A Bridge of Years (37 page)

"I
see. You agreed to this?"

"When
it was explained to me."

"Just
like that?"

"Not
without some soul-searching."

"But
you must have had a life of your own. It must have meant giving
something up."

"Not
as much as you might think. I was old, Catherine. An old man. And
longevity is something of an art in my time; I was more than a
century old. And failing. And quite alone."

He
said this with a wistfulness that made Catherine believe him.
"They made you young again?"

"Passably
young," Ben said. "Young enough to begin another life
when I leave here."

"Are
you allowed to do that?"

"I'm
an employee, not a slave."

"So
what you want," Catherine surmised, "is to fix up all this
damage. Make the tunnel work again. And eventually go home."

"Yes."

"Is
that possible?
Can
you
fix it?"

"The
cybernetics are repairing as much of the physical damage as they can.
Then we can close the connection to Manhattan, isolate it until it
can be repaired as well. But that will take some time. Weeks, at
least."

"And
until then," Catherine interpreted, "the problem is Tom
Winter."

"He
may be perfectly safe. He may not. The cybernetics tried to warn him,
but they were working across a tremendous information
barrier—I'm afraid they weren't very specific. He may have
alerted the marauder, which puts us at risk; or he may do so if he
hasn't yet."

Catherine
bit her lip. Here was the crux of it. "You want us to bring him
back."

Ben
looked very solemn. "That may not be possible at this stage. The
cybernetics can help, and they might provide some defense against the
marauder, but the danger is obvious. I won't ask you to
go—either of you."

You
don't have to ask, Catherine thought sadly. She looked at Doug Archer
and knew.

Archer
grinned.

"Tom
is a likable sonofabitch," he said. "I expect I can drag
his ass back here."

Doug
went to the kitchen, leaving Catherine alone with Ben.

She
hesitated in the doorway, unnerved by Ben's expressionless
patience. Finally she said, "Is this necessary? If you don't get
Tom Winter back . . . would the world end?" She added, "Doug
is risking his life, I think."

"I'll
do everything I can to minimize the risk. Some risk remains. The
world won't end if Tom Winter stays in Manhattan . . . but there
might be other consequences I can't calculate." He paused.
"Catherine, Doug knows the doorway is open. Do you think he'd
stay away from it if I told him to?"

"No
...
I
don't suppose he would." Catherine resented this but understood
that it was true. "This way, at least he's serving a purpose. Is
that it?"

"This
way," Ben said, "he'll come back."

Tom
slept for three hours and woke with Joyce beside him, already feeling
as if he'd lost her.

He
phoned Max to say he wouldn't be in. "Maybe I can come in
Saturday to make up for it."

"Are
you sick," Max inquired, "or are you jerking me around?"

"It's
important, Max."

"At
least you're not lying to me.
Very
important?"

"Very
important."

"I
hope so. This is bothersome."

"I'm
sorry, Max."

"Take
care of your trouble soon, please. You do nice work. I don't want to
break in a new person."

The
trouble wasn't Joyce. The trouble was in the space between them: that
fragile connection, possibly broken.

She
was asleep in bed, stretched out on her side with one hand cupping
the pillow. The cotton sheet was tangled between her legs. Her
glasses were on the orange crate next to the bed; she looked naked
without them, defenseless, too young. Tom watched from the doorway,
sipping coffee, until she uttered a small, unhappy moan and rolled
over.

He
couldn't begin to imagine what all this might mean to her. First the
interesting news item that the man she'd been living with was a
visitor from the future . . . followed by an encounter with something
strange and monstrous in a tunnel under the earth. These were
experiences nobody was supposed to have. Maybe she would hate
him for it. Maybe she ought to.

He
was turning over these thoughts when she staggered out of the bedroom
and pulled up a chair at the three-legged kitchen table. Tom tilled
her coffee cup and was relieved that the look she gave was nothing
like hateful. She yawned and tucked her hair away from her shoulders.
He said, "Are you hungry?" and she shook her head: "Oh,
God. Food? Please, no.

Nothing
hateful in the way she looked at him, Tom thought, but something new
and disquieting: a bruised, wounded awe.

She
sipped her coffee. She said she had a gig tonight at a coffeehouse
called Mario's, "but I don't know if I can face it." "Hell
of a night," Tom observed.

She
frowned into her cup. "It was all real, wasn't it? I keep
thinking it was some kind of dream or hallucination. But it wasn't.
We could go back to that place and it would still be there."

Tom
said, "It would be. We shouldn't." She said, "We have
to talk." He said, "I know."

They
went out for breakfast in the late-morning sunlight and the hot July
smell of road tar and sizzling concrete.

The
city had changed, too, Tom thought, since last night.

