A Bridge of Years

by Charles Robert Wilson

  Joyce inspected the depths of her beer. “Maybe Susan’s right, then. I should be doing something more direct.”

  “Like what? Freedom riding? Picketing? Essentially, you know, it’s still guitar playing. It’ll be tolerated as long as it serves some purpose among the powerful—federalism, in the present instance. And tidied up when they’re done with it.”

  “That’s about the most cynical thing I’ve heard you say, Lawrence. Which covers some territory. Didn’t Gandhi make a remark about ‘speaking truth to power’?”

  “Power doesn’t give a flying fuck, Joyce. That should be obvious.”

  “So what’s the alternative?”

  “Il faut cultiver notre jardin. Or write a poem.”

  “Like Ginsberg? Ferlinghetti? That’s pretty political stuff.”

  “You miss the point. They’re saying, here’s the ugliness, and here’s my revulsion—and here’s the mystery buried in it.”

  “Mystery?”

  “Beauty, if you like.”

  “Making art out of junk,” Joyce interpreted. “You could say that.”

  “While people starve? While people are beaten?”

  “Before I starve,” Millstein said. “Before I’m beaten. Yes, I’ll make these beautiful objects.”

  “And the world is better for it?”

  “The world is more beautiful for it.”

  “You sound like the Parks Commission.” She turned to Tom. “How about you? Do you believe in poetry or politics?”

  “Never gave much thought to either one,” Tom said.

  “Behold,” Lawrence said. “The Noble Savage.”

  Tom considered the question. “I suppose you do what you have to. But we’re all pretty much impotent in the long run. I don’t make national policy. At most, I vote. When it’s convenient. Henry Kissinger doesn’t drop in and say, ‘Hey, Tom, what about this China thing?’ ”

  Millstein looked up from his drink. “Who the hell is Henry Kissinger?”

  Joyce was a little drunk and very intense, frowning at him across the table. “You’re saying we don’t make a difference?”

  “Maybe some people make a difference. Martin Luther King, maybe. Khrushchev. Kennedy.”

  “People whose names begin with K,” Millstein supplied.

  “But not us,” Joyce insisted. “We don’t make a difference. Is that what you mean?”

  “Christ, Joyce, I don’t know what I mean. I’m not a philosopher.”

  “No. You’re not a repairman, either.” She shook her head. “I wish I knew what the hell you were.”

  “There’s your mistake,” Millstein said. “Dear Joyce. Next time you go to bed with somebody, make sure you’re formally introduced.”

  Millstein drank until he loved the world. This was his plan. He told them so. “It doesn’t always work. Well, you know that. But sometimes. Drink until the world is lovable. Good advice.” The evening wore on.

  They parted around midnight, on the sidewalk, Avenue B. Millstein braced himself against Tom’s breastbone. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, about before. I was an asshole!”

  “It’s okay,” Tom said.

  Millstein looked at Joyce. “You be good to her, Tom.”

  “I will. Of course I will.”

  “She doesn’t know why we love her and hate her. But it’s for the same reason, of course. Because she’s this … this pocket of faith. She believes in virtue! She comes to this city and sings songs about courage. My God! She has the courage of a saint. It’s her element. Even her vices are meticulous. She’s not merely good in bed, she’s good—in bed!”

  “Shut up,” Joyce said. “Lawrence, you shit! Everybody can hear you.”

  Millstein turned to her and took her face between his hands, drunkenly but gently. “This is not an insult, dear. We love you because you’re better than we are. But we’re jealous of your goodness and we will scour it out of you if we possibly can.”

  “Go home, Lawrence.”

  He wheeled away. “Good night!”

  “Good night,” Tom said. But it didn’t feel like such a good night. It was hot. It was dark. He was sweating.

  He walked home with Joyce leaning into his shoulder. She was still somewhat drunk; he was somewhat less so. The conversation had made her sad. She paused under a streetlight and looked at him mournfully.

