A Bridge of Years (17 page)

He
took a pad of paper and a pencil from a kitchen drawer and opened the
pad to its first fresh page.

At
the top he wrote,
Troubling
Questions.
He
underlined it twice.

He
paused, sipped coffee, then picked up the pencil.

Something
is wrong here,
he
wrote.

Something
is wrong or I would never have found the tunnel. The previous owner
vanished. The machine bugs talked about "repairing" him/it.
The machine bugs are running on autopilot, I think. The lights left
on but the premises empty.

Question
of rubble at the end of the tunnel. "Destruction." But why,
and committed by whom or what?

Well,
that was the
real
question,
wasn't it?

He
wrote,
The
tunnel is an artifact. The tunnel is a time machine. It was built by
someone. Someone owns it.

Which
would imply someone
from
the future,
since
they weren't assembling time tunnels down at General Dynamics these
days. It was hard to come to grips with that idea, in part because of
the echo of too much juvenile fantasy, too many comic books and bad
movies. People from the future, very familiar: bald guys in pastel
tights.

The
trouble was that such thinking was dangerously useless. He would
have to think about these numbingly strange events with as much
sobriety and clarity as he could muster. The stakes—he remembered
destruction
—
might
be very high.

Some
destructive force caused problems at this end of the tunnel,
he
wrote,
bad
enough that the owners bugged out and left the property running on
automatic. The same force, presumably, did an even better job at
the Manhattan end.

But
there was so much he still didn't know. Why a tunnel between
Belltower and New York City? Were there more tunnels to other places?
Did the tunnels always go to the same place? When they functioned
normally, what were they for? Who used them?

He
wrote these questions down.

Then
paused, refilled his coffee cup and sat down again. He reached into
his pocket and took out the dead machine bug.

It
lay pallid and empty-seeming on the inky front page of the
Times.

Death
by misadventure. Most likely, he thought, it had been murdered.

Ten
years have passed,
he
wrote.
If
the passing of time means anything at all, under the circumstances.

Chewed
his pencil.

You
could walk away from this.

After
all: what was he really doing here? Tempting himself? Daring
himself?

This
is dangerous, and you could walk away.
It
was undeniable.

Maybe
the only question is which way to walk.

Because
he had a choice now, didn't he? He felt a tingle of excitement, the
pleasure of this secret option, this new ace that had been dealt him.
He hadn't dared to consider it. He considered it now.

You
could leave it all behind.

You
could leave the car lot and the divorce and the polite pink slip and
the greenhouse effect all behind.
The
sensation of writing the words made him dizzy.
You
could walk out on it. Everybody else on the face of the earth is
being dragged into the future an hour at a time but you can walk out.
You found the back door.
Forcing
some rationality here:
Not
the door to paradise. Thirty years ago. They have the Bomb.
Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They have racism,
ignorance, crime, starvation—

They
have the Bomb, he thought, but maybe the important thing was,
they
didn't use it
He
could live three decades, if he wanted to, knowing for a stone fact
that the air-raid siren wouldn't go off. He could laugh at the
newspapers. If he was diligent, if he did his homework, he'd know the
plane he stepped onto wasn't going to fall out of the sky; he'd be
out of town when the earthquake hit . . .

And
even if someone died, it would be a death already entered into the
history books. No graves would be filled that weren't already full.
The tragedy of the world would march on, but at least he would have
its measure.

He
heard an echo of Barbara from that chamber in his head where memories
lived and sometimes spoke:
Are
you really so frightened of the future?

After
Chernobyl, after Tiananmen Square, after his divorce? In a world
where tritium regularly disappeared from scheduled shipments, where
the national debt was coming due, where the stock market resembled an
Olympic high-dive competition? Scared of the future, here in the
world of teen suicide and the cost-effective assault rifle?
Scared?—while the Brazilian rain forests clouded the atmosphere
with their burning and the skin cancer rate had become an artifact of
the evening news? What,
frightened?
Who,
me?

I'll
go back one more time,
he
wrote.
At
least to look. To be there. At least once.
Any
other questions?

Yes,
he thought. Many. But he chose not to write them down.

When
Tom glanced up from the paper he saw that several of the larger
machine bugs had climbed the table leg and were carrying their dead
compatriot away.

Maybe
to replace it, Tom thought. Maybe to repair it: they were big on
repairing things. Or maybe to
bury
it,
to inter it in some metallic grave while they gathered around and
sang electromagnetic hymns.

They
made a bright, glassy line against the kitchen tiles as they marched
away. He didn't interfere.

