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.
This is beginning to read like a passage out of one of my father’s novels, I realize—but you’ve got to admit that what’s happening to me could have fit tidily into the old gasser’s oeuvre. I can see the pocket-paperback version clearly, with the sort of airbrushed starscape on its cover that never seems to go out of style: The Accidental Chrononaut or Timecode: Omega or Little Lost Lamb, Who Made Thee? , filed away among the works of Orson Card Tolliver’s later period, after he’d become morbid and self-pitying and unable to keep up his end of the conversation; after the Syndrome had come to tyrannize his thoughts, just as it had his father’s and his grandfather’s before him. Orson’s last books were barely a hundred pages long, nostalgic wish-fulfillment dreams posing as interdimensional quests for vanished lovers, meditations on aging that no amount of gamma gunplay could disguise. His heroes and heroines were rarely human, and often not even carbon-based life-forms; but they were all, without exception, solitary. My fate would have lent itself perfectly to one of my father’s plotlines, even before the chronosphere expelled me, if for no other reason than its loneliness.
VII
ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1905 —three days after Waldemar’s midnight proposition—Sonja celebrated Kaspar’s return by taking him to a musical evening at the Alleegasse salon of Karl Wittgenstein, a schoolmate of her father’s and one of the wealthiest men in the empire. Professor Silbermann had only the vaguest of notions that his assistant and his daughter were
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.
This is beginning to read like a passage out of one of my father’s novels, I realize—but you’ve got to admit that what’s happening to me could have fit tidily into the old gasser’s oeuvre. I can see the pocket-paperback version clearly, with the sort of airbrushed starscape on its cover that never seems to go out of style: The Accidental Chrononaut or Timecode: Omega or Little Lost Lamb, Who Made Thee? , filed away among the works of Orson Card Tolliver’s later period, after he’d become morbid and self-pitying and unable to keep up his end of the conversation; after the Syndrome had come to tyrannize his thoughts, just as it had his father’s and his grandfather’s before him. Orson’s last books were barely a hundred pages long, nostalgic wish-fulfillment dreams posing as interdimensional quests for vanished lovers, meditations on aging that no amount of gamma gunplay could disguise. His heroes and heroines were rarely human, and often not even carbon-based life-forms; but they were all, without exception, solitary. My fate would have lent itself perfectly to one of my father’s plotlines, even before the chronosphere expelled me, if for no other reason than its loneliness.
VII
ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1905 —three days after Waldemar’s midnight proposition—Sonja celebrated Kaspar’s return by taking him to a musical evening at the Alleegasse salon of Karl Wittgenstein, a schoolmate of her father’s and one of the wealthiest men in the empire. Professor Silbermann had only the vaguest of notions that his assistant and his daughter were
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