A Bridge of Years

by Charles Robert Wilson

  What they preserved in this fashion was not the time traveler’s body, precisely, but the rough core of it—the skeletal system (minus a leg and most of the skull); crude reductions of the major organs; some sterile meat. An observer walking into the woodshed would have seen what looked like a freshly flayed, naked, and brutally incomplete corpse. It was not in any sense functional.

  It never would have been, except that the cybernetics maintained among themselves a blueprint of the time traveler’s body and had shared a map of his brain and its contents. This information was shared among them holographically; some detail had been lost in the EM pulse, but it was nothing they couldn’t infer from genetic data still preserved in the body. They had salvaged what parts they could and they were ready to begin rebuilding the rest.

  The problem was raw material: raw material for the reconstruction and raw material for their own maintenance. Much needed to be done. For now, they simply sterilized the corpse and sealed its perimeters. They maintained a watch over the body of Ben Collier to guarantee the continued viability of his meat; but the main phalanx of the cybernetics retreated to the house to consider their resources and rebuild their material base.

  Many new nanomechanisms would be needed. These could be assembled—albeit slowly—from material in the house and surrounding soil. The nanomechanisms were intricate but very nearly massless; this was their advantage. With this new army, work could proceed on the restoration of the body … a task unfortunately much more massive.

  Their sole ally was the body itself. Once primitive cardiovascular function had been restored, the time traveler’s own digestive functions could begin to work. In effect, he could be nourished, and the nourishment directed into building and healing. The problem was that he would require a vast amount of protein for maintenance alone.

  The cybernetics had established a broad path between the house and the woodshed, and within this space they taught themselves to scavenge food. Much acceptable protein was available in this temperate rain forest. Much that was not acceptable could be rendered so, with modification. They learned how to harvest the forest without denuding it. They took deer fern and horsetail, red huckleberries, bracket fungus from a tall, mossy hemlock. They competed with the frogs and the thrushes for insects. On one occasion they discovered the fresh body of a raccoon. This was a banquet, skinned and liquefied with enzymes. They could have killed a deer and speeded their task immensely; but the cybernetics were deeply inhibited against the taking of vertebrate life. They acquired most of their meat by theft—a mouse or frog stolen from the beak of an owl on moonlit summer nights.

  If their numbers had been greater this might have sufficed. Restrained by their material base, they were able to preserve the time traveler but only occasionally to upgrade a major function. In July 1983 he regained an operational kidney. In October 1986 he took his first real breath in seven years.

  Consciousness was the last great hurdle—so much brain tissue had been destroyed. The reconstruction was more delicate and required more raw material. Consequently it was slow.

  The work was painstaking but the cybernetics were infinitely patient. Nothing intruded on their labor until the arrival of Tom Winter—a complication that was not merely distracting but possibly dangerous. Since they couldn’t evict him they attempted to use him to their advantage … but there was so much they didn’t know, so much wisdom that had been lost, and working with Tom Winter culled away too many of their essential nanomechanisms. For a time, the work was slowed … but it hastened once again when Tom Winter donated several packages of proteins from his freezer; hastened again when a cougar killed a deer within range of the woodshed. The cougar was easily frightened away and the deer was a vast, warm repository of useful food.

  The work hurried toward completion.

  Ben Collier experienced odd moments of wakefulness.

  His awareness, at first, was tenuous and small, like the flickering of a candleflame in a vast, dark room.

  The first experience strong enough to linger in his memory was of pain—a scalding pain that seemed to radiate inward from all the peripheries of his body. He tried to open his eyes and couldn’t. The eyes weren’t functional and the lids felt sutured shut. He tried to scream and lacked this function also.

  The nanomechanisms inside him sensed his distress and alleviated it at once. They closed his sensorium, blocking nerve signals from his raw and mending skin. They triggered a flood of soothing endorphins. Almost immediately, Ben went back to sleep.

