I spread the contents of the package out in fan-shaped symmetry across the floor — like Ozymandias with his cards in The Excuse—and spent the first day sitting Indian-style on a cushion pulled down from the mildewy, beer-smelling couch, waiting for the universal Answer to arrive. It was inevitable, I suppose — or at the very least par for the course — that questions started pelting me instead.
They came slowly at first, almost bashfully; then faster and harder with each passing minute, until the floor and the sofa and the countertop were littered with scribblings on torn scraps of paper, feverish demands on one part of my brain by another. Enzie and Genny had clearly been trying to protect me at the General Lee, to keep my identity a secret from the Iterants; but what had the Iterants been doing there in the first place? What sort of a deal had been struck, and to whose benefit?
I was reading the entry in Kaspar’s diary — rereading it, to be accurate, for the seventeenth time — describing that horrific afternoon on which he’d discovered his brother in the Brown Widow’s attic, when a line suddenly stood out from the text surrounding it, like the wing of a butterfly caught in a stray beam of light:
You look funny down there, he called to me from the top of the wardrobe. You look like a cicada in a jar.
A cicada in a jar, I thought, turning the phrase over in my mind. It was then that I recalled a further point in the series, not in the diary but in my own experience, in the immediate past, so recent that the memory was still damp. The mural in Haven’s sanctum in the Villa Ouspensky: the one Miss Greer had allegedly painted. Those insects had been cicadas, not grasshoppers or cockroaches or ants. I hadn’t made the connection at the time — I hadn’t been sure — but I was sure of it now. And with that first modest link, that initial line drawn between a casual turn of phrase and its most extravagant, fantastic expression, I was suddenly attuned to other points in the sequence, other appearances, both in the documents littering the floor of Van’s apartment and in my own memory. It was a cicada that my great-uncle had been mesmerized by as a boy; it was a cicada I’d seen trapped under a glass at age ten, when Genny had shown me the Archive; and what else could the “little flying thing” have been that the twins had communed with as children? It had visited them every seven years, after all — in between, it had been “no-where and no-when,” as Enzie had put it in her diary. No wonder they’d given it Ottokar’s name.
I lowered my throbbing head onto the couch. Was the cicada somehow significant to Waldemar’s argument for rotary time — as a symbol of the overlooked, perhaps, or of the meandering, or of the cyclical? Or was it simply the Timekeeper’s totem, a fetish he left behind him at every point of the chronosphere he visited, like a dirty drawing on a bathroom stall?
I’d taken the critical step, Mrs. Haven: the leap from the rational to the occult. But none of the above, beguiling though it was, brought me nearer to cracking the fundamental conundrum, the one from which all the others arose, and without which they subsided into nothing. Physical time travel, especially into the past, has long been regarded as an impossibility. How had Waldemar — indigent, paranoid Waldemar, embittered and embattled and patently mad — succeeded where so many better men had failed? What sliver of his grotesque, rabid, mystical pseudotheory had ultimately turned out to be true?
Dreams had something to do with it, according to my aunts: dreams and subjectivity, and the inexorable influence of the observer. The secret of Enzie’s homemade time machine, in other words. What was an “exclusion bin,” in effect, but an objectivity filter? I’d seen into the future myself, after all, using nothing but a whitewashed plywood box. Was it possible that Waldemar’s madness, far from being a hindrance, had brought him some sort of advantage? Could the breach of consensus reality be a preliminary step — perhaps even a precondition—to escaping from consensus time?
I reached this inductive toehold again and again in the course of that week, in relative psychological comfort; but whenever I tried to move past it, to find the next step, my brain would begin to feel greasy and hot and penned in by my skull, like a tin of pâté left out in the sun. Orson had tried to shield me from this punishing, frightening, hazardous mental state for the bulk of my childhood — he’d told me as much at the Villa Ouspensky. But it was too late, Mrs. Haven. It had been too late forever.
* * *
Time is a nightmare, wrote Theodore Sturgeon — hero of West Village coffee-shop Orson—that madmen have always felt themselves at home in. The problem with time, Sturgeon argues, is that it’s too boundless a concept — too fever-dream nightmarish, too all-pervasive, too sublime — for us to wrap our feeble primate brains around. Saint Augustine struggled with time all his life; Newton, in his arrogance, reduced it to a constant; Nietzsche tied it into pretzel knots to make it submit to his mania, then ultimately scrapped it altogether. And the harder I tried, in the course of that week, to distill the contents of my aunts’ package into a single explicable truth, the more inclined I was to follow his example.
What then, is time? writes Augustine. If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.
What confounded me most about the Accidents was the lack of unanimity about them. Everyone who’d tried to crack the rebus of Ottokar’s discovery had come up with his or her own inimitable answer, often contradicting all the rest. My namesake had discovered impunity there: a sovereign solution, accountable only to itself, that could be warped to accommodate every possible question, to rationalize every crime. My grandfather, understandably enough, had come to view them as a conduit to madness. And to Enzie and Genny, after their mother’s death, the puzzle of the Accidents became nothing less than the window frame — the only one they didn’t fill in, or brick up, or shutter over — through which they watched and understood the world. For my part, Mrs. Haven, I was tempted to view my great-grandfather’s legacy as a window, as welclass="underline" a blank pane of glass — sometimes letting light through, sometimes throwing it back — in which we’d discovered nothing but our own monkey-like reflections.
The glass-pane notion was a seductive one, for obvious reasons: it would have allowed me to dismiss the whole mess and head back to Ogilvy, or to Cheektowaga, or to some cottage in the country, as Nietzsche had done, and spend the rest of my duration shaving horses. There was only one catch, Mrs. Haven. My projection theory might have explained Enzie and Genny and Kaspar, and even, with a bit of fiddling, Ottokar himself; but Waldemar had actually succeeded. Waldemar, the worst of all of us, had broken free.
If no one asks of me, said Augustine, I know.
* * *
By the end of the sixth day I was out of ramen noodles, and the only cheese I had left—“Processed Manchego,” according to the packaging; exactly the sort of thing Van would eat — was making the roof of my mouth itch. I was sick to death of sifting through the ashes of my paternal lineage in search of the keys to the chronoverse. What I needed had been clear to me since I’d woken up that morning, bug-eyed and antsy, at 07:45 EST.