“Have either of you seen the movie?” Orson gave a dull laugh. “What a stupid thing to ask. Of course you haven’t.”
My aunts exchanged a puzzled look. “Why would we need to see it, Orson? We already know about the Accidents.”
“What are the Accidents?” I said.
All heads turned. Genny began to speak, then stopped herself; Enzie did the same. I couldn’t tell, at the time, whether the look on my father’s face was one of anger or bemusement or concern. Now I think that it was all of the above.
“What are the Accidents?” I asked again.
One by one they sighed and looked away. I’d posed the question, in all innocence, that defined them. Even my father’s rebellion, his duration-long evasion of his legacy, was no more than a way of restating the problem. Whatever the term may have meant in Ottokar’s brining room in Moravia in 1903, it had become synonymous, by the end of the century, with the dilemma of existence itself.
* * *
We pitched camp in the parlor that night, Orson and I, on a mattress made of bubble wrap and twine. I’d never slept in the same room as my father, much less under the same packing sheet. The experience was not a pleasant one.
“Laugh and the world laughs with you,” he said as he blew out the candle. “Snore, son, and you sleep alone.”
I didn’t appreciate the finer points of this joke — it seemed like standard-issue Tolliver cornpone to me — until he drifted off. The sounds he emitted over the next seven hours, Mrs. Haven, are impossible to render in prose. At least every ten minutes he seemed to suffer some sort of attack, and I was sure he was about to suffocate; the rest of the time he panted sadly — defeatedly, even — like an unfulfilled pervert. I found myself wondering what my father was dreaming about, which is never a good thing for a son to wonder. And as if all of that wasn’t bad enough, he kicked.
It was after midnight when I gave up on sleep. I wasted a huge amount of effort getting out of bed with as little noise as possible — Orson would have slept through a putsch — and groped my way back out into the Archive. I rounded a corner, then a second, then a third. The tunnel straightened for five or six steps, then made an even sharper turning. I had no clear objective — I was too drowsy for that — but I must have had some expectation as to what I might find, because what I saw next somehow came as no surprise. I saw the outline of a door — high and narrow, with a beveled glass knob, a simulacrum of the doors at Pine Ridge Road — silhouetted by a thread of yellow lamplight. Most likely the kitchen, I said to myself. I pushed the door open.
“Hello, Waldemar. Can’t you sleep?”
“Hi, Aunt Enzie,” I said, shading my eyes against the sudden glare.
She was sitting straight-backed at her desk with a look of calm forbearance on her face, a willingness to interrupt important work, if only for a moment. A pair of reading glasses rode low on her long equine nose, making her seem more like a mad scientist than ever. She had on a Pendleton shirt — an aubergine-and-yellow “shadow plaid”—with the sleeves rolled up high. Her colorless eyes were unblinking as ever. Her feet made fan-shaped dust marks on the floor.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m working,” she said. “Come on in, Waldemar. I could do with some company.”
I approached the desk cautiously. The papers spread out before her were covered in formulas and algebraic proofs and phrases in a language that might have been Sanskrit.
“Why are you still working, Aunt Enzie? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Ach! The hour makes no difference here. It takes me a great deal of effort, Nefflein, to hunker down and set my mind to thinking. I need quiet and dark.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then smiled to herself. “I’ll tell you a secret, Waldy — I have a tendency to put things off. I like to watch the hands of the clock go round. I’m addicted, you might say, to the passage of time.”
“So am I,” I said, mostly out of politeness. But I realized, as I said it, that the statement was true. It gave me pleasure to feel wasted minutes pass.
Enzian’s smile widened. “You’re a Tolliver, Nefflein. Time is our shared disorder.”
“My father says it’s our fetish.” I hesitated. “Your fetish, I mean.”
“Your father ought to know.” She turned back to her papers. “Do you happen to know what a ‘fetish’ is?”
I watched her for a moment. “Something bad.”
“Not necessarily. Something important.” She gathered up the papers and flipped them over one by one, precisely and smoothly, like a dealer at a blackjack table. I noticed an actual deck of cards at her elbow, warped and discolored with age. Then my eyes fell on the object in the center of the room.
“What’s that?”
“Hmm?” she said without turning.
I raised my arm and pointed.
“Why don’t you go and see?”
I rallied my courage and stepped past the desk. The blankness of the thing had somehow kept it hidden. It looked like a steamer trunk, or a refrigerator box, or a crudely made and freshly whitewashed casket. There were no knobs or buttons that I could detect: no hinges, no levers, no markings on the outside at all. The hair stood up on my forearms when I went to touch it, as if the air around it were electrified. I felt younger than thirteen now — much younger. I felt about six.
“Go on, Waldemar,” said Enzie. “It won’t bite.”
I ran my hand along a corner of the thing — it sat on sawhorses, and came up to my armpits exactly — then drummed against it lightly with my thumb. A dusting of whitewash came off on my skin. It dawned on me that Enzie had built it herself, and that it was connected to the “research” she was doing. The embarrassment I felt on her behalf came close to pity.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she said, rising from the desk and joining me.
“What is it?”
She took in a breath. “It’s an exclusion bin.”
“I’m not sure what that means.”
“There’s no shame in that, Waldemar.” She nodded. “You might say it’s a kind of time machine.”
Given everything I knew about my aunts, of course, this was no more than I ought to have expected. At regular intervals throughout my childhood I’d pictured them at work on some vast contraption, a vaguely starship-shaped confusion of wires and transistors and throbbing Tesla coils; I’d abandoned this daydream a few years before, around the time I’d stopped believing in centaurs and alien abduction. But now I’d have to reconsider everything. I was standing next to Enzie in her workshop in the middle of the night in Spanish Harlem, resting my right hand on an impossibility.
It looked nothing like the machine that I’d envisioned — nothing at all — which was precisely what convinced me it was real. I’d have been skeptical of flashing lights and pulsing panels, but I didn’t question this. There was nothing to question. My aunt undid a hidden catch and its top swung creakingly upward, like the hood of a go-kart. There was nothing — or next to nothing — inside: just a graphite-colored layer of some spongy material that might have been Nerf, enclosing what looked to be (and in fact, on closer inspection, actually turned out to be) a reclinable Naugahyde seat. There was no denying what I was looking at any longer. Enzie’s “exclusion bin” was a white plywood crate, roughly three feet by seven, with a secondhand car seat inside it.
“I’m going to ask you to do me a kindness,” Enzie said into my ear. “I’m going to ask you to get inside this apparatus. Will you do that for me?”