  The next time he was allowed to wake, the fundamental mechanisms of self and thought were more nearly healed. He knew who he was and what had happened to him. He was paralyzed and blind; but the nanomechanisms reassured him and monitored his neurochemicals for panic.

  Ben was mindful of his custodial duties, doubtless neglected during the period of his death. He had one overriding thought: Tell me what’s happened at the house.

  In time, the nanomechanisms responded. He had made great progress but he wasn’t ready to assume his former status. For that, he would need to be entirely healed.

  Sleep now, they said. He was grateful, and slept.

  The next time he woke he woke instantly, alert and buzzing with concern.

  Someone is here, the nanomechanisms told him.

  Ben knew where he was. He was in the ancient woodshed in the forest behind the house. The cybernetics had restored his memory, including the memory of his own murder and beyond: really, their memories were his memories. The cybernetics had been designed for Ben as his personal adjuncts —appendages—and he was pleased at how well they had functioned without him. For a moment much briefer than a second he savored the details of his own reconstruction.

  Which was miraculous but unfortunately not complete. His mind was almost fully functional, but his body needed work. His skull was still partial, large chunks of it replaced with a gluey, transparent caul; his left leg was a venous flipper; muscle tissue stood exposed over large parts of his body where the skin and decay had been stripped and sterilized.

  At least his eyes were functional. He opened them.

  He was supine in the rotted mass of newsprint. Sunlight glimmered through gaps in the southern wall of the shed. Everything was green here, the color of moss and lichen. The air was full of dust motes, pollen and spores.

  He looked at the door of the shed, a crudely hinged raft of barnboards held together with rusty iron nails.

  His ears worked. He was able to hear the rasp of his own breathing … the faint scuttle of cybermechanisms in the detritus around him.

  The sound of footsteps in the high meadow weeds beyond the door.

  Now, the sound of a hand on the primitive latch that held the door closed. The sound of the latch as it opened. The door as it squealed inward.

  Ben couldn’t move. He drew a deep breath into his raw lungs and hoped he would be able at least to speak.

  Eight

  Greenwich Village, Manhattan, in the gathering heat and tidal migrations of the summer of 1962: by the end of June Tom Winter had learned a few things about his adopted homeland.

  He learned some of its history. “The Village,” named Sapokanican by the Indians and Greenwich by the British, had been a fashionable section of Manhattan until its prestige migrated north along Broadway at the end of the nineteenth century. Then an immigrant population had moved in, and then radical bohemians drawn by low rents in the years before the First World War. If his time machine had dropped him off in the 1920s he could have walked into Romany Marie’s in one of its several incarnations—on Sheridan Square or later on Christopher Street—and found Eugene O’Neill making notes for a play or Edgard Varese dining on a ciorba aromatic with leeks and dill. Or he might have arrived in 1950 and encountered Dylan Thomas drunk in the White Horse or Kerouac at the Remo considering California—these public lives only an eddy of the deeper current, a counterpoint to American life as it was understood in the movies.

  Rents had climbed since then; a sl
ow gentrification had been proceeding ever since the subway linked the Village to the rest of the city in the 1930s. Genuinely poor artists were already being shouldered into the Lower East Side. Nevertheless, it was 1962 and the scent of rebellion was strong and poignant.

  He learned that he liked it here.

  Maybe that was odd. Tom had never considered himself a “bohemian.” The word had never meant much to him. He had gone to college in the seventies, smoked marijuana on rare occasions, worn denim and long hair in the last years that was fashionable. None of this had seemed even vaguely rebellious—merely routine. He moved into a white-collar job without anxiety and worried about his income like everybody else. Like everybody else, he ran up his credit debt and had to cut back a little. He was troubled—like everybody else— when the stock market tottered; he and Barbara had never set aside enough for an investment portfolio, but he worried about the economy and what it might mean for their budget. Barbara was deeply committed to ecological activism but she was hardly bohemian about it, despite what Tony thought— her approach, he sometimes thought, was brutal enough to put a hard-nosed corporate lawyer to shame. She told him once that if she had to wear a Perry Ellis skirt to be credible, she’d fucking wear it: it wasn’t an issue.

