A Bridge of Years (43 page)

He
wondered what the headlines were. This wasn't precisely the
present, not exactly the future; he had come here by a twisted path,
a road too complex to make linear sense. Maybe some new country had
been invaded, some new oil tanker breached.

She
looked up from the editorial page and saw him watching her. He
came the rest of the way across the lawn.

She
was an anachronism in her harlequin glasses and straight hair,
beautiful in the shade of these tall trees.

Before
he could frame a sentence she said, "I'm sorry about the way I
behaved. I was tired and I was sick about Lawrence and I didn't know
how you were involved. Ben explained all that. And thank you for
bringing me here."

"Not
as far out of danger as I thought it would be."

"Far
enough. I'm not worried. How's your shoulder?"

"Pretty
much okay. Enjoying the news?"

"Convincing
myself it's real. I watched a little TV, too. That satellite news
station, what's it called? CNN." She folded the paper and stood
up. "Tom, can we walk somewhere? The woods are pretty—Doug
said there were trails."

"Is
it a good idea to leave the house?"

"Ben
said it would be all right."

"I
know a place," Tom said.

He
took her up the path Doug Archer had shown him some months ago, past
the overgrown woodshed—its door standing open and a cloud of
gnats hanging inside—up this hillside to the open, rocky space
where the land sloped away to the sea.

The
sea drew a line of horizon out beyond Belltower and the plume of the
mill. In the stillness of the afternoon Tom heard the chatter of
starlings as they wheeled overhead, the rattle of a truck out on the
highway.

Joyce
sat hugging her knees on a promontory of rock. "It's pretty up
here."

He
nodded. "Long way from the news." Long way from 1962. Long
way from New York City. "How does the future strike you?"

The
question wasn't as casual as it sounded. She answered slowly,
thoughtfully. "Not as gee-whiz as I expected. Uglier than I
thought it would be. Poorer. Meaner. More shortsighted, more
selfish, more desperate."

Tom
nodded.

She
frowned into the sunlight. "More
the
same
than
I thought it would be."

"That's
about it," Tom said. "But not as bad as it looks."
"No?"

She
shook her head vigorously. "I talked to Ben about this. Things
are changing. He says there's amazing things happening in
Europe. The next couple of decades are going to be fairly wild."

Tom
doubted it. He had watched Tiananmen Square on television that
spring. Big tanks. Fragile people.

"Everything
is changing," Joyce insisted. "Politics, the
environment—the weather. He says we happen to be living on the
only continent where complacency is still possible, and only for a
while longer. That's our misfortune."

"I
suppose it is. What did he tell you, that the future is some kind of
paradise?"

"No,
no. The problems are huge, scary." She looked up, brushed her
hair out of her eyes. "The man who killed Lawrence, he's
the future too. All the horrible things. Conscription and famine
and stupid little wars."

"That's
what we have to look forward to?"

"Maybe.
Not necessarily. Ben comes from a time that looks back on all that as
a kind of insanity. But the point is, Tom, it's the future—it
hasn't happened yet and maybe it doesn't have to, at least not that
way."

"Not
logical, Joyce. The marauder came from somewhere. We can't wish him
out of existence."

"He's
a fact," Joyce conceded. "But Ben says anyone who travels
into the past risks losing the place he left. Ben himself. If
things happen differently he might be orphaned— might go home and
find out it's not there anymore, at least not the way he remembers
it. It's not
likely,
but
it's
possible."

"So
the future is unknowable."

"I
think the future is something like a big building in the fog—you
know it's there, and you can grope your way toward it, but you can't
be sure about it until it's close enough to touch."

"Leaves
us kind of in the dark," Tom observed.

"The
place you stand is always the present and that's all you ever really
have—1 don't think that's a bad thing. Ben says the only way you
can own the past is by respecting it— by not turning it into
something quaint or laughable or pastel or bittersweet. It's a real
place where real people live. And the future is real because we're
building it out of real hours and real days."

No
world out of the world, Tom thought.

No
Eden, no Utopia, only what you can touch and the touching of it.

He
took her hand. She gazed across the pine tops and the distant town
site toward the sea. "I can't stay here," she said. "I
have to go back."

"I
don't know if I can go with you."

"I
don't know if I want you to."

She
stood up and was beautiful, Tom thought, with the afternoon sun on
her hair.

"Hey,"
she said. "Don't look at me like that. It's just me. Just some
fucked-up chick from Minneapolis. Nothing special."

He
shook his head, was mute.

"I
was a ghost for you," she said. "Ghost of some idea about
what life used to be like or could be like or what you wanted from
it. But I'm not that. But that's okay. Maybe you were a ghost too.
Ghost of whatever I thought I'd find in the city. Somebody
mysterious, wise, a little wild. Well, the circumstances are very
strange. But here we are, Joyce and Tom, a couple of pretty ordinary
people."

"Not
all that damn ordinary."

"We
hardly know each other."

"Could
change that."

"I
don't know," Joyce said. "I'm not so sure."

These
last few hours—before the marauder attacked, or the time machine
was repaired, whichever apocalypse happened first—were a kind of
Indian summer.

