Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Doris Vanderkamp approached him when the electric clock on the commissary wall marked ten minutes to midnight. Doris had become something of a pariah, too, for her role in exposing the smuggling ring. They had been avoiding each other for that reason. “Dance with me,” she said, a little drunkenly.

  She was pretty in her disarray, ringlet curls unraveling at her shoulders. “Are you sure you want that, Doris?”

  “I would rather dance with you than not dance at all. I don’t want to be lonely when the year turns. Dance with me, Jesse, just for tonight. You owe me that much.”

  The clock turned minutes into seconds, today into yesterday. The boundary between past and future was called the present, Jesse thought. It was where he lived. It was where everyone lived. He took her in his arms and danced.

  PART TWO

  Runners

  —1877—

  8

  The town was called Stony Creek, but the name didn’t matter. Jesse guessed he’d forget it sooner or later, as he would forget the town itself. Stony Creek was a New England town like every other New England town he had ridden through by rail or buckboard in the last six months, not that he knew much about New England towns except by reputation: dour Yankees, whitewashed houses, teetotaling Congregationalist churches. And maybe that was the case; but the towns, as towns went, seemed pleasant enough from the perspective of an outsider. This one surely did, by the light of a late spring morning.

  He stepped off the Pullman car into a chorus of birdsong. The trees on the north side of the tracks were full of birds, all vocalizing. It made Jesse wish he knew something about birds or their calls. He guessed some of the birds might be sparrows. He asked the uniformed stationmaster about it. “Sparrows,” the stationmaster said, looking him up and down, “bluebirds, goldfinches, ovenbirds, uh-huh—the whole choir.”

  Stony Creek was a one-street town surrounded by smallhold farms, with a brickworks and a pottery factory on its outskirts, cut through by a river that turned all the requisite mill wheels. The train depot smelled of sun-warmed lumber, creosote, coal smoke, wildflowers. The stationmaster was a squat box of a man maybe ten years older than Jesse. His uniform was dusty black wool trimmed with gold braid, and he looked at Jesse’s canvas bag with an undisguised, almost avaricious curiosity. Jesse asked him about a residential hotel in town.

  “Staying long?”

  “Probably not more than a day or two.”

  “For that, the Morgan House. For a longer stay, Coretta Langstaff rents rooms by the week. Depends on your business, I suppose.”

  Yankee manners ruled out a direct question, and the stationmaster was clearly chafing under that constraint. Jesse said, “As a matter of fact, I’m looking for someone. Maybe you can help me.”

  “I guess that depends on who it is you’re looking for. Do you represent the law?”

  “No, sir, I don’t. But I don’t mean anyone any harm. There’s a family trying to find their daughter.” This much was almost true. “Not a child but a grown woman. They think she might have arrived here around this time last year. Unaccompanied.”

  “This woman have a name?”

  “She probably isn’t using her family name.”

  “Is she in some kind of trouble?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say what drove her from her family. I’m to tell her they hold nothing against her and want to see her again, if she’s agreeable. I have a letter to deliver. That’s all.”

  “Are you some kind of Pinkerton man they hired?”

  “Not Pinkerton, but hired by the family, yes.”

  “Well, it’s none of my business,” the stationmaster said.

  “And I shouldn’t have asked. I thank you for your time.” Jesse tipped his hat and made as if to walk away.

  “It’s an unusual situation,” the trainman called after him, “a woman traveling unescorted.”

  Jesse turned back. “Maybe the kind of thing folks remember?”

  “I don’t know anything about it. But a woman from out of town has been staying at Widow Langstaff’s for most of a year now.”

  “And which way is Widow Langstaff’s?”

  “East. Just this side of the millpond. There’s a sign in the window.”

  New Englanders weren’t such bad people, Jesse thought. More generous than they were given credit for. Back in San Francisco he would have had to pay for information like that.