  And when the structure of life and job collapsed around him, it didn’t occur to Tom that the system had failed; only that he had failed it.

  He was surprised and delighted to discover another attitude here, not only in Joyce but generally, in the Village: a consensus that the world outside was a sterile laboratory and that its only interesting products were its failures, its rejects, and its refugees.

  He was as poor, certainly, as any refugee. Joyce put him up for a few days when he arrived—until Lawrence objected— and persuaded him not to sell his guitar. She had found a part-time job waitressing and lent him enough cash for a room at the Y. She told her friends he was looking for a day job and one of them—an unpublished novelist named Soderman—told Tom there was a radio and hi-fi shop on Eighth with a Help Wanted sign in the window. The store was called Lindner’s Radio Supply, and the owner, Max Lindner, explained that he needed a technician, “somebody to work in the back,” and did Tom know anything about electronics? Tom said yeah, he did—he’d done a couple of EE courses in college and he knew his way around a soldering iron. Most of what Max’s customers brought in for repair would be vacuum tube merchandise, but Tom didn’t anticipate any trouble adapting. “The back” was a room the size of a two-car garage; the walls were lined with tube caddies and testers and there was a well-thumbed RCA manual attached to the workbench on a string. The smell of hot solder flux saturated the air.

  “My last guy was a Puerto Rican kid,” Max said. “He was only eighteen, but there was nothing he couldn’t strip and put back together twice as nice as the day we sold it. You know what they did? They fucking drafted him. Six months from now he’ll be building radar stations in Congo Bongo. I did my bit on Guadalcanal and this is how the army repays me.” He looked Tom up and down. “You can really do this work?”

  “I can really do this work.”

  “You start tomorrow.”

  After work, his first priority was a place to live.

  Joyce agreed. “You can’t stay at the French Embassy. It’s not safe.”

  “The what?”

  “The Y, Tom. It’s nothing but faggots. Maybe you noticed.”

  She grinned a little slyly, expecting him to be shocked by this information. He wondered what to say. My ex-wife was politically correct—we attended all the AIDS fundraisers. “I think my virtue is intact.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Virtue?”

  To celebrate his job they had come to Stanley’s, a new bar on the Lower East Side. Tom had begun to sort out the geography of the city; he understood that the East Village was even more subterranean than the West, a crosstown bus away from the subways, the Bearded Artist a recent immigrant, which was why Stanley’s sometimes offered free beer in an effort to build a clientele. Lawrence’s apartment was nearby and Joyce’s not too far from it and anyway nothing was happening tonight in the gaudier precincts of Bleecker and MacDougal.

  Tom was pleased about the job, a little nervous about the evening.

  Joyce offered him a cigarette. He said, “I don’t.”

  “You’re very light on vices, Tom.” She lit one of her own. The office where he worked at Aerotech had been designated smoke-free; none of Barbara’s friends smoked and the salesmen at the car lot had been encouraged not to. He’d forgotten what a fascinating little ritual it could be. Joyce performed it with unconscious grace, waving the match and dropping it in an ashtray. In an hour, when the bar filled up, the air would be blue with smoke. The stern disapproval of C. Everett Koop was a quarter century away.

  “At least you drink.”

  “In moderation.” He was nursing a beer. “I used to drink more. Actually, I wasn’t a very successful alcoholic. My doctor told me it was too hard for me to drink seriously and too easy to stop. He said I must not have the gene for alcoholism —it just isn’t in my DNA.”

  “Your which?”

  “I’m not cut out that way.”

  “Hopelessly Presbyterian.” She drew on the cigarette. “Something’s bothering you, yes?”

  “I don’t want to fend off a lot of questions tonight.”

  “From me, or—?”

  He waved his hand—no, not her.

  “Well, people are curious. The thing is, Tom, you’re not a label. People come here and talk about nonconformity and the Lonely Crowd and all that jazz, but they’re wearing labels all the same. You could hang signs on them. Angry young poet. Left-wing folksinger. Ad executive reclaiming his youth. So on. The real, true ciphers are very rare.”

