A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Maybe so, Barbara would have said, but we can go down fighting. She had believed that half measures were better than none; that even an ineffectual morality was useful in the decade of Reaganomics, the homeless, and the video church. Her voice rang out in his memory.

  She was your conscience, Tom thought.

  But morality—the morality of weapons research or the morality of selling cars—had a way of twisting out of his grasp. He was twenty minutes late when he arrived at the lot, but there were no buyers waiting and nobody seemed to notice the time; the salesmen were clustered around the Coke machine telling jokes. Tom had clocked in and was standing helplessly on the lot watching cars roar past—thinking about Barbara, thinking about the house—when Billy Klein, the manager, eased up behind him and draped an arm over his shoulder. Klein was wide all over his body, big shouldered and big hipped and broad in the face; his smile radiated predatory vigor and automatic, fake heartiness—an entirely carnivorous smile. Tom turned and took a blast of Tic-Tac-scented breath. "Come with me," Klein said. "I'll show you what selling really means."

  It was the first time since his interview that he had been allowed into Klein's sanctuary, a glass-walled room that looked into three sales offices where contracts were written up. Tom sat nervously in what Klein called the customer chair, which was cut an inch or two lower than an ordinary office chair; troublesome deals were often T.O.'d to Klein, who felt he benefited from the psychological edge of gazing down from a height. "Strange, but it works. The salespeople call me 'sir' and practically shit themselves bowing out of the room. The customer looks up and he sees me frowning at him—" He frowned. "How do I look?"

  Like a constipated pit bull, Tom thought. "Very imposing."

  "You bet. And that's the point I want to make. If you're going to work out in sales, Tom, you need an edge. You understand what I'm saying? Any kind of edge. Maybe a different edge with different customers. They come in and they're nervous, or they come in and they're practically swaggering— they're going to make a killer deal and fuck over this salesman —but either way, deep down, some part of them is just a little bit scared. That's where your edge is. You find that part and you work on it. If you can convince them you're their friend, that's one way of doing it, because then they're thinking, Great, I've got a guy on my side in this terrifying place. Or if they're scared of you, you work on that. You say stuff like 'I don't think we can do business with that offer, we'd be losing money,' and they swallow hard and jack up their bid. Simple! But you need the edge. Otherwise you're leaving money on the table every time. Listen."

  Klein punched a button on his desktop intercom. Tinny voices radiated from it. Tom was bemused until he realized they were eavesdropping on the salesroom behind him, where Chuck Alberni was writing up a deal for a middle-aged man and his wife.

  The customer was protesting that he hadn't been offered enough on his trade-in, an '87 Colt. Alberni said, "We're being as generous as we can afford to be—I know you appreciate that. We're a little overstocked right now and lot space is at a premium. But let's look at the bright side. You can't beat the options package, and our service contract is practically a model for the industry."

  And so on. Focusing the customer's attention on the car he obviously wants, Klein said. "Of course, we'll make money on the financing no matter what happens here. We could practically give him the fucking car. His trade-in is very, very nice. But the point is that you don't leave money on the table."

  The customer tendered another offer—"The best we can do right now," he said. "That's pretty much my final bid."

  Alberni inspected the figure and said, "I'll tell you what. I'll take this to the sales manager and see what he says. It might take some luck, but I think we're getting close."

  Alberni stood up and left the room.

  "You see?" Klein said. "He's talking them up, but the impression he gives is that he's doing them a favor. Always look for the edge."

  Alberni came into Klein's office and sat down. He gave Tom a long, appraising look. "Toilet training this one?"

  "Tom has a lot of potential," Klein said. "I can tell."

  "He's the owner's brother. That's a whole lot of potential right there."

  "Hey, Chuck," Klein said disapprovingly. But Alberni was very hot in sales right now and he could get away with things like that.

  Tom said nothing.

  The intercom was still live. In the next room, the customer took the hand of his nervous wife. "If we put off the cedar deck till next year," he said, "maybe we can ante up another thousand."

  "Bingo," Alberni said.

  "See?" Klein said. "Nothing is left on the table. Absolutely nothing at all."

  Tom said, "You eavesdrop on them? When they think they're alone?"

  "Sometimes," Klein said, "it's the only way to know." "Isn't that unethical?"

