“I’m sending it off tomorrow. The whole manuscript.”
That got her attention. “Tomorrow? You’re sure?”
“Genny’s found me an agent, if you can believe it. Apparently he’s a bona fide piranha.”
“Is this a good thing, a piranha?”
“Depends on who gets bit.”
She was quiet a moment.
“Does Genny know what the book is about? Does Enzie know?”
He made a face at the ceiling.
“They’ll be furious, Orson.”
“They can see it when it’s published.”
“Orson—”
“I don’t want to talk about this, Ursula. Not now.”
Conversation lagged for a time.
“I found your deck of tarock cards yesterday,” Ursula said. “My mother used to play it with my father, you know. Actually, they met over a game.”
“Then thank Jehovah for tarock,” he said, pulling her closer.
“Let’s have a game tonight. Will you play it with me?”
“I don’t really know how.”
“Come now, Mr. Tolliver. You just wrote a novel about it!”
“I’ve written about telekenesis, too, and about astral projection and fencing. You see me doing any of that stuff?”
“You could learn, Mr. Tolliver. I could teach you.”
“Fräulein Kimmelmann! Do you know how to fence?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” he said, planting a kiss on her shoulder. “When this book is done — really and finally done, flushed out of my duration forever — I’m going to put those cards back in the cabinet, pull the sliding door shut, and spend whatever’s left of my duration sipping Gennesee Cream Ale.”
But as you and I both know, Mrs. Haven, that isn’t how the cards fell for my father.
* * *
Orson swore up down and crosswise, to the day of his death, that he’d had no idea of the significance of the Sküs to our family when he wrote The Excuse—and unlikely as it might sound, I believe him. The Gottfriedens Protocols wouldn’t be released to the public until the midseventies, and Kaspar had never talked much to his son about the past; it’s possible that not even Enzie and Genny knew about the Sküs before Waldemar’s writings finally came to light. But all mention of tarock aside, the comparison of the study of physics with the study of the black arts was more than enough to horrify his sisters. The book’s final section, with the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, reads like nothing so much as a veiled declaration of war.
Ozymandias Urquhart’s vision in book III ends abruptly after eighty-four pages, as though somebody’s pulled the plug on the projector. He gets to his feet, more than a little woozy, and sets out for the desert. His psychotropic peregrinations through the timestream are behind him, and he feels no nostalgia for either the future or the past — the present is now the only tense that matters. He has come (to lift a phrase from a UCS prospectus) “to live in the moment.” He has a message to deliver to his brothers, after which he hopes to breed sheep at last, if possible on the family estate.
Word reaches Ozymandias, as he makes his way westward, that his brothers have “gone queer” during his absence. They’ve stopped shaving and bathing, he learns, and have boarded up the windows of Ouspensky Hall; they’re rumored to have constructed a device for traveling vast distances without the appearance of motion, by making infinitesimal alterations to the angle of the earth’s rotation. They’re said to have stopped speaking altogether, communicating exclusively by playing games of whist.
After a month of hard travel, most of it on foot, Ozymandias arrives at his birthplace. The once-proud estate now lies weed-choked and fallow, its front doors are missing, and the Greek-revival façade — Cassandra Urquhart’s pride — has vanished behind a shroud of Tasmanian ivy. A muffled droning draws him to the cellar, where he discovers Ralph and Gawain, barely recognizable under “Talmudic” beards, tampering with the pitch of the planet’s axis, exactly as rumored, by means of a network of magnets and tubes. It becomes clear to Ozymandias that the true purpose of this infernal machine is to travel through time; having given up on the future — to say nothing of the present — his brothers plan to subjugate the past.
The closing pages of The Excuse are devoted to what Orson’s more kindly disposed critics refer to as a “polemical dialogue,” but which is actually no better than a rant, a salvo fired at his sisters from point-blank range:
“In summation, you both have my pity,” Ozymandias ejaculated.
“Pity?” Ralph sneered, breaking his silence at last. “We’ll see who pities whom, little brother, when Gawain and myself are Masters of the Kronoverse!”
“Have you not understood?” Ozymandias answered sadly. “We travel through time all our lives — into the future at the speed at which we age, and into the past each time that we remember. There is only the brain, after all; however we choose to employ it, we have no other device. But the brain, my dear brothers, is more than enough. Our consciousness is all the time machine we need.”
The Excuse was published on December 1, 1969, in a clothbound edition by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. In a more conservative age — in other words, at practically any other time in human history — the book would have been a hard sell; but this was the final year of the sixties, the year the grown-ups started taking what the kids had been taking, and phantasmagoria was all the rage. Orson’s novel was hailed as a bulletin from the front lines of the soft revolution, a late mid-twentieth-century Pilgrim’s Progress, a lysergic bugle call to self-expression. All of which was annoying — to put it mildly — to its author, given the message that he’d actually intended. CONSCIOUSNESS IS A TIME MACHINE began turning up on T-shirts nationwide, but they were being worn by dopers, not by astrophysicists or heads of state. More perturbingly still, the book would go on to outsell the rest of my father’s oeuvre combined, though it’s about as erotic as a dental questionnaire.
The full-page review in Life was Ursula’s favorite:
“The Excuse” is not simply an improbable bestseller; it is an improbable book, from an equally improbable man.
Orson Card Tolliver — twenty-seven years of age, veteran of Greenwich Village’s beat catacombs — was heretofore known, if he was known at all, as a writer of speculative pornography for the pulps. His new novel, however, is a horse of a rather different phenotype.
“The Excuse” is the record — in grotesque, quasi-allegorical guise — of one individual’s rejection of all received truth; of the shackles of familial precedent; even of the precepts of chronology itself. Isaac Newton counts for nothing in this brave new cosmos, and neither does Albert Einstein, or the Buddha, or even Jesus Christ. This novel demands to be interpreted as a ragged, desperate yawp of celebration: a shout from the trenches of tomorrow’s youth culture to all of us still lollygagging back in the supply tents. There is a wild, wicked music throughout these pages. America could do worse than lend an ear.
“‘A ragged, desperate yawp of celebration?’” Orson muttered after she’d read it aloud. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that we can get our gutters fixed,” Ursula answered. “The leak in the pantry has started again.”
“The leak in the pantry? Mein Gott!” he shouted, mimicking her Oxbridge-by-way-of-the-Vaterland accent. “Whatever will become of the bratwurst?”