A Bridge of Years (24 page)

He
dropped the wallet in a trash bin on Eighth Street. The money—five
dollars in ones—he took home and flushed down the toilet.

Soothed
and sweetly alive in the dark of his apartment, Billy relaxed his
armor and folded it into its box. By dawn, the clouds had rolled
away. A winter sun rose over the snowbound city. Billy showered
and raided the refrigerator. He had lost a lot of weight in the last
few months, but now his appetite had returned with a vengeance. Now
he was very hungry indeed.

He
went to bed at noon and woke in the dark. Waking, he discovered
something new in himself. He discovered remorse.

He
found his thoughts circling back to the man he'd killed. Who had he
been? Had he lived alone? Were the police investigating the
murder?

Billy
had watched police investigations on TV. On TV, the police always
found the killer. Billy knew this was a social fiction; in real life
the opposite was probably nearer to the truth. Still, fiction or not,
the possibility nagged at him.

He
developed new phobias. The tunnel in the sub-basement was
suddenly on his mind. He had sealed that tunnel at both ends:
according to Ann Heath, the dead woman with the wedge of glass in her
skull, that act would guarantee his safety. No one would come hunting
him from the future; no time ghost would carry him off. The tunnel,
after all, was only a machine. A strange and nearly incomprehensible
machine, Billy admitted privately, but a
powerless
machine,
too —inaccessible.

Nevertheless,
it made him nervous.

He
patrolled the sub-basement daily. He thought of this as "checking
the exits." The city of New York and the meridian of the
twentieth century had become in Billy's mind a private place, a
welcoming shelter. The natives might be a nuisance, but they weren't
gravely dangerous; the real dangers lay elsewhere, beyond the
rubble where the tunnel had been. Billy piled the rubble higher and
installed a door at the foot of the stairs; on the door he installed
an expensive padlock. If—by some magic—the tunnel repaired
itself, any intruder would have to disturb these barricades. If Billy
found the lock broken or the door splintered it would mean his
sanctuary had been invaded ...
it
would mean the twentieth century wasn't his own anymore.

The
effort reassured him. Still, his
proximity
to
the gateway made him nervous. It was hard to sleep some nights
with the thought of that temporal fracture buried in the bedrock some
few yards under the floor. By the summer of 1953 Billy decided that
this building didn't need his nightly presence— that he could move
a few streets away without harming anything.

He
rented an apartment on the other side of Tompkins Square, three
streets uptown. It was not much different from his first apartment.
The floor was a crumbling, ancient parquet; Billy covered it
with a cheap rug. The windows were concealed by yellow roll blinds
and dust. Cockroaches lived in the gaps in the wallboard and they
came out at night. And there was a deep closet, where Billy kept his
armor in its box.

His
life fell into a series of simple routines. Every week, sometimes
more often, Billy walked the short distance between the two
buildings—or, when he was restless, took a long night walk uptown
and back—to collect his rent money and check the exits.

The
rent was often late and sometimes his few tenants failed to pay at
all. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that the padlock in
the basement was never disturbed—a fact more reassuring as the
years began to stack up behind him.

Time,
Billy
often thought, tasting the word in his mind. Time: small circles of
days and the great wheel of the seasons. Seasons passed.
Engrossed in television news—watching his small Westinghouse
TV set the way Nathan had monitored the immensely larger screen in
the civic center— he learned a parade of names: Eisenhower,
Oppenheimer, Nixon; and places: Suez, Formosa, Little Rock. He
numbered the years although the numbers still seemed implausible,
one-nine-five-four, one-nine-five-five, one thousand nine hundred and
fifty-six years in the wake of a crucifixion which seemed to Billy
just as ludicrously unreal as the fall of Rome, the treaty of Ghent,
or the Army-McCarthy hearings.

His
armor continued to call to him from its hiding place, a small voice
which sometimes grew shrill and unbearable. The need seemed to follow
the seasons, an irony Billy failed to appreciate: if time was a wheel
then in some sense he had been broken on it. Two killings
per
annum,
winter
and summer, dark nights or moonlit, as irresistible as the
tides. And each killing was followed by a grinding remorse, then
numbness, then weeks of dull torpor . . . and the Need again.

Nineteen
fifty-eight, 'fifty-nine, 'sixty.

Nixon
in Moscow, sit-ins in Greensboro, Kennedy in the White House by a
fraction of the vote.

Billy
grew older. So did the armor—but he tried not to think about that.

Tried
not to think about a lot of things, especially tonight, as he was
checking the exits: early summer of Anno Domini 1962, a hot night
that reminded him of Ohio.

Billy
entered the groaning front door of the old building near Tompkins
Square where the time traveler had once lived and where nobody lived
now except a few aging relics.

He
had developed a perverse fondness for these people, human detritus
too fragile or tenacious to abandon a building he had allowed to
crumble around them. Two of them had been there long before Billy
arrived—an arthritic old man named Shank on the fourth floor and a
diabetic pensioner on the second. Mrs. Korzybski, the pensioner,
sometimes forgot her medication and would stumble out to the street
in insulin-shock delirium. This had happened once when he was
checking the exits, and Billy had helped the woman inside, using his
passkey to open the apartment door she had somehow locked behind
her. He didn't like the police or an ambulance coming to the
building, so he rummaged in the kitchen drawers among her cat-food
cans and cutlery and fading photographs until he found her
diabetic kit. He used the syringe to inject a measured dose of
insulin solution into the crook of her flabby arm. When she came to,
she thanked him. "You're nice," she said. "You're
nicer than you look. How come you know how to use that needle?"

