The orgy scene in “How to Make Machines and Influence Your Wife,” for example, is tame by today’s standards (six-dimensional dildo notwithstanding), and its prose won’t win any Nebula Awards; the wireless earpiece, however, so casually deposited on a night table as the frolicking begins, is noteworthy in a story written in 1963. Personal infrared goggles were undreamed-of in 1959, but they’re standard issue on “Planet Perinorium 13,” and used to predictably lascivious ends. Orson had a rabid fantasy life, needless to say, and a commitment to reality negation possibly unsurpassed in human history, not to mention a lifetime subscription to Technology Today; but even I have a hard time explaining the appearance, 112 pages into Clocksuckers (1973), of a jihadist riding a Jet Ski.
Every self-respecting religion needs its miracles, Mrs. Haven, and it was from “prophecies fulfilled” such as these that the UCS distilled its theology. If they hadn’t done their work so outrageously well, hadn’t transmuted Orson’s art into propaganda with such consummate skill, the rest of the world might have taken him more seriously; and if the rest of the world had taken him more seriously, I might have an explanation for my father’s apparent clairvoyance, for the Iterants’ growing influence over him, maybe even for what’s happened to me since. By the time I tried to get the truth out of Orson, however, he was tucked away in the attic of a place called the Villa Ouspensky — the Vatican of the Church of Synchronology — surrounded by sycophants and nurses and bullnecked, hard-eyed men in khaki suits. He was far gone by then, ravaged by both cancer and time, and I had to choose my questions carefully. I didn’t kick up any fuss; there was no point in that. I had other dragons elsewhere to attack.
But I’ve succumbed to achronology again, Mrs. Haven. Before we arrive at the United Church of Synchronology and my own (decidedly upstage) arrival, I need to tell you how my father met my mother, how The Excuse made Orson Card Tolliver into a household name, and how I came to be born in Buffalo instead of Spanish Harlem. The contributing circumstances are as dubious as any others in this history, which is a pretty good argument, as arguments go, for their truth. Whatever else my family might be accused of, rightly or wrongly, no one’s ever questioned our improbability.
* * *
Orson had just begun the third and final section of his novel when he came down with infectious mononucleosis, which goes some way toward accounting for book III’s fever-dream grotesquerie. He arrived at his guardhouse at the Hudson/Gold Power Generating Station punctually at 23:00 EST on December 5, eager to continue his writing; when the day watchman clocked in at 07:00, however, he found my father curled up on the floor. Orson was sent home at once in a car-service limo (which expense was duly deducted from his paycheck) and his next of kin — identified on his ID sheet as “GENTIAN AND ENGINE TOLLIVER”—were notified by means of a reverse-charge telegram.
Less than forty-eight hours later, in a turn of events that would have flabbergasted Orson if he’d been conscious, two salt-and-pepper-haired spinsters, neatly got up in the fashions of the forties, stood shoulder to shoulder in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station, admiring the constellations on the ceiling.
“They haven’t got Cassiopeia quite right, I don’t think,” said Enzian (in German, in case anyone was listening).
“Hush, Enzie.”
“It’s supposed to be shaped like a W, as in ‘Waldemar.’ That looks more like an M.” Enzian pursed her lips, looking very much like Orson for a moment. “Not that anyone can tell, under all of that soot.”
“It’s beautiful, Enzie. Besides, a W can be an M, if you’re looking at it upside down. It all depends upon your point of view.”
Enzian appraised her sister coldly. “You sound more like the Patent Clerk with every passing week.”
“It’s the Patent Clerk’s world, dear, in case you haven’t noticed. We’ve been living in it for more than forty years.”
“Not me,” said Enzian fiercely, as though she were reciting an oath. “I’ve never lived in it. Not for a day.”
Something like worry passed over Gentian’s face as she regarded her sister; but it was gone again at once. “We’ll be here a week, Enzie. Two weeks at the most. I know you’re in the middle of interesting work—”
“More than interesting. Decisive.”
“—but your research will keep. Our Peanut, on the other hand, might not.”
Enzian rolled her eyes, then gave a grudging nod.
“And don’t forget what I told you about the apartment. Four floors up from the street, rooms arranged in a ring, the unit below currently vacant.” She was quiet a moment. “It could be perfect, Enzie. Much better for us than Pine Ridge Road.”
Enzian looked at her sharply. “The downstairs apartment is vacant? Who told you that?”
Gentian only smiled.
“He’d never agree to it,” Enzian said, chewing her lip. “Not Orson.”
Her sister said nothing.
“You have a scheme of some kind.” She squinted at Gentian. “I can see it in your face. You have a scheme.”
“I’m sure you’ll find Manhattan stimulating,” Gentian said, taking up her valise. “They say people here never sleep at all.”
* * *
Orson’s fever lasted a week and a day — a muted, shadowed interval, of which his sisters wasted not one instant. By the time he’d recovered enough to grasp what was happening, Enzie and Genny had altered his apartment beyond recognition: the waterstained walls of the entryway had been papered in a fleur-de-lis pattern that seemed kitschy even by the twins’ standards, and the windows overlooking the park had been draped in bulky tangerine damask, giving the west-facing rooms the ambience of an out-of-date bordello. My father had assumed that he knew all there was to know about his sisters, but the speed with which they managed to fill that cavernous space with armchairs and gouaches and Ottoman carpets — some bought in antique shops, some shipped by rail from Buffalo, some scavenged from neighborhood dumpsters — hinted at talents he’d never suspected. He emerged from his delirium to find them cozily ensconced in a city he’d taken years to feel at home in.
More astonishing still, at least to Orson himself, was his lack of dismay at this turn of events. He was a prisoner now, more at Enzian’s mercy than he’d been since his earliest childhood. This ought to have been my father’s darkest nightmare — he’d dreamed it many times, in fact, with only a handful of differing details — but something inexpressible had changed. The Excuse no doubt contributed, long-due settling of accounts that it was; it’s even possible that Orson found Enzian’s nearness — and the return to the dynamic of his first years of writing — in some subliminal way inspiring. Whatever the reason, my father wrote as fluidly and surely during his convalescence as at any time since coming to New York. As he neared the end of his first draft, he became more convinced than ever that the book would bring him prominence, wealth, and the attention of beautiful women. As C*F*P would have it, Mrs. Haven, he was right on all three counts — though in drastically different ways than he imagined.