“Synonyms, Nefflein.” His voice had gone rapt. “Two words for approaching the nexus of things.”
“I’d never have done what you did in that camp. I’d have found some way out. I’d have cut myself free—”
“What was that?” He took a dragging step toward me, his hand to his ear, leering sightlessly into the dark. “I can barely hear you, little Waldy. You’ll have to speak up.”
“Why are you here?” I stammered. “How in God’s name did you end up in this place?”
To my surprise this question stopped him cold. He looked confused for an instant, blinking down at the floor.
“I don’t know,” he said softly. “An accident of some sort. I can’t seem to recall.”
I watched his face for a time. I saw no cunning there.
“I can’t either,” I told him.
He said nothing to that. I propped myself against the wall between the doorway and the bed and waited for my body to recover. The horror of my situation was clear to me now: more convincing by far than the man on the bed, or the room we were in, or the labyrinth of trash to every side. The Timekeeper kept himself still, his dead eyes wide open, staring sadly past me into empty space.
XIX
LATER THAT NIGHT, in his empty apartment at the corner of 109th and Fifth Avenue (in a tenement house with the unlikely name of the General Lee), Orson laid out the cards, all fifty-four of them, in a crescent on the floor beside his desk. The power was out, a not-uncommon state of affairs in Harlem, and the six tallow candles he’d lit and stuck into bottles of Yuengling Draft bathed the scene in an appropriately pre-Enlightenment glow. He’d taken out a book from the library that he had no intention of returning—Tarock für Trotteln, by Yitzak W. Yitzak — and he read the introduction and first chapter before so much as glancing at the cards. The rules were still opaque to him, as much due to Herr Yitzak’s schnapps-addled prose as to anything else; but the history of the game held him entranced.
As its name implied, the deck was derived from the tarot, which had infiltrated Europe from Egypt in the late Rennaissance. The origin of the Sküs, however — the joker-like card that had first caught my father’s attention — was a mystery. No such card existed in the Arab tradition, or in any other deck of the ancient world. The game of tarock predated the use of the cards for occult purposes by three centuries, though certain cards — the Sküs among them — were rumored to have been made use of by alchemists (no one quite knew how) to gain access to the wisdom of past ages. The fool on the Sküs had taken many forms over the centuries, from bearskin-sporting hobo to lute-strumming courtier to urchin to dwarf; the illustration on Orson’s deck, however, was the only one to display that curious, Escher-like circularity.
He brought the book nearer to the light and kept reading, concentrating on the fool card now. In tarock, the Sküs (L’excuse in French) is the deck’s highest trump, but it has no rank or value of its own. Alone among the trumps, L’excuse has no number: its power emerges only in challenge to another card. Orson began to understand its appeal for him now, since he often felt that way about himself.
He took the card from the floor and regarded it fondly. Like the Sküs, he was a born contrarian, and — like the fool on the card, like madmen and jesters and clowns throughout the ages — the nonsense he spouted could serve, if used artfully, as a vessel for ideas that couldn’t otherwise be spoken. He thought of Enzian at the university, and of Waldemar before her, and of what little he understood about his “mad” grandfather’s work. “The fool,” he muttered to himself, staring down at the card, “ought to be on our family crest.”
What Orson didn’t realize — not on that first evening; not yet — was that he would be the one to put it there.
* * *
The telephone rang at Pine Ridge Road a few days later, and Genny went to answer it, thinking it must be someone from Warranted Tolliver Timepieces. It was the first time that the phone had rung all week.
“I’m working on something,” said the caller before she could speak.
“Peanut! Is that you? Enzie and I were just saying — both of us — how nice it would be to hear from you. It’s not as though we can call you up, you know.”
“I know that, Genny. I’ll get a telephone soon. Then you can call me whenever you want.”
“Well! We’d certainly appreciate that.” She hummed to herself for a moment in the odd, nervous way she had when she was pleased. “You’re working on a story, did you say?”
“I’m working on a novel.”
“A novel! My goodness, Peanut! What about?”
“It’s about time, believe it or not. A variation on what Ouspensky calls ‘Möbius time’ in The Hydra-Headed Hourglass. The basic idea is that time, which seems to be running straight ahead from any given point — just as the earth seems flat, from any one perspective — might in fact be ‘feeding back’ into itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail. If that snake were long enough — it would have to be really gigantic, of course — it might appear straight, because the curve wouldn’t be visible, you see? Like a Möbius strip, that has either one side or two, depending on how you choose to think about it. It’s chronologic time considered as a kind of sleight-of-hand trick, really. I got the idea from a deck—”
“Where are you calling from, Peanut? You sound fuzzy.”
Orson cleared his throat. “From a pay phone.”
“You really must get a line of your own. Is it cold where you are?”
“Not as cold as in Buffalo.”
“It’s important to eat, you know, when it gets cold. You need calories to help you keep warm. Have you been taking the vitamin caplets I sent?”
An awkward pause ensued.
“Genny, can I talk to Enzie now?”
“Of course you can, Peanut! How silly of me! I’ll go get her.”
But Enzian, as usual, turned out to be indisposed.
* * *
To the end of his days, my father viewed The Excuse as his proudest achievement, and it was a milestone for him without question: both his first published novel and his last attempt to keep within the bounds of decency. He wrote the first eleven chapters in a trance, narcotized by the story he was spinning, by the radical idea that lay hidden behind it, and by his fervent belief that the fruits of his labor would free him of the family curse forever. The Excuse was no antiseptic exercise, no half-baked scientific treatise smeared with narrative frosting, as the bulk of his fiction had been. It was no more and no less, Mrs. Haven, than a reckoning — in extravagant, ham-fisted, desperate terms — with the Syndrome itself.
Ozymandias Hume, the book’s protagonist, is the scion of an haute-bourgeoisie family whose fortune was made in the licorice trade, but whose clandestine passion — passed from generation to generation, like a weakness for drink — is the use of the tarock deck to tell the future. Virtually any game can be used to foretell events, he believes, if it’s played in reverse, or counterchronologically; but the game of tarock is especially well suited, on account of being intended to run counterclockwise, and of displaying the follies of mankind so bluntly on its picture cards. (Ozymandias’s grandfather made this discovery a half century earlier, we’re told in a flashback, during a postcoital game with his clandestine lover, the chief of police of Merthyr Tydfil, in Wales. As he threw down his trump—L’excuse over La lune—a vista of living, dancing symbols rose before him, and he saw himself lying dead in the street, with the chief of police standing over his body, smoking pistol in hand. Horrified, he ended their affair on the spot and rushed home to his wife. His lover shot him the next time he left the house.)