My father began to imagine himself sitting propped against that chain-link fence for the remainder of his extension into the fourth dimension, fashioning a life for himself with only the guard and the river for company. He saw himself growing progressively slacker and more hunched as his body conformed to the stool, waiting for word from the station that never arrived. After fifty-odd years he’d simply wither away to nothing; before he expired, however, he’d beckon to the guard, who would kneel down to receive his dying words. How can it be, he would gasp, that in the half century I’ve spent sitting next to this gate, no one else has ever tried to enter?
He was in the middle of deciding what the answer might be when the guard stepped to the gate and waved him in. To his disappointment, the interview took place in a Quonset hut a few yards inside the fence, not within the facility proper. It consisted of exactly six questions, the last of which was whether he’d ever done time. Before he’d even gotten his bearings, he was back at the guardhouse with a brown paper bundle in his hands. He hadn’t been told what the bundle contained, but he was guessing a uniform, a flashlight, and a cap that would make him look more like a school-bus driver than an agent of the law.
“Welcome to the Hudson/Gold Power Generating Station,” the guard told him gravely, packing his personal effects into a Chiquita banana crate that he’d been using as a footstool. “I trust you’ll take your work here seriously.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the next guardhouse in. Can’t have two bugs in one jar.”
“But you’re here in the daytime,” said Orson. “I’ll be working nights.”
“Can’t have two bugs in one jar,” the guard repeated, as though Orson were forgetting his manners.
“Two bugs,” Orson mumbled. “Okay.”
“Did you find out about the lost time accidents?”
To his shock Orson realized he’d forgotten to ask. “I thought I might hold off for a while,” he replied. “Until I get my bearings.”
“Fair enough. When you figure it out, be sure to let me know.”
Orson squinted at him. “You mean you don’t know, either?”
“It doesn’t seem to mean much,” said the guard. “Just a fancy way of saying the system’s conked out. The house of cards falls down on them every once in a while, and the management needs a term for that — a technical term — to make it sound more like an act of God. It’s nothing more than an excuse, if you ask me.”
Orson went quiet for a moment. “An excuse?”
Monday, 09:05 EST
I searched the tunnels all day, Mrs. Haven, with nothing to show for it by sundown but a cramp. It’s never occurred to me how easy it would be to hide an object—any object, even a human being — in the coils and convolutions of the Archive. Who’s to say the chambers I’ve discovered are the only ones here? I have only the blurriest sense of where one room ends and the next one begins, after all. I’m using decades-old memories to navigate by.
Sensing the next sleep cycle approaching, I began yanking objects out of the walls at random, hoping to uncover hidden chutes and galleries; instead I had to dig myself out from under landslides of VHS cassettes and take-out trays and Sharper Image catalogs. As exhaustion set in, I found myself asking a question I’d never thought to ask before: What if these grottoes and trenches came about not by accident, as a by-product of my aunts’ dementia, but as part of some larger design?
This idea had just hit — I was lying on the kitchen floor at the time, massaging a crick in my neck — when a sound carried in from the Archive. It was the real thing, Mrs. Haven, not a subsonic hum or a liminal whir or the grannyish complaining of my bowels: a series of knocks, as if someone were testing a wall or a door — or possibly even the floor — for points of entry. It seemed whole rooms away, but these walls swallow sound, as I’ve mentioned before. It might almost have been close enough to touch.
I dropped onto my belly like the cockroach I’m becoming and scrabbled slowly forward, pausing every few feet to make sure the sound hadn’t stopped. It was coming from somewhere to my right, I was certain of that, but pinpointing it was maddeningly tricky. When at last I reached the spot where the knocking was sharpest, I attacked the wall in such a frenzy that the ceiling should have fallen on my head. The detritus was packed more haphazardly there, like a spot of slightly mealier decay in an already badly rotten set of teeth, and in no time I’d exposed a narrow door. Its knob made a crack when I turned it, as though it had been painted shut from the inside, and the knocking grew brighter. It was coming from a radiator pipe — that was obvious now. The door gave a pop, like the report of an air gun, and I toppled in.
I found myself in a dust-choked recess, barely wider than my spread arms, the bulk of which was taken up by an enormous bed. There was no space to spare between the bed and the walls, not even the width of a finger: it must have been brought into the room in sections and assembled inside, like a ship in a bottle. An entire family — grandparents, parents, grandchildren and all — could have passed the night in it without discomfort. The knocking was coming from a heating pipe beside it, just as I’d guessed.
How to explain what happened next, Mrs. Haven? The urge overtook me, filthy though that great bed was, to climb over the footboard and hide under its covers. I’d never encountered so totemic an object, Tolliver-wise: I imagined my elders sleeping between those varnished bedboards — all the heroes and the villians of this history of mine, from Enzie to Kaspar to Ottokar himself — and felt a genealogical ache to join them there. However this monstrous object had come to be shoehorned into that cramped and airless chamber, it had traveled across a vast expanse of time and space to do so. It was possible that generations of my forefathers had been born in that bed, and even likelier that some of them had died in it. But in spite of this thought — or because of it, maybe — I wanted to wrap myself up in those sheets.
“You don’t have to be quiet,” came a voice. “I’m already awake.”
A bunched, loglike mass near the headboard started twitching at this, like a sackful of mice. You’d think I’d be innoculated against surprise by this point, Mrs. Haven, but what I was seeing nearly dropped me to the floor. I clutched at the pipe to keep from falling over: it was scalding, and I snatched my hand back with a cry. But the pain passed at once, was flushed clear of my brain, because the thing under the covers had sat up.
“It’s you, of course,” I murmured. “Who else could it possibly be?”
I can’t explain how I knew that the thing on the bed was the man I’d been named for — Waldemar Toula, the Black Timekeeper of Äschenwald-Czas — but I was sure even before I’d seen its face. It had to be him, Mrs. Haven. And therefore it was.
“I had an eyeglass somewhere,” he said, shivering slightly. He spoke in a damp, droning hiss, like steam issuing out of a pipe.
“A what?”
“Not an eyeglass — what’s the word — what’s the blessed word for it in English?”
“A monocle,” I said, as though it were the most ordinary question in the world.