The Lost Time Accidents. John Wray

his order with the Serb that Kaspar recognized him. That voice could belong to no other.

      “A large mocca, at room temperature, with a small cube of unsalted butter,” said Waldemar crisply. “A bowl of goulash, cold, with a pumpernickel roll cut into fourths. Two fingers’ worth of anise-flavored brandy, lightly peppered.” The Serb nodded as he marched through his preposterous order, showing no surprise at any of it. He was shabbily dressed, but his shabbiness had something affected about it, even genteel. He’s putting on airs, Kaspar thought. And he’s doing it well.

      Waldemar sat straight-backed in his chair, his eyes nearly closed, while the waitress waddled off to place his order. She returned straightaway with the mocca and brandy, setting her tray down circumspectly, so as not to disturb the great man’s reverie.

      Kaspar marveled at his brother’s aplomb, at his consummate lack of self-consciousness, at his world-weary poise; he couldn’t entirely suppress a twinge of envy. It made little difference, suddenly, whether or not the source of that remarkable self-assurance lay in madness: he himself had never been waited on half so well. To think that I’ve been pitying him all these years, Kaspar said to himself. Actually pitying him! While he’s likely been pitying me!

      This notion was almost enough to bring my grandfather to his estranged brother’s table; almost, Mrs. Haven, but not quite. The habit of aloofness—of cowardice, better said—was too deeply ingrained by that time. He kept still, barely sipping his mélange, doing his best to blend in with the upholstery. For the moment it was best to watch and listen.

      Waldemar, meanwhile, was scribbling on a roll of butcher’s paper that he’d pulled out of the lining of his coat. He was scribbling on this roll—which hung nearly to the floor—not with a pen or a pencil, but with a toothed wheel of brass that looked to have been pried loose from a clock. It made no marks on the paper that Kaspar could see; but his brother reviewed his writing carefully, occasionally crossing out what he had written.

      He’s working on the Accidents, Kaspar thought suddenly. He’s been working on them all these many years. The thought dizzied him to the point of vertigo, and moved him to a sympathy far more potent than his pity had been; but it also made him regret the series of seemingly inconsequential decisions that now appeared, in retrospect, to have shaped the whole of his adult experience.

      Over the previous decade—tacitly at first, but with growing conviction—my grandfather had come to acknowledge the importance of relativity. He had done so because the theory had compelled him to, of course, but also because he found it elegant and fashionable; and not least (he saw now, with the ruthless clarity of hindsight) because such an allegiance asked of him—demanded of him, in fact—that he break with his past and family forever. Sitting in his velvet booth at Trattner’s, confronted with his long-lost brother’s fidelity to the grail of their youth, Kaspar found himself wondering whether his commitment to reason, to objectivity, and to the scientific method—his commitment to sanity, in other words—might not, at bottom, be an act of treason.

      ∞

      From an article in the Science section of The New York Times that I came across on my last visit to the bathroom (why my aunts kept such prodigous amounts of newsprint next to the toilet, Mrs. Haven, I hesitate to guess), I’ve learned some interesting facts about the phenomenon of reflection, a number of which apply to my grandfather’s condition as he eavesdropped on his brother. “When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they’re doing,” claims a psychologist with the felicitous name of G. V. Bodenhausen. “Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in non-mirrored settings.” Your reflection is a representative of your superego, in other words: an inquisitor dressed in your clothes. And Kaspar, in his sixteen-page diary entry for Thursday, November 14, 1922, likens spying on Waldemar to catching sight of his own face, grotesquely distorted, in a half-empty cup of mélange.

      He also notes—in a hurried little postscript, as if the fact were of no consequence—that the Patent Clerk has won the Nobel Prize.

      ∞

      “Herr Toula!” came a voice from over Kaspar’s shoulder. He spun in his seat involuntarily, forcing his face into a smile—but the man in question shuffled blithely past him.

      “Pardon my lateness, Herr Toula. The trams at this hour—”

      “Von Toula,” Waldemar interrupted, breaking into the same queer laughter, dry as ashes, that Kaspar had found so disquieting in the widow’s attic all those years before. “As for the trams, Herr Bleichling, suffice it to say that it’s a fallen world.”

      “It certainly is, sir! Beautifully put.”