A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

"She's not a bitch," Tom had said.

  "They're all bitches."

  "Don't call her that," Tom had said, and he remembered Tony's look, the arrogance eroding into uncertainty.

  "Well . . . you can't throw your life away for her, anyhow. There are people out there going on with their business —people with cancer, people whose kids were smeared over the highway by semi trucks. If they can deal with it, you can fucking well deal with it."

  This was both unanswerable and true. Tom accepted the chastisement and had been clinging to it since. Barbara would not have approved; she disliked the appropriation of public grief for private purposes. Tom was more pragmatic. You do what you have to.

  But here he was in Tony's big house beside the bay, and it occurred to him that he was carrying a considerable load of guilt, gratitude, and resentment, mostly directed at his brother.

  He made small talk while the steaks charred over the flames. Tony responded with his own chatter. Tony had bought the propane barbecue "practically wholesale" from a guy he knew at a retail hardware outlet. He was considering investing in a couple of rental properties this summer. "You should have talked to me about that house before running off half cocked." And he had his eye on a new sailboat.

  This wasn't bragging, Tom understood. Barbara had long ago pointed out Tony's need for physical evidence of his worth, like the validations punched into bus tickets. To his credit, he was at least discreet about it.

  The problem was that he, Tom, had no such validation of his own; in Tony's eyes, this must render him suspicious. A man without a VCR or a sports car might be capable of anything. This nervousness extended to Tom's job performance, a topic that had not been broached but which hovered over the conversation like a cloud.

  Tony's own reliability, of course, was unquestioned. When their parents died Tony had staked his share of the estate on a junior partnership in an auto dealership out on Commercial Road. The investment was more than financial: Tony had put in a lot of time, sweat, and deferred gratification. And the investment had paid off, handsomely enough that Tom sometimes wondered whether his own use of the same inheritance—for his engineering degree, and now the house—was ultimately frivolous. What had it bought him? A divorce and a job as a car salesman.

  But he was not even a salesman, really. "For now," Tony said, carrying the steaks in to the dining room table—Topic A surfacing at last—"you are strictly a gofer, a lot boy, a floor whore. You don't write up sales until the manager says you're ready. Loreen! We're gettin' hungry here! Where the hell is the salad?"

  Loreen emerged dutifully from the kitchen with a cut-glass bowl filled with iceberg and romaine lettuce, sliced tomatoes, mushrooms, a wooden spoon and fork. She set down the bowl and went about tucking Tricia into a high chair while Barry tugged at her dress. Tony sat down and poured himself iced tea from a sweating jug. "The steaks look wonderful," Loreen said.

  Tom spent the salad course wondering what a "floor whore" was. Loreen fed Tricia from a jar of strained peas, then excused herself long enough to install the baby in a playpen. Barry didn't want the steak even after she cut it for him; Loreen fixed him a peanut butter sandwich and sent him out into the back yard. When she sat down again her own steak was surely stone cold—Tony had just about finished his.

  A floor whore, Tony explained, was a novice salesman, viewed mainly as a nuisance by the older hands at the lot. Tony shook his head. "The thing is," he said, "I'm already getting some flak over this. Bob Walker—the co-owner—was very much opposed to me putting you in this job. He says it's nepotism and he says it frankly sucks. And he has a point, because it creates a problem for the sales manager. He knows you're my brother, so the question becomes, do I handle this guy with kid gloves or do I treat him like any other employee?"

  "I don't want any special treatment," Tom said.

  "I know! Of course! You know that, / know that. But I had to go to the manager—Billy Klein, you'll meet him tomorrow —I had to go to him and say, Hey, Billy, just do your job. If this guy fucks up then tell him so. If he doesn't work out, you tell me. This is not a featherbed. I want the maximum from this man."

  "Sure enough," Tom said, inspecting the greasy remains of the steak on his plate.

  "There are basically two things I want to make clear," Tony said. "One is that if you screw up, I look bad. So as a favor to me, please don't screw up. The second is that Billy has a free hand as far as I'm concerned. You answer to him from now on. I don't do his job and I don't look out for you. And he is not always an easy man to please. Frankly, he wouldn't piss down your throat if your guts were on fire. If it works out, then fine, but if not—what the hell are you smiling at?"