  She said, “You’re not immortal anymore!”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “No, no! When you came here, Tom, you were immortal. I was sure of it. The way you walked. The way you looked at everything. Like this was all some fine, wonderful place where nothing could hurt you. I thought you must be immortal—the only explanation.”

  He said, “I’m sorry I’m not immortal.”

  She fumbled her key into the front door of the building.

  The apartment was hot. Tom stripped down to his T-shirt and briefs; Joyce ducked out of her shirt. The sight of her in the dim light provoked a flash of pleasure. He had lived in this apartment for more than a month and familiarity only seemed to intensify his feelings about her. When he met her she had been emblematic, Joyce who lived in the Village in 1962; now she was Joyce Casella from Minneapolis whose father owned Casella’s Shoe Store, whose mother phoned twice monthly to plead with her to find a husband or at least a better job; whose sister had borne two children by a decent practicing Catholic named Tosello. Joyce who was shy about her thick prescription lenses and the birthmark on her right shoulder. Joyce who carried a wonderful singing voice concealed inside her, like a delicate wild bird allowed to fly on rare and special occasions. This ordinary, daily Joyce was superior to the emblematic Joyce and it was this Joyce he had come to love.

  But she was ignoring him. She rummaged through a stack of papers by the bookcase, mainly phone bills; Tom asked her what she was looking for.

  “Susan’s letter. The one I was telling Lawrence about. She said I could call. ‘Call anytime,’ she said. She wants me to go down there. There’s so much work to do! Jesus, Tom, what time is it? Midnight? Hey, Tom, is it midnight in Georgia?”

  He felt a ripple of worry. “What do you mean—you want to call her tonight?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “What for?”

  “Make arrangements.”

  “What arrangements?”

  She stood up. “What I said wasn’t just bullshit. I meant it. What good am I here? I should be down there with Susan doing some real work.”

  He was astonished. He hadn’t anticipated this.

  “You’re drunk,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m a little drunk. I’m not too drunk to think about the future.”

  Maybe Tom was a little drunk, too. The future! This was both funny and alarming. “You want the future? I can give you the future.”

  She frowned and set aside the papers. “What?”

  “It’s dangerous, Joyce. People get killed, for Christ’s sake.” He thought about the civil rights movement circa 1962. What he recalled was a jumble of headlines filtered through books and TV documentaries. Bombs in churches, mobs attacking buses, Klansmen with riot sticks and sawed-off shotguns. He pictured Joyce in the midst of this. The thought was intolerable. “You can’t.”

  She held out the letter, postmarked Augusta.

  “They need me.”

  “The hell they do. One more earnest white college graduate isn’t going to turn the tide, for Christ’s sake. They have TV. They have pinheaded southern sheriffs beating women on all three networks. They have friends in the Kennedy administration. After the assassination—” He was drunker than he’d realized. He was giving away secrets. But that didn’t matter. “After the assassination they’ll have Lyndon Johnson signing civil rights legislation while Vietnam escalates. You want the future? Vietnam, Woodstock, Nixon, Watergate, Jimmy Carter, Ayatollah Khomeini, the whole fucking parade of cliches, with or without the help of Joyce Casella. Please,” he said. “Please don’t go get killed before we know each other better.”r />
  “Sometimes I wonder if I know you at all. What’s all this shit about the future?”

  “That’s where I’m from.”

  She looked at him fiercely. “Tell me the truth or get out of my apartment.”

  He described in broad and clumsy outline the train of events that had carried him here.

  Joyce listened with focused patience but didn’t begin to believe him until he brought out his wallet and unpacked his ID from the card windows—his Washington State driver’s license, his Visa card, an expired American Express card, a card to access bank machines; from the billfold, a couple of tens bearing a mint date twenty years in the future.

  Joyce examined all these things solemnly. Finally she said, “Your watch.”

  He hadn’t worn it since his first visit; it was in the left-hand pocket of his jeans. She must have seen it. “It’s just a cheap digital watch. But you’re right. You can’t buy those here.”