"I
was in the army," Billy said.

"Korea?"

"That's
right. Korea."

He
had seen Korea on television.

She
said she was glad now that she paid her rent on time, and how come
nobody had moved in for such a long while? "Since that Mr. Allen
was the manager. It gets kind of lonely these days."

"Nobody
wants to rent, I guess."

"That's
funny. That's not what I hear. Maybe if you painted?"

"One
day," Billy explained solemnly, "all this will be under
water."

Nowadays,
when he came, he came at night, when Mrs. Korzybski was asleep. Her
apartment was dark tonight. All the apartments were dark except for
403: Amos Shank, who lived on his retirement fund from the H. J.
Heinz Company in Pittsburgh. Mr. Shank had come to New York to find a
publisher for his epic poem
Ulysses
at the Elbe.
The
publishing industry had disappointed him, but Mr. Shank still
liked to talk about the work—three massive volumes of vellum paper
bound with rubber bands, still not entirely finished.

Mr.
Shank left the light on in case inspiration struck in the depths of
the night . . . but Mr. Shank was probably asleep by now too.
Everyone in Billy's building was lonely and asleep. Everyone but
Billy.

He
whistled a formless tune between his teeth and stepped into the
entranceway. The paint on the walls had faded to gray a long time
ago. The mirrored wall by the stairs was fogged and chipped and some
of the floor tiles had turned up at the corners, like leaves.

Billy
went directly to the basement.

The
stairway leading down smelled hot and stale. These old wooden steps
had grown leathery in the humid air. Silent in the dim light, Billy
passed the bizarre and inefficient oil furnace with its many
arms, the groaning water heater; through an unmarked access door and
deeper, past the storage cellar with its lime-green calcinated walls
and its crusted cans of paint, to the door he had sealed with a
sturdy Yale padlock. The light was dim—the light here was always
dim. Billy took a chrome Zippo lighter out of his hip pocket.

He
felt strange down here so close to the tunnel. He had been deeply
frightened when he first understood how vast this warren of temporal
fractures really was—what it implied and what that might mean to
him. He couldn't think about the tunnel without considering the
creatures who had made it . . . beings, Billy understood, so nearly
omnipotent that they might as well be called gods. And he remembered
what he'd seen in this tunnel the day he arrived here, something even
stranger than the godlike time travelers, a creature as bright and
hot as a living flame.

He
flicked the igniter on the Zippo. Time for a new flint, Billy told
himself.

He
brought the light down closer to the padlock—then drew a sharp
breath and stepped back.

Dear
God! After all these years—!
The
lock had been broken open.

Billy's
first thought was of Krakow gazing down at him through another door,
the night he was recruited. He had the same feeling now: discovered
in hiding.

He
was defenseless, weaponless, and the walls were much too close.

He
touched his throat, instinctively reaching for the touch-plate that
would trigger his armor—but the armor was at home.

He
backed away from the door.

Someone
had been here! Someone had come for him!

He
considered going upstairs, dragging Mrs. Korzybski out of her sleep,
Amos Shank from his senile slumber, beating them until they told him
who had come and who had gone. But they might not know. Probably
didn't. Maybe no one had seen.

I
need help, Billy told himself. The sense of imminent danger had
closed around him like a noose.
(Not
alone anymore!)
He
pocketed his lighter, climbed the stairs, and left the building.

He
stood alone in the sweaty darkness of the street, his eyes patrolling
the sawtooth shadows between the tenement stoops.

He
hurried away, avoiding streetlights.
The
armor,
Billy
thought. The armor would know what to do.

Catherine
Simmons drove into Belltower after the cremation of her grandmother,
Peggy Simmons, who had lived out along the Post Road for many years
and who had died a week ago in her sleep.

Summer
made Belltower a pretty little town, at least when the wind wasn't
blowing from the mill. Catherine knew the town from her many visits;
she didn't have any trouble finding the Carstairs Funeral Home
on a side street off Brierley, between an antique shop and a marine
electronics store. She parked and sat in her Honda a few minutes—she
was early for her appointment.

Gram
Peggy's fatal stroke had been unexpected and the news of her death
still seemed fresh and unreasonable. Of all Catherine's family, Gram
Peggy had seemed most like a fixture—the solidest and most fun
of the sorry lot. But Gram Peggy was dead and Catherine supposed she
would have to adjust to that fact.

She
sighed and climbed out of the car. The afternoon was sunny and the
air carried a whiff of ocean. Pretty little dumb little smelly little
town, Catherine thought.

There
was no ceremony planned and no other Simmonses at the funeral home.
Catherine's father—Gram Peggy's only son—had died in 1983, of
liver cancer, and the rest of the family was hopelessly scattered.
Only Catherine had ever come to visit these last several years.
Apparently Gram Peggy had appreciated those visits. Her lawyer, Dick
Parsons, had phoned to say that the entire estate, including the
house, had been left to Catherine: another stunning piece of news,
still somewhat indigestible.