A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  So Catherine opened the creaking woodshed door and peered inside, where a stack of newspapers had moldered for decades, and where something hideous moved and spoke in the darkness.

  Eleven

  How did it feel to begin life over again, thirty years in the past?

  Giddy, Tom thought. Strange. Exhilarating.

  And—more often now—frightening.

  It wasn't clear to him when or why the fear had started. Maybe it had been there all along, a subtler presence than now. Maybe it had started when he moved into the house on the Post Road, a steady counterpoint to all the raucous events since. Maybe he'd been born with it.

  But it wasn't fear, exactly; it was a kind of systematic disquiet . . . and he felt it most profoundly on a hot Thursday afternoon in July, when he could have sworn, but couldn't prove, that somebody followed him from Lindner's Radio Supply to Larry Millstein's apartment.

  The day had gone well. Since he'd taken this job Tom had turned in enough reliable work that Max mainly left him alone. The cavernous back room of Lindner's had begun to feel homey and familiar. Hot days like this, he tipped open the high leaded windows to let the alley breezes through. He was working on a Fisher amplifier a customer had brought in; the output tube had flashed over and one of the power-supply electrolytics was leaking. The capacitors were oil-filled, the kind eliminated under an EPA edict—some years in the future—for their PCB content. The danger, at least at this end of the manufacturing process, was far from mortal. At lunch, Max asked him why he kept the fan so close to his work. "I don't like the smell," Tom said.

  Toxins aside, Tom had developed a respect for these old American radios and amplifiers. The up-market models were simple, well built, and substantial—the sheer weight of them was sometimes astonishing. Iron-core transformers, steel chassis, oak cabinets, a pleasure to work with. The job was underpaid and offered absolutely no opportunity for advancement, but for Tom it functioned as therapy: something pleasant to do with his hands and a paycheck at the end of the week.

  And still—long since the novelty should have worn off— he would look up from his soldering at the calendar on the wall, where the year 1962 was inscribed over a picture of a chunky woman in a lime-green one-piece bathing suit, and he would feel a dizzy urge to laugh out loud.

  What was time, after all, except a lead-footed march from the precincts of youth into the country of the grave? Time was the force that crumbled granite, devoured memory, and seduced infants into senility—as implacable as a hanging judge and as poetic as a tank. And yet, here he was—almost thirty years down a road that shouldn't exist; in the past, where nobody can visit.

  He was no younger than he had been and he was nothing like immortal. But time had been suborned and that made him happy.

  "You're always looking at that calendar," Max said. "I think you're in love with that girl." "Head over heels," Tom said.

  "That's the calendar from Mirvish's. They use the same picture every year. Every summer since 1947, the same girl in the same bathing suit. She's probably an old lady now."

  "She's a time traveler," Tom said. "She's always young." "And you're a fruitcake," Max explained. "Please, go back to work."

  Certain other implications of this time travel business had not escaped him.

  It was 1962 in New York. Therefore it was 1962 all over the country—all over the world, in fact; therefore it was 1962 in Belltower, Washington, and both his parents were alive.

  Somewhere in the Great Unwinding—perhaps at step number forty-eight or sixty-three or one hundred twenty-one in the tunnel between the Post Road and Manhattan—a log truck had swerved backward up a mountain road; a bright blue sedan had vaulted an escarpment onto the highway; two bodies had shuddered to life as the dashboard peeled away from the seats and the engine sprang back beneath the hood.

  In 1962, in Belltower, a young GP named Winter had recently opened a residential practice serving the middle-class neighborhood north of town. His wife had borne him two sons; the younger, Tommy, had his fourth birthday coming up in November.

  They are all living in the big house on Poplar Street, Tom thought, with Daddy's offices downstairs and living quarters up. If I went there, I could see them. Big as fife.

  He pictured them: his father in a black Sunday suit or medical whites, his mother in a floral print dress, and between them, maybe a yard high in baby Keds, something unimaginable: himself.

  One morning when Joyce was off doing restaurant work and he was home feeling a little lonely, he picked up the telephone and dialed the long-distance operator. He said he wanted to place a call to Belltower, Washington, to Dr. Winter's office on Poplar Street. The phone rang three times, a distant buzzing, and a woman answered. My mother's voice. It was a paralyzing thought. What could he possibly say?

  But it wasn't his mother. It was his father's nurse, Miss Trudy Valasquez, whom he dimly remembered: an immense Hispanic woman with orthopedic shoes and peppermint breath. Dr. Winter was out on call, she said, and who was this, anyway?

  "It's nothing urgent," Tom said. "I'll try again later."

  Much later. Maybe never. There was something perverse about the act. It felt wrong, to disturb that innocent household with even as much as an anonymous call—too tangled and Oedipal, too entirely strange.

  Then he thought, But I have to call them. I have to warn them.

  Warn them not to go traveling up the coast highway on a certain date some fifteen years from now.

