The Lost Time Accidents by Wray John

Author:Wray, John [Wray, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781429944526
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XVIII

ON A CHALK-COLORED Sunday in early October, four years to the day after heading downstate, my father caught sight of something in a Lexington Avenue shop window that stopped him in his tracks. Things stopped him in his tracks all the time on his walks—stockinged calves, pipe smoke, even the occasional stoplight—but this event was of a different order. The item in question was a pack of playing cards, slightly taller and wider than a standard poker deck, browned along the edges and speckled with age. Orson gawked through the glass for a while, took a few aimless steps, then stepped quickly into the shop. The shopkeeper, a white-bearded Czech who looked of roughly the same vintage as the cards themselves, and was shockingly disheveled even for a junk dealer (though just about right for a physicist, Orson thought), scooped the pack up unceremoniously into his tobacco-stained fingers, as though it had no particular value, and passed it to my father with a sigh.

“What’s your trouble, grandpop?” said my father, whose manners hadn’t been done any favors by the move to New York. “Don’t you care for my looks?”

“It’s not cards to read the future with. Tarock, it’s called—not tarotové karty. A game only. Try to tell the future and you’ll see.”

“See what, exactly?”

The Czech made no reply. Orson gave him his most hard-boiled squint.

“Who said anything about the future, anyhow?”

“No one plays this game anymore,” said the shopkeeper. “Not around here.” He coughed into his beard. “There used to be clubs.”

Orson flipped the topmost card over: a face card, identical to the one he’d seen through the window. Heavier than a poker card, and cut from stiffer stock. “My grandfather used to play this game,” he said. “What’s this first one—the joker?”

“No jokers in tarock,” harrumphed the shopkeeper.

“What’s the name of this card, then?”

“I don’t know in English.”

“Then tell me in German. Or in Czech. Whichever.”

The old man shrugged his shoulders. “In French it was called L’excuse.”

Orson frowned and brought the card up to the light. A wavy-haired man in what might either have been the costume of a soldier or a harlequin held a saucer-shaped hat on which another man, dressed in the same gaudy outfit, was dancing. This dancer, who was roughly squirrel-sized, held a hat in his own hand, no bigger than an espresso cup, into which the wavy-haired man was pointing, as if there were something of significance inside. The effect was agreeably dizzying, like tracing the curve of a Möbius strip. The image itself was like a Möbius strip, come to think of it: an infinite loop with a twist in the middle. It represented something—that much was clear—though God alone knew what that thing might be.

“Where were these cards made?”

“I don’t know,” said the shopkeeper. “Vienna, maybe.”

“How do you play?”

“It goes counterclockwise.”

“Counterclockwise,” said Orson. He thought for a moment. “I was reading something about that just this morning. It’s supposed to be the direction the Milky Way spins.”

“That,” said the shopkeeper, “depends on who’s looking.

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