“I did?” Sonja stammered, more baffled than ever.
“A week ago,” he said, triumphant now. “The same night as the widow’s dinner party.”
Finally she understood. It ought to have been obvious from the start, evident in the simple fact of his calling at that hour. There was nothing theoretical about what he wanted, nothing rarefied or obscure. She hadn’t expected it — not from him. That was all.
“Waldemar,” she said, as kindly as she could. “You’re going home now. Do you understand me? You’re going home and getting into bed.”
“Aren’t you listening to me, damn you? I’m giving you the opportunity to make use of your skill — of the gift that you have — to bring about an unprecedented—”
“I’m your brother’s sweetheart, Waldemar. Are you capable of grasping what that means? No, don’t bother answering. Go home and do your multiplication tables. And count your blessings I pity you enough not to tell Kaspar.”
Waldemar’s face went unnaturally still. “Pity me?”
“Good night, Waldemar.” She rose from the bench and walked straight to her front door without looking back. It was slightly ajar, just as she’d left it, and she slipped inside and pushed it shut behind her. Waldemar made no attempt to follow. When she looked out of her bedroom window, no longer bothering to keep out of sight, she saw that he was standing as he’d been when she’d first glimpsed him, with his head cocked to one side and his arms hanging slack, staring calmly at the bench where they’d been sitting. She watched him a great while, fascinated in spite of her distress, and at no point did she see him turn or shift. She imagined that time moved differently for him already — that he’d managed to escape its hold without her aid — and she couldn’t suppress a shiver at the thought. She drew back from the window, willing him away with all her might, and when she looked again she saw that she’d succeeded. She went to bed with the awareness that disaster had missed her — missed her by a hair’s breadth — and resolved to tell Kaspar as little as possible. She fully believed that was the end of it.
Monday, 08:47 EST
A remarkable thing has happened, Mrs. Haven, and I’ve got to write it down. Waldemar’s breakthrough can wait.
I was sitting at the card table just now, struggling with the contradictions and minutiae of my great-uncle’s theory, when I became aware of a discomfort in my lower body — a sort of roiling muscular impatience — with its focus at the buckle of my belt. I shifted and the sensation ebbed briefly; but it came back soon after, and this time there was no mistaking it. I needed the bathroom, Mrs. Haven, and I needed it quick.
My first reaction was disbelief, then astonishment, then a wild rush of hope: if my guts are resuming their God-given functions, then my banishment from the timestream might not be as total as I’ve thought. I wasn’t able to think this proposition through, however — not fully — because by that point I was in a state of panic. I tried to move my feet inside their slippers — to wiggle my toes, at the very least — but the roar of my bowels drowned out all competition. I won’t say more than this: the only thing that frightened me worse, at that moment, than the idea of getting out of my chair was the idea of not getting out of it. I bit down on my lip, steeled myself for the worst, then shut my eyes and pushed back from the table.
When I opened my eyes, I was exactly where I ought to have been: an arm’s length from the table with my legs slightly splayed, as though a medium-sized textbook had been dropped into my lap. I hadn’t dematerialized, or inverted the timestream, or exploded in a shower of gore. I kept still for a moment to let this sink in. Then I leaned forward in my chair, dropped to my hands and knees, and hauled myself into the tunnel.
Have I described the tunnel to you, Mrs. Haven? It’s a kind of dismal wonder in itself. At one time it was nearer to a trench, a shoulders-width gorge cut through what my aunts always referred to as “the Archive”; but that era is past. Aside from the occasional cone-shaped hollow — the one I’m sitting in as I write this, for example — the tunnel is never more than five feet high, and usually less than three. A kind of clear-eyed dementia took hold of Enzie and Genny in their twilight years, but they never lost their commitment to their work — Enzie’s so-called research — in which this tunnel played some unfathomable role. Its purpose had to do with time, they admitted that much: with time’s shape, and its color, and the sound that it makes as it moves. It was a proof of some sort, or so my aunts implied. But what was being proven, exactly — what the Archive is, or does, or represents — was left for future ages to discover. My father and I used to joke about it.
Crawling through the Archive is torturous and asthma-inducing at the best of times, Mrs. Haven, and its sloping, strutless walls are none too stable. To make matters worse, it’s well known that my aunts passed their days, toward the end, constructing snares and booby traps for prowlers. The material of the walls is mostly newsprint — whole decades of The New York Times and the Observer and the Daily News and the Post and the Sun, bundled together with duct tape and wire — but countless other artifacts impinge, in an order that never seems completely random. On my way to the bathroom, for example, a framed postcard of an eighteenth-century Haarlem farmhouse led to a broken African mask, which led to an aluminum baseball bat, which led to a hardcover copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A few feet farther on, at the door to the bathroom, a stereoscopic postcard of Vienna’s famous Ferris wheel sat cradled in the wax jaws of a shark. Past that bend in the tunnel lies the door to kitchen, which I don’t have the nerve to investigate yet. God knows what bugaboos await me there.
The bathroom, to my surprise and relief, turned out to be fairly clean and free of clutter. I lingered after the completion of my mission, in no great rush to slink back to my desk. I let my sight drift from the tiles under my feet to the pressed tin above, then glanced at the bookshelf behind me. A Bulova digital clock radio on the second-to-lowest shelf read
09:05 AM
Eighteen minutes had passed since I’d left the card table: exactly the amount of time that ought to have passed, if time were moving normally again.
This may not strike you as much, Mrs. Haven, but it hit me with the force of amnesty. I began to make plans right away, sitting there with my pants around my ankles, and every scheme I hatched began with you. My next step was clear: I needed to wash my hands in the sink, find some presentable clothes, get out of this hellhole and tell you the rest of this history in person. I yanked the pull chain and got to my feet.
It was then that I noticed, as I hiked up my briefs, that the clock radio behind me still read
09:05 AM
By the time I’d grasped the import of this terrible discovery I’d fallen sideways into the bookshelf and brought it down with me across the floor. A vast sucking sound filled my ears, a noise like the wind at the mouth of a whirlpool; and it seemed to me, as I fell, that I’d heard that monstrous sucking all my life. The water in the bowl was still flushing, still revolving like our galaxy in miniature, and I knew its bright cascade was neverending. My exile was anything but over: the little Bulova had stopped functioning as soon as I’d come near. I’d brought timelessness with me, in other words, as surely as a carrier of the plague.
Looking up from the floor — where I lay crumpled under a landslide of pop-physics paperbacks and rolls of quilted lilac toilet paper — I found the things closest to me in a state of suspension, hanging perfectly still. Farther out, this motionlessness gradually gave way to an elliptical drift, like the course of planetoids around a sun. For the very first time, I was able to witness the phenomenon of which I form the epicenter: to perceive it for myself in all its geometric glory.