One
more time, he promised himself, at least to see—all decisions
postponed until then. He decided he'd provision himself for a weekend
trip and in the meantime lead a normal life, as impossible as
that sounded.

Astonishingly,
the charade was a success. He put in good hours at work. Tony invited
him for a family dinner and that worked out well, too, with Tony and
Loreen making casual but pointed inquiries about his health and his
"attitude," Tom fending them off with carefully fuzzy
answers. Time passed easily except at night, when his doubts came
sneaking back like guilty prodigals. He installed a hardware store
deadbolt on the door leading into the back basement—not that this
would stop any serious traffic coming up the tunnel, but it was a
useful psychological prop, a sleeping aid, like the small white pills
he bought at the Valu-Save Pharmacy. He found some popular histories
of the 1960s in the library and invested some study in the first
third of that decade, everything up to the Kennedy
assassination. It struck him as an oddly quiescent time, large events
jostling in the wings but not quite ready to put in an appearance on
stage. Call it a nervous appendage of the fifties. He began to
recognize names: Gagarin, Khrushchev, John Glenn, Billie Sol Estes—
but history paled in the face of this enormity, his secret shortcut
through the maze of years and death. The week wheeled on.

He
woke up before dawn Saturday morning, marked the space between the
wall studs and carved an opening with a keyhole saw—he was getting
good at this.

At
the opposite end of the tunnel he noted with relief that the rubble
had not been disturbed—only his own footprints in the dust—and
that the broken lock on the adjoining door had not been replaced.

No
one knows yet.

He
was safe here still.

He
left the tunnel and ventured into the street on a cool and cloudy
spring morning. Time passed at the same rate, he noted, here and at
home, though the seasons were out of synchronization by a couple of
months. He wrote down the street number of the tenement building he
emerged from and then the street as he passed the sign at an
intersection. Then simply walked. He was a tourist. That was what
he'd say if anyone asked.
I'm
from out of town.
Basic
and quite true.

Of
course, he got lost.

He
had been to New York on business trips for Aerotech but his grasp of
the city's geography was vague at best. He walked across Fourteenth
Street to Fifth Avenue with the notion that he might find some
familiar landmarks . . . but he didn't want to stray that far from
the tunnel.

Not
that he would have a hard time finding his way back; the address was
there in his pocket. But he couldn't hail a cab and he couldn't even
buy a tourist map in a dimestore; his money was useless—or at least
ran the risk of being mistaken for counterfeit—unless he put it in
a vending machine. He told himself that getting lost wasn't such a
bad thing; that he had planned to spend the day wandering—aimlessly
or otherwise.

But
it was hard to navigate coherently. He walked in a daze, blinded by
the miraculous. The most prosaic object—a woman's hat in a
milliner's window, a billboard, a chromium hood ornament—would
suddenly capture all his attention. They were tokens of the
commutation of time, bodies risen from the grave. He could not say
which was stranger, his own numbing awareness of the transiency of
these things or the nonchalance of the people he passed—people for
whom this was merely
the
present,
solid
as houses.

It
made him grin. It made him shiver.

Of
the people he passed, many must have died by 1989.
These
are the lives of the dead,
Tom
thought.
These
are their ghost-lives, and I've entered into them.
If
they'd known, they might have looked at him twice. He was a cold wind
from the land of their children . . . one more cold wind on a cold
afternoon.

It
was
afternoon
now, and colder than it had been, and the rain started again; a
bitter, squalling rain that ran down his collar and seemed to pool,
somehow, at the base of his spine. From Fifth Avenue he crossed
Washington Square North into the park. He recognized the arch from
one of his visits to the city, but that arch had been a canvas for
spray-paint graffiti; this arch was visibly marble, if not pristine.
He found a bench (the rain had subsided a little) and occupied it
while he calculated his route home; then a young woman in
harlequin-rimmed glasses and a black sweater stopped and looked
at him—really looked—and asked him his name, and wondered
whether he had anywhere to go.

Her
name was Joyce Casella. She bought him coffee.

She
took him home.

He
woke once in the night. Waking, he unfolded his memory of the
day and examined it—read it like a text, for clues. The mystery was
what he ought to do next. He had come a great distance without a
compass.

A
siren wailed in the outer darkness. He stood up, here in this shabby
room in the city of New York in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred
and Sixty-two, stumbled through a dim wash of streetlight to the
bathroom and pissed into the rusty porcelain bowl. He was embedded in
a miracle, he thought, not just the miracle of 1962 but the miracle
of its
dailiness,
of
this toothpaste-stained 1962 medicine cabinet, this 1962 bottle of
aspirin, this leaky 1962 faucet ...