By that time the manager had apologized to everybody and distributed vouchers good for any later showing in that same theater, and the goon and his cohorts had disappeared. The theater was still full of people, bunched in loose clumps of intrigue, unwilling to believe the show was over. My understanding of what had happened was roughly as follows: my father had whipped the whole theater up into a homicidal rage, then settled on the only exit strategy that would save him from being disarticulated. He’d had a coronary.
Orson was conscious for most of the brief, choppy ride to the ICU, gripping my wrist and gazing up into my panic-stricken face, as though we’d traded one film genre for another. He had a message for me — a message of vital importance — as fathers in movie ambulances tend to do. He tried to lift his head to tell it, to the considerable irritation of the EMTs. In the hope of calming him, I told him I loved him; he shook his head and gave a breathless groan. The transition from blockbuster to low-budget family weepie was now complete. I told him I loved him again, taking care to enunciate clearly.
“At this point, son, you mostly seem to be annoying him,” the nearest EMT said. I looked down at my father, who blinked his eyes twice in agreement.
“Okay, Orson,” I said. “I get it.” I didn’t get it, of course. I took his trembling hand in both of mine.
* * *
It wasn’t until the next morning, after the bypass, that my father told me what was on his mind.
“I want you to go see the rest of that movie.”
“Excuse me?”
“I want you to watch the whole thing, Waldy, right to the end.” His voice was diminished and hoarse, which somehow made it more authoritative. “Don’t even blink until the houselights come back on.”
“Orson, I’m not sure I—”
“Pay special attention to the closing credits. Then come back here and tell me what you saw.”
You might think it would be easy to interrogate a cardiac patient — they can’t run off, for one thing — but they have the moral high ground, Mrs. Haven, whether they deserve it or not. It was 11:15 EST when Orson gave me my marching orders; at 12:45 I was watching the opening credits of Event Horizon (do you remember them, Mrs. Haven? The way they scrolled toward the audience out of the vastness of space, gilded and silent, like hearing-impaired subtitles for the voice of God?) from the same seat I’d sat in the evening before. Quite a few people in the audience looked familiar, including a man, two rows up, who appeared to be wearing the helm of invisibility; but I did my best to tune out all distractions. I was seeing the movie with different eyes now, on the lookout for hidden messages and codes.
At the one-hour mark, the notebook I’d brought contained only the following:
“ANDRO” = ROBOT
PHOTON BLASTER “BULLETS” = REALISTIC??
It happened every so often that Orson forgot and/or ignored the fact that I was still a child, so the sensation of near-total inadequacy I was experiencing was nothing new. For once, however, it seemed vitally important not to fail. This was partly because Orson was in intensive care, of course, but also because the Timestrider trilogy fell squarely within my microscopic zone of expertise. All I thought about between the ages of nine and fourteen was science fiction; even my filthiest onset-of-puberty fantasies featured “contact”—so to speak — with other worlds. Which is just to say, Mrs. Haven, that I was my father’s son. If I couldn’t give an accurate summary of Timestrider III: Event Horizon, no one could.
It turned out I needn’t have worried. No sooner had the Timestrider escaped the clutches of the Empiricist forces by punching a random set of coordinates into his krono-kruiser and hitting “jump” than a suspicion began to tug at my awareness. The first half of the movie had been devoted to combustion of various types, punctuated by swordfights and gunfights and cleavage; as soon as the time-travel sequences kicked in, however, I felt the blood rush to my head. I hadn’t yet reached the age at which I would start to pester Orson about our family history, but I’d scavenged enough over the years to recognize a correspondence between spacetime (as the Tollivers defined it) and the kronoverse our hero voyaged through. Both were based on the notion that the timestream is curved; curved in such a way, in fact, that it forms a ring, or possibly a sphere. Given this curvature of time, it ought to be possible to take shortcuts across it, geometrically speaking, by traveling along its chords; this (as I’d soon learn) was what my aunt Enzian had come to believe, and what she was experimenting with, at that very moment, in her rooms in the General Lee. It was also, coincidentally or not, how the Timestrider’s krono-kruiser (which looked like nothing so much as an enormous, globe-shaped pulpit) took him on his rumbling, flashing jaunts from Now to Then.
From that point forward, it was as though two movies were being projected onto the interior of my skull — both the climactic conclusion of the Timestrider trilogy and a spectral companion piece, flickering in and out of focus, made for a purpose I’d grasped only one thing about: my family was both its audience and its subject. In that final hour, surrounded by Coke-slurping strangers in that oversold, sticky-floored theater, I felt what paranoid schizophrenics report experiencing during pyschotic episodes: the suspicion that the actors were speaking directly to me.
Psychiatrists refer to this phenomenon as “delusions of reference,” Mrs. Haven, but there were no delusions in play in the Mohawk 6 that afternoon. I’d heard my own father reciting the actor’s lines, after all, less than twenty-four hours before. There was a riddle in that, a mystery I was still too young to solve; but I had no doubt that I’d crack the code in time. As a twelve-year-old boy, I saw the world of adults in precisely those terms — as a series of time-coded, self-solving riddles — and in this particular instance I was right. I didn’t have to wait longer than the closing credits.
* * *
I rushed from the Mohawk 6 back to Buffalo General as fast as the NFTA bus would carry me, bursting at the seams with self-importance. Orson was having something done to him involving gauze and electrodes when I got there, so I was forced to cool my heels out in the hall. I kept my back to the wall and my eyes on the floor, struggling to choke back my excitement. For whatever reason — urgency? fear? an adrenaline spike? — my senses were as sharp as a raccoon’s. I heard the nurse’s crepe-soled shoes against the crackling ancient vinyl and saw and smelled things that I’d rather not remember. Finally Orson’s door opened and the nurses filed out. I found him wide awake and restless.
“Well, Waldy?” he gasped. It seemed to me now, in my paranoid state, that he was gasping on purpose, on the off chance that the premises were bugged.
“I did it,” I whispered.
“Good boy. What have you got?”
“The Insurgency won, Orson. Just like you said.”
He gave a sigh and let his eyes fall closed. “That’s wonderful, Waldy. Huzzah for the cosmos. Is that all?”