,” I said carefully. “I behaved like a perfect ass the night we met.”

“Like a perfect ass,” you repeated. You glanced over your shoulder. “I’ll confess something to you, Mr. Tompkins. Do you mind?”

I shook my head.

“I’d had a sidecar or six at that godawful party, and I’ve been trying to figure out which of my memories of that night I could trust. Sidecars tend to make me see little green men.” You nodded to yourself. “But I guess that part of it was true enough.”

“Which part?”

“That you look like you’re twenty and talk like you’re sixty.”

“I’ve been told that before, Mrs. Haven. Apparently I’m prematurely aged.”

You smiled at that. “If you say so, Mr. Tompkins.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“Well! It’s been a pleasure running into you, Mrs. Haven. If you’ll kindly—”

“Don’t run away like a girl,” you said, catching me by the sleeve. “There’s something I want you to see.”

I struggled to assemble an appropriate response as you steered me roughly down a flight of steps. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why we were entering your brownstone through the basement until I knocked my head against the lintel.

“Are you all right out there, Walter?”

“Extremely all right! Never better.” I thought of Van and his sailor friend butting foreheads and felt what I can only describe as a rush of nausea and nostalgia combined. Naustalgea, I thought, pleased with myself in a far-off sort of way. Red-and-purple globules danced before my eyes.

“Come on in, Mr. Tompkins! Don’t dawdle!”

Apart from a defeated-looking beanbag and a tidy pile of junk mail by the window, the room I stepped into held nothing at all. There were clues, if one looked closely, that the apartment had once been inhabited: shadows on the parquet where carpets had lain, ghosts of vanished pictures on the walls, scattered stacks of vintage 45s. You sat on the floor and began flipping through them.

“Have you ever listened to the One-Way Streets, Walter? I’m betting you haven’t. I’ll play them for you if I can find the single. There should still be a turntable somewhere. Would you look?”

The bedroom at the back was the barest of all. I crossed its freshly waxed floor to a window that faced a high wall of bamboo. Its sill was as sterile as everything else, but I found a cocktail napkin (Bemmelmans Bar at The Carlyle) wedged between the window and the frame, with a scribbled note along its inner fold. It took me a moment to decipher the scrawl:

NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

1 NO lying

2 NO biting

3 NO travel thru time

“What have you found back there, Walter?”

“Nothing,” I said, pocketing the napkin. “Any more stops on the tour?”

“Only the grand finale.”

The bathroom, with its overflowing medicine cabinets and terry-cloth toilet-seat cover and heap of scaly-looking couture in the bathtub, was the only room that seemed lived-in. The clothes in the bathtub looked oddly compressed, and I felt a dark thrill, a tingle in regions unmentionable, when I realized you’d used them for a bed.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Three years this Thanksgiving. What do you think of the decor?”

“I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Haven. I don’t know how to answer that.”

“I had a fight with the Husband,” you said matter-of-factly. “The Husband took my furniture away.”

“Is that what that truck’s for, outside? Van Gogh Movers?”

You shrugged. “He hardly needed them, really. They just took everything upstairs.”

“This whole brownstone is Haven’s, then.” I felt my stomach twist. “Of course it is.”

Your expression went cold. “The Husband feels that way, too. You ought to get to know each other, Walter. You might turn out to have a lot in common.”

My plan had been to avoid the subject altogether, to keep Haven small and indeterminate and vague, but I should have known there’d be no way around him. He was a feature of the landscape through which you and I moved—as vast and undeniable as a mesa. But he was also as lifeless as one, and as flat, at least on that first magic afternoon. He was static on a TV set in a corner of the room in which I loved you. I couldn’t even bring his face to mind.

“As far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Haven, your husband—”

“Why were you following me, Walter?”

I wobbled in place for a moment, then stepped stiffly toward you, clutching an imaginary hat. “My intentions are honorable, Mrs. Haven.”

“Your what?”

I took your hand in both of mine, not caring how Victorian I seemed. “I saw you, just by chance, in Union Square—” What on earth was I trying to say? A humming sprang up somewhere behind my left ear, in what may or may not have been my temporal lobe. The chronologic wind was picking up again.

“I was following you,” I said. “I can’t deny it.”

“That wasn’t my question. I wanted to know—”

I grabbed you by the shoulders—roughly, clumsily—and kissed you. My eyes were clenched shut and there was a disturbance in my head like the buzzing of an ultrasonic toothbrush, but I could tell that I had caught you by surprise. I understood, as we kissed, that I was being offered the chance to step out of myself, to reset the clock: to start over from nothing, defenseless and naked, like a lizard wriggling out of its skin. Your body was tense, I remember, but your mouth was warm and open and alive. You smelled like rain and cigarettes and dill.

“Don’t get rid of him completely,” you breathed into my ear.

“Get rid of who?”

“The old you. Walter Tompkins. It turns out that I like him very much.”

I’d been thinking out loud—what else could it have been?—but I felt no embarrassment. “What is it you like? Of his many noble qualities, I mean.”