Archer
drove to the Burger King out along the highway and brought home
dinner. They ate on the back lawn in the long sunlight; the alarms
would sound, Ben said, if anything happened inside.

Ben,
who didn't eat prepared food, was an avuncular presence at the
edge of the feast, periodically hobbling over to the redwood fence
where he had marked a long rectangular patch with string. It was too
late in the year to start a garden, he said, but this was where one
ought to be. Tom wondered, but didn't ask, whether he planned to
start one in the coming year or expected someone else to.

After
dark, Archer took Tom down into the basement—what remained of the
basement. The false wall in front of the tunnel had been removed
entirely, and so had one of the foundation walls—revealing a layer
of what must be machinery, pale white and blue crystals swarming
with cybernetics. This was the functional heart of the time terminal
and the machine insects, he assumed, were repairing it. Periodically,
bright sparks erupted from the work.

"We're
running a race," Archer said. "The longer that sonofabitch
in Manhattan sits on his hands, the closer we come to shutting him
out entirely."

"How
long until all this is finished?"

"Soon,
Ben says. Maybe by this time tomorrow. Here—" He opened a
drawer under the workbench: Tom's woodworking bench, the one
he'd moved from Seattle. "Ben said you should have one of
these."

Archer
handed him a ray gun.

No
doubt about it, Tom thought, this was a ray gun. It weighed about a
pound. It was made of red and black polystyrene plastic and the
words
space
soldier
were
stenciled on the side.

He
looked at the gun, looked at Archer.

"We
had to make 'em out of something," Archer said. "I picked
up a bunch of these at the K-mart at Pinetree Mall. The machine bugs
worked them over."

The
trigger was made of what looked like stainless steel, and the
business end featured a glassy protrusion too finely machined to
match the rest of the toy. "You're telling me this is
functional?"

"It
projects a focused pulse that might or might not slow down the
gentleman's armor a little bit. Use it but don't depend on it.
We all have one."

"Jesus
Christ, Doug,
space
soldier?"

Archer
grinned. "Looks kind of cool, don't you think?"

Back
upstairs, the sun was setting over the ocean and Catherine had
turned on the living room lights.

Tom
helped Archer collect the dinner plates from the back yard. The sky
was a deep evening blue; the stars and the crickets had come out.

Archer
hesitated a moment in the cooling air.

"Everything's
going to be different when this is over," he said. "Suddenly
we're out of the picture. Bystanders. But we did something rare,
didn't we, Tom? Took a long stroll into the past. Imagine that. I
stood on those streets, nineteen sixty-two, Jesus, I was a toddler
down at Pine Balm Pre-School! Hey, Tom, you know what we did? We
walked straight up to Father Time and we kicked that miserly SOB
right in the family jewels."

Tom
opened the screen door and stepped back into the warmth of the
kitchen. "Let's hope he doesn't return the favor."

Archer
and Catherine shared a mattress in the spare bedroom. Ben spent
the night in the basement—slept there, if he slept at all.

Joyce
had spent two nights on the living room sofa. She came into Tom's bed
tonight with what he took to be a mixture of gratitude and
doubt.

When
he rolled to face her she didn't turn away.

It
was a warm night in the summer of 1989, skies clear over most of the
continent, oceans calm, the world on some brink, Tom thought, not yet
explicit, a trembling of possibilities both dire and bright. Her
skin was soft under his touch and she took his kiss with an eagerness
that might have been greeting or farewell.

Midnight
passed in the darkness, an hour and another.

They
were asleep when the alarms went off.

Amos
Shank, eighty-one years old, who had come from Pittsburgh to
publish his poetry and who had lived for fifteen years amid the
stained plaster and peeling wallpaper of this shabby apartment, rose
from his bed in the deep of the night, still wrapped in dreams of
Zeus and Napoleon, for the purpose of relieving his bladder.

He
walked to the bathroom, past his desk, past reams of bond paper,
sharpened pencils, leatherbound books, in the stark light of two
sixty-watt floor lamps which he kept perpetually lit. The rattle
of water in the porcelain bowl sounded hollow and sinister: the
clarion call of mortality. Sighing, Amos hitched up his boxer shorts
and headed back to his bed, which folded out of the sofa, convolution
of night inside day. He paused at the window.

Once
he had seen Death in the street outside. A sudden dread possessed him
that if he looked he would see that apparition again. He had, in
fact, kept vigil for several consecutive nights—ruining his
sleep to no good effect. He was torn between temptations: oblivion,
vision.

He
slatted the blinds open and peered into the street.

Empty
street.

Amos
Shank pulled his desk chair to the window and nestled his bony
rear end into it.

The
older he got the more his bones seemed to protrude from his body.
Everything uncomfortable. Nowhere to rest. He whistled out a long
breath of midnight air and put his head on the windowsill, pillowed
on his hands.

Without
meaning to, he slept again . . .

And
woke, aching and stiff. He moaned and peered into the street
where—perhaps—the sound of footsteps had roused him: because here
he
was
again, Death.