  " 'Piss down your throat if your guts were on fire'?" "It's a colloquialism. Jesus, Tom, it's not supposed to be funny!"

  "Barbara would have loved it."

  Barbara would have repeated it for weeks. Once, during a phone call, Tony had described the weather as "cold as the tits on a brass monkey." Barbara laughed so hard she had to pass Tom the receiver. Tom explained patiently that she'd swallowed her gum.

  But Tony wasn't amused. He wiped his mouth and slapped the napkin down on the table. "If you want this job you'd better think a little more about your future and a little less about your hippy-dippy ex-wife, all right?"

  Tom flushed. "She wasn't—"

  "No! Spare me the impassioned defense. She's the one who ran off with her twenty-year-old boyfriend. She doesn't deserve your loyalty and you sure as shit don't owe it to her."

  "Tony," Loreen said. Her tone was pleading. Please, not here.

  Barry, the five-year-old, had wandered in from the back yard; he stood with one peanut butter-encrusted hand on the armoire and gazed at the adults with rapt, solemn interest.

  Tom desperately wanted to be able to deliver an answer— something fierce and final-—and was shocked to discover he couldn't produce one.

  "It's a new world," Tony said. "Get used to it."

  "I'll serve the dessert," Loreen said.

  After dinner Tony went off to tuck in Barry and read him a story. Tricia was already asleep in her crib, and Tom sat with Loreen in the cooling kitchen. He offered to help with the dishes but his sister-in-law shooed him away: "I'm just rinsing them for later." So he sat at the big butcher-block table and peered through the window toward the dark water of the bay, where pleasure-boat lights bobbed in the swell.

  Loreen dried her hands on a dish towel and sat opposite him. "It's not such a bad fife," she said.

  Tom gave her a long look. It was the kind of bald statement Loreen was prone to, couched in the slow Ohio Valley cadences of her youth. Her life here, she meant; her life with Tony: not so bad.

  "I never said it was," Tom told her.

  "No. But I can tell. I know what you and Barbara thought of us." She smiled at him. "Don't be embarrassed. I mean, we might as well talk. It's all right to talk."

  "You have a good life here."

  "Yes. We do. And Tony is a good man."

  "I know that, Loreen."

  "But we're nothing special. Tony would never admit it, of course. But that's the fact. Down deep, he knows. And maybe it makes him a little mean sometimes. And maybe / know it, and I get a little sad—for a little while. But then I get over it."

  "You're not ordinary. You're both very lucky."

  "Lucky, but ordinary. The thing is, Tom, what's hard is that you and Barbara were special. It always tickled me to see you two. Because you were special and you knew it. The way you smiled at each other and the way you talked. The things you talked about. You talked about the world—you know, politics, the environment, whatever—you talked like it mattered. Like it was up to you personally to do something about it. I always felt just a little bigger than life with you two around."

  "I appreciate that," Tom said. In fact he was unexpectedly grateful to her for saying it—for recognizing what Barbara had meant to him.

  "But that's changed." Loreen was suddenly serious. Her smile faded. "Now
Barbara's gone, and I think you have to learn how to be ordinary. And I don't think that's going to be real easy for you. I think it's going to be pretty tough."

  Tony didn't apologize, but he came out of Barry's room somewhat abashed and eager to please. He said he'd like to see the new house and Tom seized on the offer as an excuse to leave early. He let Tony follow him down the coast in the electric-blue Aerostar. Moving inland, up the Post Road and away from the traffic, Tony became a glare in Tom's rearview mirror, lost when the car angled around stands of pine. They parked at the house; Tony climbed out of his van and the two of them stood a moment in the starry, frog-creaking night.

  "Mistake to buy so far out," Tony said.

  "I like the place," Tom offered. "The price was right."

  "Bad investment. Even if the market heats up, you're just too damn far from town."

