“Then I’ll tell you now, you starry-eyed buffoon, though heaven knows you don’t deserve to hear it.” He brought his mouth alongside Kaspar’s ear. “Chronology, dear brother, is a lie.”
Kaspar raised his hands at that, as if to arrest a speeding motorcar; but there was no halting his brother any longer.
“Sequential time is a convenient fiction, an item of propaganda — a fable propagated from the birth of Jesus outward by a collective of interests that has spread in all directions since that instant, growing in power in direct proportion to the advance of so-called chronologic time.” He held up a finger. “Civilization was founded on numbers, Herr Toula, and its downfall can be read in them as well. Today, for example, the interests to which I refer are approximately one thousand, nine hundred and five times more powerful than they were at the beginning of the so-called Christian era. The very calendar we use, in other words, is not only the totem of the progress of this aforementioned ‘collective,’ but the actual numerical index of that progress. What do you say to that?”
Kaspar shook his head and said nothing. Waldemar touched his fingers to his temples, as if he were about to attempt telekinesis, which wouldn’t have surprised his brother in the slightest.
“You’re a clever boy, Kaspar — nearly as clever as I am. I don’t intend to condescend to you.” Waldemar withdrew his fingers from his brow. “I’m confident, for example, that you can identify the secret society to which I refer.”
Kaspar hesitated. “The Masons?”
“The Jews,” said Waldemar, without a hint of irritation. The precision of his answer seemed to please him.
“But surely — I mean to say, surely it was the Christians who began numbering the years from Christ’s birth,” Kaspar interjected, forgetting himself for a moment. “The Jews would not likely have chosen—”
“You fancy yourself an expert on Jewry, of course,” Waldemar said genially. “And no doubt you are, in your bumbling way. You’ve been taken in by the secret sharers, after all — you’ve been welcomed with open arms, because you pose no danger to them. Taking you in, in fact, was the surest way of rendering you harmless.”
Kaspar found himself nodding. “I don’t see why anyone would bother—”
“Because you were closing in on them, dear brother. You and I were closing in. The two of us together.”
“Listen to me, Waldemar. I need you to explain—”
“But they have a surprise in store for them. The truth will soon be clear for all to see. Nothing moves in a straight line: not even history. The highest and the mightiest have built their empire on a foundation of ashes, and to ashes shall their empire return.”
Waldemar was breathing effortfully now, his face set and pale, like the figures on the plague column on the Graben. “What has been, Kasparchen, will come again. Tell that to Fräulein Silbermann from me.”
It was at this precise instant, he would later recall, that Kaspar first began to fear his brother.
“You must realize — after what you’ve just said — that there can be no future for us,” he murmured, in the hope that he might make himself believe it. But there was no end in sight, Mrs. Haven, and my grandfather knew it. He was witnessing not an end but a beginning.
Waldemar gave a shrug. “Your time is now,” he said simply. “The future is mine.”
There was an inherent contradiction in this statement, given Waldemar’s beliefs about the nature of time; but Kaspar had no strength to point it out. He left the room in a daze, placing one foot gingerly before the other, and put the attic and the villa and the Accidents behind him, breathing more easily with every step he took.
More than fifteen years would pass, or seem to pass, before he saw his brother’s face again.
I SPENT THE WEEK after Van’s party playing detective, Mrs. Haven, with the same luck I’ve enjoyed in other fields. My cousin told me to go fuck myself when I asked for your address, and the response of the public record was the same, if worded differently. Back in college I’d been told I had a gift for research, but you seemed to have an equal and opposite talent for obscurity. Each trail I uncovered dissolved underfoot, as if my interest in you were in violation of some natural law or civil statute — which I suppose, in certain states, it might have been. Society was united against us, Mrs. Haven, and my failure to find you was proof.
It didn’t help that I had only your husband’s name to work with, though that was less of a problem than it might have been, on account of your choice of a husband. Even if he hadn’t been my cousin’s prize investor — even if our paths through spacetime hadn’t ever intersected — I’d have known Richard Pinckney Haven, Jr., both by name and reputation. He was a man of means and influence, perhaps even a famous man, though he’d taken pains to steer clear of the limelight. He came from a medium-sized New England dairy community that happened to bear the name of Pinckney Dells, and he’d attended Amherst College, home to the Haven Collection of Connecticut Oils. His biography gets murky for a while in the mid-seventies, in consummate seventies style: an unexplained expulsion from Amherst, a year spent keeping bees back at Pinckney HQ, a semester auditing physics and computer science lectures at MIT, then treatment for a prescription drug addiction, two years of apparent inactivity and — seemingly out of nowhere — formal public emergence as First Listener of the Church of Synchronology, aka the Iterants, when he was in his early twenties (and looked, from the handful of photos I’ve been able to find, like a sixteen-year-old on his first beer run).
You know most of this already, Mrs. Haven — the sanitized version, at least — but I can’t deny I found it lively reading.
By the time you and I met, R. P. Haven (the “Jr.” had been ditched somewhere in transit) was known as a capitalist first and a spiritualist second, and the cult he’d helped found had been given the government’s blessing in the form of a 501(c)(3) religious tax exemption. He’d repeatedly denied rumors of a gubernatorial bid in Wyoming, which was a curious thing, since he’d never been a resident of Wyoming. He had a stake in NASCAR and Best Western, and a controlling stake in a frozen yogurt line; he’d produced a few films; he was “warm friends” with Michael Douglas and Cher and Jeb Bush; he spoke Spanish, German, Tagalog, and “a smattering of Urdu.”
This was the man I intended to inveigle you from. I would do so, Mrs. Haven, by means of my personal charm.
* * *
I’ll admit that as the days passed I grew desperate. I convinced myself that I saw you in the background of a pixelated snapshot at a gala reception for Schindler’s List, and at a press conference at Gracie Mansion (half-hidden behind a bowl of calla lilies), and in riot footage on the evening news. I was new to New York, with no friends and less money. Van had stopped returning my calls altogether, though he hadn’t yet kicked me out of the studio I was renting from him, which was something I gave thanks for every day. There was no time to lose: I had my history to write, and a dangerous secret mission to accomplish (more on this later), both of which involved travel to faraway climes. I needed cash, Mrs. Haven, and I needed it quick. I seemed to have no option but to earn it.
I’ve never told you how I made my living that summer — not the whole sordid truth. I told you I worked in the medical field, in “administration,” which is technically correct. But the field of medicine I worked in, Mrs. Haven, was the care of the elderly, and what I typically administered was a mineral colonic, followed by a cup of Metamucil tea.