  Alberni laughed out loud. Klein said, "Unethical? What the hell? Who are you all of a sudden, Mother Teresa?"

  He clocked out at quitting time and took the highway to the Harbor Mall. At the hardware store he picked up a crowbar, a tape measure, a chisel, and a hammer. He paid for them with his credit card and drove the rest of the way home with the tools rattling in his trunk.

  The northeastern end of the house, Tom thought. In the basement. That's where they live.

  He microwaved a frozen dinner and ate it without paying attention: flash-fried chicken, glutinous mashed potatoes, a lump of "dessert."

  He rinsed the container and threw it away.

  Nothing for them tonight.

  He changed into a faded pair of Levi's and a torn cotton shirt and took his new tools into the basement.

  He identified a dividing wall that ran across the basement and certified by measuring its distance from the stairs that it was directly beneath a similar wall that divided the living room from the bedroom. Upstairs, he measured the width of the bedroom to its northeastern extremity: fifteen feet, give or take a couple of inches.

  In the basement the equivalent measurement was harder to take; he had to kneel behind the dented backplate of the Kenmore washing machine and wedge the tape measure in place with a brick. He took three runs at it and came up with the same answer each time:

  The northeastern wall of the basement was set in at least three feet from the foundation.

  He pulled away storage boxes and a shelf of laundry soap and bleach, then the two-by-four shelves themselves. When he was finished the laundry room looked like Beirut, but the entire wall was exposed. It appeared to be an ordinary gypsum wall erected against studs, painted flat white. Appearances can be deceptive, Tom thought. But it would be simple enough to find out.

  He used the chisel and hammer to peel away a chunk of the wallboard. The wallboard was indeed gypsum; the chalk showered over him as he worked, mingling with his sweat until he was pasty white. Equally unmistakable was the hollow space behind the wall, too deep for the overhead light to penetrate. He used the crowbar to lever out larger chunks of wallboard until he was ankle-deep in floury rubble.

  He had opened up a hole roughly three feet in diameter and he was about to go hunting for a flashlight for the purpose of peering inside when the telephone buzzed.

  He mistook it at first for some angry reaction by the house itself, a cry of outrage at this assault he had committed. His ears were ringing with the effort of his work and it was easy to imagine the air full of insect buzzing, the sound of a violated hive. He shook his head to clear away the thought and jogged upstairs to the phone.

  He picked up the receiver and heard Doug Archer's voice. "Tom? I was about to hang up. What's going on?"

  "Nothing ... I was in the shower."

  "What about the videotape? I spent the day waiting to hear from you, buddy. What did we get?"

  "Nothing," Tom said.

  "Nothing? Nada? Zip?"

  "Not a thing. Very embarrassing. Look, I'm sorry I got you involved in this. Maybe we ought to just let it ride for a while."

  There was a sile
nce. Archer said, "I can't believe I'm hearing this from you."

  "I think we've been overreacting, is all."

  "Tom, is something wrong up there? Some kind of problem?"

  "No problem at all."

  "I should at least drop by to pick up the video equipment—"

  "Maybe on the weekend," Tom said.

  "If that's what you want—"

  "That's what I want."

  He hung up the phone.

  If there's treasure here, he thought, it's mine.

  He turned back to the basement.

  The house hummed and buzzed around him.

  Four

  Because it was Monday, because she had lost her job at Macy's, because it was a raw and intermittently rainy spring day—and maybe because the stars or Kismet or karma had declared it so—-Joyce stopped to say hello to the strange man shivering on a bench in Washington Square Park.

  The gray, wet dusk had chased away everybody but the pigeons. Even the nameless bearded octogenarian who had appeared last week selling "poetry" on cardboard box bottoms had moved on, or died, or ascended to heaven. Some other day the square might be thronged with guitar strummers, NYU kids, teenage girls from uptown private schools making (what they imagined was) The Scene; but for now the park belonged to Joyce and to this odd, quiet man who looked at her with startled eyes.

  Of course, it was silly and maybe even dangerous to stop and talk. This was New York, after all. Strange men were hardly in short supply; their strangeness was seldom subtle or interesting. But Joyce had good intuition about people. "Sharp-eyed Joyce" Lawrence had called her. "The Florence Nightingale of love." She rejected the implication (though here she was again, perhaps: taking in strays), but accepted the judgment. She knew who to trust. "You're lost," she said.