  He thanked the stationmaster and set out to walk. Stony Creek’s main street was pressed earth, white with dust. The birds kept up their chorus, the breeze was soft as cotton. Passing strangers glanced at Jesse; curious faces peered at him from the sun-silvered window of a barber shop, the shaded porch of a dry-goods store. Jesse ignored them all. His bag was heavy in his hand. The bag contained a change of clothes and a pistol, and in his pocket was money enough for two fares to New York City. Of these, he expected he would require all but the pistol.

  After a walk long enough to draw out a light sweat on his forehead, he came within sight of Widow Langstaff’s house. The house resembled its neighbors: heavy cornices, gabled roof, a long porch furnished with wicker chairs. Bookending the chairs, two tall ceramic vases with dried cattails sticking out of them. A sign in the window offered ROOMS TO LET. Jesse stepped onto the creaking porch and knocked at the door.

  The door opened, wafting out a scent of dusty carpets and wood polish. A gray-haired woman gave him a long up-and-down look, just as the stationmaster had. Maybe it was a New England custom. “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Langstaff? My name is Jesse Cullum.”

  “You want to rent a room?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m sorry but I don’t. I want to speak to one of your guests.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  The true name of the woman he was looking for was Mrs. Standridge, Claire Standridge. She wouldn’t be using Standridge, in all likelihood. But she might have stuck by her given name. Runners often did. “Her name is Claire.”

  “Are you a relative?”

  “No. I have business to discuss with her.”

  “Well, she’s upstairs. I’ll see if she’s available. You said your name was Cullum?”

  “Tell her I represent her people from the City.”

  “Which city?”

  “She’ll understand.”

  “Well—you can wait in the parlor if you like.”

  “Thank you, but it’s such a nice day I’d rather sit out here, if it’s all the same to you.” For the kind of conversation he hoped to conduct with Mrs. Standridge, the porch was likely to be more private.

  “Suit yourself,” the widow Langstaff said.

  * * *

  Jesse wedged himself into a wicker chair and watched the street. The life of the town rolled by, what there was of it. A cargo truck drawn by two scrawny dray horses. A man on horseback. Another young man in creased trousers and a straw hat came quick-striding along, in a hurry to get somewhere—love or money was involved, Jesse guessed.

  Then the door creaked open and a dark-haired woman stepped out onto the veranda. She looked at Jesse closely, more sadness than curiosity in her eyes. She was tall, of an indeterminate age somewhere north of thirty, and she wore a white day dress and a small, ridiculous hat. “Don’t get up.” She settled into the chair beside Jesse. “I thought someone like you might show up sooner or later. Mrs. Langstaff said your name is Cullum?”

  “Jesse Cullum.”

  “And you’re from the City.” A deliberately ambiguous statement, on the off chance she had misunderstood.

  “I work for the City, yes.”

  “A local hire?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ve been in the City’s employ almost four years now.”

  “And you’ve come to take me back?”

  “It’s not in my power to compel you to do anything at all, Mrs. Standridge. I’m just a messenger.”

  She flinched when he said her name. “And the message is?”

  “Eighteen seventy-seven is the last year the City w
ill operate, as I’m sure you know. August Kemp means to shut down the Mirror as soon as winter sets in. And once that door is closed, no power on Earth can open it up again. The City discourages runners, obviously, but there’s no penalty for changing your mind, and we’d be happy to pay your way and protect your anonymity, should you make that choice. But the time has come. It’s a choice you have to make.”

  “So this is Kemp doing due diligence? Covering his ass in case my family tries to bring a lawsuit against him for losing me?”

  Mrs. Standridge had lived in New England for a while now, according to what Jesse had been told, but apparently she hadn’t lost her futuristic habits of speech. (At least not for the purposes of this conversation—Jesse hoped she was more careful when she spoke to her Yankee neighbors.) “I don’t know anything about Mr. Kemp’s motives, but the offer is genuine.”

  And now she’ll send me away, Jesse thought, and that’ll be the end of it. Or she’ll begin to talk. If she began to talk, chances were good that she would leave with him.

