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
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
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