On this particular day, given his condition, I imagine the butcher’s wife straddling him like a cyclist, leaving her apron on in case of interruption, her ample body driving his hips into the upholstery and causing the French enamel of the settee’s frame to crack like the shell of an overboiled egg. These were his last earthly moments, and I like to think he made the most of them.)
At some point, Ottokar dug his left hand into a pocket of his coat, pulled out some—but not all; this is very important—of the hastily scribbled notes he’d made while sitting on his workbench, and arranged them in a row across the table. He confessed to feeling slightly feverish, and allowed Frau Svoboda to apply a compress to his brow. At five minutes to one, with the freakishly precise awareness of the hour that has always distinguished the men of my family, he sat up and announced that he had to be off. He seemed refreshed by the respite, and his forehead felt cooler, but his eyes shone with a fervor that took Marta quite aback. She made no attempt to stop him when he teetered to his feet and left the house.
It was just past 13:00 CET, the hour of rest in every cranny of that narcoleptic empire, and by all accounts a muggy afternoon. By the time the clock on the Radnicní tower struck a quarter past, Ottokar was crossing Obroková Street with his hands clasped behind him, taking long, abstracted steps, staring down at the freshly cobbled street and nodding to himself in quiet triumph. At the same instant, Hildebrand Bachling, a dealer in jewelry and pocket watches from Vienna, was making a leisurely circuit of Masarykovo Square, affording the public as much time as possible to admire his fifteen-horsepower Daimler. The precise sequence of events is impossible to reconstruct, though half a dozen Toulas have tried: most likely Herr Bachling was momentarily distracted—by the smile of a fräulein? by the smell of fresh hops?—and failed to notice the man drifting into his course.
∞
Wealth is famously insecure, Mrs. Haven, and even the greatest art is shackled to its culture and its age; a scientific breakthrough, by contrast, is timeless. A great theory can be amended, like Galileo’s planetary system; improved on, like Darwin’s principle of natural selection; even ultimately discarded, like Newton’s postulation of absolute time; once it’s been metabolized, however—once it’s been passed through the collective intestines, and added to the socioconceptual chain—it can vanish only with the death of human knowledge. My great-grandfather had just made a discovery that promised to bring him not merely fortune and fame—and even, in some quarters, infamy—but immortality. This intoxicating fact must have colored his thoughts as he made his way homeward, reviewing that morning’s calculations like a magpie sorting bits of bottle glass. He barely recognized his neighbors, returned nobody’s greeting, perceived nothing but the cobbles at his feet. The clatter of the Daimler’s engine was thoroughly drowned out by the buzzing of his brain.
What happened next was attested to by everybody on the square that day. Bachling took sudden notice of the man in his path—“He popped up out of nowhere,” he said at his deposition—“out of the air itself”—and clawed frantically at the Daimler’s manual brake; Ottokar paid no mind to his impending end until its grille made gentle contact with his paunch. His coat seemed to drape itself over the hood of the Daimler, as if no human body were inside it, and by the time he hit the cobbles he was in his shirt-sleeves. Bachling opened his mouth in a coquettish O of disbelief, extending his right arm over the windshield in an absurd attempt to shunt aside his victim; a stack of loose papers pirouetted skyward with no more urgency or fuss than the Daimler took to pass over the obstruction. The papers came to rest in the middle of the street—in perfect order, as I picture it—but no one present took the slightest notice.
No one except a single passerby.
Monday, 08:47 EST
Of the many mysteries of my situation, Mrs. Haven, the most brain-curdling isn’t the question of time, but—for want of a better expression—the question of space. My recollection of events since our parting is patchy at best, a shadowy pudding of fuddled impressions, and the days and hours leading up to this limbo seem to have been erased altogether. I regained consciousness sweatily, fuzzily, as if surfacing from an afternoon nap beside some muddy semitropical lagoon, and I still haven’t snapped out of it completely. What force and/or agency deposited me here? Why this place, of all places? Who excavated this cramped little burrow for me, set up this table and armchair, laid out this pen and ream of acid-free paper, and drank half of this bottle of nearly undrinkable beer?
As if to smooth my way further, a dozen or so books jut out of the mess within reach of this armchair, each one of them related to my work: Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Kubler’s The Shape of Time, a pocket biography of Einstein, and The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS by a lurid little German named Heinz Höhne, to name just a few. This room was once my aunts’ library, as I’ve said, but the coincidence is a little hard to credit. I can’t help but suspect—like the stiff, defensive Protestants who raised you—that some Intelligence contrived to place me here.
I took my first stab at writing the history of my family when I was still in college, and that manuscript—“Toula-Silbermann-Tolliver: A Narrative Genealogy”—lies close by as well, in the crumpled manila envelope, packed with Tolliver lore, that was the last thing my aunts ever gave me. It’s a ponderous slog, a painstaking patchwork of “primary” texts—I was a history major at the time—and reading it now, I find its fusty, deliberate tone grotesquely out of keeping with a family for whom “objectivity” has always been an alien (if not downright extraterrestrial) concept. In other words, Mrs. Haven, it’s an undercooked, flavorless porridge of facts, the opposite of what I’m after here. You’ve never read a work of history in your life. To bring the past alive for you, I’m going to have to approach it as a sort of waking dream, or as one of those checkout counter whodunits you keep stacked beside your bed. I’ll have to treat my duration as a mystery and a sci-fi potboiler combined—which shouldn’t be too hard to do at all.
Not to say these books won’t come in handy, Mrs. Haven. The Kubler, for instance—an elegant art history tract, with a pretty two-tone cover that I think you would have liked—practically reads like an abstract of my family’s travails. Here’s a passage from page 17:
Our signals from the past are very weak, and our means for recovering their meaning are still most imperfect. The beginnings are much hazier than the endings, where at least the catastrophic action of external events can be determined. Yet at every moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures.
Ottokar’s death, both as an ending and as a beginning, might have been dreamed up expressly to prove Kubler’s point. His ending was hazy enough, witnessed though it was by half the town of Znojmo; but the questions raised by his death led into a swamp in which first his children, then his grandchildren, and finally even his great-grandchildren lost themselves beyond hope of recovery. In spite of embracing science—and pseudoscience, and science fiction (and even, in one case, out-and-out humbuggery)—as our family religion, we Tollivers have always been a backward-looking bunch, and we’ve paid a fearsome price for our nostalgia. Like an unconfirmed rumor, or a libelous book, or a golem, or a flesh-eating zombie—never fully alive and therefore unkillable—Ottokar’s discovery shadowed each of us from the cradle to the tomb.
I was once informed by a tour guide, on a high school trip to Scotland, that any self-respecting clan should have at least one ancient curse; and even then, at the age of not-quite-fifteen, the Lost Time Accidents sprang to mind at once. I’ve asked myself countless times how we might have turned out if my great-grandfather had stepped in front of that Daimler even one day earlier, only to realize, time and again, that I might as well ask what would have happened if he’d never been conceived. Time may be as subject to spin as everything else in the universe, Mrs. Haven, but the lines of cause and effect are no less evident for being curved. If the Tollivers had a crest, it would be the colors of pickling brine and tattered notebook paper, twisted together into a Möbius strip, rampant against a background of jet-black, ruthless, interstellar space.