himself) were like sorcerers or demigods to me. I knew nothing about my namesake—everyone made very sure of that—except that he’d done some extraordinary thing. A hush crept into the voices of the grown-ups whenever the subject came up, and his name was rarely uttered, as if its power might wear thin with repetition. I grew to see myself as heir apparent to a grand occult tradition—one that mustn’t be alluded to until I came of age. I promised myself I’d learn everything I could about this great-uncle of mine, the better to do my mystic birthright justice. And I told no one my plan, not even my doting, long-suffering mother.
I must have known, even then, that the day would come when it would cause her pain.
Monday, 08:47 EST
I can’t see much in my current position, but I’m not too far from the windows, and—if I crane my neck to look past a cracked lucite bust of J. W. Dunne—I can make out a light-speckled sliver of park. For an hour a day, the view has the patina of a retouched picture postcard: the willow boughs sigh, the asphalt promenades gloam, and Nutter’s Battery and the old wooden boathouse hum with a mystery they could never aspire to at noon. Right now, for example, the evening sun is setting across Harlem Meer, glimmering up from the pond scum, giving a pair of overweight maintenance workers the look of lovers in a cheap romantic comedy. The universe is still in motion, close enough to take hold of, patiently awaiting my return; but the clock at my elbow—a Tolliver Magnetic Chronometer, model 8-Ω, accurate to .000000000000000178 of a second—remains frozen, Miss Havisham–like, at 08:47 Eastern Standard Time.
So many forces had to conspire for our paths through the chronosphere to intersect, Mrs. Haven, let alone for us to share a bed. Isn’t that a great and terrifying notion? If the past of a given event—let’s call it event X—might be considered as all things that can influence X (as mainstream physicists claim), then the whole of human history could be thought of as the past of our affair. You’ve decided, under the influence of God knows what toxic cocktail of fear and regret, to deny the events of the last seven months; but I believe—I have no choice but to believe—that if I bear witness to our history, you’ll consent to raise it back up from the grave.
I can picture you shaking your head as you read this, your magnificent corkscrew-curled head with its translucent ears. You’ve ordered me, in no uncertain terms, to obliterate all traces of our friendship: I’ve received clear instructions, in writing, to cease and desist. I don’t blame you for that. We were given three shots, after all—far more than we deserved—and we bungled each one.
Our last and bravest attempt ended on the morning of August 14, between 08:17 and 11:47 CET, in the honeymoon suite of the Hotel Zrada, in that fatal little town in Moravia whose name I choose not to recall. We’d slept with our clothes on, a full arm’s length apart, a first in all our secret life together. You informed me that you’d struggled all night to come to a decision; your coppery hair stuck straight out on one side, I remember, as though pointing the way out the door. I noticed a minor constellation of freckles under your left clavicle—a faint, Pleiades-like clustering I didn’t recognize—and wondered whether your recent safari in Mr. Haven’s company might have brought it to the surface of your skin. A vision came to me of you riding naked on a Bengal tiger, leading a winding file of porters through the khaki-colored bush; I tried to make a joke about it, but instead let out a strangled chirp, like a deaf child attempting to speak.
You took no notice, Mrs. Haven, because you were making a speech of your own. I watched your beautiful lips move, unable to follow. Something momentous was happening, that much was obvious, but my conscious mind refused to let it in. I thought of something you’d said on our first day together, coming out of the Ziegfeld after seeing some by-the-algorithm Hollywood romance:
“There ought to be a word for this feeling, Walter.”
“What feeling is that?”
“The one when you come out of a movie—in the daytime especially—and everything still feels like part of it.”
“The ancient Greeks called it euphasia,” I’d said, inventing a word off the top of my head.
“Aren’t you the bright penny,” you’d laughed, then asked me to spell it for you, which I did. I could do no wrong that perfect afternoon.
“Euphasia,” you’d said thoughtfully. “I’ll make a note of that.”
My memory of our last hours has gone nova since then, grown so bloated and bright that it’s all I can see, though I sense—though I know—that glorious things are hidden just behind it. I want to make a pilgrimage back along the causal chain: to line up my mistakes in a row, for the sake of comparison, with those of all my star-crossed ancestors. From the moment we met I’ve felt like an impostor, like the single normally proportioned member of a clan of sideshow geeks, desperate to keep his pedigree obscured. That ends as of this writing, Mrs. Haven. I want to explain the Tollivers to you, to take you on a private tour of our shabby little hall of curiosities; but in order to do that properly, I’ve got to take an axe to the vitrines. I’ll have to reckon with my namesake—Waldemar, Freiherr von Toula, physicist and fanatic, the Black Timekeeper of Äschenwald-Czas—by testifying to his many crimes at last.
I’m writing to bring you back to me, Mrs. Haven. I can’t deny that. I want to reenter the continuum, if for no other reason than because it’s the place—or the field, or the condition—in which you exist. And there’s only one way to do that, appalling though the prospect is to me.
I’m writing to tell you about the Lost Time Accidents.
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