  He backed off and let her contemplate these things. He was a little more sober for the telling of it and he wondered whether this had been a terrible mistake. It must be frightening. God knows, it had frightened him.

  But she fingered the cards and the money, then sighed and looked at him fearlessly.

  “I’ll make coffee,” she said. “I guess we don’t sleep tonight.”

  “I guess we don’t,” Tom said.

  She held the cup in both hands as if it were anchoring her to the earth.

  “Tell me again,” she said. “Tell me how you came here.” He rubbed his eyes. “Again?”

  “Again. Slower.”

  He took a deep breath and began.

  By the time he finished it was past two a.m. The street outside was quiet, the light of the room seemed strange and sterile. He was dazed, sleepy, hung over. Joyce, however, was wide awake.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Why a tunnel between here and—what’s it called? Bellfountain?”

  “Belltower,” Tom said. “I don’t know. I didn’t build it, Joyce. I found it.”

  “Anybody could have found it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And no one else used it?”

  “Someone must have. At least once. Used it and, I guess, abandoned it. But I don’t know that for a fact.”

  She shook her head firmly. “I don’t believe it.”

  He felt helpless. He had shown her all the evidence he possessed, explained it as calmly as possible—

  “No, I mean—I know it’s true. The cards, the money, the watch—maybe somebody could fake all that, but I doubt it. It’s true, Tom, but I don’t believe it. You understand what I’m saying? It’s hard to look at you and tell myself this is a guy from the year 1989.”

  “What more can I do?”

  “Show me,” Joyce said. “Show me the tunnel.” This wasn’t the way he had meant it to happen.

  He walked with her—it wasn’t far—to the building near Tompkins Square.

  “This place?” Joyce said. Meaning: a miracle—here? He nodded.

  The street was silent and empty. Tom took his watch out of his pocket and checked it: three-fifteen, and he was dizzy with fatigue, already regretting this decision.

  Later Tom would decide that the visit to the tunnel marked a dividing line; it was here that events had begun to spiral out of control. Maybe he sensed it already—an echo of his own future leaking through zones of fractured time.

  He was reluctant to take her inside, suddenly certain it was a mistake to have brought her here at all. If he hadn’t been drunk … and then weary beyond resistance …

  She tugged his hand. “Show me.”

  And there was no plausible way to turn back. He took one more look at the bulk of the building, all those rooms and corridors he had never explored, a single window illuminated in the darkness.

  He led her inside. The lobby was vacant, silent except for the buzzing of a defective fluorescent lamp. He grasped the handle of the door that led to the basement.

  It wouldn’t turn.

  “Trouble?” Joyce inquired.

  He nodded, frowning. “It wasn’t locked before. I don’t think it had a lock.” He bent over the mechanism. “This looks new.”

  “Somebody installed a new lock?”

  “I think so.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Could mean somebody knows I’ve been here. Could mean the janitor found some kids in the basement and decided it was time for new hardware.”

  “Is there a janitor?”

  He shrugged.

  She said, “But somebody must own the building. It’s a matter of record, right? You could look it up at City Hall.”

  “I suppose so.” It hadn’t occurred to him. “Might be dangerous. This isn’t a Nancy Drew mystery. I don’t think we should draw attention to ourselves.”

  “If we don’t open that door,” Joyce pointed out, “you can never go home again.”

  “If we do open it, maybe they’ll put in a better lock next time. Or post a guard.” This was a chilling thought and he couldn’t help looking past her, through the cracked glass of the outer door. But the street was empty.

  “Maybe we can open it without being too obvious,” Joyce said.

  “We shouldn’t even try. We should get the fuck out of here.”

  “Hey, no! I’m not backing out now.” Her grip on his hand tightened. “If this is true … I want to see.”

  Tom looked at the lock more closely. Cheap lock. He took out his Visa card and slipped it between the door and the jamb. This worked on television but apparently not in real life; the card bumped into the bolt but failed to move it. “Give me your keys,” he said.