  He said, “I’m a cipher?”

  “Oh, definitely.”

  “Isn’t that a label too?”

  She smiled. “But no one likes it. If you don’t want to hang around, Tom, you have some options.”

  “Like?”

  “Like, you could go somewhere else. Or you could tell everybody to fuck off. Or we could go somewhere else. Now or later.”

  She sat across the table from him, one hand cocked at an angle and the smoke from her cigarette drifting toward the ceiling. The light was dim but she was beautiful in it. She had tied her long hair back; her eyes were pursed, quizzical, blue under the magnification of her glasses. He could tell she was nervous about making the offer.

  Nor was there any mistaking what the offer meant. Tom felt as if the chair had dropped out from under him. Felt weightless.

  He said, “What about Lawrence?”

  “Lawrence has some problems. Or, I don’t know, maybe they’re my problems. He says he doesn’t want to own me. He doesn’t want anybody else to, either. He says he’s ambivalent. I’m what he’s ambivalent about.”

  Tom was considering this when the door opened and a crowd rushed in from the hot evening on Avenue B. Her friends. “Joyce!” one of them sang out.

  She looked at Tom, shrugged and smiled and mouthed a word: it might have been “Later.”

  Like any immigrant—any refugee—he was adjusting to his new environment. It was impossible to live in a state of perpetual awe. But the knowledge of where he was and how he had come here was seldom far from his mind.

  Nineteen sixty-two. The Berlin Wall was less than a year old. John F. Kennedy was in the White House. The Soviets were preparing to send missiles to Cuba, precipitating a crisis which would not, finally, result in nuclear war. In Europe, women were bearing babies deformed by thalidomide. Martin Luther King was leading the civil rights movement; this fall, there would be some trouble down at Oxford, Mississippi. And the Yanks would take the World Series from the Giants.

  Privileged information.

  He knew all this; but he still felt edged out of the conversation that began to flow around him. For a while they talked about books, about plays. Soderman, the novelist who tipped Tom off to the radio-repai
r job, had strong opinions about Ionesco. Soderman was a nice guy; he had a young, round chipmunk face with a brush cut on top and a fringe of beard under his chin. Likable—but he might have been speaking Greek. Ionesco was a name Tom had heard but couldn’t place, lost in a vague memory of some undergraduate English class. Likewise Beckett, likewise Jean Genet. He smiled enigmatically at what seemed like appropriate moments.

  Then Lawrence Millstein performed a verbal editorial on folk music versus jazz and Tom felt a little bit more at home. Millstein was of the old school and outnumbered at this table; he hated the cafe-folk scene and harbored nostalgia for the fierce gods of the tenor sax.

  He looked the part. If Tom had been casting a movie version of On the Road he might have picked Millstein as an “atmosphere” character. He was tall, dark-haired, lean, and there was something studied about his intensity. Joyce had described him as “a Raskolnikov type—at least, he tries to come on that way.”

  Millstein performed a twenty-minute monologue on Char-he Parker and the “anguish of the Negro soul.” Tom listened with mounting irritation, but kept silent—and drank. He knew the music Lawrence was talking about. Through his breakup with Barbara and after the divorce, he had sometimes felt that Parker—and Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis of the Sketches of Spain era, and Sonny Rollins, and Oliver Nelson—were the only thing holding him together. He had traded in his scoured LPs for the CD versions of some of these records. It was an anomaly, he sometimes thought, these old monophonic recordings deciphered by laser-beam technology. But the music just rolled on out of the speakers. He liked it because it wasn’t crying-in-your-beer music. It was never pathetic. It took your hurt, it acknowledged your hurt, but sometimes—on the good nights—it let you soar out somewhere beyond that hurt. Tom had appreciated this strange way the music translated losses into gains and it bothered him to hear Millstein doing a self-righteous tap dance on the subject.