As I walked the sixty-odd blocks from Harlem to midtown, it seemed that a flickering beam of my aunts’ light still reached me; but though I could feel it on the back of my neck and the palms of my hands — especially when my eyes were closed — it illuminated nothing. The mess they’d left behind them would have delighted Professor Kubler, no doubt, but I had little hope of finding meaning there. There was too much of everything, Mrs. Haven, and not enough of me.
* * *
I made it back to Forty-Fourth Street a few minutes before midnight, knock-kneed and dizzy with hunger, my mind a humid, hypothermic blank. I’d meant to call the Kraut as soon as I got in — even to contact Orson, if I could — but I ended up facedown on the couch. I fell asleep instantly, without the slightest preamble, and started awake just as the sun came up. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, reverberating cruelly off the tilework, and a man was sitting on my windowsill.
“I’m dreaming,” I said to the man.
“You might want to get that,” he answered, in an accent I couldn’t pin down.
I rolled off the sofa and got to my feet. The ringing was becoming unendurable. My visitor wore a threadbare tweed jacket, a dented gray homburg, and greasy-looking yellow calfskin gloves. The overall effect, Mrs. Haven, was seedy. He looked only vaguely like Waldemar Toula — he was too young, for one thing, and his face was unnaturally wide — but I knew he could be no one else. He was waiting to kill me, or to answer my questions, or to take me with him to eternity. But first I had to stop the phone from ringing.
I lurched into the kitchen and grabbed the receiver. I’d meant to hang up right away, but something happened.
“Collect call from the year 2718. Will you accept the charges?”
“What do you want, Van? It’s late—”
“It’s early,” the man in the living room told me.
“It’s early, you mean,” Van said, stifling a yawn. “But I’m awake, for some reason, so I thought I’d check in. How did you spend your summer vacation?”
It took me a moment to answer. “I have to tell you something, Van. Something terrible. Enzie and Genny are dead.”
“I know that, Waldy. That’s why I called. You’re not the only one who reads the paper.”
“How stupid of me. Of course not. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have—”
“You have what, exactly? A job? A date? An uninvited guest?”
I glanced involuntarily over my shoulder. “Actually—”
“There’s a reason I’m calling, believe it or not. I won’t take up much of your time.”
“Listen,” I said, passing a hand over my face. “I can’t—”
“Normally, Waldy, this would be People/Feelings territory. But nothing about what happened to those aunts of yours was normal. Therefore—”
“They were your aunts, too, the last time I checked.”
“Once removed,” Van said tartly. “Don’t go changing the subject. It’s been bothering me all week, what to do about you.”
“About me? I don’t—”
“You’re depressed,” Van declared. “And why wouldn’t you be? Your parents have split, you’ve just dropped out of college, and the bodies of your father’s only sisters, the people you’d come all the way from Ohio to visit — for Christ knows what reason — have just been dug out from under seventeen tons of—”
“Enough!” I said, turning to check on my visitor, who suddenly was nowhere to be seen. “What’s the answer, Van? What’s your brilliant solution? What are you going to do about me?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I’m going to throw you a party.”
Monday, 09:05 EST.
The Timekeeper just left, Mrs. Haven, for the very last time. We’ve gotten what we hoped for from each other. He doesn’t need me any longer, because I’ve helped him to see how this history ends — and I don’t need him, either. I’ve finally remembered for myself.
I was sitting at my usual station, revising my next-to-last chapter, when the air heaved a sigh and pulled soundlessly back, disclosing the crown of my great-uncle’s head. He was pushed through the skin of this world, Mrs. Haven, like a baby pushed out of a birth canal. He dropped onto the floor with a damp, muted thump, barely clearing the table, then lay facedown on the parquet. The coat he was wearing hung off of him strangely. I got up and went to him and turned him over.
I should have been prepared, Mrs. Haven, for what I saw next. He was coming apart, warping and buckling, like a plastic plate held over a fire. It seemed impossible that he could speak, but he did speak. He forced his lips apart and spoke my name.
“What is it, Waldemar?” I said. “What can I do?”
He asked me to help him raise his head and I obliged. I could feel his deformities through the jacket’s threadbare tweed, and what I felt there made my stomach twist.
“Where are you coming from, Uncle?” I pulled him up by the shoulders. “The Forty-Fourth Street apartment?”
He moved his head in what I took to be a nod.
“What were you there for? Did you have something to tell me? Was it something important?”
His head jerked again, downward and to the left. I was suddenly less sure that he was nodding. It might have been a gesture of denial, or of helplessness, or simply a spasm of pain.
“Tell me what I can do. Can I bring you some water?”
His head lolled forward and he took my arm and gripped it. I was surprised by the strength in his hands. His ruined mouth twitched and came open.
“What was that, Uncle? I didn’t quite hear.”
He pulled me closer, slowly and irresistibly, until I was within a hair’s breadth of his face. It took all my self-control to keep from retching. His breath smelled of dust and old newsprint: the dead, airless smell of the Archive.
“Read me the last one, Nefflein. Close the loop.”
I went back to my armchair, relieved to get away from him, grateful to have been asked a thing that lay within my power. I read the last chapter to him, taking care to enunciate clearly, unsure whether his ravaged ears could hear me. You’ll say he deserved what he got, Mrs. Haven, and most likely you’re right — but still it was a grievous thing to watch him suffer. The chapter was a long one and I read it slowly. His name was mentioned more than once, in the most damning of terms, which seemed to give him some small satisfaction. When I’d finished he forced his eyes open as best he could, turned his head in my direction and beckoned me to him. He was saying something almost inaudibly, repeating it with each exhalation, and I knelt down next to him to make it out. It was a request, Mrs. Haven — the last request he’d ever make of me. I let him say it a dozen times, then as many times again, to make sure there was no misunderstanding. Then I squatted beside his right shoulder, braced a knee against his collarbone, and brought my hands together at his neck.
Disfigured though he was, Mrs. Haven, his life took a long time to leave him. He put up no resistance, even lifted his chin to help my hands find purchase, but the force that had deformed him had tautened his skin, and it took all my strength to press his windpipe shut. The live-wire sensation returned to my palms, and my own throat seemed to close along with his, but I didn’t let go until the thing was done. I’d foreseen this, after all, and I knew how it ended. Waldemar had said it himself long before, in his last conversation with Sonja. The ultimate Lost Time Accident is death.