As she read I looked past her, past the ceiling-high matrix of shelves, past a personal computer and a dressmaker’s mannequin and a stuffed kinkajou, toward the shadows at the turning of the hallway. The hallway had refused to conform to my expectations as my aunt led me inward, rushing toward us when my attention was diverted, then holding unnaturally still — resisting any and all acknowledgment of our forward motion — as though we’d stepped into the forced perspective of a painting. I was seven years old, an age at which the world still changes shape and hue according to one’s mood; but there was something unnatural, irresolvable, about the boundaries of that space. I sensed this right away, Mrs. Haven, as clearly as I sensed the anxiety behind my aunt’s coquettishness.
“‘Such things mark the passage of Time with far greater accuracy than we know, and they fill Time with shapes of a limited variety. Like crustaceans, we depend for survival upon an outer skeleton, upon a shell of historic houses and apartments filled with things belonging to definable portions of the past.’”
“That’s what I’m after with this little collection,” my aunt said, closing the book with a snap. “To approach every man-made thing as if it ought to be in a museum. Everything I see out there”—here she waved a hand vaguely (and with a bit of a shudder, I thought)—“could potentially have a place in here. Isn’t that terribly exciting, Waldemar?”
I struggled to come up with some worldly-sounding comment, as I did when watching football with my father. “How do you decide what to take?”
“Excellent question!” She looked proudly about her. “In theory, of course, this collection should be infinite. I suppose that we’ll have to expand.”
“What’s back there?” I asked, pointing toward the hallway’s turning.
“Where?”
“Back there. Where it starts to get dark.”
“You must be hungry,” my aunt said, returning the book to its shelf. “I baked a peach cobbler this morning. It’s not easy to find peaches, you know, at this time of—”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Of course, dear! The WC’s right behind you. Don’t trouble yourself about that dressmaker’s dummy — just waltz it right out of the way.”
Aside from its arched ceiling and acid-green walls, the only point of interest in the WC was the toilet seat, which was upholstered in chocolate pile. My aunt said something through the door that I didn’t quite catch, then tittered to herself and trundled off. Every so often I heard an odd noise, like the moving-about of heavy furniture. I made a game of trying to guess what it could be.
The hallway seemed darker when I came back out. I could hear my father’s voice not too far off, speaking more guardedly than I was used to, and a woman’s voice asking him questions. I stood still for a time, trying to make out what was being said, savoring the delectable thrill all children feel when spying on their elders. The voices were tantalizingly close, just shy of intelligibility; I crawled toward them on my hands and knees to keep the floor from creaking. My father was talking about someone they all seemed to know, someone who had to be handled with tact, even caution — a delicate case, not as simple as it might appear.
“I’m aggrieved to hear that,” came the voice of the woman. Not the one who’d led me down the hallway — the other one. Aunt Enzian.
“Let’s not get melodramatic here,” my father said. “He isn’t who you thought he was, that’s all.”
“He is,” said Enzian. “He has to be.”
“Listen to me. He’s too suggestible, too fragile—”
“We’ll handle him gently, Orson. Like an egg.”
It took him a moment to answer. His voice had gone high and wheedling, the voice of the boy he’d once been. Whatever it was that my aunts wanted, it was clear his defenses were crumbling. It had never before occurred to me that there might be things, let alone human beings, of which or whom my father was afraid.
“Explain to me, one more time, what you need his help for.”
It was Gentian who answered. “We need him to believe in us, Peanut. To go where we can’t. As we’ve tried to explain—”
“We need him to jump,” came Enzian’s voice. “He has the best chance of any of us. It has to be him, Orson. There’s nobody else.”
“There’s you, isn’t there? What the hell have you been doing all these years?”
“My work,” Enzian answered, her voice hard as slate. “And I’ll say it again, little brother: I’ve done my work well. But I’m not the one to make the world take notice, and neither is Genny. We’d thought we could rely on you — but you decided otherwise. You decided to write smut instead.”
To my great surprise my father didn’t argue.
“There was no other option,” he murmured. “Not for me. I didn’t believe in the Accidents.” He was quiet a moment. “I still don’t, no matter what you say.”
“What is it that you do believe in, then?” said Gentian. “You must believe in something.”
“In my family,” my father spat out — then stopped short, as if surprised at his own answer. “I believe in this family.” He paused again, then mumbled, “God knows I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
“Give him to us,” said Enzian. “We had an understanding, Orson. We had a covenant.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What covenant?”
“It’s just for a spell,” Genny purred. “You can visit whenever you like.”
“But I’ve been enjoying his company lately. He’s just starting to reason, to think for himself—”
“We had an understanding,” Enzian repeated. “You knew this day would arrive.”
“What are you blathering about?” said my father, his voice going shrill. “What goddamn understanding?”
“We sent you a message,” Genny said with a sigh.
“You did no such thing.”
“Don’t play the fool,” said Enzian. “Why else do you think we named him Waldemar?”
If my father gave an answer I no longer heard it. I was halfway up the hallway already, scuttling backward like a water bug, stopping only when my sneakers hit the door. It gonged faintly, its earlier boom in miniature, but they were too busy squabbling to notice. I rose to a crouch, barely able to breathe. I’d been brought as an offering: that much was now clear. I would never see daylight again.
I was too young to have much self-control, Mrs. Haven, but I mustered what little I had. Be reasonable, I commanded myself — a thing my parents often said to each other. “Be reasonable, Waldy,” I whispered aloud. Nobody gets sacrificed anymore. Nobody gets skinned alive or atomized or eaten. Reality isn’t like your father’s books.
I lived in awe of my father, as most children do; but just then, in that dim no-man’s-land, my reverence for him failed to bring me comfort. My upbringing had been religion-free, more or less, but I knew the fable of Abraham and Isaac. Orson himself, just a few weeks before, had told it to me over breakfast.
I turned to face the door and found it locked. The sight of that column of deadbolts, thick and black and corroded, made me start to hyperventilate with panic. I hadn’t started crying — not yet — but I could feel my lungs and tear ducts mobilizing. I stepped away from the door, dropped back onto my knees, and set a course for the end of the hallway.
My luck held long enough to carry me past the parlor door, then the bathroom and the dressmaker’s mannequin, but after that the air began to shudder. The forced-perspective sensation returned with a vengeance: the turning kept its distance like a fata morgana, as though it were miles away from me instead of yards. It was easier to move, I discovered, if I kept my eyes closed. The argument was growing fainter now, less relevant, more abstract. When I rounded the corner it stopped altogether.