  She looked across the rooftops of the houses across the street, to the peak of a wooded hill and the small clouds that drifted lazily beyond it.

  “Last summer,” she said softly, “a lightning-rod salesman came through town.”

  Jesse knew better than to prompt her with a question. He let her silent thoughts play out against the homely sound of birdcalls, a barking dog, children playing somewhere out of sight. Wind chimes were suspended from the ceiling of the porch, but the breeze was so gentle that they gave out only the occasional bright ting.

  “I don’t know if you can understand how it seemed to me, Mr. Cullum. How it was for me before I came here. I was raised in a relatively wealthy family. My father owns a chain of automotive-supply stores. And I married a man who is even more successful. So my life has been good, by conventional standards. Home in Manhattan, a vacation house in Malibu. My husband was a decent man, is a decent man—often out of town, maybe something of a philanderer, sometimes photographed with women he refuses to talk about, but we liked each other well enough. It’s just that he didn’t understand my … nostalgia.”

  “Nostalgia?”

  “That’s the word I use. Can you be nostalgic for a place you’ve never really been? Well, I was. Strange as it sounds. It started after we were married. I began to read history compulsively—I guess you could say obsessively—long before August Kemp started selling tickets to it. American history, I mean; America before the Internet, before television, before cars, before electric lights. I read history books and old novels, books out of print for a century and half.” She smiled, not happily. “I collected stereoscopes and daguerreotypes. Scenic views of New York and Boston. My husband called it unhealthy—I made the mistake of wondering out loud whether I was actually channeling a past life. I thought about seeing a psychic; he wanted me to see a shrink.”

  “And did you?”

  “I looked up my family genealogy instead. What I found was the usual assortment of European immigrants, most too recent to be interesting. But my maternal grandfather’s line went way back. Like a golden thread. Old New England stock. The names of people, the places they lived—it all seemed familiar to me, like something I had once known and forgotten. Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could see it perfectly clearly. Another world. Church steeples and wooden sidewalks and women in bustle skirts, all clean and simple and bright and new. Do you have even the faintest idea what I mean?”

  Jesse’s father had once given him a children’s book—probably left behind by one of Madame Chao’s inebriated clients—in which there was a fanciful drawing of a pirate’s cave strewn with jewels. On more than a few nights Jesse had imagined himself into that cave, a private kingdom where rubies rubbed shoulders with emeralds and no one was ever startled awake by the simulated ecstasies of hardworking whores. The cave had seemed real enough in his mind, occasionally more real than the world around him. “I think I understand.”

  “Of course I was fascinated by the idea of August Kemp’s resort when I heard of it. The idea seemed so compelling and at the same time so implausible. I still don’t understand how it works. Leaves of the past pressed together like the pages of a book. Absurd. But true.”

  Jesse nodded. The nation’s newspapers had reacted to the advent of the City with the same incredulity. The claims made on the City’s behalf could not possibly be genuine, but reporters sent to debunk the fraud had come back converted, bearing photographs of the flying machine in which they had been permitted to ride.

  “I tried to put it out of my mind. The cost of a week at Kemp’s resort wasn’t trivial, even for us. Almost like flying into orbit for a vacation. Which was what my husband said when I raised the question. It would be a titanic waste of money. I was disappointed, but I could hardly contradict him. So we flew to Switzerland that winter. An awkward trip. There were arguments. Skiing bores me. The time passed slowly, as it does in marriages that have decayed into friendships. I think Terrence sensed that.”

  “Terrence is your husband?” Is or was or will be, Jesse thought: time travel caused those ordinary words to tangle up like shoestrings.

  “Yes. And he genuinely wanted to make me happy, and he knew he wasn’t succeeding at it. So for my thirty-sixth birthday he conceded the point and booked us the full tour. It was a wonderful surprise … though I knew, even then, that I wanted to leave him. And not just him but the world we lived in. I knew I’d take the chance if the opportunity presented itself. I knew it without ever really admitting it to myself, if that makes any sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense.”