  He looked up at her and managed a smile. A certain effort there, she thought.

  "No," he said. "Not really. I figured it out. New York City. I'm in New York. But the date . . ." He held out his hands in a helpless gesture.

  Oh, Joyce thought. But he wasn't an alcoholic. His eyes were bright and clear. He might have been schizophrenic, but his face didn't radiate the pained perplexity Joyce had seen in the faces of the schizophrenics she'd met. (There had been a few, including her uncle Teddy, who was in a "care home" upstate.) Not an alcoholic, not a schizo—maybe he had taken something. There were some odd pills circulating around the Village these days. Dexadril was popular, LSD-25 was easy to come by. An out-of-towner who had picked up something at the Remo: that was possible. But not really a tourist. The man was dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt open at the collar, and he wore the clothes comfortably; they weren't some outfit he had cobbled together for an afternoon of slumming. So perhaps he is One of Us after all, Joyce thought, and this fraternal possibility moved her to sit down next to him. The bench was wet and the rainwater soaked through her skirt; but she was already wet from dashing out of the West Fourth Street station of the IND. Okay to be wet on a cold afternoon at dusk because eventually you'd find a comfortable place to get dry and warm and then it was all worth it. "You look like you could use a cup of coffee."

  The man nodded. "Sure could."

  "You have money?"

  He touched his left hip. Joyce heard the change jingle in his pocket. But his face was suddenly doubtful. "I don't believe I do."

  She said cautiously, "How do you feel?"

  He looked at her again. Now there was focus in his eyes— he understood the drift of the question.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I know how this must seem. I'm sorry I can't explain it. Did you ever have an experience you just couldn't take in all at once—something so enormous you just can't comprehend it?"

  The LSD, she thought. Down the rabbit hole for sure. A naif in chemical wonderland. Be nice, she instructed herself. "I think coffee would probably help."

  He said, "I have money. But I don't think it's legal tender."

  "Foreign currency?"

  "You could say that."

  "You've been traveling?"

  "I guess I have." He stood up abruptly. "You don't have to buy me a coffee, but if you want to I'd be grateful." "My name is Joyce," she said. "Joyce Casella." "Tom Winter," he said. Early in the month of May 1962.

  She bought coffee at an unfashionable deli where no one would recognize her: not because she was embarrassed but because she didn't want a crowd chasing this man—Tom Winter—away. He was dazed, numbed, and not entirely coherent; but beneath that she was beginning to sense a curious edge, perhaps the legacy of whatever journey had brought him here, or some ordeal, a tempering fire. She talked about her life, the job she'd lost at Macy's book department, her music, relieving him of the need to make conversation and at the same time letting her eyes take him in. Here was a man maybe thirty years old, wearing clothes that were vaguely bohemian but not ragged, a traveler with traveler's eyes, who wasn't skinny but had the gauntness of someone who had ignored meals for too long.

  He didn't want to talk about himself or how he'd arrived here. Joyce respected that. She'd met a lot of folks who didn't care to talk about themselves. People with a past they wanted to hide; or people with no past, refugees from the suburbs with grandiose visions of the Village inferred from television and all those self-righteous articles in Time and Life. Joyce herself had been one of these, an NYU undergraduate in a dirndl skirt, and she respected Tom's silence even though his secrets might be less prosaic than hers.

  He did say where he was from: a little coastal town in Washington State called Belltower. She was encouraged by this fracture in his reticence and ventured to ask what he did there.

  "Lots of things," he said. "Sold cars." "It's hard to picture you as a car salesman." "I guess other people thought so, too. I wasn't very good at it."

  "You lost your job?"

  "I—well, I don't know. Maybe I still have it. If I go back."

  "Long way to go back."

  He smiled a little. "Long way to come here."

  "So what brought you to the city?"

  "A time machine," he said. "Apparently."

  He had hitchhiked or ridden boxcars, Joyce guessed, a sort of Woody Guthrie thing; maybe that was what he meant. "Well," she said, "Mr. Car Salesman, are you planning to stay awhile?"