  Joyce handed him her key ring.

  He tried several of the keys until he found one that slid into the lock. By twisting it until it caught some of the tumblers he was able to edge the bolt fractionally inward; then he forced the card up until the door sprang open an inch.

  A gust of cool, dank air spilled through the opening.

  He felt the change in Joyce as they descended. She had been cocky and reckless, daring him on; now she was silent, both hands clamped on his arm.

  In the first sub-basement he tugged the cord attached to the naked forty-watt bulb overhead—it cast a cheerless pale circle across the floor. “We should have brought a flashlight.”

  “We probably should have brought an elephant gun. It’s scary down here.” She frowned at him. “This is real, isn’t it?”

  “As real as it gets.”

  The second lock, on the wooden door in the lowest sub-basement, had also been replaced. Joyce lit a series of matches while Tom examined the mechanism. Whoever had installed the lock had been in a hurry; the padlock was new and sturdy but the hasp was not. It was attached with three wood screws to the framing of the door; Tom levered the screws out with the edge of a dime and put them in his pocket.

  Down into darkness.

  They climbed over rubble. Joyce continued striking matches until Tom told her to stop; the fight was too feeble to be useful and he was worried about the flammable debris underfoot. She let the last match flicker out but flinched when the darkness closed over them. She said, “Are you sure—?

  But then they were in the tunnel itself. A sourceless light illuminated the slow, precise curve of the walls ahead.

  Joyce took a few steps forward. Tom hung back.

  “It’s really all true,” she said. “My God, Tom! We could walk into the future, couldn’t we? Just stroll a few decades down the road.” She faced him. “Will you take me sometime?” Her cheeks were flushed. She looked fragile and feverish against these blunt white walls.

  “I don’t know if I can promise that. We’re playing with something dangerous and we don’t know how it works. I can’t guarantee we’re safe even just standing here. Maybe we’re exposed to radiation. Maybe the air is toxic.”

  “None of that stopped you from coming here.”

  But that was before, Tom thought
. When I had nothing to lose.

  She touched the walls—smooth, slightly resilient, utterly seamless. “I wonder who built it? Haven’t you thought about it?”

  “Often,” he said. “It must have been here at least ten years. Maybe longer.” Maybe since the Indians occupied Manhattan. Maybe since Wouter van Twiller operated the Bossen Bouwerie in this district. Maybe Wouter had had a tunnel under his cowshed hereabouts. Maybe he knew it and maybe he didn’t.

  “People from the future,” Joyce said. “Or Martians or something like that. It’s like a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode, isn’t it?” She drew a line in the dust with the point of her shoe. “How come it’s broken at this end?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She said, “Maybe it was hijacked.”

  He blinked at the idea. Joyce went on, “The people who are supposed to use it aren’t here. So somebody used it who wasn’t supposed to … maybe fixed it so nobody could find him.”

  Tom considered it. “I suppose that’s possible.”

  “There must be other tunnels. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. So maybe this one used to be connected somewhere— a junction. But somebody hijacked it, somebody sealed it off.”

  This was plausible; he couldn’t formulate a better explanation. “But we don’t really know.”

  “Hey,” she said. “Nancy Drew is on the case.”

  Maybe, Tom thought, this would turn out all right. He had convinced her to turn around and go back—but then the strange thing happened.

  Joyce saw it first.

  “Look,” she said. “Tom? What is that?”

  He turned where she was pointing, already afraid.

  What he saw was only a vague blur of luminescence against the uniform brightness of the tunnel, far away. He thought at first it might be some malfunction of the lights. Then Joyce squeezed his hand. “It’s moving,” she said.

  Slowly but perceptibly, it was. It was moving toward them.

  He guessed it might be a hundred yards away—maybe more.

  He turned back to the rubble at the near end of the tunnel. They had wandered maybe thirty feet from it. Sprinting distance, Tom thought.