A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  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 damaged 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.

  The clothes were bloodstained and a poor fit, but they allowed Billy to move without attracting attention. He explored the corridors of the tenement building above the sub-basement chamber which contained the tunnel; he explored the nearby streets of the night city. He deduced from the contents of the dead man's wallet that the time traveler had occupied an "apartment" in this building. Billy located the entrance, one numbered door among many, and fumbled keys into the primitive lock until the door sprang inward.

  He slept in the dead man's bed. He appropriated a fresh suit of clothes. He marveled at the dead man's calendar: 1953.

  He found cash in the dead man's wallet, more cash in a drawer of his desk. Billy understood cash: it was an archaic form of credit, universal and interchangeable. The denominations were confusing but simple in principle: a ten-dollar bill was "worth" two fives, for instance.

  He stayed in the apartment a week. Twice, someone knocked at the door; but Billy was quiet and didn't answer. He watched television at night. He ate regular meals until there was nothing left in the refrigerator. He sat at the window and studied the people passing in the street.

  He kept his armor hidden under the bed. As vulnerable as Billy felt without the armor, he would have been grotesquely conspicuous in it. He supposed he could have worn the body pieces under his clothing and looked only a little peculiar, but that wasn't the point; he hadn't come here to wear the armor. He planned not to wear the armor at all ... at least, only to wear it when he had to, when the peculiar needs of his altered body demanded it. In a month, say. Two months. Six months. Not now.

  When there was nothing left to eat Billy gathered up his cash and left the building. He walked three blocks to a "grocery" and found himself in a paradise of fresh fruit and vegetables, more of these things than he had ever seen in one place. Dazzled, he chose three oranges, a head of lettuce, and a bunch of bright yellow speckled bananas. He handed the checkout clerk a flimsy cash certificate and was nonplussed when the man said, "I can't change that! Christ's sake!" Change it to what? But Billy rooted in his pocket for a smaller denomination, which proved acceptable, and he understood the problem when the cashier handed him a fresh selection of bills and coins: his "change."

  Words, Billy thought. What they spoke here was English, but only just.

  He acquired his new life by theft.

  The custodian, a time traveler, had owned the block of tenement flats above the sub-basement which concealed the tunnel. The deeds were stored in a filing cabinet in the bedroom. For years the time traveler had operated the building strictly as, a formality and most of the apartments were empty. Billy passed himself off as "new management" and accepted the monthly rent checks. The charade was almost ridiculously easy. There was no family to mourn the dead man, no business partners to inquire about his health. By reviewing the documents he learned that the time traveler had registered his business under the name Hourglass Rentals, and Billy was able to discern enough of the local financial customs to manipulate bank deposits and withdrawals and pay the tax bills on time. Hourglass Rentals didn't generate enough revenue to cover its debts, but the amount of money banked in the company name was staggering—enough to keep Billy in food and shelter for the rest of his life. Not only that, but the management of these fiscal arcana had been streamlined for a single individual to operate without help— an hour of paperwork an evening, once Billy mastered the essentials of bookkeeping and learned which lies to tell the IRS, the city, and the utility companies. By the end of 1952, Billy was Hourglass Rentals.

  It suited him to commandeer the life of a loner. Billy was a loner, too.

  He guessed the armor had made him that way. He knew the Infantry surgeons had made him dependent on the armor —that without it he was less than a normal human being. Sexually, Billy was a blank slate. He remembered a time when he had wanted the touch of a woman—back in his brief adolescence, before he was prepped, when the physical need had burned like a flame—but that was long ago. Nothing burned in him now but his need for the armor.
Now he saw women all the time: women on television, women on city streets, bank tellers, secretaries, women available for money. Occasionally they looked at him. Their looks seldom lingered. Billy guessed there was something about him they could sense—a blankness, a deferral, an inertia of the soul.

  It didn't matter. By the snowy January of 1953 Billy had established a life he was content to lead.

  He was far from the Infantry, the Storm Zone, and the prospect of imminent death or court martial. He wasn't hungry and he wasn't in physical danger. When he stopped to think about it, it felt a little bit like paradise.

  Was he happy here? Billy couldn't say. Most days passed in blissful oblivion, and he was grateful for that. But there were times when he felt the pangs of a brittle, piercing loneliness. He woke up nights in a city more than a century away from home, and that impossible distance was like a hook in his heart. He thought about his father, Nathan. He tried to remember his mother, who had died when he was little. He thought about his life in exile here, stranded on this island, Manhattan, among people who had been dead a hundred years when he was born. Thought about his life among these ghosts. He thought about time, about clocks: clocks, like words, worked differently here. Billy was accustomed to clocks that numbered time and marked it with cursors, linear slices of a linear phenomenon. Here, clocks were round and symbolic. Time was a territory mapped with circles.

  Time and words. Seasons. That January, Billy was caught in a snowstorm that slowed the buses to a crawl. Tired and cold, he decided to check into a hotel rather than walk the distance home. He found an inexpensive boarding hotel and asked the desk clerk for a room with a slut; the clerk showed him a strange smile and said he would have to arrange that himself—he recommended a bar a few blocks away. Billy disguised his confusion and checked in anyway, then realized that in 1953 the word "slut" must have some other meaning —he didn't need a heated bed; the entire room, the entire hotel was heated. Probably every room in the city was heated, even the vast public spaces of banks and the cavernous lobbies of skyscrapers, all through the bitter winter. He had a hard time grasping this simple fact; when he did, the sheer arrogant monstrosity of it left him dazed and blinking.