  “We signed on to the ‘Springtime in New York’ package. Very exciting, going through the Mirror, and especially when we left Futurity Station on the special train, watching the old America slide by the window, all those sleepy depots and smoky little towns, cities without skyscrapers. New York, of course. They took us to see Adelina Patti at the Academy of Music. Dinner at Delmonico’s. That was the night I made my run. Delmonico’s invented Lobster Newburg, did you know that? But as it happens, I hate lobster. So I excused myself and found my way out of the building. It was the Delmonico’s on Broad Street, a fine June evening, and there I stood on the street corner, all by myself, dressed in my period clothes, the kind they give us so we don’t shock the locals, Velcro instead of buttons and stays—do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And money in my purse, because I had made preparations. And a whole world in front of me. It felt … wonderful. For a short time. I learned better very quickly. An unchaperoned woman in New York is liable to be mistaken for a prostitute. Renting a room, buying a train ticket, even shopping for clothes, all much more difficult than I had anticipated. I learned to pass myself off as a widow. Because, God knows, the Civil War left no shortage of widows. But it’s a difficult lie to maintain. So I refined the story. I told people I had been engaged when my betrothed was killed at Waynesboro. Or I said I’d been traveling with my brother when he was taken ill. I told all sorts of lies, a lie for every occasion. Eventually I arrived here. I had convinced myself that this town would be different. I chose it because I have relatives—I suppose you could say ancestors—here. Not that I would dare introduce myself to them. I planned to make my own home here, on my own merits. I would join the church, I would be absorbed into the community. I had no better plan that that. It seemed sufficient.” She gave Jesse another smile with no discernible trace of happiness in it. “Do you know the story of the painted bird?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I read about it in a book. A man catches a bird and paints it different colors and releases it. The painted bird tries to go back to its flock, but the flock doesn’t recognize it anymore—the other birds turn on it, kill it. Well, I haven’t been killed. But otherwise, Mr. Cullum, I am that bird. I dress incorrectly, no matter how hard I try. I’ve been told I have a peculiar accent, that I talk like a sodbuster or a Negro. I don’t defer to
men exactly as I should. I stare when I ought to cast my eyes down. I say the wrong words at the wrong time. In a thousand subtle ways, I am that painted bird. Which is why I live alone in a rented room. Which is why I’ve nearly run out of money and can’t find decent work. Which is why I have no friends to speak of.”

  Jesse waited for her to go on. Three women strolled past the house, twirling sun umbrellas. Their conversation was a tangle of tenor voices fading in the warm spring air.

  “One of the tenants here has a tumor on his face. It covers most of his right eye. Where I come from, it would have been treated and removed. So I find myself thinking, what if I get sick? Something as simple as appendicitis could kill me. A fever could kill me. I’ve had all the shots, but what happens when the vaccines wear off? As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find—it exists, it really does, but consider what it’s buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. Hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese—not that many of them are seen in these parts. Europe is as far away as the moon, Asia might as well be Mars. And—did I mention the lightning-rod salesman?”

  “Just briefly.”

  “Late last summer I was standing at my window when a lightning-rod salesman came down the road. A lightning-rod salesman! You won’t understand this, but it was exciting to me—it was like something out of those old stories I loved so much. He was pulling a cart with his name painted on the side in bright red circus writing: PROFESSOR ELECTRO. A crowd of children following after him. A perfect day for it, too, sullen and hot, storm clouds swelling on the horizon. So I ran down to see him—I couldn’t help myself. But you know what Professor Electro was? Professor Electro was an old Jew with yellow eyes and a smelly blue Union jacket, hardly more than a beggar—so drunk or demented he could barely mumble his pitch, and the children were mocking him obscenely, and he looked as if he had endured so much serial humiliation that he would have been grateful if a bolt of lightning had struck him dead on the spot.”