A Bridge of Years

by Charles Robert Wilson

  Joyce ventured, “Nobody’s putting down Parker. Folk music is doing something else. It’s just different. There’s no antagonism.”

  Tom sensed that they had had this argument before and that Millstein had his own reasons for bringing it up. “It’s white people’s music,” Millstein said.

  “There’s more social commentary in the folk cafes than in the jazz bars,” Soderman said.

  “But that’s the point. Folk music is like a high school essay. All these earnest little sermons. Jazz is the subject It’s what the sermon is about The whole Negro experience is wrapped up in it.”

  “What are you saying?” Tom asked. “White people shouldn’t make music?”

  Eyes focused on him. Soderman ventured, “The repairman speaks!”

  Millstein was full of beery scorn. “What the fuck do you know about the Negro experience?”

  “Not a damn thing,” Tom said amiably. “Hell, Larry, I’m as white as you are.”

  Lawrence Millstein opened his mouth, then closed it. A moment of silence … then the table erupted in laughter. Millstein managed to say something—it might have been fuck you—but it was lost in the roar and Tom was able to ignore him.

  Joyce laughed, too, then steered the conversation down a less volatile alleyway: she’d had a letter from somebody named Susan who was doing political organization in rural Georgia. Apparently Susan, a Vassar graduate, had been pretty wild during her Village days. Everybody trotted out Susan stories. Joyce relaxed.

  She leaned over and whispered in Tom’s ear, “Try not to make him mad!”

  He whispered back, “I think it’s too late,” and ordered another beer.

  He had reached that subtle turning point at which he was not quite drunk but definitely a little past sober. He decided these were good people. He liked them. When they left Stanley’s, he followed them. Joyce took his hand.

  The night air was warm and stagnant. They moved past tenement stoops full of people, bleak streetlights, noise, a barber shop reeking of Barbasol, to an old building and inside and up to a long room cluttered with bookshelves and bad, amateurish paintings. “Lawrence’s apartment,” Joyce confided. He asked, “Should I be here?” and she said, “It’s a party!”

  The books were poetry, Evergreen Review, contemporary novels. The record collection was large and impressive— there were Bix Beiderbecke 78s in among the LPs—and the hi-fi looked expensive: a Rek-O-Kut turntable, an amplifier bristling with tubes. “Music!” somebody shouted, and Tom stood aside while Millstein eased a John Coltrane record out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable—the gesture was faintly religious. Suddenly the room was full of wild melody.

  Tom watched Soderman pull down the blinds, cutting off a view of the Con Ed stacks on Fourteenth Street, while someone else produced a wooden box containing a quarter ounce of seeded brown marijuana and a package of Zig-Zag rolling papers. Tom was amused by the solemnity of this ritual, including a few doubtful glances in his direction—was this new guy trustworthy? He bustled over and said, “Let me roll it.”

  Smiles. Joyce asked, “Do you know how?”

  He pasted together two papers to make a double-wide. His technique was rusty—it had been a long time—but he produced a creditable joint. Soderman nodded his approval. “Where did you learn that?”

  He answered absently, “In college.”

  “So where’d you go to college?”

  “In the agricultural heartland of the Pacific Northwest.” He smiled. “A match?”

  He meant only to establish his camaraderie, but the dope went instantly to his head. Coltrane’s sax, radiating from a single speaker, became a great golden bell-like instrument. He decided he liked Lawrence Millstein for liking this music, then remembered the diatribe in the bar and Joyce’s warning —Don’t make him mad—implying something about his temper and what she might have seen of it. He looked at Joyce where she stood silhouetted in the door to Lawrence’s ugly kitchen. He recalled the half promise she had made him and thought about the possibility of holding her in his arms, of taking her to bed. She was very young and not as sophisticated as she liked to believe. She deserved better than Lawrence Millstein.

  The Coltrane ended. Millstein put on something Tom didn’t recognize, fierce bop, an angry music recorded with the microphone too close to the trumpet—it sounded like a piano at war with a giant wasp. The party was getting noisier. Disoriented, he moved to a vacant chair in one corner of the room and let the sound wash over him. There was a knock at the door; the dope was carefully hidden; the door eased open —it was some friend of Soderman’s, a woman in a black turtleneck carrying a guitar case. Shouts of welcome. Joyce went to the turntable and lifted the tonearm. Millstein shouted, “Careful with that!” from the opposite end of the room.

  Joyce borrowed the guitar, tuned it, and began picking out chords and bass runs. Pretty soon there were five or six people gathered around her. She was flushed—from the drinking or the dope or the attention—and her eyes were a little glassy. But when she sang, she sang wonderfully. She sang traditional folk ballads, “Fannerio,”

  “Lonesome Traveler.” When she spoke she was tentative, or shy, or sardonic, but the voice that issued out of her now was utterly different, a voice that made Tom sit up and stare. He had liked her without guessing she had this voice bottled up inside. The look on his face must have been comical; she smiled at him. “Come play!” she said.

  He was startled. “Christ, no.”

  “I heard you diddling that guitar you carried into town. You’re not too bad.”

  Soderman said, “The repairman plays guitar?”