  Warn them, in order to save their lives. So that Tom could go to med school, as his father had insisted; so that he wouldn't meet Barbara, wouldn't marry her, wouldn't divorce her, wouldn't buy a house up the Post Road, wouldn't travel into the past, wouldn't make a phone call, wouldn't warn them, wouldn't save their lives.

  Would, perhaps, loop infinitely between these possibilities, as ghostly as Schroedinger's cat.

  This was the past, Tom told himself, and the past must be immutable—including the death of his parents. Nothing else made sense. If the past was fluid and could be changed, then it was up to Tom to change it: warn airliners about bombs, waylay Oswald at the Book Depository, clear the airport lobbies before the gunmen arrived ... an impossible, unbearable burden of moral responsibility.

  For the sake of sense and for the sake of sanity, the past must be a static landscape. If he told Pan Am a plane was going to go down, they wouldn't believe him. If he flew to Dallas to warn the President, he'd miss his plane or suffer a heart attack at the luggage carousel. He didn't know what unseen hand would orchestrate these events, only that the alternative was even less plausible. If he tried to change history, he would fail . . . that was all there was to it. Dangerous even to experiment.

  But he thought about that call often. Thought about warning them. Thought about saving their lives.

  It was hardly urgent. For now and for many years to come they were alive, happy, young, safer than they knew.

  But as the date drew closer—if he stayed here, if he lived that long—then, Tom thought, he might have to make the call, risk or no risk ... or know they had died when he could have saved them.

  Maybe that was when the fear began.

  He slept with these thoughts, woke chastened, and rode the bus to Lindner's. He regarded the girl on the calendar with a new sobriety. Today her expression seemed enigmatic, clouded.

  "You're still in love with her," Max observed. "Look at her face, Max. She knows something." "She knows you're a lunatic," Max said.

  He lost himself in his work. The day's biggest surprise was a call from Larry Millstein: apologies for the incident at the party and would he come over that afternoon? Meet Joyce at the apartment, the three of them could go to dinner, make peace. Tom accepted, then phoned Joyce to make sure she was free. "I already talked to Lawrence," she said. "I think he's reasonably sincere. Plus, you're too popular these days. Avoiding you is beginning to interfere with his social life."

  "Should I be nice? Is it worth the trouble?"

  "
Be nice. He's neurotic and he can be mean sometimes. But if he were a total loss I would never have slept with him in the first place."

  "That's reassuring."

  "You both like jazz. Talk about music. On second thought, don't."

  He left the shop at six. It was a warm afternoon, the buses were crowded; he decided to walk. The weather had been fine for days. The sky was blue, the air was reasonably clean, and he had no reason to feel uneasy.

  Nevertheless, the uneasiness began as soon as he stepped out of Lindner's front door and it intensified with every step he took.

  At first he dismissed it. He'd been through some novel experiences in the last few months and a little paranoia, at this stage, was perhaps not too surprising. But he couldn't dismiss the uneasiness or the thoughts it provoked, memories he had neglected: of the tunnel, of the machine bugs, of their warning.

  He recalled the rubble in the sub-basement of the building near Tompkins Square. Someone had been there before him, someone dangerous. But Tom had passed that way safely, and his anonymity would be guaranteed in a city as vast as New York—wouldn't it?

  He told himself so. Nevertheless, as he walked east on Eighth toward Millstein's shabby East Village neighborhood, his vague anxiety resolved into a solid conviction that he was being followed. He paused across the street from Millstein's tenement building and turned back. Puerto Rican women moved between the stoops and storefronts; three children crossed the street at a fight. There were two Anglos visible: a large, pale woman steering a baby stroller and a middle-aged man with a brown paper bag tucked under his arm. So who in this tableau was stalking him?

  Probably no one. Bad case of coffee nerves, Tom thought. And maybe a little guilt. Guilt about what he'd left behind. Guilt about what he'd found. Guilt about falling in love in this strange place.

  He stepped off the curb and into the path of an oncoming cab. The driver leaned into his horn and swerved left, passing him by inches, unidentified man killed on city street—maybe that was history, too.

  After some nervous overtures they adjourned to Stanley's, where Millstein drank and relaxed.

  They talked about music in spite of Joyce's warning. It turned out Millstein had been an avid jazz fan since he arrived here, "a callow youth from Brooklyn," at the end of the forties. He was an old Village hand; he'd met Kerouac once or twice—an observation which plunged Tom into one more "time travel" epiphany. Giants had walked here, he thought. "Though of course," Millstein added, "that scene is long dead."

  Joyce mentioned her friend Susan. Susan had written another letter from the South, where she was getting death threats because of her affiliation with the SNCC. One enterprising recidivist had delivered a neatly wrapped package of horse manure to the door of her motel room.

  Millstein shrugged. "Everybody's too political. It's tiresome. I'm tired of protest songs, Joyce."

  "And I'm tired of passive pseudo-Zen navel-gazing," Joyce said. "There's a world out there."

  "A world run by men in limousines who don't much listen to music. As far as the world is concerned, guitar playing is a minor-league activity."

  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 / 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."