  He shook his head no, then seemed to hesitate. "I'm not sure. My travel arrangements are kind of vague." "You need a place to stay?"

  He glanced through the window of the deli (strictly kosher, like the sign in the Peace Eye Bookstore over at 10th and Avenue C). Evening now. Traffic labored through the shiny wet darkness.

  "I've got a place," he said, "but I'm not sure I can find the way back."

  Joyce suspected he was right. Coming down off some towering LSD kick, he'd probably bounce around Manhattan like the little steel ball in a pachinko machine. Joyce asked herself whether she was convinced of his harmlessness; she decided she was. Taking in strangers, she scolded herself—but it was one of those acts Lawrence had called "blinks of connection" in a poem. The grace of an unexpected contact. A kind of touch. "You can sleep on my sofa if you want. It's not much of a sofa."

  The offer seemed to provoke fatigue in him. "I would be very happy to sleep on your sofa. I'm sure it's a wonderful sofa."

  "Very courtly," she said. "It came from the Salvation Army. It's purple. It's an ugly sofa, Tom." "Then I'll sleep with my eyes closed," he said.

  She lived in a little railroad apartment in the East Village where she had moved from the dorm at NYU. It was two flights up in a tenement building and furnished on no budget at all: the ugly purple sofa, some folding chairs, a Sally Ann standing lamp from the Progressive Era. The bookcases were made of raw pineboard and paving bricks.

  Tom stood awhile looking at the books. They were nothing special, her college English texts plus whatever she'd picked up at secondhand stores since then. Some C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Aldous Huxley— but he handled them as if they were specimens in a display case.

&nbs
p; "Read anything you want," she said.

  He shook his head. "I don't think I could concentrate."

  Probably not. And he was shivering. She brought him a big bath towel and a cotton shirt Lawrence had left behind. "Dry off and change," she said. "Sleep if you want." She left him stretched out on the sofa and went into the "kitchen"—a corner of the room, really, with a sink and a reconditioned Hotpoint and a cheap partition—and rinsed a few dishes. Her rent was due and the severance check from her department store job would cover it; but that would leave her (she calculated) about seven dollars to live on until she picked up some music work or another job. Neither was impossible, but she would have to find a gig or go hungry. But that was tomorrow's problem—today was today.

  She left the kitchen passably clean. By the time she'd finished Tom was asleep on the sofa—stark stone unconscious, snoring a little. She picked up his watch from the wooden crate table where he'd left it, thinking, It must be late.

  Then she did a double-take at the face of the watch, which wasn't a watch face at all but a kind of miniature signboard where the time was written in black numerals over a smoke-gray background.

  9:35, it said, and then dissolved to 9:36. The little black colon winked continuously.

  Joyce had never seen such a watch and she assumed it must be very expensive—surely not a car salesman's watch. But it wasn't a foreign watch, either. It said "Timex" and "Quartz Lithium" (whatever that was) and "Water Resistant."

  Very very strange, she thought. Tom Winter, Man of Mystery.

  She left him snoring on the couch and moved into the bedroom. She undressed with the fight off and stretched out on the narrow spring-creaking bed, relishing the cold air and the clank of the radiator, the rattle of rainwater on the fire escape. Then she climbed under the scratchy brown blanket and waited for sleep.

  Mornings and evenings, she loved this city.

  Sometimes she slept five hours or less at a time, so she could have more morning and more night.

  Nights, especially when she was out with Lawrence and that crowd, she would simply let herself be swept up in the urgency of their conversation, talking desegregation or the arms race in some guitar cafe; swept up by the music, too, legions of folk singers arrowing in on Bleecker and MacDougal from all over the country these days; in sawdust-floored rooms filled with her poet friends and folk friends and "beat" friends, earnest Trotskyites and junkies and jazz musicians and eighteen-year-old runaways from dingy Midwest Levit-towns, all these crosscurrents so fiercely focused that on some nights she believed the pitch-black sky might open in a rapture of the dispossessed and they would all ascend bodily into heaven. Nights like that had been common enough this winter and spring that she was eager for summer, when the pace would double and redouble again. Maybe Lawrence would publish his poetry or she would find an audience for her music. And they would be at the eye, then, of this luminous vortex.