  If he’d been a little more sober he would never have accepted. But what the hell—if he was lousy it would only make Joyce look good. Making Joyce look good seemed like a fairly noble ambition.

  For years he’d taken his guitar out of its box maybe once a month, so he wouldn’t lose what little skill he had. He’d been serious about it in college—serious enough to take lessons with a semialcoholic free-lance teacher named Pegler, who claimed to have led a folk-rock outfit in the Haight in 1965. (Pegler, where are you now?) He took the guitar from Joyce and wondered what he could possibly play. “Guantanamera”? Some old Weavers ballad? But he recalled a song he’d taught himself, years ago, from an old Fred Neil album—counted on inspiration and luck to bring back the chord changes.

  His singing voice was basically charmless and the dope had roughened it, but he managed the lyrics without groping. He looked up from his fingering halfway through the song and realized Joyce was beaming her approval. Which made him fumble over a chord change. But he picked it up and finished without too much embarrassment. Joyce applauded happily. Soderman said, “Impressive!”

  Lawrence Millstein had drifted over from a dark corner of the room. He offered, “Not bad for amateur night.”

  “Thank you,” Tom said warily.

  “Sentimental shit, of course.”

  Joyce was more rankled by the remark than Tom was. “Must be a full moon,” she said. “Lawrence is turning into an asshole.”

  “Reckless,” Soderman observed quietly. Tom sat up.

  “No, that’s all right,” Millstein said. He made an expansive gesture and spilled a little Jack Daniel’s from the glass in his hand. “I don’t want to interrupt your lovefest.”

  Tom handed away the guitar. It was dawning on him that he was in the presence of an angry drunk.

  Don’t make him mad. But Joyce seemed to have forgotten her own advice. “Don’t do this,” she said. “We don’t need this shit.”

  “We don’t need it? Who—you and Tom here? Joyce and the repairman?”

  Soderman said, “You spilled your drink, Lawrence. Let’s get another one. You and me.”

  Millstein ignored him. He turned to Tom. “You like her? Are you fond of Joyce?”

  “Yes, Larry,” he said. “I like Joyce a lot.”

  “Don’t you fucking call me Larry!”

  Instantly, the party
was quiet. Millstein picked up the attention focused on him; he forced a smile. “You know what she is, of course,” he went on. “But you must know. It’s an old story. They come in from Bryn Mawr wearing these ridiculous clothes—ballet flats and toreador pants. They have bohemian inclinations but they all shop at Bonwit Teller. They come here for intellectual inspiration. They’ll tell you that. Of course, they really come to get laid. Isn’t that right, Joyce? They see themselves in the arms of some nineteen-year-old Negro musician. You can get laid in Westchester just as easily, of course, but not by anyone nearly as interesting.” He peered at Tom with a fixed, counterfeit smile. “So just how interesting are you?”

  “Right now,” Tom said, “I guess I’m a little bit more interesting than you are.”

  Millstein threw down his glass and balled his fists. Joyce said, “Stop him!” Soderman stood up in front of Millstein and put a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, calm down. It’s nothing. Hey, Larry—I mean, Lawrence—”

  Joyce grabbed Tom’s hand and pulled him toward the door.

  “The party is fucking over!” Millstein screamed.

  They ducked into the hall.

  “Come home with me,” Joyce said.

  Tom said that sounded like a good idea.

  She undressed with the unselfconsciousness of a cat.

  Pale streetlight came glowing through the dusty window. He was startled by her small breasts and pink, pleasant aureoles; by the neat angle of her pubic hair. She smiled at him in the dark, and he decided he was leading a charmed life.

  The touch of her was like a long, deep drink of water. She arched against him as he entered her; he felt rusty springs unwind inside him. She had put her glasses on the orange crate by the bed and her eyes were fiercely wide.

  Later, as they were drifting into sleep, she told him he made love like a lonely man.

  “Do I?”

  “You did tonight. Are you lonely?”

  “Was lonely.”

  “Very lonely?”

  “Very lonely.”

  She curved against him, breasts and hips. “I want you to stay here. I want you to move in.”

  He experienced another moment of pure free-fall. “Is the apartment big enough?”

  “The bed is big enough.”

  He kissed her in the dark. Charmed life, he thought.

  Nineteen sixty-two, a hot summer night.

  It was night all over the continent now, skies clear from the Rockies east to the coast of Maine, stars shining down from the uncrowded sky of a slightly younger universe. The nation slept, and its sleep was troubled—if at all—by faint and distant dreams. A dream of Mississippi. The dream of a war that hadn’t quite started, somewhere east of the ocean. The dream of dark empires moving on its borders.

  JFK slept. Lee Harvey Oswald slept. Martin Luther King slept.

  Tom Winter slept and dreamed of Chernobyl.

  He carried this nugget of discontent from the night into the morning.

  I am a cold wind from the land of your children, he had thought. But he looked at Joyce—eating a late breakfast at a cheap restaurant at the end of a dirty, narrow, sunlit street— and didn’t want to be that anymore. This was history and history was good because it was immutable; but he worried that he might have brought an infection from the future— not a literal disease but some turbulence in the timestream. Some dark, stalking irregularity that would unravel the fabric of her life. Maybe his certainties were absolutely false. Maybe they would all die in the Soviet attack that followed the missile crisis.

