I thought hard this time. “Is it because—”
“Right you are, Waldy. As light works its way through the earth’s gravitational field, it expends energy. The less energy light has, the lower its frequency. So that’s why,” he said, turning back to the game.
I tried and failed to understand his point. “That’s why what?”
“The lower light’s frequency is, the more time elapses between the crests of its waves,” he said, keeping his eyes on the set. “It’s the distance between those crests that determines how quickly time passes. So what old Professor Lipschitz did was this: he got himself two clocks — superaccurate clocks — then put one at the top of an old water tower and one at the bottom. What do you think he found?”
“Um—”
“Exactly. The clock at the bottom — closer to the earth — was found to run more slowly, in perfect agreement with general relativity.” He puckered his lips at the screen. “Blitz, you chickendicks! Pull your heads out of your jocks!”
I cleared my throat. “So, um, for the football — when it goes way up high — time is actually, really moving faster?”
Orson rolled his eyes wildly, though whether at me or at the Trojans was impossible to guess. “On the other hand, time moves more slowly for a body in motion, so the two factors might cancel each other out. Tough to say. I’m an amateur, remember, not like your departed gramps. You know what that old gasser used to say to me? ‘Time, my boy, is the universe’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.’ I thought that was pretty deep-dish, let me tell you.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s actually kind of—”
“Then I found out he was quoting the goddamn Patent Clerk.” He made a face at something only he could see. “I dropped out of school the next day.”
“But why would that make you—” I started to ask, but he’d already switched off the set, as if there were nobody else in the room, and scuttled back down to his bunker.
* * *
The world, as the saying goes, is full of disappointed men — but my father, Mrs. Haven, was a disappointed child. When I picture the Cheektowaga of my boyhood, I see a Kodachromatic checkerboard of buzzing summer lawns, any of which might hide the Keys to Revelation; for Orson it was more like purgatory. The conceit of the checkerboard applies to him just as well — I stole it, in fact, from his seventeenth novel, Monkey Say, Monkey Die—but the board in Orson’s case was something monstrous: a horizon-wide grid across which he was fated to be shunted back and forth — the hero of some dated existential pulp — by forces beyond his control. Long after they’d outgrown their feelings of divine election, Enzian and Gentian continued to think of their brother as their personal herald: they’d named him, after all, just as Adam had done for the birds and the beasts. Which meant that he belonged to them completely.
Little by little, as they entered their teens, a new idée fixe emerged for the twins. It arrived so perfectly in concert with the beginnings of puberty that it seemed, to their astonished father, as much a secondary sex characteristic as the appearance of hair in their armpits. While other girls were sneaking their mothers’ lipstick and piercing each other’s ears under the bleachers, Enzian and Gentian were struggling through the Hooke-Newton debate on gravitation and arguing about whether God existed within the timestream or outside of it. As if to illustrate Lamarck’s theory of soft inheritance, they developed an aversion to relativity before they fully understood it, and in a matter of months — just as Kaspar had feared — they began to ask about their grandfather’s research. It became appallingly clear, by their thirteenth birthdays at the very latest, that Enzian and Gentian were showing early symptoms of the Syndrome.
Long after Abraham and Isaac had begun to bore them, the twins continued their bedtime readings of the Bible, if only for the conversation between Moses and the angel about time. Time was Jehovah’s most magnificent and terrible creation, they decided: nothing else he’d come up with was half as impressive. It may well have been God’s way of keeping everything in the universe from happening at once, but the twins understood, as their uncle and grandfather had before them, that the inverse was equally true: the universe existed to give time something to play with.
Would the mystery of Ottokar’s legacy have inflamed my aunts’ brains so virulently — would it have infected them at all — if their mother had lived? A psychologist might argue that it served to fill the void created by Sonja’s death; and it’s true, I suppose, that they’d shown no great interest before. The search for the Accidents might easily have expired in a single generation, with the passing of Ottokar’s sons: Kaspar, for example, seems to have all but cured himself before he died. But I can’t see Enzie and Genny, knowing them as I did, other than in the damp, lurid light of the Syndrome.
* * *
Enzian and Gentian were by no means alone in their obsession: not then, in the interminable end phase of the war. If there was ever a year when the power of physics to reconfigure the planet was plain, when engineers and theoreticians seemed as fearsome and divine as Enzian’s cherished seraphim, it was 1945. The twins were preparing a suprise birthday for their father when he came home unexpectedly, his workday smile fixed loosely on his face, and sank onto the couch without a word. They fixed him his favorite drink — he’d never taken much to cocktails, that American eccentricity, but he enjoyed a cup of tea with fino sherry — and asked him whether he was feeling poorly.
“You must not have heard,” Kaspar mumbled. “We did it, just as we told them we would.” He blinked down at his tea as though surprised to find it there. “We did it.”
“Did what, Papa?”
“Hiroshima,” he said. “We dropped the bomb.”
“Of course we’ve heard that,” said Enzian. “We heard about it at school. Mrs. Kieffer played the broadcast on the radio.”
“The war is over,” Gentian added.
“Not yet,” said Enzian.
Gentian rolled her eyes. “The war is over, Enzie. Everybody says.”
No one spoke for a moment. The twins stood close together, watching their father. They’d grown used to condescending to him, but not when the talk turned to physics. They both remembered Oppenheimer’s letter.
“I could have gone down there, to New Mexico,” Kaspar said, almost too quietly to hear. “I could have worked on that project.”
Gentian sat beside him now and took his hand in hers, a thing she hadn’t done since she was eight. “You could have, Papa. We know that, don’t we, Enzie? You could have helped them to build it. And we’d have been so proud.”
“Proud?” said Kaspar, lurching to his feet. He looked older than the twins had ever seen him, but there was color in his face now and his voice was harsh with rage. “Proud?” he yelled, looking from one of their startled faces to the other. “For heaven’s sake, what kind of children are you?”
* * *
Kaspar refused to answer any questions about physics from that day forward, let alone about the Accidents. The twins had no choice, therefore, but to invent their own creation myth, like the primitive society they were. They did their mythmaking privately, individually, taking two shots in the dark instead of one. Enzian wrote her version — in the pidgin she still used in notes to herself — on the back of a Hanukkah card, then used it as a bookmark in her journaclass="underline"
THE “LOST TIME ACCIDENTS” BY ENZIAN OLIVIA TOLLIVER.