I got to the hostel at midnight, worn out and giddy from thinking, but the good times there were only getting started. Chicken vindaloo was bubbling in the kitchen, merengue was squawking from somebody’s laptop, and the TV in the 1-Love Lounge was tuned to the Sri Lankan lawn bowling championships, although no one in that sticky, smoke-filled room was watching. They were playing a game on the floor with what looked like a lopsided clog; someone explained it was like spin the bottle, but Swiss. The lounge smelled of hashish and muesli and socks. My bunkmate looked disappointed that I didn’t join in: he’d taken a shine to me, God bless him, and wanted me to meet his lady friend. He was one of those suntanned, straw-haired, ice-cube-eyed Australians who look like a member of the Aryan Nation on holiday. “Get a big black dog up yar,” he growled when I turned in, which I’m guessing is Australian for good night.
My night was not good, Mrs. Haven — not even remotely. Unmentionable acts were transpiring less than three feet below me, in a half-dozen languages, until past 04:00 EST; but it wasn’t just that. The brave face I’d put on in Menügayan’s parlor wasn’t nearly as convincing in the dark, and doubts began to infiltrate my dreams. I saw you lounging in a kif house in the souk of ancient Alexandria, then riding bareback on a cantering mastodon, then attending a gala in New Singapore in the twenty-fifth century, dressed in a ball gown of pulsing, intelligent gas. You’d never be bored again, Mrs. Haven. The Sensational Gatsby had cured you at last.
“One man’s now,” the Patent Clerk famously declared, “is another man’s then.” He was talking about relativity, of course — and about its knock-kneed little mascot, “the observer,” the puppet who had to jump through all of its hoops, no matter how they danced and jiggled, for the amazement and amusement of the public — but I couldn’t help recalling it that night, tossing and groaning in that overheated room, whenever I imagined the Husband beside you. The second law of thermodynamics, the most bitter in physics, states that the sum of entropy in the universe must always increase: no matter how madly we fight to create systems and structures and vital connections, the result of all our striving yields the opposite. “Now I am become Death,” said Oppenheimer. “The destroyer of worlds.” The rush he felt at the Trinity site that fateful day was less professional or political, I now realized, than cosmic. He was finally batting for the winning team.
It was growing light in the room when I had this last thought. My bunkmate and his Sri Lankan clog-spinner had fallen asleep, having spent a fair part of the night attempting to create order (i.e., a new human being) while contributing inescapably to disorder (expended thermal energy, bodily fluids, time). But no sooner had I tried to flush the second law of thermodynamics from my brain than a memory rushed in to fill the vacuum: something Genny had told me when I’d first seen the Archive.
“The past of X is thought of by most people, if they consider it at all, as the set of all events that can affect what happens at X. But most people — how shall I put this, Waldemar? — are fools.”
I’d asked her what she meant by that, and she’d smiled down at me in her daft, sunny, Genny-ish way. “Let me put it differently, Schätzchen. Entropy increases with time, people say. Fair enough. But there’s one point — one minor detail — they forget to consider. Entropy increases with time for a reason. Can you guess what it is?”
I’d thought hard for a while, then confessed that I couldn’t.
“Because we choose to measure time in the direction in which entropy increases. Now run along and tell Enzie her coffee is ready.”
I sat up in my bunk, banging my head against the flaking ceiling. I’d had an idea, Mrs. Haven, and it couldn’t wait. I climbed out of bed and struggled into my jeans and dug the envelope Enzie had given me out of my suitcase. The key to my aunts’ apartment was inside, wedged down in the bottom left-hand corner. The Husband’s goons had taken most of the rest, but that no longer mattered. The key itself was all I needed.
The sun was still low when I got to the General Lee. The only person on the street was a man in an electric wheelchair and a peach-colored fedora, running slalom around two yellowing ginkgos — first the one, then the other — in tribute to the symbol for infinity. I gave him the last dollar in my wallet, and he looked up at me with watery, grandfatherly concern. “You take care now,” he said. Something about me must have worried him.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, taking me by the wrist. “I’ll see you tomorrow, you hear?”
Police tape still barred my aunts’ door, but it was sagging and dusty, like the velvet rope to an abandoned club. It took me a few tries to inveigle the key into the lock, and another half-dozen to coax the corroded deadbolt into sliding. The door jammed after less than half a foot: I could work my way in sideways, but my suitcase had to stay out on the landing. I took out what I needed — a few books, my toothbrush, the notes for my history, the manuscript itself, a refillable tortoiseshell pen that I’d bought on the flight from Vienna — and left all the rest. It was daylight by then, a clear autumn morning, and the clatter of cooking carried brightly up the stairwell. It was strange to imagine the neighbors at breakfast, to picture them nestled in their dining nooks, complacent in their chronologic serfdom. I pitied them, Mrs. Haven, but I envied them more. The apartment before me was dark as a tomb.
* * *
Within four steps I was forced into a crouch, plowing headfirst through the ruined Archive, and in no time I was on my hands and knees. The reek of mold and rot was overpowering. And there was another smell underneath, thicker and more pungent the farther I crawled, but never strong enough for me to guess its source: a heavy smell, fetid and sour, like the musk of an animal’s cage.
Gradually my eyes adjusted to the gloom. I thought at first that the roof had fallen in, or one of the load-bearing walls; then I recalled what I’d read in the Times. They’d found Genny under a landslide of newsprint, immobilized but not crushed, a wire looped around her bare left foot. She’d tripped it by accident, the police speculated: she’d forgotten, in a moment of absentmindedness or panic, the location of one of her traps. Enzie had been less than ten feet away when the landslide was triggered — dead already, most likely, though possibly not. The chronology was hazy, forensically speaking, which would of course have pleased my aunts no end. Rats and cockroaches had gotten to them both.
I was slithering forward now like some prehistoric fish, both arms pressed against my sides. Just as beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, the Patent Clerk wrote, so does each man carry with him his own space and his own time. The garbage bearing down on me grew heavier, denser, expelling the breath from my body. My mouth and windpipe were becoming furred-over with dust. It’s dizzying to think of seeing into the future, Walter, you said to me once. Why isn’t it dizzying to see into the past?
The question made me light-headed, Mrs. Haven, and I welcomed the feeling. I gave up struggling, gave up breathing altogether, let gravity have its sluggish way with me. I was being pushed through the tunnel peristaltically now, like a morsel through the bowels of some great snake. There was no point in resisting. There was no need to use my arms or legs at all.
* * *
I found myself in a low, dome-shaped chamber, its roof tapering upward like the impression left by an enormous bell. The walls looked cut from a solid mass of envelopes and photocopies and Styrofoam bricks, like a hidden money pocket in a book; light came through one of three small openings at the level of my knees. The floor to my right was exposed, inexplicably dustless, and I could just make out the bottom of a green enameled door. My aunts’ bathroom door had been green, I remembered. The opening to my left — the one a weak gray light was coming through — must lead to what had once been Genny’s parlor. That left the third one unaccounted for.