What happened then, Mrs. Haven, is still beyond my power to describe. It was a long time ago, back when the real and the unreal were interchangeable to me, and thinking in the colorless, odorless, soundless nonplace I suddenly found myself in was like trying to breathe on the moon. I made a left turn, then a second, then a third. The last of my panic had fallen away. I was traveling counterclockwise, in an inward-curving spiral, in accordance with the laws of C*F*P. When I finally stopped and stood upright and opened my eyes, it came as no surprise that I saw nothing.
THERE’S A PASSAGE in that silver book you gave me, Mrs. Haven, that comes to mind each time I think of our elopement. It’s from chapter two—“Modern Survivals of Ancient Customs”—and it touches on one of the author’s pet topics, namely abduction:
THE HONEYMOON. — The honeymoon is a period of seclusion for the amorous couple, and/or absence from the familiar habitat. It is a relic of the remote time of marriage by capture, when it was necessary for the groom to remain in hiding with his bride until the search was given up.
We never discussed it — we steered clear of the topic, both of us, by unspoken consensus — but I thought of those weeks on the run as our honeymoon, and I was relatively sure that you did, too. It was improbable and preposterous and most likely a violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions that I’d managed to spirit you away from New York City, and the happiness this gave me lent a lightness and warmth to everything I saw or touched: the world you and I inhabited for that brief, exalted interval was less a solid object, looking back on it now, than a vast and exquisite soufflé.
But like all soufflés, Mrs. Haven, it was ultimately destined for collapse.
You paid for our tickets — cash, for reasons of secrecy — and I never thanked you. The reason for your change of heart remained a blind spot in my understanding, a redacted line, a glowing white unknown, and I was incapable of asking you, for fear that you’d suddenly come to your senses. Absurdly, inexplicably, my last-ditch attempt to use the mystery of the Accidents to beguile you to Europe had worked, and I took a giddy sort of comfort in my triumph. At the same time, the fact that your husband was bankrolling our “period of seclusion from the familiar habitat” made me sick with resentment and shame, and lent the whole enterprise — your escape, our elopement, my ill-thought-out scheme to find Ottokar’s notes, even my pursuit of the Timekeeper himself — the triteness of a junior high school play.
As the more experienced of the two of us (in elopement especially), you let these moods pass without comment. You even indulged me so far as to inquire about my plan, though it was obvious you didn’t expect much in the way of an answer: you’d assumed (perfectly reasonably) that Vienna was only a pretext. You finally posed the question two and a half hours out of JFK — we’d just left the coast of Nova Scotia, I remember — and I answered as forthrightly as I could. By the time I’d finished we were over Belgium.
“So—” you said tentatively, after a long spell of quiet. You didn’t get further than that.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Haven. I know it’s a lot to take in.”
You blinked and cleared your throat and tried again. “Let me try to summarize what you’ve told me, Walter. To make sure I’ve got it all straight.”
“Sure thing.”
“First we’re flying to Vienna, to visit your mother. Then we’re going by train to, um, Snodge—”
“Znojmo,” I said patiently. “The letter j has a y sound in Czech. Like the oy in goyim.”
“Znojmo. Okay.” You flagged down a stewardess and ordered a bourbon-and-soda. “We’re going to Znojmo to track down some papers that your great-grandfather dropped in the street when he was hit by a car at the turn of the century—”
“He might not actually have dropped them; that’s conjecture on my part. They could have disappeared some other way — stolen by rivals, for example. Or his mistress might have them.”
You gave me a sharp look. “His mistress.”
“Her descendants, of course.” I hesitated. “His mistress is dead by now, I’m guessing.”
“I’d call that a safe guess.”
“Absolutely. Point taken.”
“Except that the whole reason, you’re telling me, that we’re looking for these papers—”
“These notes—”
“—these notes, is to track down your grandfather’s brother, a Nazi war criminal, who developed relativity in the same year that Albert Einstein—”
“We never say that name in my family, if you don’t mind. And it wasn’t relativity, exactly. He referred to it as rotary—”
“—in the same year that Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity, and who used his knowledge of the secret workings of time to somehow screw up your whole family — including, apparently, you — not to mention all sorts of other god-awful and nasty and just plain weird stuff, like sending cicadas back into the past, and tampering with people’s dreams—”
“That’s not exactly what I—”
“—and who now, if I’m doing my math right, would be one hundred and seven years old. And you’re doing this—we’re doing this — because you want him to be—” You pursed your lips. “What’s the expression you used?”
I took a deep breath. “Brought to justice.”
“Brought to justice. Okay.”
Neither of us spoke for a while. The cabin bucked and shuddered death-defyingly. Someone very close by, possibly right behind us, let out a groan of pent-up human misery. The stewardess arrived with your bourbon. You tried to give her a tip, which she refused.
“It all sounds so hokey, when you put it like that,” I said.
“It doesn’t sound hokey, Walter. It sounds batshit crazy.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Haven.” I leaned forward. “But the man you’re married to believes it — I know that for certain. And so does the rest of his church.”
You took a slow swig of your bourbon. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Tolliver. The two of us had better pray that isn’t true.”
* * *
The Kraut was living in a one-room apartment on Taubstummengasse that had been used as an atelier by so many artists over the years that you could feel the clots of hardened paint under the carpet. One of them — or so she claimed — had been the mysterious Kappa, for whom Sonja had modeled in her Jandek days. The Jandek itself was two blocks up the street, still open for business and seedy as ever.
None of this was by design, of course, but neither was it pure coincidence. I soon learned that Vienna is such a dense and impacted mass of translucent, overlapping layers of history and nostalgia and happenstance that it resembles nothing so much as a massive candied onion. I found emblems of my family’s downfall everywhere I looked: some as slight as a waltz played by panhandling Poles, some as monumental as the gold-and-marble plague column up the Graben from Saint Peter’s. The Brown Widow’s villa was still standing, and the house with the intertwined dragons was, too, though it now housed a shop selling Red Bull and bongs. I shambled through those marzipan streets like a zombie, Mrs. Haven, if only because the dead seemed so oppressively alive. You admired the Breughels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum and shopped for Alexander boots and sea-green loden jackets on the Graben. Both of us kept our distance from the Klimts.