A Bridge of Years (8 page)

"Both
my parents died in a car accident," Tom said. "It was about
twelve years ago. A log truck sides wiped them coming around a turn
on the coast highway."

"You
were how old?"

"Just
finishing high school."

"Tough
situation," Archer said.

"I
lived. The insurance paid for my engineering degree. Much good it's
doing me. But, you know, it was kind of ironic. I always figured Dad
got into medicine because he believed the world was a bad, dangerous
place. He had a real sense of human vulnerability—the basic
fragility of a human body. He once told me the human body was a sack
of skin containing the vital organs and something even more fragile,
which was life."

"Maybe
not a good attitude to grow up with," Archer said.

"But
he was right. I understood that when the police showed up at the
door, the night the truck accordioned his car. There's no forgiveness
built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She
was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some
goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always
heard Dad's voice: This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever
really saved.' Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a
virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right
vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the
vital organs of the earth. You can't stop that by marching."

"Isn't
that a little like giving up?" "I think it's called
acceptance."

Archer
stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the
motion of the trees. "Very bleak attitude, Tom."
"Experience bears it out."

Around
six, when the sun began to slant through the window over the sink and
the kitchen bloomed with summer heat, they moved into the cooler
dimness of the living room. Tom phoned Deluxe Pizza in Belltower and
was assessed a five dollar delivery charge, " 'Cause we don't
ordinarily come out that far." The order arrived an hour
later—pepperoni pizza with anchovies, room temperature. After he
paid the delivery driver Tom opened the curtains onto a view of the
back yard, shadows lengthening among the pines. His appetite had
vanished. He ate a little and took his plate to the kitchen.
Coming back he negotiated around the video camera looming on its
tripod like an alien sentinel. "They won't stand for it,"
he said again.

Archer
looked up from his intense involvement with the pizza. "Yeah,
you said that before. Who's
they?"

"I
don't know." Tom shrugged. "But don't you get a sense of
it—a sort of intelligence at work?"

"I
didn't think we'd admitted that much. Maybe you just have
exceptionally tidy roaches."

"I'm
beginning to think otherwise."

"For
any particular reason?"

The
dreams, Tom thought. The dreams, the holes in the foundation of the
house . . . and a feeling, an intuition. "No, no particular
reason."

"What
you've described," Archer said, "sounds less like
intelligence than it does like a machine. The kind of idiot machine
that keeps running when the owner's on vacation."

"Its
owner being who? The guy who lived here—Ben Collier?"

"Maybe.
Unfortunately, it's impossible to find out anything about him.
Totally anonymous. Joan Fricker at the grocery store up at the
highway must have seen him more than anybody else, and I doubt
she could give you a good description. He never participated in
public affairs, never held office, never wrote letters to the
editor—never said more than hello, as far as anybody can remember.
The only person with a special memory of Ben Collier is Jered Smith,
who delivered his mail."

"He
had memorable mail?"

"According
to Jered, Ben Collier subscribed to every magazine published, or
it seemed that way. Some not even in English. Every business day
Jered delivered five or ten magazines and newspapers to this
address. Magazines, he says, are heavy—and he was delivering on
foot back then, though the Postal Service gave him a truck last year.
That was the first hint that Ben Collier had vanished: Jered
complained that there was a stack of magazines deep enough to block
the mail slot."

"What
kind of magazines?"

"Everything
from
Time
to
the
Manchester
Guardian.
Heavy
on current events, but not exclusively." Tom was bemused. "It's
an eccentricity, but—" "Not just eccentricity. There's
some pattern here. It's not a random set—more like a linear
equation." Tom raised his eyebrows; Archer added, "Math is
my
other
hobby.
Math was the only high school class I never cut—you remember Mr.
Foster? Tall guy, gray hair? Said I had a talent for it. I'm the guy
who always reads the puzzles column in
Scientific
American. "

Douglas
Archer, JD mathematician.
Don't
underestimate this man.
"It's
not much to go on."

"It's
absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Just kind of interesting."
Archer put his plate aside and stood up. "Well, anyway.
Don't touch the equipment—it'll turn itself on. But you might want
to play back the tape in the morning."

"Count
on it. Can you stay for coffee?"

"I
have a date for a late movie. But let me know what shows." His
smile was mischievous. "Or what doesn't."

Archer
closed the door behind him, and suddenly the house was hollow and
empty.

That
night, Tom made the disturbing discovery that he was afraid to go to
sleep.

He
showered and wrapped himself in a bathrobe and tuned in the "Tonight"
show. The chatter was tedious, but he left it on for the sound of
human voices. That's why we all own these boxes, he thought: because
they talk to us when there's no one else home.