It
was a city lost in a well of time, magical and strange beyond
knowing, subterranean, more legend than reality. He had come here
from a world of disappointment and miscalculation; in its place
he had discovered a pocket universe of optimists and cynical
romantics—people like Joyce, like Soderman, like Larry Millstein.
They said they hated the world they lived in, but Tom knew better.
They loved it with their outrage and their poetry. They loved it with
the conviction of their own newness. They believed in a future
they couldn't define, only sense—used words like "justice"
and "beauty," words that betrayed their own fundamental
optimism. They believed without shame in the possibility of love
and in the power of truth. Even Lawrence Millstein believed in these
things: Tom had found a carbon copy of one of his poems, abandoned by
Joyce in a kitchen drawer; the word "tomorrow" had been
printed with fierce pressure—
"Tomorrow
like a father loves his weary children and gathers them up"
—
and
yes, Tom thought, you're one of them, Larry, brooding and bad
tempered but singing the same song. And of all these people Joyce was
the purest incarnation, her eyes focused plainly on the wickedness of
the world but seeing beyond it into some kind of salvation,
undiscovered, a submerged millennium rising like a sea creature
into the light.

All
in this hot, dirty, often dangerous and completely miraculous
city, in this nautilus shell of lost events.

But
I've changed that, Tom thought.

I've
poisoned it.

He
had poisoned the city with dailiness, poisoned it with boredom. The
conclusion was inescapable: if he stayed here this would become
merely the place where he lived, the morning paper and the evening
news not miraculous but predictable, as ordinary as the moving
of his bowels. His only consolation would be a panoramic, private
window on the future, thirty years wide. And Joyce.

Consolation
enough, Tom thought . . . unless he'd poisoned her, too.

He
tried to remember what he'd said last night, a drunken recital of
some basic history. Too much, maybe. He understood now what he
should have understood then: that he wasn't giving her the future, he
was stealing it. Stealing the wine of her optimism and leaving in its
place the sour vinegar of his own disenchantment.

He
ordered breakfast at a little egg and hamburger restaurant where
the waitress, a tiny black woman named Mirabelle, knew their names.
"You look tired," Mirabelle said. "Both of you."

"Coffee,"
Tom said. "And a couple of those Danishes."

"You
don't need Danishes. You need something to build you up. You need
aigs."

"Bring
me an egg," Joyce said, "and I'll vomit."

"Just
Danishes, then?"

"That'll
be fine," Tom said. "Thank you."

Joyce
said, "I want to be alone a little bit today."

"I
can understand that."

"You're
considerate," Joyce said. "You're a very considerate man,
Tom. Is that a common thing where you come from?" "Probably
not common enough."

"Half
the men around here are doing a Dylan Thomas thing—very horny and
very drunk. They recite the most awful poetry, then get insulted
if you don't go all weak-kneed and peel off your clothes."

"The
other half?"

"Are
lovable but queer. You're a nice change." "Thank you."

"Something's
bothering me, though." "That's not surprising."

"Tom,
I know why you lied to me. That part is understandable. And it
wasn't even really lying—you just kept a few things to yourself.
Because you didn't know whether I would understand. Well, that's
fair."

He
said, "Now you're being considerate."

"No,
it's true. But what I don't understand is why you're here. I mean, if
I found a hole in the ground with the year 1932 at the other end I
would definitely check it out . . . but why would I want to
live
there?
To catch a bunch of Myrna Loy movies, chat with F. Scott Fitzgerald?
Maybe get a real close look at Herbert Hoover? I mean, it would be
absolutely fascinating, I'll grant you that. But I have a life."
She shook her head. "I think it would be different if the tunnel
ran the other way. I might be really tempted to jump a few decades
down the road. But to take a giant step backward—that doesn't
make a whole lot of sense."

She
lit a cigarette. Tom watched the smoke swirl up past her eyes. She
had asked an important question; she waited for his answer.

He
was suddenly, desperately afraid that he might not have one—that
there was nothing he could say to justify himself.

He
said, "But if you
didn't
have
a life ...
if
you had a lousy, fucked-up life . . ."

"So
is that how it was?"

"Yes,
Joyce, that's pretty much how it was."

"Nineteen
sixty-two as an alternative to suicide? That's a weird idea, Tom."

"It's
a weird universe. The defense rests."

Mirabelle
arrived with Danishes and coffee. Joyce pushed hers aside as if they
were an irrelevancy or a distraction. She said, "Okay, but let
me tell you what worries me."

Tom
nodded.

"Back
in Minneapolis I went out with a guy named Ray. Ray used to talk
about World War Two all the time. We'd go to the movies and then sit
at some cheap restaurant while he told me about Guadalcanal or the
Battle of Midway. I mean
everything,
every
detail—I can tell you more about Midway than you want to know. So
after a while this began to seem kind of strange. One day I asked him
how old he was when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Ray says, 1
was twelve —almost thirteen.' I asked him how he came to know all
this stuff about the war and he told me he got it from books and
magazine articles. He was never in the army; he was four-F because of
his allergies. But that was okay, he said, because there was nothing
happening nowadays, nothing like the
real
war,
not even Korea had been like that. He told me how great it must have
been, guys risking their lives for a cause they really cared about. I
asked him what he would have done if he'd had to invade Italy. He
gave me a big smile and said, 'Shit, Joyce, I'd kill all the Nazis
and make love to all the women.'"