  But that was absurd—wasn’t it?

  “Sometime soon,” she said, “you’re going to have to tell me who you are and where you came from.”

  He was startled by the suggestion. He looked at her across the table.

  “I will,” he said. “Sometime.”

  “Sometime soon.”

  “Soon,” he said helplessly. Maybe it was a promise. Maybe it was a he.

  Nine

  His name was Billy Gargullo, and he was a farmboy.

  He had lived in New York City for ten years now, but hot nights like this still reminded him of Ohio.

  Hot nights like this, he couldn’t sleep. Hot summer nights, he left his tiny apartment and moved like a shadow into the streets. He liked to ride the subway; when the subway was crowded, he liked to walk.

  Tonight he rode a little, walked a little.

  He had left his shiny golden armor safe at home.

  Billy seldom wore the armor, but he often thought about it. The golden armor was at home, in the tenement apartment where he had lived for the last decade. He kept the armor in his closet, behind a false wall, in a box no one else could open.

  He wore the golden armor seldom; but the golden armor was a part of him, profoundly his own—and that was troublesome. He had left a great many things behind when he came to New York. Many ugly, many shameful things. But some ugly and shameful things had come with him. The armor itself was not ugly or shameful—in its own way it was beautiful, and when Billy wore it he wore it with pride. But he had come to suspect that his need for it was shameful … that the things he did when he wore it were ugly.

  This wasn’t entirely Billy’s fault, or so he told himself. The Infantry had performed certain surgeries on him. His need for the armor was real, physical; he wasn’t whole without it. In a sense, Billy was the armor. But the armor wasn’t entirely Billy: the armor had its own motives, and it knew Billy better than any other creature in the world.

  It sang to him sometimes.

  Most often, it sang about death.

  Billy emerged from the roaring machine caves of the subway into the night wilderness of Forty-second Street and Broadway. Midnight had come and gone.

  Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, by mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this— astonishingly—in the name of advertising.

  He paced through Times Square, where the lights were so bright he could hear them sizzle and spit.

  Where Billy came from—back on the farm—this frivolous use of electricity would have been called promiscuous. A very bad word. But the word meant something else here … a dissipation of some other energy entirely.

  Words had troubled him from the day he arrived in New York.

  He had arrived in a fury of blood and noise, disgorged into the sub-basement of an old building through a fracture in the firmament of time—frightened of what he had seen there; frightened of what might be waiting for him. He detonated EM pulses, brought a wall tumbling down, and killed the man (a time traveler) who tried to stop him.

  When the dust settled, he crouched in a corner and considered his options.

  He thought about the monster he’d encountered in the tunnel.

  The monster was called a “time ghost”—Ann Heath had warned him about it before she died.

  The fiery apparition had terrified Billy even through the haze of chemical courage pumped into him by his armor. The time ghost was like nothing he had ever seen and Billy sensed—he couldn’t say how—that its interest in him was particular, personal. Maybe it knew what he’d done. Maybe it knew he had no place in this maze of time; that he was a deserter, a criminal, a refugee.

  The monster had appeared as he reached the end of the tunnel, and Billy felt the heat of it and the subtler weight of its hostility; and he had run from it, a terrified sprint through the terminal doorway to this place, a safe place where the monster couldn’t follow—or so Ann Heath had told him.

  Nevertheless, Billy was still frightened.

  He had a rough idea where he was. Mid-twentieth century. Some urban locus. He had killed the custodian of this place and a few more pulse detonations would sweep it clean of cybernetics. But Billy crouched in the corner of the dimly fit sub-basement—in the stench of fused plaster and cinder-block and a fine gray dust from the dam
aged tunnel—and understood that his exile was permanent.

  He powered down his armor and performed a private inventory.

  Things he had run away from:

  The Infantry.

  The Storm Zone.

  Murder.

  The woman Ann Heath with a wedge of glass in her skull and a hemotropic tube embedded in her chest. Things he had left behind:

  Ohio.

  His father, Nathan. A town called Oasis.

  Miles of kale and green wheat and a sky empty of everything but heat and dust.

  Things he couldn’t leave behind: His armor.

  And, Billy realized, this place. This building, whatever it was. This tunnel entrance, which he had sealed but which he could not trust: because it contained monsters, because it contained the future.

  What had seemed at the time like inspiration, this feverish escape into the past, troubled him now. He had tampered with mechanisms he didn’t understand, mechanisms more powerful than he could imagine. His encounter with the time ghost had been disturbing enough; who else might he have angered? There was so much Billy didn’t understand. He believed he was safe here … but the belief was tempered with fresh new doubts.

  But here you are. That was the plain fact of it. Here he was and here he would stay. At least no Infantry; at least no Storm Zone. A place away from all that. Not Ohio with its deserts and canals and the miracle of the harvest, but at least a safe place.

  A city in the middle years of the twentieth century.

  That night, his first night in the city of New York, Billy undressed the body of the time traveler and used a fan beam to turn the corpse into a dune of feathery white ash.