“Ick,” Catherine said. “I’m sorry if this is disturbing.”
It was, but she shrugged. “They fed my aunt Lacey through a tube for two years before she died. This isn’t any worse, I guess. But I’m sorry for you.”
“Strictly temporary. And I’m not in any pain. You two have lunch if you like. I’m quite happy here.”
“Okay,” Catherine said. Meekly: “But I have a couple of questions of my own.”
“Surely,” Ben said.
“You told us you were a sort of custodian. A caretaker. You said you were recruited.’ But I don’t know what that means. Somebody knocked at your door and asked you to join up?”
“I was a professional historian, Catherine. A good one. I was approached by another caretaker, from my own near future, also a historian. Think of us as a guild. We recruit our own.”
“That puts a lot of power in your hands.” Custodian was a modest word, Catherine thought; maybe too modest.
“It has to be that way,” Ben said. “The tunnel-builders are journeying into their own distant past. Their records of this time are sketchy; that’s why they’re here. The custodians act as their buffer in a sometimes hostile environment. We provide them with contemporary documents and we help to integrate them into contemporary culture on the rare occasions when they choose to make a physical visit. Could you, for instance, walk into a Cro-Magnon encampment and expect to pass for one of the tribe?”
“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.”
Fourteen
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 kin
d 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.’ ”
She exhaled a long wisp of smoke. “My uncle was in Italy. He never talked about it. Whenever I asked him about the war, he got this really unpleasant expression. He’d stare at you until you shut up. So I knew this was basically bullshit. It kind of made me mad. If Ray wanted to live out some heroic existence, why not just do it? It wasn’t even what you could honestly call nostalgia. He wanted some magic transformation, he wanted to live in a world where everything was bigger than life. I said, ‘Why don’t you go to Italy? I admit there’s not a war on. But you could live on the beach, get drunk with the fishermen, fall in love with some little peasant girl’ He said, ‘It’s not the same. People aren’t the same anymore.
Tom said, “Is this a true story?”
“Mostly true.”
“The moral?”
“I thought about Ray last night. I thought, What if he found a tunnel? What if it led back to 1940?”
“He’d go to war,” Tom said. “It wouldn’t be what he expected, and he’d be scared and unhappy.”
“Maybe. But maybe he’d love it. And I think that would be a lot more frightening, don’t you? He’d be walking around with a permanent hard-on, because this was history, and he knew how it went. He’d be screwing those Italian girls, but it would be macabre, terrible—because in his own mind he’d be screwing history. He’d be fucking ghosts. I find that a little terrifying.”
Tom discovered his mouth was dry. “You think that’s what I’m doing?”
Joyce lowered her eyes. “I have to admit the possibility has crossed my mind.”
He said he’d meet her after her gig at Mario’s.
Alone, Tom felt the city around him like a headache. He could go to Lindner’s—but he doubted he could focus his eyes on a radio chassis without passing out. Instead he rode a bus uptown and wandered for a time among the crowds on Fifth Avenue. On a perverse whim he followed a mob of tourists to the 102nd-floor observatory of the Empire State Building, where he stood in a daze of sleep-deprivation trying to name the landmarks he recognized—the Chrysler Building, Welfare Island—and placing a few that didn’t yet exist, the World Trade Center still only a landfill site in the Hudson River. The building where he stood was thirty years old, approximately half as old as it would be in 1989 and that much closer to its art deco glory, a finer gloss on its Belgian marbles and limestone facades. The tourists were middle-aged or young couples with children, men in brown suits with crisp white shirts open at the collar, snapping photos with Kodak Brownies and dispensing dimes to their kids, who clustered around the ungainly pay-binoculars pretending to strafe lower Manhattan. These people spared an occasional glance for Tom, the unshaven man in a loose sweatshirt and denims: a beatnik, perhaps, or some other specimen of New York exotica. Tom looked at the city through wire-webbed windows.
The city was gray, smoky, vast, old, strange. The city was thirty years too young. The city was a fossil in amber, resurrected, mysterious life breathed into its pavements and awnings and Oldsmobiles. It was a city of ghosts.
Ghosts like Joyce.
He shaded his eyes against the fierce afternoon sun. Somewhere in this grid of stone and black shadow, he had fallen in love. This was certain knowledge and it took some of the sting from what Joyce had said. He wasn’t fucking ghosts. But he might have fallen in love with one.
And maybe that was a mistake; maybe he’d be better off fucking ghosts. He tried to recall why he had come here and what he had expected. A playground: maybe she was right about that. The sixties—that fabled decade—had ended when he was eleven years old. He’d grown up believing he’d missed something important, although he was never sure what—it depended on who you talked to. A wonderful or terrible time. When the Vietnam War was fought in, or against. When drugs were good, or weren’t. When sex was never lethal. A decade when “youth” was important; by the time of Tom’s adolescence the word had lost some of its glamour.
Maybe he had expected all these wonders assembled together, served with a side of invulnerability and private wisdom. A vast phantom drama in which he was both audience and actor.
But Joyce had made that impossible.
He had come here wanting love—some salvaging grace— but love was impossible in the playground. Love was a different landscape. Love implied loss and time and vulnerability. Love made all the props and stage sets too real: real war, real death, real hopes invested in real lost causes.
Because he loved her he had begun to see the world the way she did: not the gaudy Kodachrome of an old postcard but solid, substantial, freighted with other meanings.
He raised his eyes to the horizon, where the hot city haze had begun to lift into a comfortless blue sky.
He bought dinner at a cafeteria and showed up at Mario’s, a basement cafe under a bookstore, before Joyce was due on stage. The “stage,” a platform of two-by-fours covered with plywood panels, contained a cane-backed chair and a PA microphone on a rust-flecked chromium stand—not strictly necessary, given the size of the venue. Tom chose a table by the door.
Joyce emerged from the shadows with her twelve-string Hohner and a nervous smile. Out of some tic of vanity she had chosen to leave her glasses offstage, and Tom was mildly jealous: the only other time he saw her without her glasses was when they were in bed together. Without them, under the stage lights, her face was plain, oval, a little owl-eyed. She blinked at her audience and pulled the microphone closer to the chair.
A Bridge of Years Page 23
