“It wouldn’t have surprised me, Dr. Ryslavy,” Kaspar replied, “if they’d somehow turned out to have gills.”
Disquieting as their debut was, both girls were pronounced healthy, and they came home with Sonja soon after. Kaspar and his in-laws received the new mother with deference, and the twins — still unnamed — were installed with great pomp in the master bedroom. No one wondered at the fact that the children remained nameless: it seemed in keeping with their otherworldliness. As Kaspar put it to Sonja that same evening, “None of the names we’ve come up with will do, I’m afraid. They seem—presumptuous, somehow.” Sonja had laughed at first, then nodded in agreement.
The twins’ fractious entry into our atmosphere, Mrs. Haven, proved to be characteristic. They bawled at milk bottles and grimaced at rattles and ate other children for breakfast. Even Sonja, with all her gift for equanimity, was brought to the edge of despair by their tantrums. Mama Silbermann commented — with the best of intentions — that she’d never seen a child who could cry while breast-feeding, let alone two; the professor predicted careers at the bar. Kaspar seemed to be the only human being who could make his daughters smile, and that only by making the most hideous grimaces, or by slapping himself in the face. A full month after their birth, the twins were as nameless as ever.
It was Kaspar, fittingly enough, who finally brought the stalemate to an end. A Slovenian communist had brought Sonja a bouquet of alpine flowers in belated honor of the birth, and my grandfather discovered that the surest way to quiet the twins, at the height of their tantrums, was to twirl a tiny star-shaped gentian above them. Enzian is the name of that flower in Austria, and it struck Kaspar as perfect for the firstborn of his daughters: not too feminine, not too pretentious, and fittingly peculiar to the ear. Sonja allowed him to convince her (as much out of exhaustion as anything else) and suggested, lover of verse that she was, that their younger daughter be named Gentian, in tribute to William Cullen Bryant’s “To the Fringed Gentian,” a favorite poem of her schooling days. The resulting names managed to sound as awkward in German as they did in English, which is harder to achieve than you might think; but no one ever claimed the twins’ names didn’t suit them.
Professor Silbermann retired the following summer, to the relief of everyone who knew him, and the twins grew more tractable, if no less bizarre. Gradually existence reverted to normal — though Kaspar could never say for certain that he hadn’t simply grown accustomed to the strangeness of the times. Conditions grew grim for the city’s Jews and leftists, then very slightly better, then worse than anybody could recall. Sonja did what she could for her embattled protégés, but her protection wasn’t what it once had been. There was little she could offer them but shelter.
It grew commonplace for Kaspar to come home from the university — or, just as often, to rise in the mornings — to find a rumpled, bearded ism-ist sleeping on the yellow divan in the parlor. He complained to his wife regarding this exactly once. “If you want me to sleep in your house, Herr Toula,” Sonja replied, “then you’ll have to put up with my guests. The girls enjoy them, even if you don’t.” Disgruntled though he was, my grandfather knew there was no point in arguing, especially with regard to the twins: Enzian and Gentian, barely able to walk, delighted in standing next to the divan in pallbearer-ish silence, taking turns seeing how firmly they could tug on the whiskers of each new refugee before he sat up with a yelp of pain.
Rumors of Waldemar von Toula surfaced from time to time — he was in Germany now, allegedly, which came as no surprise at all — but the family preferred to disregard them. Kaspar was offered no promotions by the Department of Physics, but no pigs were stuffed into his pen cup, either. By the turn of the decade, he’d resigned himself to passing the remainder of his duration as an adjunct professor in a city he no longer felt at home in, shunning the papers and most of the people he knew, Jew and gentile alike. When a body, in motion, is not acted upon by any force, Newton famously wrote, that body shall continue on in a straight line, at the same speed. If the middle of Kaspar’s life was a plateau to him — a hilltop with an unobstructed view — then the future was a single smooth descent. And that temperate decline was all he wished for.
How to assess my grandfather, Mrs. Haven? How to judge him? Admittedly, he hadn’t read a newspaper since 1927, he rarely left the house except to deliver his lectures, and he’d come to have as much use for human interaction as a jellyfish; but the force that was building — and would soon overwhelm him — had announced its arrival in letters of fire. To quote Kaspar himself, on the last page of his European diary: Only a blind man could have lived through these last years without seeing what was bearing down upon us; so I made myself as blind as I could manage. I wanted to believe that the worst was behind me, and I found an easy way to make it so. I simply turned my back on what was coming.
Monday, 09:05 EST
Where in spacetime are you, Mrs. Haven? Are you relaxing at home on a dull winter evening, as I like to imagine, leafing idly through these pages by the fire? Are you happy, Mrs. Haven? Are you tipsy? Are you bored? It’s getting harder and harder, with each chapter I finish, to bring your darkling image into focus. My reason for writing was allegedly to capture your interest, or at least to recapture your memory; instead I find your likeness warping, refracting the light I shine toward it, like a cigarette wrapper left out in the sun. How far can I go before you’re gone completely?
In one of Orson’s first published pieces, “The Un-Extended Life” (Preposterous! Stories, volume 21, number 3, 1957), a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk named Silas Strangeways comes across a thumbnail-sized ad on the back page of volume 21, number 3 of Preposterous! Stories (with a fantastically geeky attention to detail that I can’t help admiring, the ad was actually run in that same issue) promising escape from his humdrum existence:
ARE YOU LIVING THE LIFE THAT YOUR MAKER INTENDED?
Does your life lack the flavor, the crackle, the intensity you’ve hoped for?
Daily, we find ourselves bombarded by a thousand recommendations for extending the duration of our lives — exercise three times weekly! smoke in moderation! exchange sugar for saccharine! — but the truth is that time does not gain value by accruing. Time acquires value by being “spent,” and spent freely. The longest life is not always the best one; in the majority of cases, just the opposite.
If you are, in fact, living the life that your maker intended — it may be time to seek another maker.
Prompted, perhaps, by his genre-appropriate surname, Strangeways answers the ad, and soon finds himself in a bunker with titanium walls — located, for some reason, sixty feet beneath the Statue of Liberty — as a test subject in a top-secret, Pentagon-funded experiment in something known as “rotary chrono-feedback.” The basic idea (explains the ascot-sporting, sherry-sipping scientist in charge, Dr. Hugo von Karst) is to harness the power of certain especially nasty cosmic rays to collapse spacetime into a kind of nugget—“a diamond, if you will, of pure, unadulterated NOW”—in which every instant of a man’s life will occur simultaneously. Karst’s pitch is as follows: “Your life, Mr. Strangeways, is sadly diluted. It holds precious few pleasures, a handful at best, with far too much of nothing in between. Imagine, however, the bliss and the terror, the intensity and the passion, if it all were compressed — if you lived your whole life in a nanosecond!”