* * *
“Nefflein,” my great-uncle said gently. “Answer me, Nefflein. Do you hear my voice?”
I placed myself by smell before my eyes came open. I was flat on my back on my aunts’ immense bed, the one with the strangely carved headboard and discolored sheets. It was morning outside, to judge by the brightness, and I wondered — as I so often had before — how the light of chronologic day could reach me. This time, however, I remembered a joke Orson had once told me about singularities. It’s no problem at all, physics-wise, to enter a black hole: an event horizon is an easy thing to cross. Problems only arise if you should reconsider.
“What am I doing on this bed?”
“I brought you here, Nefflein. You had an accident.”
I watched the dust roll and coagulate above me. “It’s possible I’m going to be sick.”
“That might be for the best.”
I waited for the nausea to pass. It took a while.
“What happened to me?”
“I found you facedown at the door to the apartment. Your idea must have been to open it. Apparently you had second thoughts.”
“Second thoughts? I collapsed on the floor!”
“That’s right,” he said, snuffling. “This concludes your lesson for today.”
“What lesson, for God’s sake?”
He gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder. “I told you that you didn’t want to leave.”
XXIII
GIVEN WHAT YOU KNOW about my two earlier visits to the General Lee, Mrs. Haven, you can probably guess that my feelings the third time — a month after my father’s Timestrider-induced coronary — were mixed. Orson had ranted less than usual on the drive down, speaking mostly in grunts, so I’d had plenty of time to sort through my memories of my aunts’ apartment, and the wonders — or alleged wonders — that had transpired there. The difference between ages seven and thirteen is enormous (the difference, really, between an overgrown toddler and a miniature taxpaying citizen) and I viewed my younger self with prim disdain. Five years after the episode in the dark at the bend in the hallway, it was my informed thirteen-year-old opinion that I’d dreamed the best parts of it up.
They’d found me facedown on the floor, after all, blubbering and shivering with fever. I’d barely recognized Orson, who’d fed me some aspirin and rushed me straight home. My aunts had failed to prevent our departure: there’d been no sorcery, no kidnapping, no human sacrifice. If my father displayed any emotion at all on the drive back to Buffalo — as far as I can recall — it was boredom. The status quo had reasserted itself so unconditionally that I’d found myself doubting, as the months and years passed, that we’d driven down to see my aunts at all.
But none of my considered thirteen-year-old opinions, however blasé, could stave off a spasm of anxiety as we rang the General Lee’s epileptic buzzer, or an equal and opposite thrill of excitement as the lobby lamps sputtered to life. There remained zones of magic in the world, apparently, and 109th Street was one. (It didn’t hurt that enchantments in folktales, both benign and horrific, have a habit of coming in threes.) Orson kicked the lobby door open without waiting to be buzzed in, shot me a look that I couldn’t account for, then steered me upstairs, gripping me by the shoulder, as though afraid that I might try to run away. He’s reconsidered their offer, I found myself thinking. He’s going to sacrifice me after all.
* * *
This might be as good a place as any, Mrs. Haven, for a caplet-sized history of the United Church of Synchronology, from 1970—the year of both my own and the Church’s conception — to the moment my father rang his sisters’ bell. You know some of what follows, of course, but I’m betting you don’t know it all. You always insisted that the Husband kept you at a remove from the Church, and I still believe that, in spite of everything I’ve found out since. I refuse to indulge the suspicion (clamorous though it sometimes gets) that you were a willing party to his machinations. I could never have fallen in love with one of Haven’s automata.
If my father hadn’t learned of his wife’s pregnancy moments before the First Listener and his sidekicks had appeared on his stoop, he might have taken the “Three Fuzzy Fruits,” as he took to calling them, more seriously — but I can’t say for certain. Orson was a celebrity at the time, however priggish and conflicted, and Haven and Co. had by no means been the only pilgrims to Pine Ridge Road. Like some solitary king under a spell — one who never leaves his throne room, and eventually comes to doubt the existence of the world outside — Orson rarely engaged with anyone anymore, his wife and son included, and the more isolated he became from his so-called generation, the more he saw himself as its True Voice. In other words, he was beginning, like so many successful men before and after, to believe that his shit smelled like rosewater. He’d stopped seeing anything funny about Life’s portrait of him long before. And if he still ate death biscuits, Mrs. Haven, he ate them in private.
In defiance of Orson’s rejection of the world, however, the world continued to exist, and it was growing fuzzier and fruitier by the day. The sixties may be the decade we tend to associate with communes and dropouts and thousand-yard stares, but it was in the seventies that things got seriously weird. There were never more quasi-religious organizations on the FBI’s watchlist than in 1979: the number of cults in North America was estimated at 108, not counting Mormons, vegetarians, or the Daughters of the American Revolution. A house just up the street from ours had a sign on its lawn with a quotation from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon — GOD WILL TAKE THE WORLD BY LOVE — and though the people who lived there looked more like candidates for a mass divorce than a mass wedding, there was never a shortage of tenants. If Orson didn’t see why the Fuzzy Fruits were worth his time, Mrs. Haven, who can blame him? He’d set his sights on withdrawing from the world, after all, in the classic Toula/Tolliver tradition: not for his father’s reasons — or his mad uncle’s, either — but because it suited his vocation as a prophet.
Missives from the faithful arrived in our mailbox regardless. It was my job, once I was old enough, to bring in the mail, and I used to dread finding those letters: somehow I’d intuited that they were dangerous. The first were from the Listener himself, with the return address scrawled clumsily in cursive; then from Menügayan, typewritten; then from people we had never heard of, on corporate-looking UCS stationery. Orson passed them along, unread, to Ursula, who rolled them into tight little joints that she used to light the burners on our stove.
For a while near the close of the decade, the doorbell would ring at odd hours — most often between seven and eight in the morning — and Ursula would discover progressively more desperate “Iterants” (as UCS members had taken to calling themselves), always in groups of three, petitioning for an audience with the Prime Mover. Eventually Ursula took to calling the cops, and a court injunction was obtained, much to my parents’ and the neighborhood’s (and quite possibly the Iterants’ own) relief. All of which explains how it was possible for my father to go a full ten years without realizing that the UCS had become — both figuratively and by official church decree — the cult to end all cults, along with organized religion, Western philosophy, and the Internal Revenue Service. He had no one to blame for the shock but himself, needless to say — which didn’t make it any easier to stomach.