“I like his politeness. I like the look in his eyes when he’s trying to think. I like his terrible haircut. I like the jokes that he makes—the bad ones especially—and the way his head tilts when he’s listening. I like that he listens at all.” A shyness crept into your features. “I guess I like that he has time for me.”

“He has nothing but,” I said, and bent to kiss you again. It was true, Mrs. Haven: I might have nothing else to offer, but I had plenty of time. It amazed me to think that you might be neglected. How could your husband make such a beginner’s mistake?

You looked dazed and defiant when we stopped for breath. We stood an arm’s length apart, just as we’d been before, but now we were looking at each other without a trace of pretense, grinning complementary stupefied grins. You led me to the back of the apartment, mumbled something about the garden that I didn’t quite catch, then pulled a stack of framed museum posters out of a closet—the kind college freshmen tack on the walls of their dorms—and arranged them on the floor for me to see. At least six were reproductions of The Kiss.

“Gustav Klimt,” I said.

You watched me intently.

“Gustav Klimt,” I repeated. “From Vienna. Of the Viennese school.”

There were twelve posters in all, every last one a Klimt: gold and copper curlicues and gauzy-haired women with alabaster skin and privileged faces. The words THE KISS were printed across a few of them, leaving nothing to chance, in a font that looked lifted from one of my father’s dust jackets.

I noted all this carefully, Mrs. Haven, because I was stalling for time.

“He was definitely a painter,” I heard myself croak. “His use of gold leaf—”

“I can’t stand Klimt.” You shuddered. “His paintings are like butter-covered doughnuts.”

“Then why—”

“The Husband put them up yesterday. There’s one for every wall of this apartment. He screwed them in with an electric power drill and four-inch drywall screws.”

A truck passed outside, then another, rattling the windows in their frames. From somewhere nearby came the buzz of television. I made an effort not to wonder who else might be in the house.

“Four-inch screws, did you say?” I nodded to myself. “He certainly gave it the old college try.”

“He’s R. P. Haven, Walter. He gives everything the old college try.”

“What made him want to do all this, exactly?”

You gave a dull laugh. “I guess you could say he’s the possessive type.”

“So he knows about us?”

“I’ve only just met you, Walter. What’s there for him to know?” You sighed and let your head rest on my shoulder. “There’s no need for you to worry, anyhow. He’ll murder me before he murders you.”

I felt a twinge of dread at that, as anybody would; but you fit against me so well, notching your forehead between my neck and clavicle, that my fear felt like a kind of imposition. Your body was warmer than mine—much warmer—and your cropped hair spiraled clockwise at the crown. I looked down at your pale, goose-boned neck, the width of my palm exactly, and guessed (rightly, as it turned out) that it would be covered in freckles come summer.

“I’m reading a book,” you said suddenly. “A self-help book. I’d like to show you something.”

It was my turn to laugh. “What would you need a self-help book for?”

You pulled a slim, silver-bound book out of your jacket—a sleight-of-hand trick—and passed it to me. I read its title with a sinking feeling.

STRANGE CUSTOMS OF COURTSHIP & MARRIAGE

Authentic revelations of curious mating customs of all ages and allraces, and the history and significance of modern marriage conventions

by

William J. Fielding, author of The Caveman Within Us, etc.

“Go ahead, Walter. Page sixty-eight.”

The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was to educate myself about marriages, either modern or ancient; but I did as you asked. Page 68 was marked with a wrapper from a pack of Newport Lights:

TREE MARRIAGE.—Among the Brahmans of the south of India it is the established custom that a younger brother should not marry before an older one. To fulfil this requirement, when there is no satisfactory bride in sight for a senior brother, he is married to a tree, which leaves the younger one at liberty to take a wife.

Mock marriages are also carried out among the Punjab of India, in the case of a widower taking his third wife. It is celebrated with a certain tree or rosebush, and sometimes with a sheep, which is dressed up as a bride and is led by the groom around the sacrificial fire while the real bride reposes nearby.

“I see,” I said slowly, though of course I saw nothing. “How is this a self-help book, exactly?”

“My marriage is like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I married a tree, Walter. That’s what I mean.”

“Has your husband—was he married before? Or are you trying to tell me—”

“Shh, Walter,” you said, pulling me down onto the beanbag in a way that made all talk seem academic.

Less than a year later, when I was as good as dead to you, I read the rest of Fielding’s tawdry little survey—it’s next to me on the floor right now, in fact—and one passage, more than any other, took me back to that first bliss-drenched afternoon:

THE KISS.—In its sensory impulses, the kiss is the most direct prelude and incitement to sexual fulfilment. Surfaced by a tissue of full-blooded, sensitive membranes, moistened by the honey of salivary sweetness, shaped at their loveliest into a curvature that has been likened to Cupid’s bow, the lips seem especially contrived by nature for their role of allurement into the labyrinths of bodily desire. It is for this reason that restraint and discrimination should be the watchword of those who understand the real meaning and importance of the kiss, and who hold in high regard the sacredness of the forces which its casual bestowal may unwittingly release. Proceed with circumspection!