  "It's not an investment, Tony. It's my house. It's where I five."

  Tony gave him a pitying look. "Come on in," Tom said.

  He showed his brother around. Tony poked into cupboards, dug a fingernail into the window casements, stood up on tiptoe to peer into the fuse box. When they arrived back at the living room Tom poured his brother a Coke. Tony acknowledged with a look that this was good, that there was no liquor handy. "Fairly sound building for its age," he admitted. "Christ knows it's clean."

  "Self-cleaning," Tom said.

  "What?"

  "No—nothing."

  "You planning to have us out for dinner one of these days?" "Soon as I get set up. You and Loreen and the whole tribe." "Good . . . that's good."

  Tony finished his Coke and moved toward the door. This is as hard for him, Tom recognized, as it is for me. "Well," Tony said. "Good luck, little brother. What can I say?"

  "You've said it. Thanks, Tony."

  They embraced awkwardly. "I'll look for you at the lot," Tony said, and turned away into the cool night air.

  Tom listened to the van as it thrummed and faded down the road.

  He went back into the house, alone. The silence seemed faintly alive.

  "Hello, ghosts," Tom said. "Bet you didn't do the dishes after all." But the thing was, they had.

  Two

  It wasn't long before a single question came to occupy his mind almost exclusively: What was madness, and how do you know when it happens to you?

  The cliche was that the question contained its own answer. If you're sane enough to wonder, you must be all right. Tom had trouble with the logic of this. Surely even the most confirmed psychotic must sometimes gaze into the mirror and wonder whether things hadn't gone just a little bit wrong?

  The question wasn't academic. As far as he could figure, there were only two options. Either he had lost his grip on his sanity—and he wasn't willing to admit that yet—or something was going on in this house.

  Something scary. Something strange.

  He shelved the question for three days and was careful to clean up meticulously: no dirty dishes in the sink, no crumbs on the counter, garbage stowed in the back yard bin. The Tidiness Elves had no scope for their work and Tom was able to pretend that he had actually done the dishes himself the night he went to Tony's: it must have been his memory playing a trick on him.

  These were his first days at Arbutus Ford and there was plenty to occupy his mind. He spent most of his daylight hours studying a training manual or bird-dogging the senior salesmen. He learned how to greet buyers; he learned what an offer sheet looked like; he learned how to "T.O."—how to turn over a buyer to the sales manager, who could eke out a few more dollars on an offer; who would then T.O. the customer to the finance people. ("Which is where the real money's made," the sales manager, Billy Klein, cheerfully confided.)

  The lot was a new/used operation down along the flat stretch of Commercial Road between Belltower and the suburban malls. Tom sometimes thought of it as a paved farm field where a crop of scrap metal had sprouted but not ripened—everything was still sleek and new. The weather turned hot on Wednesday; the days were long, the customers sparse. Tom drank Cokes from sweating bottles and studied his system manual in the sales lounge. Most of the salesmen took breaks at a bar called Healy's up the road, but they were a fairly hard-drinking crowd and Tom wasn't comfortable with that yet. Lunchtimes, he scuffed across the blistering asphalt to a little steak and burger restaurant called The Paradise. He was conserving his money. He might make a respectable income on commissions in an average month, Klein assured him—assuming he started selling soon. But it was a grindingly slow month. Evenings he drove inland through the dense, ancient pine forest and thought about the mystery of the house. Or tried not to.

  Two possibilities, his mind kept whispering.

  You're insane.

  Or you're not alone here.

  Thursday night, he put three greasy china plates on the counter next to the stainless steel sink and went to bed.

  In the morning the dishes were precisely where he had left them—as smooth and clean as optical lenses.

  Friday night, he dirtied and abandoned the same three plates. Then he moved into the living room, tuned in the eleven o'clock news and installed himself on the sofa. He left the lights on in both rooms. If he moved his head a few degrees to the right he had a good view of the kitchen counter. Any motion would register in his peripheral vision.

  This was scientific, Tom reassured himself. An experiment.