But
maybe "afraid to sleep" was overstating the case: he wasn't
jittery. It was more like a reluctance to close his eyes in the midst
of these curious events. He had convinced himself something was
happening here, a kind of subterranean industry, maybe something (if
Archer's history was accurate) that had been happening for a hundred
years or more on this spot. Something insectile, something out of the
ground; something that loved holes and hidden places. He was
developing a sense of it that was almost frighteningly precise.
The eyes that regarded him in his dreams were the eyes—not of
machines,
Archer
was wrong; but of something nearly mechanistic in its
single-mindedness. A
builder's
eyes.
But what exactly were they building?

Not
something dangerous. Tom felt this to be true; the insects in his
dreams weren't hostile or deadly. But they were fundamentally,
utterly strange. It was as if he had reached into a tide pool and
touched something that lived there: a variegated, many-limbed polyp
so unlike himself that it might have been extraterrestrial.

And
of course there was Archer's video machinery, almost as alien,
already whirring away. It had recorded no event and probably
wouldn't. Or maybe—here was a disturbing thought —he would wake
up and find the camera dismantled, its useful parts carried away and
its carapace open and gutted on the carpet.

He
made himself go to bed before the end credits rolled on the "Tonight"
show. He lay in the darkness a long time and imagined he could hear
the camera whirring in the next room —but surely that was
impossible? It was the whirring, more likely, of his own nerves. His
own blood pulsing through his ears. He could not stop turning over
these questions in his mind, of
machines
and
intelligence
and
what might have been a faint cry for help; but in time his thoughts
tumbled away in odd, skewed directions and he was asleep.

For
a second night Tom Winter slept dreamlessly. He woke to the noise of
the clock radio, a Seattle AM station emitting prophecies about
weather and traffic. Sunlight streamed in through the margin of the
curtains, but he felt as if he had just gone to bed. Nothing remained
of the night in his memory—except, dimly, the echo of a pervasive
hum. It was the sound he imagined a buried dynamo might make.

The
sound of his thoughts.

Possibly,
the sound of
their
thoughts.

But
he put that idea away.

The
kitchen was clean again.

This
trick was familiar enough by now that it had ceased to impress him.
It was the small details that fascinated. For instance, every minor
dot of organic matter had been cleansed from the cardboard pizza
sleeve but the box itself was still open at a random angle on the
table. Decisions had been made: this is refuse, this is not. And not
simple mechanical decisions. Food in the refrigerator was never
disturbed. Unopened packages were off limits. There was a logic in
it. Repetitive, maybe, but complex and odd. A maid would have tidied
away the empty box. A robot would not. But a robot wouldn't care
whether it was caught in the act; a robot wouldn't wait for the small
hours of the night.

The
video recorder was still running, still minutes away from eight
o'clock. Tom bent past the camera lens and switched it off.

He
ejected the tape and discovered his hand was trembling. It took
him a good fifteen minutes to hook up the VCR to his TV set ...
a
minute more to rewind the cassette.

He
switched on the monitor and when the screen brightened he
punched the Play button of the VCR. An image formed and
stabilized—the kitchen, rendered odd and sterile by the static
camera angle. The phantom numbers at the top left of the screen
ticked off
12:01,
12:02
—
he
had still been awake then and when he turned up the sound he could
hear the Carson show playing in the background. Somewhere behind
the picture tube he was watching the "Tonight" show in his
bathrobe. A sort of time loop—
but
then they'd know all about that.

This
was another phantom thought, unbidden and peculiar. He shook it
off.

He
punched the Fast Forward key.

A
noise bar rolled up the screen; the picture flickered. Minutes rolled
by too fast to read. But it was the same messy kitchen he had
abandoned last night.

1:00
a.m
.
blinked past.

2:00.

3:00.
Nothing happened. Then—

3:45.

He
stabbed the Pause key, too late, and backed up.

3:40:01.

3:39:10.

3:38:27.

At
exactly 3:37:16
a.m
.,
the kitchen lights had gone off.
"Goddamn!"
Tom
said.

The
camera was built to function in ordinary house light but not absolute
darkness. The screen remained a gray, impenetrable blank. It was
so obvious as to be painful. They had fucking
turned
the lights out.

He
hit Rewind and watched the sequence in real time. But there was
nothing to see: only the static picture . . . and, faintly, the sound
of the switch being thrown.

Tock.

Darkness.

And
in the background . . . buried in tape hiss, elusive and barely
audible . . . something that might have been
their
sound.