  He was pleased with himself for approaching the problem objectively. In a way, it was almost exciting—staying up late waiting for something impossible to happen. He propped his feet on the coffee table and sprang the tab on a soda can.

  Half an hour later he was less enthusiastic. He'd been keeping early hours; it was hard not to nod off during commercial breaks. He dozed a moment, sat upright and shot a glance into the kitchen. Nothing had changed.

  (Well, what had he expected? Gnomes in Robin Hood hats humming "Whistle While You Work"? Or maybe—some perverse fraction of his mind insisted—creatures like rats. With clackety claws and saucer eyes.)

  The "Tonight" show was less than engaging, but he wasn't stuck with Carson: the local cable company had hooked him up last week. He abused the remote control until it yielded an antique science fiction film: Them, featuring James Whitmore and giant ants in the Mojave. In the movies radiation produced big bugs; in the neighborhood of failed fission reactors it mainly caused cancer and leukemia—the difference, Barbara had once observed, between Art and Life. He was nodding off again by the time the ants took refuge in the storm drains of Los Angeles. He stood up, walked to the kitchen— where nothing had changed—and fixed himself a cup of coffee. Now, mysteriously, it felt late: no traffic down the Post Road, a full moon hanging over the back yard. He carried his coffee into the living room. It occurred to him that this was a fairly spooky activity he had selected here: making odds on his own sanity, sometime after midnight. He had done things like this—well, things this reminded him of—when he was twelve years old, sleeping in the back yard with a flashlight or staying up with the monster flicks all by himself. Except that by now he would have given up and found some reassuring place to spend the night.

  Here, there was only the house. Probably safe. Hardly reassuring.

  He found an all-night Seattle station showing sitcom reruns. He propped himself up on the sofa, drained the coffee, and hoped the caffeine would help keep him awake. It did, or at least it put him on edge. Edgy, he remembered what he had come to think of as his father's credo: The world is a cold, thoughtless place and it has no special love for human beings. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he should go to bed, let the elves wash up, wake up bright and early and put the house back on the market. No law required him to become the Jacques Cousteau of the supernatural. That wasn't what he'd signed up for.

  But maybe there was nothing supernatural about it. Something odd but entirely explainable might be at work. Some kind of bacteria. Insects (nonmutated). Anything. If he had to bet, that's where he'd put his money.

  It was j
ust that he wanted to know—really know.

  He stretched out on the sofa. He meant to rest his head against the padded arm. He had no intention of going to sleep.

  He closed his eyes and began to dream.

  This time, the dream came without preamble.

  In the dream he stood up from the sofa, went to the window and raised the sash.

  The moon was low, but it cast a clear fluorescence over the back yard. In the dream, it seemed at first as if nothing had changed; there was the starry sky, the deep shadow of the forest, the bleached cedar fence obscure under ivy. Then he saw the grass moving in the wind, a curious sinewy motion— but there was no wind; and Tom understood that it wasn't the grass moving, it was something in the grass—something like insects, a hundred or more, moving in a snakelike column from the house into the woods. His heart gave a startled jump and he was suddenly afraid, but he couldn't look away or leave the window . . . somehow, that choice had been taken from him. He watched as the line of insect-things slowed to a stop and each one—and there were more of them than he had guessed—turned simultaneously to look at him with tiny saucer-shaped eyes, and they pronounced his name —Tom Winter—somehow inside his head, a voiceless chorus. He woke in a drenching sweat.

  The TV was showing fuzz. He stood and switched it off. His watch said 3:45.

  In the kitchen, the dishes were flawlessly clean.

  He slept four more hours in his bedroom with the door closed, and in the morning he showered and phoned Doug Archer—the number on the back of his business card. "You wanted me to get in touch if I noticed anything strange."

  "That's right ... is it getting weird out there?"

  "Just a little weird. You could say that."

  "Well, you called at the right time. I'm on vacation. The beeper gets switched off at noon. I was planning to drive up into the Cascades, but I can put it off a little while. How about if I drop by after lunch?"

  "Good," Tom said, but he was troubled by the note of happy anticipation in Archer's voice.